Film semiotics

• Ricciotto Canudo – Italian writer working in the 1920s, identified “language-like character of cinema”.[1]
• Louis Delluc – French writer, working in the 1920s, wrote of the ability of film to transcend national language.[1]
• Vachel Lindsay – referred to film as “hieroglyphic language”.[1]
• Béla Balázs – Hungarian film theorist who wrote about language-like nature of film from the 1920s to the 1940s.[1]

Yury Tynyanov was a Russian writer and literary critic. Boris Eichenbaum outlined principles of syntagmatic construction. Syntagmatic analysis deals with sequence and structure, as opposed to the paradigm emphasis of paradigmatic analysis. The cinema, for Eichenbaum, is a “particular of figurative language,” the stylistics of which would treat filmic “syntax,” the linkage of shots in “phrases” and “sentences.”[1]

Russian formalists Eichenbaum and Tynyanov had two different approaches to interpreting the signs of film. "Tynyanov spoke of the cinema as offering the visible world in the form of semantic signs engendered by cinematic procedures such as lighting and montage, while Eichenbaum saw film in relation to "inner speech" and "image translations of linguistic tropes.""[1]

The film-language concept was explored more deeply in the 1960s when post-structuralist thinkers started to criticize structuralism. Also, semiotics became popular in academia. Early work in this field dealt with “contrasting arbitrary signs of natural language with the motivated, iconic signs of the cinema”.[1]

• Umberto Eco – Italian novelist and semiotician
• Pier Paolo Pasolini – Italian director and writer
• Christian Metz – French film theorist
• Roland Barthes – French literary theorist

Denotation and connotation

Film communicates meaning denotatively and connotatively. What the audience sees and hears is denotative, it is what it is and they do not have to strive to recognize it. At the same time these sounds and images are connotative and the way the scene is shot is meant to evoke certain feelings from the viewer. Connotation typically involves emotional overtones, objective interpretation, social values, and ideological assumptions. According to Christian Metz, “The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art (the “seventh art”).”[2] Within connotations, paradigmatic connotations exist, which would be a shot that is being compared with its unrealized companions in the paradigm. A low angle shot of a rose conveys a sense that the flower is somehow dominant or overpowering because we unconsciously compare it with an overhead shot of a rose which would diminish its importance. Syntagmatic connotation would not compare the rose shot to other potential shots but compare it with actual shots that precede or follow it. The meaning adheres to it because its compared to other shots we actually see.[3]

Narrative

Narrative is generally known as having two components; the story presented and the process of telling it, or narration, often referred to as narrative discourse. Film narrative theory seeks to uncover the apparently “motivated” and “natural” relationship between the signifier and the story-world in order to reveal the deeper system of cultural associations and relationships that are expressed through narrative form.[1] As Roland Barthes has said, “narrative may be transmitted through oral or written language; through static or moving images, through gestures and through an organized mixture of all these substances. There is narrative in myth, legend, fables, fairytales, novellas, novels, history, novel, epos, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, pictures, comics, events and conversation. In these unlimited forms, narrative exists at all times, in all corners of the earth, in all societies. Narrative begins with the history of mankind.” Films use a combination of dialog, sounds, visual images, gestures and actions to create the narrative. Narrators, usually in a voice-over format, are very popular in documentary film and greatly assist in telling the story while accompanying powerful shots.

Tropes

Metonymy refers to the ability of a sign to represent something entirely, while literally only being a part of it. An example of this is the Eiffel Tower, which is a metonym for Paris. Film uses metonyms frequently because they rely on the external to reveal the internal. Another powerful semiotic tool for filmmaking is the use of metaphors, which are defined as a comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. In film, a pair of consecutive shots is metaphorical when there is an implied comparison of the two shots. For instance, a shot of an airplane followed by a shot of a bird flying would be metaphorical, implying that the airplane is (or is like) a bird.[4]

• Semiotics of music videos