If film theory paradigms are stocks on the intellectual market, following their peak highs in the 1970s, shares in semiotics and allied conceptual frameworks have been in decline and past decades have seen a major sell- off in favor of cognitive, neo- formalist, affectbased, phenomenological and various other theoretical approaches. Yet like semiotics more generally, cinemasemiotics (for short) is far from a single unified corpus of theoretical works, one specific doctrine, or a position that is amenable to being either fully embraced or rejected. Within film theory, semiotics is an umbrella term of convenience covering many differently oriented theories of the basic units of filmic communication and/ or films as wholes conceived as signs or symbol systems. As in other contexts, film signs are seen to compose messages. For some theorists, these are governed by the use of codes and sub- codes, historically variable conventions of signification often entwined with socio- cultural assumptions, beliefs and ideologies.

Christian Metz is rightly regarded as a founding father of film semiotics. His seminal work, rooted in the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and several of his major followers, is a primary reference point for any discussion of it. For Metz and theorists favorably disposed to his general program (as laid out in his early essay collection, Film Language) cinema relies on some of the same design features that are productive of linguistic sense- making, as appropriately modified to fit the medium's primarily visual mode of address. These include a reliance on cinematic and extra- cinematic conventions (and related codes), the presence of syntagmatic relations (as may be found in both the spatial and temporal axes of the film form, and both within and among images and sequences) and cross- media intertextuality.

Metz's approach is centered on the causal, spatial- temporal structures in and through which cinematic stories and worlds are created and comprehended.