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Semiotics: the “science of signs”

One cultural studies writer has joked that “semiotics tells us things we already know in a language we will never understand.

This is partially true, but semiotics is also a very useful way to study communication, because it looks closely at cultural meanings that are often so familiar we don’t even think about them.  Semiotics does have a specialized vocabulary but I’ll be skipping most of that and focusing on basic concepts.

The key writers on semiotics were the structuralist linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “perse” even though it’s spelled more like “pierce”).

Saussure’s basic proposition was that communication creates meaning, rather than the other way around. It was very radical at the time. If you’ve studied philosophy, you know Rene Descartes’ famous phrase, I think therefore I am, which

meant that cognition could be understood through introspection – from a “first-person perspective.”

The structuralists turned things around by saying, let’s look at the social manifestations of thought, because that’s observable, and it will give us a better sense of how meaning works in the real world.

So rather than making the Cartesian, first-person assumption that subjective mental processes are the foundation of all thought, they took a “third-person perspective,” and looked at culture as the key to understanding.

What this means is that they looked for the structural patterns of meaning in society rather than thinking about it as something that comes from the mind.

This debate is still very currant, because contemporary methods of studying the brain have made cognition more accessible, so it’s possible to look at the aspects of understanding and communication that may be cognitively “hard wired” rather than socially constructed.

But even if many aspects of how we understand the world are the product of evolution and the brain, culture still plays a significant role in language, which is clear to anyone who’s learned a foreign language and discovered that each language has different priorities and expressive options.

Similarly, other sign systems vary across cultures, and structuralism and semiotics look for the rules that govern culture and all kinds of communication, from storytelling to fashion. We aren’t necessarily conscious of these rules, but we intuitively follow them because they’re familiar.

Signs and sign systems

Both Peirce and Saussure created categories for different kinds of signs, but for our purposes you might just use a general definition from Umberto Eco, who described a sign as “everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else.”

A sign can be a word, but it can also be an image, a symbol, even a sound. A sign has meaning because it’s part of a system of meaning, like a language, or a set of cultural beliefs or symbols. If you see a red, yellow, or green light at a street corner you know what that means because those signs are part of a system of traffic management in our culture.

So both structuralism and semiotics see meaning as relational and differential, rather than something that is inherently linked to an object or referent.  The word bird has no intrinsic connection to the animal – it could also be called a chair.

But we know what “bird” means because the word has been arbitrarily assigned to that animal in our language, and it means something that is different from “dog” or “bat.” This might seem obvious where language is concerned, but it’s important when you start to think about signs that we see as more “natural.”

One good example is film lighting. Standard lighting is at a 45-degree angle above horizon in our longitude because that convention comes form the position of the sun before or after noon.

But if you are lighting a horror film, you’ll probably have some strange angles, particularly low angles. This creates an eerie image. Why? Where does low light come from in nature? Generally a campfire or something, but the symbolic association with light from below is something hellish and unnatural because it’s not from the sun. It’s not something we think about when we see low light casting unusual shadows on someone’s face – it just looks weird or creepy.

Another example is the use of color. In All That Heaven Allows certain colors are positively associated with nature, for example. Similarly, in Slumdog Millionaire there is a very clear use of contrasting gold and blue palettes (warm vs. cool). And the cliche of good characters wearing light colors and bad characters wearing dark ones is an obvious cliché but one that is still used all the time.

So, semiotics looks at signs that are part of some sort of system of communication – whether it’s language, or visual codes, or dress codes – any kind of sign system that communicates meaning.

One of the problems with both structuralism and semiotics is that the process of identifying the main structures of difference and meaning can imply that they are relatively stable and consistent.

This changed with the advent of poststructuralism, which looks at “reception” as where meaning takes place, not in the communication medium or text itself, but in the process of making sense of it. We discussed in relation to genres, for example – the way that genres don’t have inherent meaning and values, they’re given that meaning by the audience based on their viewing histories, and cultural background. So the thing to keep in mind is that you need to think in terms of a “social semiotics” that is very grounded in a specific cultural context.

Semiotics and ideology

One of the most important early semiotic theorists was Roland Barthes, who wrote a little book called Mythologies.  This was a collections of essays on different aspects of popular culture, including things like photographs and movies.  I mentioned last week that Barthes’ theory of realism was very influential in literary and film studies because he argued that people perceive a representation as realistic when it corresponds to their preexisting world view – their beliefs and ideology.

Barthes also wrote about the difference between denotation and connotation.  The most basic level of meaning generated by a sign is called denotation – it means that when I say the word “chair,” you think of a chair.  But connotation is something else – it’s a bundle of associations and values that go along with a particular sign’s denotative meaning.  For example, if I say “Queen of England,” or show you a picture of her, the denotative meaning stops once you’ve recognized the concept “Queen of England.”

But anything else that might come to mind like “royalty, English imperialism, the ruling class,” etc., are connotative meanings.  For Barthes, connotative meaning was very influenced by ideology (our socio-political values) , because it’s usually connected to a cultural “code” or what he called cultural mythologies.

When semiotics began to be used as a way to analyze films (in the 1960s), it seemed to offer a way to look at how films could reproduce or challenge social and ideological meaning on a level that many of us are not conscious of.

Early Christian Metz: semiotics and textual analysis

Christian Metz was one of the first film theorists to look at cinema as a kind of language system. But he was less interested in the question of how conventions of meaning reinforce ideology than with the question of whether mainstream filmmaking can be said to be like a language in terms of having a set of consistent patterns of construction that are equivalent to the rules of grammar.

One of the precepts of Saussurian linguistics is that each language has a structural system (which in French is langue, and that’s different from actual instances of speech, which is parole).  The combination of these two aspects of language – the rules, and it’s actual usage – is called language.

What Metz argued is that cinema has a language, but ultimately it has no langue, or deep structure of cinematic rules. There are a number of reasons he argued that film is different from other language-systems; one is that films can’t be broken down into small, abstract units of meaning like phonemes (the smal sound units in a word): the smallest unit of meaning in film is a frame, which is already a complex image full of different signs.

Ultimately he concluded that film can be considered a language because it has its own formal codes that are significantly different from reality, such as the way editing cuts or dissolves images to convey changes in space and time, but he also said that because the film is so representational, much of what it communicates can only be understood in terms of the cultural codes they refer to.

So one of the aspects of Metz’s work that continues to be quite useful, I think, is this idea that some codes of representation in cinema draw on cultural codes that we use in day-to-day perception, like dress codes, social stereotypes, or visual design and the meaning of consumer goods, but others are more specific to the formal techniques of filmmaking.

Ultimately the purpose of film semiotics wasn’t simply the cataloguing of cinematic conventions. It was to try and understand the way that movies express, exaggerate, and help form the signs and symbols that structure the ways we interpret the world itself, not just cinema.

Some semiotic codes of screen media

A code is a system of signs whose conventions are shared by members of a culture and used to generate and circulate meaning. Below are just a few examples from each of Metz’s categories.
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Formal Codes

These codes are the “language” of audiovisual media. They are the techniques of representing events and characters in time-based moving images.

camera work

lighting

editing

music

sound

narrative

dialogue

casting

setting

Social Codes

These codes govern the meanings we associate with everyday behavior and appearance – they aren’t specific to screen media, but film and television draw on these codes, usually exaggerating them to make them more expressive of character and plot.

appearance

dress

make-up

environment

behavior

speech

gesture

expression

Ideological Codes

These are more general and “unspoken” sets of assumptions conveyed through narrative and representation. They are often connotative rather than explicit and can be received almost subconsciously. Their interpretation will also vary depending on the viewer’s social position and background.

race

class

gender and sexuality

nationality

religion

morality

political orientation

Below you’ll also find some structuralist-type binary pairs that might be helpful for thinking about the spectrum of meanings attached to formal codes. Structuralist used these kinds of contrasting values to describe a spectrum of value. For example, a shot may not have high-key lighting or low-key lighting, but instead be somewhere in between, but those two terms describe the extremes of each end of the lighting-style spectrum. It’s fun to make up your own pairs of contrasting values – why not see if you can come up with one?

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Camera work

long takes : conventional scene editing

static : moving

steady movement : handheld

‘straight’ photography : soft focus/filter

close up : long shot

high/low angle : neutral angle

black and white : color

Lighting

high key : low key

hard light : soft light

naturalistic : stylized

Editing

fast paced : slow paced

linear narrative : non-linear narrative

continuity : non-continuity

straight cuts : dissolves/wipes

action shots : reaction shots

Sound and music

diagetic : non-diagetic

synchronous : non-synchronous

major key : minor key

contemporary music : classical/mood music

generically coded music : culturally coded music

Mise-en-scene

interior : exterior

location : studio

contemporary : period

fashionable : unfashionable

white-collar : blue-collar

unusual : average

realist : stylized

‘straight’ make-up : ‘character’ make-up

Performance and casting

naturalistic : stylized

star acting : character acting

lead performance : ensemble performance

dramatic : comic

exaggerated gender role: ‘naturalistic’ gender role

Dialogue

formal : colloquial

contemporary : period language

introspective : action-oriented

realist : stylized

fast-paced : contemplative

local accent : ‘foreign’ accent

Discussion prompt:

What I’d like you to blog about this week is the difference I mention in this video between the formal codes of filmmaking and the social codes of representation. After watching All that Heaven Allows, briefly describe one aspect of how the film is made that seems particularly meaningful. Right off the bat many of you will mention the use of color, because there are lots of good examples of that. If you’re favorite example gets used, try to think of something else (like the way images are framed, the way the camera moves, the use of light/dark contrasts, the use of music, etc.). Of course music is also socially coded, but you can focus on the particular qualities of how music works in a film. If you really run out of ideas that haven’t been posted already, use an example from a different film. You don’t need to have a big, deep interpretation – just give some idea why you think it stood out to you or affected you in some way that was noticeable.

Secondly, I’d like you to post one small image (instructions below) that you think illustrates a social or cultural code. This could easily have to do with gender, age, class, race, urban/rural values, etc. (feel free to use an image from the Sirk film if you like). What kind of code do you think makes that image a “sign” that is not just literal (denotative), but one that may have larger cultural meanings (connotative) for some some audiences?

To copy a picture from the web, you can right click (Mac control-click) and choose “save image as,” and then pick a place to put it, like your desktop. Then, in your post, put the cursor where you want the image. At the top of the text window you’ll see “add media.” Click the first little square and it will let you pick an image file from your computer to post (”select files”). Please select the smallest size. Click “insert into post,”  and then publish. Voila. You can make the text wrap around it if you want to get fancy but don’t worry. If you have problems, send me a message: sberry@pdx.edu.