Film Semiotics

It is a commonplace that the mass media are populated with stereotypes. They are readily recognized on television, where their frequency has been ceaselessly documented by researchers. Why, then, return to the problem of defining stereotypes at this time? I believe that by reevaluating and clarifying the term we can improve the way we study the media, particularly television, in the academy, in our research, and in our teaching.

Resumen

Se aborda el fenómeno del individualismo contemporáneo, las transformaciones de la intimidad y la fragilidad de los vínculos humanos. Se muestra cómo las sociedades telemáticas dan lugar a nuevas formas de fuga y ausencia del mundo, a un malestar cultural, donde hombres escindidos entre la agresión y el temor, experimentan derivas identitarias y zozobras existenciales ante la exacerbación del consumo, la alienación del trabajo y el terror difuso de las ciudades del pánico.

The paper discusses Derrida's concept of hospitality which perfectly describes the experience of loosing the sense of feeling at home and reveals the disintegrating entrance of the Otherness into a coherent home space. Jacques Derrida's theory makes it possible to deconstruct the familiar home space, which, however, does not constitute in any case its destruction. Revealing a complex and ambiguous nature of the challenge of hospitality, he perceives the sense of feeling at home as one of the necessary conditions of a stable subject. This is the subject that most fears the Otherness which could disrupt, unsettle their permanent structure and a sense of certainty. Therefore, the Author follows closely the fear of strangeness and the nostalgic longing for the sense of feeling at home as depicted by David Lynch and Michael Haneke in their films. Then he passes on to the field of contemporary art which not only reveals the fact that something has happened to the house we have known so far, but it also allows for creative deconstruction of the feeling at home. The artistic works selected by the Author break the binary oppositions: one’s own/someone else’s, familiar/strange (Jessica Sue Layton), close/distant (Shizuka Yokomizo) and finally the most important one: interior/exterior (Marja Pirilä, Eve Dent).

This special issue of 'Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies' offers an original and provocative contribution to debates around adaptation and appropriation in film, television and new media.

The issue is organised in four sections, each dealing with a different form of cultural borrowing. Part I examines 'Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation' and provides three complimentary historical accounts of the development of adaptation within US cinema. Part II looks to the future and examines the contemporary practice of 'Found Footage and Remix Culture'. Shifting focus onto more imitative forms of appropriation, Part III focuses on 'Modes of Parody and Pastiche.' Finally, in Part IV, the focus shifts away from the predominant focus on US media to consider the contribution that 'Transnational Screen Cultures' can make to our understandings of the adaptive act.

Contributors are: I. Q. Hunter, Jason Scott, Stijn Joye, Eli Horwatt, Emma Cocker, Sérgio Dias Branco, Brigid Cherry, Darren Elliott, Jordan Lavender-Smith, Austin Fisher, Neelam Sidhar Wright, and Pamela Atzori.

Formal theories reveal a visual dimension underlying better-known picture theories. Patterns of elements such as lines, shapes, and spaces, along with their properties, generate emotional responses and follow visual styles in society. The elements combine into systems that create perspectives on the world. Formal awareness may generate an understanding of visual philosophies and their inherent values and consequences. Picture theories start from the tension between scientific invention and artistic expression. From linguistics and philosophy, semiotics provides terms for analyzing pictures as signs that mediate among mind, eye, and reality, operate within codes, and reproduce mythology. From film and literary aesthetics, narrative theory offers analytical structures that reproduce realism through supposed objectivity, rationality, and autonomy in dialogue with conventions and genres. Critical, cultural, and poststructural theories assert the inauthenticity of pictures, social construction of representation, and instability of meaning. Visual aesthetics, analysis, criticism, and ethics have entered flux in digital times.

sito internet: http://www.campanottoeditore.it È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, non autorizzata con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia, anche a uso interno o didattico. L'illecito sarà penalmente perseguibile a norma dell'art. 171 della legge n. 633 del 22.04.1941. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. ISBN 88-456-0772-0 4 IN COPERTINA: Anatomia di un omicidio Disegno di Saul Bass per i titoli di testa L'editore è a disposizione degli aventi diritto per le fonti iconografiche non individuate Valentina Re

What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing the sensory enjoyment of artworks, but about placing them in a much richer context, where they can work a far greater magic.

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations, and of the concept of "politics" more broadly

Signatim è termine raro. Compare in un passo attribuito all’autore Caio, all’interno dei cosiddetti Gromatici veteres, una raccolta di testi di agrimensura compilata nel V secolo d.C. “Gromatico” è infatti tutto ciò che si riferisce alla misurazione, divisione, e rappresentazione di terreni. Il termine deriva da “groma”, uno strumento che gli Etruschi prima, e poi i Romani, utilizzarono per tracciare sul territorio allineamenti ortogonali, necessari per la delimitazione di nuove città, quartieri, e strade, ma anche per suddividere il terreno in quadrati o rettangoli, e renderne così calcolabile la superficie.
Nel passo di Caio si descrive una tecnica gromatica. Al fine di poter identificare anche in futuro i paletti interrati che delimitano il terreno, è necessario contraddistinguerli con un segno a forma di stella, la cosidetta “stella junior”. In questo contesto, “signatim” è dunque avverbio che designa la scrittura e la lettura di segni nella delineazione di frontiere. Quale parola più appropriata per evocare il lavoro della semiotica della cultura, la quale pure si occupa dei segni, delle tracce, delle marche che gli individui e le società producono nell’istituire la diversità? Per cartografare non colture ma culture, non gromatiche ma grammatiche, riconducendone le forme esuberanti all’ortogonalità di strutture soggiacenti?

In the passage of the Course in General Linguistics where Ferdinand de Saussure first foresaw the necessity to develop a new discipline called “semiology”, “nautical flags” are prominently listed among its objects of inquiry. Flags, indeed, are naturally interesting objects for semiotics, not only because they signify through a systematic display of forms and colors, but also because of the specific pragmatics of such display. A flag can be thought of abstractedly, as an array of symbols, but it features also a specific materiality, wherein two elements particularly stand out: (1) the flag is generally a textile; (2) this textile is meant to interact with a natural element, the wind. Flags are so symbolically important also because they seem to acquire an individual agency when they wave in the wind, and therefore to confer this autonomous agency to the cultural ideas which they stand for. The paper investigates this particular semiotics in relation to opposite ideological usages of the Italian national flag, meant to signify an either inclusive or exclusive identity.

The fields of public relations has dramatically grown to build the relationships between an organization and its key publics through effective communication. The study is conducted to assess the practice and challenge of Public Relations in government universities public relation offices in Ethiopia. The research used mixed approach which enable the researchers to use both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. The main subject of the study were internal publics and external stakeholders. The researcher used questionnaire as a data gathering tool from the above subjects. The findings of the study depicted that professional Public Relations practice in the given13 government universities are in difficult condition as the office is not professionally and structurally organized despite its key role is well recognized. The PR practitioners have not well understood the concept of Public relations especially its management function to create mutual understanding with the internal and external public rather they are considered to stage the debate other than mediates. Lack of professional skilled human power, having minimal attitudes and lack of empowering the office, absence of adequate capacity building training, lack of infrastructure, inadequate assistance from the concerned leaders took the first line as challenges for the public relations practitioners

El objetivo de estas notas es responder de manera sintética a varias preguntas generales sobre las relaciones entre filosofía y estudios cinematográficos, cuya interacción ha producido el terreno que, a lo largo de más de 100 años, ha recibido el nombre de Estética del Cine.

Estas preguntas son las siguientes: ¿Qué es la estética del cine? ¿Cuáles son los principales terrenos de investigación en la estética del cine? ¿Se requiere ser filósofo profesional para explorar los terrenos de la estética del cine? ¿Es parte de la estética del cine toda reflexión filosófica sobre cine? ¿Cuándo surgió y dónde se ha desarrollado la estética del cine? ¿Es la estética del cine sólo el estudio de la experiencia estética del espectador?

From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory: Essais sur la signifi cation au cinéma, tome1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le signifiant imaginaire; and L’Enonciation impersonnelle. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz’s ideas were taken up, digested, refined,reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored.

This volume collects and translates into English for the first time a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries,elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. He speaks informally of the most fundamental concepts that constitute the heart of film theory as an academic discipline — concepts borrowed from linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, and psychoanalysis.

Within the colloquial language of the interview, we witness Metz’s initial formation and development of his film theory. The interviewers act as curious readers who pose probing questions to Metz about his books, and seek clarification and elaboration of his key concepts. We also discover the contents of his unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s.

http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089648259-conversations-with-christian-metz.html

La gestion de l’intelligibilité de l’archive est une problématique à la fois sémiotique et documentaire qui fait émerger une question fondamentale : assister le parcours interprétatif en enrichissant les métadonnées de l’archive permet-il une pratique efficiente de la mémoire ?

Análisis textual del universo Tim Burton. Escenas Fantasmáticas.

Análisis de varias escenas de la filmografía de Tim Burton acompañadas de
datos clave sobre el autor y sus influencias para el análisis de éstas.

Trabajo de Finde Grado para la consecución del Grado en Comunicación Audiovisual calificado con Matrícula de Honor.

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

Cultures can be categorized depending on whether they concentrate their attention on the past, the present, or the future, and depending on whether this attention is euphoric, dysphoric, or neutral (Leone 2014 _Longing_). The present essay intends to complexify such articulation through suggesting that it might include also aspectuality and be traversed by the three semiotic dimensions of indexical reference to the ontology of time, iconic representation of it, and symbolical evocation of it. In other words, cultures do not diverge only in terms of 'whe'n in time they focus their attention on, but also in terms of 'how' in time they do so.

Perhaps one of the oddest examples of the hotel film "genre" is undoubtedly Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). Although Marienbad takes place almost entirely within the confines of a luxurious resort hotel and its surrounding gardens, the film's abstract quality is far removed from the realistically depicted lodgings depicted in most motion pictures. Not only does the hermetically sealed estate look quite different from, say, the Plaza Hotel in Plaza Suite or the Bates Motel in Psycho, but the way the interiors and exteriors are filmed makes Marienbad stand out as an atypical "hotel movie." Some of these uncharacteristic techniques include: cinematographer Sacha Vierny's hypnotic Cinemascope tracking shots through the empty corridors; jaded, somnambulant guests who assume fixed, rigid postures; poetic voice-over narration that often seems to bear little relationship to the visuals; a mise-en-scène that separates characters with huge expanses of deserted space, furnishings, and/or bric-à-brac; a lighting scheme that repeatedly cuts from an overexposed scene to an underexposed one (especially in the famous bar-bedroom montage); a 1 An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in Post Script. "The Intentionality of Consciousness: Subjectivity in Last Year at Marienbad," Post Script 7.2 (winter 1988): 58-71.

After a short survey of the key questions regarding intermediality in cinema and placing them into the context of current debates in media studies and film theory, the paper addresses the key issues of the methodology of studying intermediality in film. In assessing the import of intermedial studies on film, the paper focuses on certain characteristic methodologies that have emerged in treating intermedial occurrences within films throughout the history of theorizing about the movies in general. Some of the major historical paradigms to be briefly described are: the normative aesthetic viewpoints in the spirit of cinematic New Laocoöns, the trans-medial theorizing of the moving image, inter-art theories, and parallax historiographies. Finally methodologies aiming at modelling intermediality and mapping the rhetoric of intermedial cinema are presented in somewhat more detail.

This chapter discusses how Christian Metz was inspired by the French filmology movement. Filmology, having been founded in the years after WWII, endeavoured to study cinema in its psychological, sociological, and philosophical complexity. Metz was impressed by the distance filmology took from the institutions of film production and criticism. Also, several important terms introduced by filmology found their way into Metz's writings. Furthermore, the essay speculates about the more subcutaneous influence of two essays by Roland Barthes from the "Revue international de filmologie". Although Metz never discusses these texts in detail, they may have played an important role in formulating his own project. By sketching this possible line, this essay contributes to the genealogy of Metz's thinking.

Critics of semiology, and of Christian Metz's work in particular, often alleged that he was not a cinephile, that he had no interest in films (since he hardly ever analyzed a film), and that semiologists like Metz were putting aside everything that made cinema an art and a source of aesthetic pleasure. In short, Metz was frequently attacked for being indifferent to film as an aesthetic artefact. This chapter seeks to develop a more nuanced view by examining the place that the aesthetic occupies in Metz's intellectual trajectory as well as its links with semiology. This place can be divided, broadly speaking at least, into three 'sites' between which the aesthetic moves: expressiveness, stylistics, and poetics.

È estatico ogni discorso che, costruendosi nel linguaggio e col linguaggio, rappresenta nondimeno una fuoriuscita da esso, un bloccarsi della semiosi, un venir meno delle distinzioni che fondano il senso. Trattasi dunque di un’impostura? Dell’evocazione impossibile, fra le maglie dell’immanenza, di una dimensione trascendente nella quale e verso la quale la prima si sfaldi, perdendo la consistenza di strutture e opposizioni? Rispondere affermativamente sarebbe forse semplicistico, sarebbe considerare l’estasi come puro effetto ottico, come sorta di trompe-l’oeil mistico. In realtà, come ogni trompe-l’oeil, anche l’estasi rinvia a qualcosa di più della propria semplice rappresentazione. Essa rimanda ai pregiudizi inconfessati di un’ideologia semiotica, alla trama nascosta, al negativo segreto che regge tutta la concezione moderna del senso e del linguaggio. Il discorso mistico, che corre parallelo e invisibile, spesso represso, a volte perseguitato, lungo tutta la storia delle religioni, esprime allora questo dubbio: e se il senso non fosse distinzione, separatezza, dualità? Se l’immanenza articolatoria che lo viviseziona non fosse che illusoria? A questo punta ogni racconto dell’estasi: al sospetto che i fondamenti della modernità, anti-mistici per definizione, non siano altro che una delle possibilità dell’umano, e che una storia non detta, in filigrana, si dipani accanto e sotto al moderno come traccia sbiadita di un altro percorso, di un altro modo d’intendere e di dire.

There have been certain conventions such as music, dance, male-female duality, personal styles of characters, entertainment, spontaneity and audience, introduced to describe the Hollywood/American film musical genre. However, the majority of these specific conventions are deconstructed in the post-modern musical movies. In order to analyze these conventions by a semiotic approach, this study is devoted to the semiotic analyses of the audio visual language in the construction of these two different types of musical movie genres. The study explores one particular musical movie, ‘The Commitments (1991)’ by Alan Parker by using the theories of prominent semioticians, Christian Metz and Roland Barthes. Musical as a genre is very closely connected with ideology of ‘ideal community’ and nation-ness. The main outcomes of the present paper are primarily related to the ideology of ‘ideal community’ and nation-ness in ‘The Commitments (1991)’ Semiotic analysis takes part a crucial role for reaching this outcome.

Di tutte le annunciazioni che popolano la storia umana e le sue svariate tradizioni, al semiologo non interessa la fonte in sé, il numinoso che all’umano si rivolge per significargli di volta in volta la propria presenza, intenzione, sensibilità; interessa, piuttosto, il modo in cui a seconda delle epoche storiche, dei contesti culturali, delle vicende sociali, ma anche delle sensibilità individuali, uomini e donne hanno utilizzato i materiali del mondo, quelli dell’immanenza, per forgiare i significanti del divino. Ovvero, specularmente, il modo in cui hanno immaginato, e creduto con fermezza, che tali materiali divenissero d’un tratto appannaggio di una divina intenzione di comunicare, stoffa della rivelazione, parole annuncianti. Al teologo, non al semiologo, spetta immaginare la ricostruzione della totalità a fronte della quale si dipana il messaggio divino nella sua vicenda immanente. Al semiologo tocca invece un compito che è insieme più modesto e più costrittivo; innanzitutto raccogliere e inventariare queste tracce: in quali circostanze gli uomini e le donne hanno raccontato e raccontano di un loro incontro con il divino? Utilizzando quali segni? Piegandoli a quali necessità comunicative? Il compito successivo, più arduo, è analizzare questi segni, con gli strumenti di cui dispone la metodologia semiotica, per capire se si possano in qualche modo catalogare, suddividere in tipologie, distribuire in atlanti che, anche al di là e a dispetto delle differenze d’origine storica e confessionale, manifestino nondimeno dinamiche comuni nella costruzione e nell’elaborazione del linguaggio.

A practical book, based on the most recent advances of art theory, neurosciences and the sciences of sensory perception, that helps both the expert and the student to have a better control over the emotive effects and the behavior produced by any visual composition in its perceiver, be it in architecture, film, graphic design, theatre, painting or any other visual media. Available through http://www.blurb.com/b/8473553-semiology-for-artists-and-designers

The author analyzes Sven Agustijnen's Specters from the philosophical perspective. He tries to prove that the cinema of Belgian director is haunted because it presents the reality as made out of traces, which disturb the traditional division into presence and absence. The author analyzes the Augustijnen's film techniques and uses Jacques Derrida hauntology to show, how contemporary cinema tries to face the difficult and unfinished colonial history of Belgium (the genocide in Congo during the reign of the Belgian king Leopold II and the murder of the first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice  Lumumba).

Le cinéma (ce qu'on appelle cinéma), qui n'est pas encore qu'au principe, deviendra au terme de son évolution la plus formidable trouvaille du monde, en ce sens qu'il dressera devant l'humanité une surhumanité ainsi qu'en face de la création une surcréation. Ce cinéma futur multipliera de ses natures la Nature » Saint-Pol-Roux (1925-1930), Cinéma Vivant, Rougerie, 1972, p. 15. ! Our analysis will be based on the Freudian theories applied to the narration of the three first movies which chronologically form the "second trilogy" of the Star Wars 1)Saga: Star Wars (1977, re-baptized Episode IV, A New Hope in 1999), 2) The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Episode V), 3) Return of the Jedi (1983, Episode VI), and the first edition of the biography of Georges Lucas written in 1983, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale Pollock.

Dusi, N., Vanoye, F., Tröhler, M., editors, automne 2004, L'adaptation cinématographique: questions de méthode, questions ésthétiques. Film Adaptation: Methodological Questions, Aesthetic Questions, numero 30 di IRIS – Revue de Théorie de l'Image et du Son – A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, pp. 7-173.

tesi magistrale in semiotica del testo riguardante gli effetti di senso creati dal montaggio audiovisivo.
il seguente studio dopo aver analizzato il medium tv, i generi televisivi ed il linguaggio proprio della televisione, affronta il particolare rapporto tra diversi codici espressivi quali: linguaggio verbale, iconico, sonoro.
la trattazione si conclude con un approfondimento riguardante un format televisivo in particolare: Blob. La scelta di analizzare questo programma risiede nel suo potenziale manipolativo-semantico insito nei processi di montaggio audiovisivo peculiari del format.