on (dis)agreements ...

"And the reason this has not been emphasized is because the current fashion is to insist that everything is a language, to such an extent that what is said is overpowered and reduced to nothing by how one says it. This is a very common illusion. The angry lover shouts to his faithless mistress, 'You don't understand me!' But she understands him only too well; the case is simply that she no longer loves him. Whether filmic or verbal, language cannot suppress reality; on the contrary, it is rooted in reality. If men do not 'understand' each other, it is not only because of words, but also because of what the words contain. How many 'misunderstandings' are actually the result of too great an understanding! People always see a lack of understanding where there is real disagreement."

(Christian Metz, "The Cinema: Language or Language System." Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema." Trans. Michael Taylor. p. 73-74)


"A thing or being yields its singularity through expression in a message that implies no answer. Even the most harmonious love is not a dialogue so much as it is a kind of duet. Jacques tells Nicole of his love for her; Nicole tells Jacques of her love for him. They are therefore not speaking about the same thing, and one says rightly that their love is 'shared' (divided). They do not answer each other – indeed how can one really answer a person expressing himself?
Shared, their love is divided into two loves, which yield two expressions. For Jacques and Nicole, expressing as they did two different sentiments, to evolve, rather than the give-and-take of a dialogue, the agreement of a true encounter tending toward a fusion that abolishes all dialogue, there had to be a kind of coincidence – hence the rareness of the occurrence – rather than the interplay of influences and after-the-fact adjustments by which a dialogue is characterized. Like Jacques (without Nicole) or like Nicole (without Jacques), films and books express themselves and are not really answered."

(Christian Metz, "The Cinema: Language or Language System." Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema." Trans. Michael Taylor. p. 84)