Jurij Lotman (1922-1993)

The Tartu-Moscow Semiotic school Jurij Lotman.

Semiotics of Cinema (1973)

V. V. Ivanov.

Eisenstein and Modern Semiotics

Boris Uspensky.

Poetics of Composition (1970)

The history of film theory

Classical film theory (1915-1945): the silent film paradigm

Modern film theory (1945-1972): structuralism, formalism and semiology

Contemporary film theory (1968 to present): film and ideology, postmodernism, and cultural studies.

Classical film theory (1915-1945)

Eclectic participants

Various and inconsistent methodologies

Broad range of questions addressed

The silent film paradigm

Classical film theory (1915-1945)

Silent film paradigm (Noel Carroll) Is cinema an art? Is so, what are its defining

characteristics? How is it alike or different from the other arts?

If cinema is an art, what defines its specificity as an artistic medium? What are cinemas constitutive forms?

What criteria of evaluation are needed to judge its aesthetic and social significance? How do spectators perceive, understand, and take pleasure in films?

Modern Film Theory (1945-1968)

Work concentrated in academic contexts: universities and film schools.

Search for a consistent and unified methodology

Common philosophical background. Formalism Structuralism Semiology: can film be considered a language?

What is semiotics? Semiotics studies cultural and art as sign

systems.

A sign is the materially expressed substitute for objects, phenomena and concepts which is used in the process of information exchange in a society (1).

Semantic relations Syntactic relations Syntagmatic relations

Semantic relations A semantic relation combines

expression and content. Expression comprises the sensuous or

representational components of the sign.

Content is what these components represent.

Conventional signs

Pictorial or iconic signs

/kat/

cat

The illusion of reality Understanding film as a

combination of iconic and conventional signs.

A dual relationship to reality. The world which [film] presents is

simultaneously the object itself and a model of the object (16).

Art does not simply render the world with a lifeless automatism of a mirror. In transforming images of the world into signs, it saturates the world with meanings (13).

The illusion of reality

Cinematography resembles the world which we see. An increase in this similarity is a constant factor in the evolution of cinema as art. But this similarity is as unreliable as the words of a foreign language which sound like words in our own. That which is different pretends to be identical. The illusion of comprehension is created where no genuine comprehension exists. Only by understanding the cinema can we be convinced that it is not a slavish copy of life, but an active re-creation in which similarities and differences are assembled into an integral tension-filledsometimes dramaticprocess of perceiving life (4)

The film shot as a basic semantic unit The nature of the shot is to transform the image as a sign. The world of the cinema is the world which we see plus discreteness.

It is a world divided into pieces, each one having a certain degree of autonomy, as a result of which we have the possibility for multiple combinations, not available in the real world. The world becomes a visible artistic world (23).

The shot acquires the kind of freedom inherent in the word. It can be isolated, combined with other shots according to semantic, rather than natural affinities, or it can be used in a figurative . . . sense (23).

Only the cinemauniquely among all the arts employing visual imagescan construct the figure of a person as a phrase located in time (23-24).

A visible artistic world

Elements and levels of cinematic language Marked and unmarked elements. Semantic value is by nature dualistic, requiring

opposed terms.

Any unit of text can be an element of cinematic language (visual image, graphics, sound) if it has an alternative, including non-use of the alternative, and thus does not appear in the text automatically, but is associated with a certain meaning. It is, moreover, necessary that both in its use and its non-use a perceptible order is manifested (rhythm) (34).

Montage

Montage and syntactic combination.

Montage as the principle of juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, their conflict and higher unityas a result of which every element, within the context of the whole text, is both unexpected and regular. . . (51).

The artistic text speaks to us in more than one voice, like a complex, polyphonic chorus. Complexly organized partial systems intersect, forming a sequence of semantically dominant moments (73).

Narration and syntagmatic organization

1. Montage of shots. the union of smallest independent units, in which semantic

meaning is still not a part of each unity in isolation, but arises in the process of the joining of units (70).

2. The cinematographic phrase or segment. An elementary syntactic whole (sentence): a complete

syntagm having internal unity and bounded at each end by structural pauses (71).

3. Supra-phrasal units. Open-ended combinations of segments into larger

groupings.

4. Plot. The text divided into parts that are structurally specialized

and which have a specific, bounded semantic character.