The Good, The Bad Or The Ideal And The Other:
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Faheem Abrahams
204021480
LMC410-semiotics and film
1st October 2007
Lecturer: Wozniak. J
The Good, The Bad or The Ideal and The Other:
An essay on Hollywood cinema and its representations of Western or American social ideologies as mainstream culture while portraying the abject other as deviant or evil.
I promise that all the work in this review is my own and I know all about the laws surrounding plagiarism and promise that I did not plagiarise.
Signed.
“Since ancient times, people have been intrigued by the seductive powers of story-telling. In The Poetics, Aristotle distinguished between two types of fictional narratives: mimesis (showing) and diegesis (telling). Mimesis is the province of the live theatre, where the events “tell themselves.” Diegisis, the province of the literary epic and the novel, is a story told by a narrator who is sometimes reliable, sometimes not. Cinema combines both forms of storytelling and hence is a more complex medium, with a wider range of narrative techniques at its disposal.” (Giannetti: pg 350: 2005)
As a result, the question comes to mind: just how far do these seductive powers resonate in the viewer and to what extent does it influence the viewers perceptions in society? Furthermore: how do these powers influence the viewer and where or how do they achieve this?
Since it is safe to say that, “it cannot be denied that, due to its popularity [] mainstream Hollywood film does have an influence on contemporary opinion, ranging in scope from fashion to gender roles, democracy, justice and religion” ( Jordaan: pg118: 2004), in the following essay I intend to discuss and define semiotics as an aspect of cinema. I shall engage in a discursive analyses to explain, as a result of the before mentioned, (specifically) Hollywoods utilization of semiotics to appropriate western or American dominant cultures as mainstream while portraying the abject or other (namely apposing factors) as evil. After defining the various before mentioned concepts, visa vi: semiotics; the other, etc. I shall analyze various examples of films from a variety of diverse film genres and expose their methods in appropriating this declaration of intent. The respected films and their genres are Wes Cravens Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) of the horror genre; Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan (1999) of the war genre and finally Nicholas Meyers Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn (1982) of the science fiction genre.
With regards to semiotics, Gilbert Marman writes that,
“The term semiotics (and, equivalently, the term semiolgy) means theory of signs. Linguistics is one such theory, since it is the theory of language-as-a-system-of-signs. The semiotics of the cinema is, similarly, the theory of language-as-a-system-of-signs. The idea is that we are to think of film as a kind of language and are to try to develope a linguistics of this language of film.” (Braudy. L & Cohen. M.: pg 90: 1998)
Further on Louis Giannetti (2005) in his Understanding Movies – Tenth Edition describes semiology or rather semiotics as,
“a study of how movies signify. The manner in which information is signified is indissolubly linked with whats being signified. The French theorist Christian Metz was in the forefront in developing semiotics as a technique of film analysis. Using many of the concepts and much of the terminology of structural linguistics, Metz and others developed a theory of cinematic communication founded on the concept of signs or codes. The language of cinema, like all types of discourse, verbal and nonverbal, is primarily symbolic: It consists of a complex network of signs we instinctively decipher while experiencing a movie.” (Giannetti: pg 498: 2005)
In other words semiotics is the language of analyzing a film according to the decoding of the representations imbedded or coded into the film being analyzed and how they are imbedded or coded. The representations are communicated to us in and from various methods employed in the making and/or interpretation of a film. As a result of the symbolic nature of these representations, in many instances the audiences are unaware of the messages and signs being mediated toward them. This is especially true as we may find that as Christian Metz states in his article, From Film Language – some points in the semiotics of cinema,
“the art of film is located on the same semiological “plane” as literary art: The properly aesthetic orderings and constraints – versification, composition and tropes in the first case; framing, camera movements, and light “effects” in the second – serve as the connoted instance, which is superimposed over the denoted meaning [] In the cinema, it is represented by the literal (that is, perceptual) meaning of the spectacle reproduced in the image, or of the sounds duplicated by the soundtrack. As for connotation, which plays a major role in all aesthetic languages, its significate is the literary or cinematographic “style”, “genre” (the epic, the western, etc.), “symbol” (philosophical, humanitarian, ideological, and so on), or poetic atmosphere” – and its signifier is the whole denotated semiological material, whether signified or signifying.” (Braudy & Cohen: pg 71: 1998)
Thus we find that every aspect of cinema, cinematic techniques, the film and its making, encompassing all attributes such as lighting techniques, the dialogue, music, framing, (especially) the narrative and its portrayal through the previously listed, even the individuals behind the making of the film and the viewers, etc. are (or should be considered) all part of the semiotic analyses, whether it be in a connotative or denotative interpretation or mediation of the representations within the film as a whole and its resulting influences on these representations albeit ideological legitimacy or stereotyping of the other through any of these means whether blatant or hidden, intentional