Semiotics and the Analysis of Film PDF Download

Author: Jean Mitry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253337337
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This study analyses the value of semiotics in film analysis. It poses the question that if cinema is a language can it be understood through the techniques of linguistic analysis? The study includes signs, montage, codes, images and narrative.

Author: Lane Roth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317928520
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Semiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct application to comparative film research. It takes as its representative subject one trilogy of films and applies semiology, with careful textual analysis. The book begins with a basic introduction to semiotics and the ideas of Christian Metz on cinesemiotics. It then presents a syntagmatic analysis of each of the three Dollars films, with an outline of autonomous segments for each and a discussion of the findings before undertaking a wider analysis of the trilogy as a whole with commentary on the stylistic unity of the director’s work. This book, an enduring detailed study of these three films, also outlines clearly this method of classifying the formal structuring codes of film communication.

Author: Hing Tsang
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614514119
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema engages with very vital problems posed by Peirce's philosophy in an innovative and inter-disciplinary fashion by examining how documentary film practice can engage with the question of emergent human agency within a wider biosphere shared by human animals and non-human animals alike. The book is in many ways a celebration of human inquiry, taking liberally from Peirce's semeiotic and parallel ideas within recent visual anthropology. Through an analysis of the work of three renowned filmmakers - Jon Jost, Johan Van der Keuken, and Rithy Panh - Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema reasserts human agency within a global age, dominated by philosophical scepticism and an unquestioning subservience to mechanistic military techno-culture. The author argues that an approach to documentary inquiry, broadly derived from Peirce's sign theory, phenomenology, and overall philosophical outlook, has strong advantages over atemporal formal approaches derived from Saussurean semiology. Nevertheless, this project is also both critical and self-critical. It also bears direct testament to the many tumultuous and life-destroying events of the late 20th century and reminds us of the moral and philosophical problems which we are still grappling with in the early 21st century. Hence - the Living Sign.

Author: Christian Metz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226521305
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage?'"—Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."—Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [Film Language] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."—Stephen Heath, Screen

Author: Warren Buckland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501316532
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Wes Anderson's Symbolic Storyworld presents a theoretical investigation of whatmakes the films of Wes Anderson distinctive. Chapter by chapter, it relentlessly pulls apart each of Anderson's narratives to pursue the proposition that they all share the same deep underlying symbolic values – a common symbolic storyworld. Taking the polemical strategy of outlining and employing Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinguished (and notorious) work on myth and kinship to analyze eight of Anderson's films, Warren Buckland unearths the peculiar symbolic structure of each film, plus the circuits of exchange, tangible and intangible gift giving, and unusual kinship systems that govern the lives of Anderson's characters. He also provides an analysis of Wes Anderson's visual and aural style, identifying several distinctive traits of Anderson's mise en scène.

Author: Raymond Bellour
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253213648
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Analysis of Film brings together the authors studies of classic Hollywood film. It is a book about the methods of close film analysis, the narrative structure of Hollwood film, Hitchcock's work and the role of women.

Author: Robert Stam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134963165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
First published in 1992. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics provides a comprehensive lexicon of semiotic concepts. With sections on linguistics, narratology, psychoanalysis and intertextuality, it constructs an indispensable dictionary for film theory, defining over five hundred critical terms. The authors address key aspects of contemporary semiotics and cultural debate, while referring to the work of key figures such as Peirce, Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Propp, Genette, Greimas, Kristeva, Lacan, Metz, Bellour, Heath, Mulvey, Johnston, Rose, Doane, Bakhtin and Baudrillard. The semiotic concepts are illustrated by examples drawn from the films of directors such as Welles, Dreyer, Brunel, Godard, Hitchcock, Varda, Akerman and Woody Allen. Although especially geared to the needs of film students, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics should be useful for scholars in all areas of the arts, philosophy and literature.

Author: John Bateman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136467556
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced ‘layout structure’—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films. With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809071940
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--

Author: Yoshiko Okuyama
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739190938
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
A cyborg detective hunts for a malfunctioning sex doll that turns itself into a killing machine. A Heian-era Taoist slays evil spirits with magic spells from yin-yang philosophy. A young mortician carefully prepares bodies for their journey to the afterlife. A teenage girl drinks a cup of life-giving sake, not knowing its irreversible transformative power. These are scenes from the visually enticing, spiritually eclectic media of Japanese movies and anime. The narratives of courageous heroes and heroines and the myths and legends of deities and their abodes are not just recurring motifs of the cinematic fantasy world. They are pop culture’s representations of sacred subtexts in Japan. Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime. Part I introduces film semiotics with plain definitions of terminology. Through familiar cinematic examples, it emphasizes the myth-making nature of modern-day film and argues that semiotics can be used as a theoretical tool for reading film. Part II presents case studies of eight popular Japanese films as models of semiotic analysis. While discussing each film’s use of common mythological motifs such as death and rebirth, its case study also unveils more covert cultural signifiers and folktale motifs, including jizo (a savior of sentient beings) and kori (bewitching foxes and raccoon dogs), hidden in the Japanese filmic text.