Session 4: Signs and meaning

RSP
Session plan
1. Language and meaning
2. History of meaning-making on screen
3. Discussion
1. Language and meaning
● Story of Babel
● Saint Augustine (Middle Ages) saw linguistic signs as only one part of a
broader category
● John Locke (1690s): signs convey meanings both arbitrarily and because of
human design
● Essentially asking whether there is an inherent relationship between signs and
the objects they designate
● How we conceptualise the world (including through films) in signs
Looking for common meanings
● Some thinkers have sought out common links between cultures and historical
periods that are rooted in a shared access language
● Seek out common linguistic and narrative structures
● Ur-text: founding mythological stories
Vladimir Propp
(1895–1970)
Structuralism
● The theory that cultural signs are governed by an overarching system or
structure
● Morphology of the Folktale identifies the fundamental components that are
shared by all Russian folktales
● E.g. Narrative functions of Oedipus Rex: “prophecy”, “escape”, “marriage”,
“patricide”, etc.
● Fundamental narrative components transmitted from one historical period to
another
● Pure, ahistorical narrative structure
Meaning across different cultures
● How can we understand the way meaning is created and understood across
different cultures?
● How might we understand the specific ways that the relationship between
meaning and language has developed and evolved?
Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913)
Semiotics
● Study of signs
● Helps us to identify the way meaning is created in different cultural contexts
● Applies to how we think and describe perception itself
● Fundamental paradigm or “key” to the way we understand the world
Course in General Linguistics (1916)
● Basic unit of semiotics is the sign
● This is broken down into signifier and signified:
○ a “signifier” (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes
○ the “signified” (signifié) - the concept it represents
Ferdinand de Saussure
● The “science” of studying “the life and operation of signs within society”
● Signs make up the basic fabric of our culture.
● Saussurean signs don’t just express existing meanings, they are the
mechanisms by which meanings are created
● Do you think there is a neat relationship between the signifier and the
signified? Do words mean the same thing to different people?
Rene Magritte, La Clef des songes (1927)
2. History of meaning-making on screen
1920s: Montage
● Began with Russian Formalism
● Yury Tynyanov: cinema as a generator of signs through lighting, movement,
performance, temporality and editing. The grammar of film style. [Formalist
Theory]
● Eichenbaum Boris: film in relation to “inner speech”, and “image translations”
of models of thinking that are actually born in a linguistic form in our minds first.
Sympathy between linguistic and cinematic signs. [The Poetics of Cinema]
● Film style: montage and rapid editing
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925): https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=29GXaXnVdA8
1940s: Realism
● Realism became a key concept in film studies with the neo-realist movement
● Andre Bazin:
○ “The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events,
or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants
of life, no one of which can be said to be more important, for their
ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis.”
● Film style: long take, deep focus, non-actors
Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948): https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=jYtQ6xz-YnI
1950s: Psychoanalysis
● Explores the relationship between the human psyche and cinematic
representation
● Looks at how visual media influence social responses and psychology
● Watching a film necessarily involves an instance of identification
● Christian Metz: The spectator identifies with the “cinematic apparatus” and its
re-creation of the act of looking, as well as the protagonist on screen
● Without identification meaning cannot be generated
● Film style: symbols, attention to on-screen space, stylised lighting, film noir
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954): https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=mGASCP2mNaM
1990s: Intertextuality
● Points beyond the text (ie the screen media)
● Meaning is produced by the viewer in relation not only to the text in question,
but to other texts
● Meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated
through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts
● Film style: irony, allusion, quotation, plagiarism, pastiche, parody; Tarantino
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003): https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=7kSuas6mRpk&frags=pl%2Cwn
Other ways in which meaning is created
● What about our bodies? I am “struck by the gap between that exists between
our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic film
scholars construct to explain it […] we are not exempt from sensual being at
the movies.”
— Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts (1992)
Why is thinking about meaning important for
practitioners?
● Meanings that are beyond our control take over
● Every creative choice (the duration of a shot) comes to mean many different
things
● Volatile and contextually dependent
● Our film viewing is equally conditional
Discussion
How do animals signify in film?

● City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

● Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
In the slums of Rio, two kids’ paths diverge as one struggles to become a
photographer and the other a kingpin.
A group of oppressed factory workers go on strike in pre-revolutionary Russia
How do these animals generate meaning?
● Break down what is happening into its constituent parts.
● How is the meaning of the sequence of shots generated?
● What do the animals represent or signify?
● To what extent does a filmmaker have control over what is happening with the
signs and signifiers in a film that they are making?