Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

24.3 Formal differences: verbal sign versus visual image
Unit 24 Film and prose fiction
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

The most important contrast between film and prose, however, rests on the distinctive features of the two media and upon the different kinds of signification involved in them. Prose as a medium depends upon linguistic signs where the relationship between the material of the sign (sounds or letters) and that which is designated by them is quite arbitrary. The significatory medium - the letters on the page in the case of prose - has no necessary, obvious or natural relationship with the entities signified by it. There is no particular reason why the letters P-I-G should be inevitably associated with the concept of a fourlegged creature that grunts and lives in a sty. The association depends simply upon convention - upon a tacit agreement between users of the sign; and decoding prose depends upon consciously learnt methods of interpretation. (See Unit 9, Language and society, for further discussion of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign.)

In film, by contrast, the signifying material (visual patterns shaped in variations of colour and of light and dark) has a much closer relationship to that which is signified. The film (or video) image resembles in visual terms the reality that it signifies or depicts, and so its relationship to reality seems more obvious, direct and easily intelligible. As a medium of representation, film is composed from iconic images - unlike prose, which is made up of linguistic signs.