The Semiology of the Cinema

Peter Wollen

Introduction

• “Is it possible to dissolve cinema criticism and cinema aesthetics into a special province of the general science of signs?”
• Cinema and linguistics
• “Language” as science, not metaphor
• Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Umberto Eco, et al engage with this framework
• Ferdinand de Saussure - Semiology - a Science that studies the life of signs within society
• Signs studied from a social viewpoint
• Language is a social institution which eludes the individual will

Introduction Cont...

• Linguistic system = Code, Langue (pre-existed the message)
• Individual act of speech = Message, Parole
• Linguistics = language-as-a-system-of-signs
• Semiotics of the Cinema = film-as-a-system-of-signs
• The sign is arbitrary. The sign is “unmotivated”
• Impossible to escape verbal language!
• “Words enter into discourse of another order either to fix an ambiguous meaning, like a label or a title, or to contribute to the meaning that cannot otherwise be communicated, like the words in the bubbles in a strip-cartoon. Words either anchor meaning or convey it” (118).
• Great complexity of meaning can be expressed through images
• Metz says cinema is indeed a language (without a code, or langue to use Saussure’s term)
• It’s a language because it has texts; there is a meaningful discourse, but cannot be referred back to a pre-existent code

Bazin & Eco

• Bazin and realism
• Bazin’s starting point is an ontology of the photographic image
• Conclusions are close to Peirce
• Speaks of photography in terms of “a mould, a death-mask, a Veronica, the Holy Shroud of Turin, a relic, an imprint”
• Bi-polar view of the cinema - Realism (the good, the true, the just) and Expressionism (deforming intervention of human agency)
• Umberto Eco: “Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all”

Peirce and Semiotics

• Charles Sanders Peirce, American Logician, carried on Semiology (Semiotics as he called it)
• Semiotics is the study of everything that can be used for communication
• Words, images, traffic signs, flowers, music, medical symptoms, etc.
• Semiotics studies the way such “signs” communicate and the rules that govern their use
• Breaks from traditional forms of criticism because it is concerned with how meaning is created, rather than what the meaning is...
• Structuralism - Claude Levi-Strauss
• Stresses that each element within a cultural system derives its meaning from its relationship to every other element in the system: there are no independent meanings, but rather many meanings produced by their difference from other elements in the system

The Sign

• The smallest unit of meaning in semiotics is called the sign. Semiotics begins with this smallest unit and builds rules for the combination of signs.
• Two distinct parts (separable only in theory)
• Signifier: image, object, or sound itself - the part of the sign that has a material form
• Signified: the concept it represents
• Relationship between signifier and signified in verbal language is totally arbitrary.
• Words have no positive value, exist in difference - language/words are a “negation” to use Lacanian terms

Arbitrary Relations

• Child
• Kind
• Bambino
• Enfant
• Niño
• Pебенок
• çocuk
• 子ども

• Dog
• Hund
• Chien
• Cane
• Perro
• 狗 or Gǒu
• Shun
• Koira

What About Onomatopoeia?

Referents and “Real Objects”

• Sausssure: bracketed off the real objects to which language refers: its referents
• Semiotics does not concern itself with referents
• Some signs have no “real” object to which they refer
• Abstractions: truth, freedom, etc.
• Products of the imagination: mermaids, unicorns, etc.
• All signs are cultural constructs that have taken on meaning through repeated, learned, collective use
• Signs that we use to define other signs are interpretants
• Images do not have an unmediated relationship with their referents

Peirce: Icon, Index, and Symbol

• Peirce saw the process of communication as an unending chain of sign production, which he dubbed “unlimited semiosis”
• Three types of signifiers (which frequently overlap):
• Icon: The signifier has a resemblance to the signified. It looks like the thing it is describing. It is a sliding scale of how much it resembles the actual thing.
• Image: simple qualities are alike
• Diagram: relations between the parts are alike
• Index: Physical connection. Smells are indexes. An example of this is smoke - no smoke without fire.
• Symbol: Doesn’t look/sound/smell like what they are describing. Most spoken words are symbols. All typography is a symbol. Road signs are symbols. Culturally constructed connections. Symbols are arbitrary.

Photo>

Images^

Photo>

Diagrams^

Icon, Index, or Symbol?

Peirce: Intention

• “In its strict sense, Peirce’s model does not require the ‘intention’ to communicate: signs may be produced by nonhuman agencies… or by unconscious senders.”
• “Signification cannot take place outside of human communications, but semiotics does not require the existence of empirically verifiable receivers of its signs, and it cannot promise that all receivers will agree on the relationship of signifier to signified.”
• “Thus authorial intention is not included in the study of signs and neither is the interpretation or reception of the message…”
• How meaning is created, not what the meaning is...

Relating Semiotics to Visual Media: Ontology of the Photographic Image

• Ontology: philosophical study of the nature/essence of being, becoming, existence, or reality
• So how should we understand the photographic image? Do photographic images “tell the truth?” (indexicality) “The camera never lies?”
• Many TV images are designed in such a way that we are encouraged to understand them only as indexical signs
• Should we consider this problematic?

Errol Morris on the Photographic Image

Denotation and Connotation

• “In images, denotation is the first order of signification: the signifier is the image itself and the signified is the idea or concept--what it is a picture of?”
• Literal meaning
• In film, literal = ‘perceptual’: What do I see?
• In film, there is no minimal unit: nothing corresponds to the word. Even a shot is already an assertion: “There’s a house.” or “This is a house.” or “Look. A house.”
• Always somewhat constructed…
• Appears only once certain syntagmatic structures have been followed...
• “Connotation is the second-order signifying system that uses the first sign, (signifier and signified), as its signifier and attaches an additional meaning, another signified, to it.”
• Connotation functions on the level of ideology and Myth making according to Barthes
• In film, connotation belongs to style: How do I see it?

Sign #1

Denotation? Connotation?

Syntagms and Paradigms

• Syntagm: an ordering of signs, a rule-governed combination of signs in a determined sequence. Normally linear and must follow a strict order.
• “Rosa throws the ball.” (not “Ball the Rosa throws) Follows the grammatical rules of order (or syntagmatic code)
• Paradigm: a group of signs so similar that they may be substituted for one another in a syntagm
• “Rosa throws the ball.” Draws on paradigms defined grammatically (nouns, verbs, and articles). Another paradigm could be verbs synonymous with throw that might be substitutable here: pitch, hurl, or toss. Of course, we change the meaning of the syntagm every time we make a substitution from a paradigm.
• Paradigms used to make syntagmatic chains

Synchronic & Diachronic

• Paradigmatic associations are synchronic: we group signs together as though they had no history or temporal order (as they exist in one point in time).
• Syntagmatic relationships tend to be diachronic: they unfold in time, whether it be a matter of seconds or of years.

Langue & Parole

• Saussurean linguistics is a synchronic model for the study of language; that is, it insists that sign systems are to be studied as they exist at one point in time.
• Langue: the total sign system - film is not a langue!
• Parole: individual utterances or signs
• One of the principles of semiotics is that the langue can be inferred from studying parole.
• Verbal language - as a system of paradigmatic and syntagmatic rules - changes very slowly.
• Shakespearean plays are still “readable” today as an English-language parole
• Film genres evolve slowly as well
• “Semiotics was founded, then, on a static model of the sign. Some of the gravest shortcomings of semiotics as a theory are a consequence of this: it inherits the tendency to ignore change, to divorce the sign from its referent, and to exclude the sender and receiver.”
• Langue: English language
• Parole: “Go F*#k yourself!”
• One is a stem, one is an individual utterance

How is Film a Language?

• Film is not a langue (=language system)
• But it is a language: a mere visual transfer (photography) has developed into its own discourse
• Everything in a film signifies: optical devices mean something, even though they don’t have a referent
• Shots are infinite in number, unlike words, but like sentences
• Shots are creations of the filmmakers, unlike words, but like sentences
• Shots present a wealth of undefined information
• Shots are assertions (denotation…)
• Shots are defined paradigmatically only minimally

How is Film a Language Cont...

• Does cinema have a rhetoric or grammar?
• Codified arrangements of the cinematic signifier organize primarily denotation (i.e. they make films understandable) and then connotation
• If films connote easily, it is because denotation is itself structured
• In film it is impossible to draw a clear line between small and large signifying units
• E.g. syntagms are paradigmatic, i.e. a choice is made to use one or the other

Questions of Narrative

• Semiotics of (narrative) film
• Screen is the place of the signifier; diegesis the place of the signified
• The narrated event is the signified
• Structural analysis of narratives
• Focused on structures of narration
• The narrated event is the signifier and the structures (roles, functions, etc.) are the signified

Structuralism

• As developed in linguistics and anthropology, structuralism sought to understand a language or a culture on its own terms and urged the analyst to put aside judgment and evaluation.
• As do semioticians, structuralists study things synchronically and are interested in the system as a whole more than in particular manifestations of it. Rather than studying forms of language, as semioticians normally do, structuralists study the way that a cultural system produces a set of texts or signs, which could be anything from folk tales to kinship relations to dietary rules.
• Structuralist analysis proposes binary oppositions such as individual/community, male/female, nature/culture, or mind/matter and argues that every element within the system derives its meaning from its relationship to these categories.
• A structuralist analysis often leads to a description of the worldview of a culture
• Important principle of structuralism: the meaning of each sign within a text derives its meaning from its relationship to other signs in the same system.

Structuralism Cont...

• Despite the length and detail of many structuralist analyses, critics of the method have accused structuralists of ignoring stray meanings in the text and of closing off potential interpretations.
• “Hair-raisingly unhistorical”
• Structuralist project is not enough. It should also include history, multiculturalism, production/political economy, etc. to really flesh it out.
• Semiotic analysis tends to “neaten up” the texts it studies: some elements are picked out for significance and others are excluded, repressed. Post-structuralism emphasizes the slippage between signifier and signified - between one sign and the next, between one context and the next - while emphasizing that meaning is always situated, specific to a given context.
• Post-structuralism takes on theories of psychoanalysis, ideologies, race, gender, et al., to focus on the gaps and fissures, the structuring absences and the incoherencies.
• Perhaps the best way to think of semiotics and structuralism is as a kind of useful exercise for making sure that we know our object before venturing out into other models of study.