Most often identified with the binary poetics of a sufficiently opposed
but necessarily linked formalism and realism, classical film theory has argumentatively and analytically severed expression from perception in its inquiries into the "true nature" or ontology of the cinema.
That is, cinematic "language" (here we might think of montage) and
cinematic being (and here of mise-en-scene) have been contrasted categorically and set against each other as opposing poles of a single, digital, two-valued system—each, in opposing the other, affirming it by implication and dependent upon it by necessity.