"Reading" films became fashionable thirty years ago, nonetheless, when semiotics declared that everything is a sign signifying something it itself is not. Everything, thus defined, acquired eluctability. In compensation semiology turned to genres, conventions and ideologies, to systems of signs, to "language."

To this tendency one of the founders of historicism, Benedetto Croce, said no a century ago. True language or "poetry," he said (meaning Art in general), has no signs. A sign is a sign because it stands for something other than itself; but poetry stands only for itself. Signs are found in prose-the impoverished pseudo language of convention, the language of science.

Tag Gallagher