The language of film is a matrix of icons

The powerful and near-universal effect of 100 years of motion pictures on human culture has naturally led to considerable study of how this effect is brought about, including an effort to break it down into its operative units. That they are not linguistic units, as held by regnant theories of the “language of film” but representational, and as such best analyzed by application of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the icon, is the argument of the present paper.