Film semiotics

Film semiotics is the study of sign process (semiosis), or any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning, as these signs pertain to moving pictures. Film semiotics is used for the interpretation of many art forms, often including abstract art. Ricciotto Canudo – Italian writer working in the 1920s, identified “language-like character of cinema”. Louis Delluc – French writer, working in the 1920s, wrote of the ability of film to transcend national language. Vachel Lindsay – referred to film as “hieroglyphic language”. Béla Balázs – Hungarian film theorist who wrote about language-like nature of film from the 1920s to the 1940s. Russian formalism 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.” 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."" 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”. 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.