Signs may be analyzed, for few love them.

But films are somehow delicate, like roses,

and pulling the petals off a rose in order to study it is often viewed as an act of
destruction.
Sol Worth,

Even while being shot, a film must be thought of already as an editable sequence of
separate
pieces of celluloid.
V. I. Pudovkin,

[Tlhe filmmaker carefully structures the motion picture to interact directly with the mind
of the viewer.
John D. Anderson, “A Cognitive Approach to Continuity”

Editing is the language of the film director. Just as in living speech, so, one may say, in
editing: there is a word ~ the piece of exposed film, the image; a phrase ~ the
combination of
these pieces.
V. I. Pudovkin, film Technique and film Acting

According to Laura
Mulvey:
Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object
for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator
within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of
the screen.. . . As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he
projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of
the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the
erotic look. (1992: 751).

Now, by the auteur theory, if a director has not technical competence, no

elementary flair
for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the pantheon of directors.
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”

in particular, it is Godard’s fame for the “jump cut” (starting with Breathless [ 19601) that
“proves”
his cinematic genius. As Bordwell notes:
If we take a simple but uncommon stylistic device, we can see how it became
identified and analyzed only after changes within the cinematic institution were
able to link it to conceptions of the author ~ author as the source of the the film, as
unique creative temperament and as the “narrator” in film. (1984: 4)

rick Altman also shares the kind of ideological concerns about

classical cinema raised by Dayan ~ seeing synchronous sound/image editing as,
essentially, manipulative:
The fundamental scandal of sound film ~ and thus the proper starting point for a
theory of sound film ~ is that sound and image are different phenomena, recorded
by different methods, printed many frames apart on the film, and reproduced by an
illusionistic technology. (79)

As Lev Manovich (1996a) writes:

Gradually cinema taught us to accept the manipulation of time and space, the
arbitrary coding of the visible, the mechanization of vision, and the reduction of
reality to a moving image as a given. As a result, today the conceptual shock of the
digital revolution is not experienced as a real shock ~ because we were ready for it
for a long time.

As Manovich (1996~w) rites:

During cinema’s history, a whole repertoire of techniques (lighting, art direction,
the use of different film stocks and lens, etc.) was developed to modify the basic
record obtained by a film apparatus. And yet behind even the most stylized
cinematic images we can discern the bluntness, the sterility, the banality of early
nineteenth century photographs. No matter how complex its stylistic innovations,
the cinema has found its base in these deposits of reality.

A film.. . circulates in a sphere which can be described as transnational with none of the
specificity so desired by nationalists. It does so because its mode of communication
doesn’t
rely exclusively on the local or the national for success.
Ron Burnett, “The National Question in Quebec”

Elsaesser writes of how:

European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a
particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea
change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the
stamp of yet another cultural currency. (1994a: 25)

So it
is that Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka talk of how:
Second-world countries like Canada and Australia are riddled with post-colonial
ambiguity and anxieties.. . . Our identity becomes both clamorous and permanently
obscure.. . . For where do “we” end and the “other” begin? Who is
the other by which we define our difference, ensuring “us”? Britain? America?
How are “they” to be satisfactorily disentangled from what we have internalized
and hybridized from them? (1988: 20)

Edward Said maintains, a culture, a

self, a national identity is always produced in relation to its “others”:
the development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of
another different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity. . . whether
of Orient or Occident, France or Britain. . . involves establishing opposites and
“others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and
reinterpretation of their differences from “us”. (1995: 332)

Bordwell
Conceiving of the text as symptomatically revealing cultural tensions introduced a
powerful frame of reference. To claim unity across an auteur’s output, to posit that
cinema contains three looks, and to suggest that a genre may constitute an intersection
of nature and culture organized a great deal of information within a new
perspective.