<研究論文>A Re-reading of Christian Metz’s “Grande Syntagmatique” Through the Concept of “Exception” – the example of alternation in Thelma & Louise (1991)

A Re-reading of Christian Metz's "Grande Syntagmatique" Through the Concept of "Exception" Recent film studies, with the use of concepts like Average Shot Length (ASL) and "Classical Editing", have fostered thinking on the "general" rather than on the "particular", giving priority to the identification of common features reproducible in different contexts rather than to the "specific" and its irreproducibility.If these approaches have permitted a better comprehension of how film styles evolve and dynamically affect the perception of the viewer, they nonetheless tend to dismiss and ignore any "exception" which does not fit the general pattern.We argue that the "Grande Syntagmatique" as originally theorized by Christian Metz in 1966, though at first sight an attempt to isolate the basic "grammatical" units composing a filmic text, constitutes in fact the beginning of a reflection on the "specific" and the "particular" at the level of the syntagmatic chain.Through the introduction of notions like "Exception" and "Second Text" (advanced respectively by Slavoj iek and Louis Althusser), the present paper aims at reinterpreting some key aspects of the "Grande Syntagmatique" in terms of the "particular", giving to this ambitious theoretical construct a new impulse in an age where, despite profound and irreversible changes, cinema is still not sufficiently problematized in its relation to History as a whole.