poral breaks, causality, adversative relationships, consequence, spatial proximity, or distance, etc.? These are central questions to the semiotics of the cinema" (Metz, Some points, 1979, p. 174). Lesage details a bit of the "how" of which Metz speaks in a discussion of what she calls "semic codes," and in so doing she suggests the importance of the narrative frame on one hand, but as well the confluence of narrative and nonnarrative elements that, combined in particular symbological ways to impart meaning and even feeling, may serve as it were to make the whole experience of the film the greater than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, the sense and significance of the narrative is derived from the multiplicity of signage--verbal, nonverbal, and certainly visual--that the film contains.
[I]n film, both the content and the composition of the shots work to connote the social situation, motives, and emotions of the principal characters. In a single photograph, one can decide things about a person from body position, facial expression, gesture and espe
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