Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that the linguistic word belongs to society as a whole rather than to the individual (50/2)1. Consequently, the associations drawn between the communicational structures of cinema and those of language shift toward the domain of social research and observation. The question of whether the signs within cinema’s communicational structure are derived from social behavior, or whether social behavior itself is influenced by cinema as a powerful communicational medium, becomes increasingly blurred.
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Saussure, who was impressed by the work of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) in sociology, emphasised that signs must be studied from a social viewpoint, that language was a social institution which eluded the in~ividual will. The linguistic system – what might nowadays be called the ‘code’ – pre-existed the individual act of speech, the ‘message’.
(117>Secuence>Images>sings>Language)
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
by Peter Wollen ↩︎
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