Units, shots, words

The cinema, like language, has much to say, but, like sign boards, it actually escapes the first articulation. It proceeds by "sentence," like sign boards, but, like verbal language, its sentences are unlimited in number. The difference is that then sentences of verbal language eventually break down into words, whereas, in the cinema, they do not: A film may be segmented into large units ("shots"), but these shots are not reducible (in Jakobson's sense) into small, basic and specific units. (Metz, p. 88.)

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information