THE "LANGUAGE" OF CINEMA: FILM "GRAMMAR" AND VISUAL LITERACY

Abstract Regarded as a "visual esperanto" transcending the barriers of national language, cinema is irrefutably a powerful means of communicating meaning, a language in itself, comparable to mathematics and music in its universality. Nonetheless, this language has its own peculiarities and it functions in a unique way, displaying its own "grammar". Indeed, film may be said to have a grammar in the sense that there are certain conventions of shooting and editing that are often followed to determine particular emotional responses or to create the illusion of continuous action in time and space. As print-oriented literacy requires recognition of words and the patterns in which they are usually combined, so film literacy requires recognition of cinematic techniques. Our current paper sets out to investigate how the language of cinema works and to prove that, in order to adequately understand this type of language, we have to be both visually and aurally literate

Research and Science Today No. 1(7)/2014

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