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Bellour’s work elaborated on Metz’s (1974) semiotic notions of lm, particularly the concept
of syntagmas, by introducing levels of segmentation greater and lesser than Metz’s. is enabled
structural analysis of lmic signal sets of any length and, eventually, of any sort, not simply the set,
say, of classic American Hollywood features.
2.4.4 DIFFICULTIES FOR BELLOUR
We identied two diculties with Bellour’s signal set analysis. e rst was the timeconsuming
nature of its practice. Simply locating the proper portions of lm, timing them, rephotographing
frames for analysis and publication, to say nothing of commentary or analysis, took days and weeks.
e second is that Bellour conducted his work too early—for the remarkable precision of
Bellour’s analysis, without digital technology he did not have a precise system of description at the
frame level. He could write of contents of the frame and of relationships holding among frames, but
not with deep precision (e.g., the shades of various colors and their changes from frame to frame).
e digital environment enables us to address both issues. Grabbing all the individual frames
from a digital version of a lm requires only seconds, not days. Also, pixels enable addressable anal-
ysis of the red, green, blue, and luminance components of any point in the frame, as well as com-
parisons of values at the same point or set of points across time. e mechanics of the practice of
lm analysis, which once would have required enormous resources of time, funding and technology
are today essentially trivial.
However, the technical ability to address and measure points within and across frames does
not address Augst’s earlier question; nor does it, in itself, provide a “genuine structural analysis of
lmic texts.” We have the technology—but what should we do with it? Techniques for analyzing the
structure of moving image documents are well known and mature. Dailianas, Allen, and England
(1995) reviewed a number of techniques for the segmentation of video including techniques for
measuring the absolute dierence between successive frames, several histogrambased methods, as
well as the measurement of objects within frames. ese techniques proved to be robust when com-
pared against human observers; however, all techniques were prone to false positives. ey note that:
“[b]ecause all the methods studied here have high falseidentication rates, they should be thought
of as providing suggestions to human observers and not as an ultimate standard of performance.”
Structure and function have a complementary, but independent relationship. In order to
advance the state of both structural and theoretical analysis, the relationship between structure
and function must be taken into account. In other words, an analysis that takes both structure and
function into account is greater than the sum of its parts. Kearns and O’Connor (2004) provide a
strong example of this approach in their demonstration of the relationship between the entropic
structure of television programs and the preferences of a group of viewers.
2.4 STORY FOUR: FUNCTIONAL ONTOLOGY
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