Signs and Semiotics
As human beings we are driven to try and make sense of our world and the media we consume.
The Theorist
Saussure (d. 19130 wrote extensively about signs and semiotics in language.)
He offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign.
He difined a sign as being composed of:
- A signifier (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes.
- The signified (signifie) - the concept it represents.
Many of these are so culturally ingrained now that they are conventions. A code is a convention that associates a signifier with a certain signified or meaning.
Denotation and Connotation
The Theorist
Roland Barthes (d. 1980) was the theorist who applied Saussure's theories of semiotics and combined it with denotation and connotation. He pointed out that the meaning changes with time, place and audience. Meanings are not fixed, which ties in with post-modernism.
3 Kinds of Sign-CS Peirce
The Theorist
Peirce (d. 1914) suggested that there are 3 types of sign.
The Theorist
Peirce (d. 1914) suggested that there are 3 types of sign.
- Symbol - language or logos for which we have to learn their significance.
- Icon - they resemble what they are.
- Index - they indicate their meaning.
Anchorage
Having a certain intent in the construction of your product.
Stuart Hall
He argues that:
- meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender.
- the message is never transparent.
- the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.
Preferred readings V Negotiated readings
What the Producer intended coming The culturally defined interpreted version,
from dominant ideology. unique to the audience.
Oppositional: directly and deliberately against the preferred reading.
Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a 'failure' of the producer or viewer. Hall argues that there is a 'lack of fit' 'between the two sides in the communicative exchange.'
Encoding - the moment of the production of the message.
Decoding - the moment of its reception.
Hall suggests that in encoding and decoding media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only simply plausible and universal but elevated to 'common-sense'.
Used in a question on GENRE.
- Poetic
- Expository
- Performative
- Reflective
- Observational
- Participatory
Narrative
- Todorov
Most motivate by a force or power that creates a disturbance.
A transition from one equilibrium to another via a dis-equilibrium.
Not all of the moments presented in the plot but the audience can read and infer them.
- Engimas
- Realisation
- Agents of narrative - character
Narrative Theory
A narrative is a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space.
The Theorist
Bordwell & Thompson (1990)
The film maker turns the story into a plot and the audience interprets the plot into a story. This will be affected by their previous experiences.
- A narrative is more than just a story.
- As human beings we enjoy & can relae to stories.
- Aristole in 'poetics' remarked that a good story should have a beginning, middle and an end.
- Everything can be narrated but if you tell someone a story of your life which parts do you choose to include or omit? This depends on the audience and you purpose. What language will you choose and what genre will you tell it in?
The Pleasure of Narrative
Known as 'epistemophelia' - the desire to know, to discover secrets and lies, to know what happens next. Aesthetic pleasure in the form and shape of a narrative. Aristotle who identified pleasure in the unities of time, place and action links to this.
Vladimir Propp
Writing in the 1960s.
Through studying 100 'wonder tales' he discovered that they all contained 31 actions, functions of a hero's journey. He also identified 7 key roles who all serve to move the narrative on.
- the villain
- the hero/chief protagonist
- the doner
- the helper
- the princess/herfather
- the dispatcher
- the false hero
Roland Barthes 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.
- Narratives are numberless
- They can be conveyed in an infinite variety of forms.
- Narrative exists in every culture.
- Narrative is international, trans-historical, trans cultural.
- All narratives use cultural norms to help convey their meaning.
- Narrative is a fundamentally cultural form.
- Narratologist - someone who studies narratives.
Narrative Structure: Plot & Story
The audience derives pleasure from awareness of a plot structure. They make assumptions from the inferences and gain pleasure when they are confirmed, or even challenged.
As societies change so do narratives according to the cultural context.
Media stories operate according to a commercial aesthetic.
The audience's engagement with narrative is conventional and patterned to a dynamic process that makes use of specific film techniques to create meaning.
The Film Experience
- A conscious decision to go to the cinema/watch a film.
- 'willingly suspend disbelief'.
- Collective & individual experience.
- Voyeuristic
- Quality
Effects Theory
- Direct effect
- Copy cat effect
- De-sensitising
- Disinhition
- Catharsis
Representation
Dyer - Stars (1979) was Dyer's first full-length book. He developed the idea that the viewers' perception of a film is heavily influenced by the perception of its stars, and the publicity materials and reviews determine the way that audiences experience the film.
Christian Metz argues that viewing film is only possible through scopophilia (pleasure from looking, related to voyeurism), which is best exemplified in silent film.
Feminist Film Theory
Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' essay.
Expands on the passive role of women in the cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor.
She identifies three 'looks' or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women:
- The perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character on screen.
- The perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen.
- The third joins the first two together. The male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This allows the male audience to take female characters as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself through looking to the male character in the film.
Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
Psychoanalytic Theory
Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society.
Ideology & Representation
Marx: the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.
Ideology And Film Theory
It became a key concept in social and media studies in the 1970s.
Althusser (1971) followed Marx in understanding ideology as 'mental production'. The audience follows into the world of the film.
Baudry (1975) extends this to two levels of identification in the cinema, as well as identifying with the gaze of the camera, the spectator identifies with particular character.
Stuart Hall argues that ideology is encoded into texts.
- Preferred
- Negotiated and oppositional meanings
Genre
One of the principal ways in which audience, producers and critics routinely classify media. The audience has expectations & assumptions about certain genres.
Genre Recognition
- Audiences - seeking pleasure of the familiar expectations.
- Institutions - aiming to avoid risk and ensure profitability, scheduling, advertising.
- Critics who wish to classify to maintain hierarchies of cultural value and status.
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