"Semiotics, or semiology, is the study of signs, symbols, and signification. It is the study of how meaning is created, not what it is. Below are some brief definitions of semiotic terms, beginning with the smallest unit of meaning and proceeding towards the larger and more complex:
Signifier: any material thing that signifies, e.g., words on a page, a facial expression, an image.
Signified: the concept that a signifier refers to".
Semiotics in film may be different to everyone, but normally you can find a common sign and meaning in some movies. For example, in the movie American Pie in the whole series of films you have this pie that symbolizes sex for Jim and you continue to see this sign throughout the whole series of these films.
Film is something we have experienced since we were younger. Little girls will mostly grow up watching the fairy tales where everyone lives happily ever after. For them this symbolizes happiness and the hope that one day they may find their prince charming. According to The Development of the Semiotic Film, "film has been made a part of our lives--a dominant mode of human expression, relatively little studied and understood at a time when the study of other, perhaps similar modes, such as verbal language, painting, and music, have developed venerable bodies of theory and analytic methods"
"In conceptualizing film from a semiotic standpoint, it becomes quite clear that one of the basic suppositions employed by de Saussure, Morris, Sebeok, and others is the notion of a relationship between signs themselves and between signs and their users and context. A sign is not a phenomenon in and of itself; a "thing" becomes a sign only because it has a specific relationship to other "things" (The Development of the Semiotic Film). The sign may be something like a color like yellow which now shows our support to the troops, but use to stand for sadness. It is something we see and then picture this idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment