During the 1960s and 1970s, semioticians extended their analytical frameworks to non-linguistic communicational media such as cinema (42/1)1. Among them, Claude Lévi-Strauss played a decisive role by proposing that any cultural system structured through signs and governed by internal rules could be analysed in a manner analogous to language. Consequently, semiotics and linguistics constitute foundational theoretical pillars for this dissertation, as they enable an investigation into whether sequential organisation within a visual discipline contributes to the facilitation of meaning and comprehension.
- 1
In the wake of the work of Levi-Strauss a wide range of apparently non-linguistic domains came under the jurisdiction of structural linguistics. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s might be seen as the height of semiotic “imperialism,” when the discipline annexed vast territories of cultural phenomena for exploration. Since the object of semiotic research could be anything that could be construed as a system of signs organized according to cultural codes or signifying processes, semiotic analysis could easily be applied to areas previously considered either obviously non-linguistic – fashion and cuisine, for example – or traditionally deemed beneath the dignity of literary or cultural studies, such as comic strips, photo-romances, James Bond novels, and the commercial entertainment film.
(Structure>language)
Film Theory: An Introduction
by Robert Stam ↩︎
Leave a Reply