This document provides an introduction to analyzing films through a semiotic lens. It discusses film as both an audiovisual system that can be analyzed through its individual signs/images, as well as a narrative constructed of characters, settings, and events. Semiotics is introduced as the study of signs and how meanings and representations of reality are constructed. Film represents reality through iconic, narrative, and dramatic forms of representation, as well as through its unique cinematic language of images, editing, and more. Analyzing a film involves examining its narrative modes, the experience of mimesis it provides, and interpreting the meanings of its individual images and signs.

1. Film Analysis. An Introduction
to Film Semiotics
Signs and meaning in film

2. Two combined approaches to film
 As a (audio)visual system, a form of
representation, a text.
 Constructed through images (mostly) each of
which can be analysed as a sign in order to
understand its meaning (Semiotics)
 As a narrative
 A story constructed of characters, a setting, and a
chain of events

3. Semiotics
 Broad definition:
 Semiotics is concerned with everything that can
be taken as a sign (Eco, 1976)
 Contemporary semioticians study signs as part of
semiotic ‘sign systems’ They study how meanings
are made and how reality is represented
(Chandler 2002, 2)

4. What is representation?
 “Whatever encompasses our attention is a world
we have constructed to live in. Whatever
organizes our sense of that world or of some
portion of it is a version; and versions we call
representations” (Andrew, 1984, 39).
 “Representation conveys the illusion of a
represented reality” (Fowler 1989, 71) – any of all
the possible representations of reality is not the
same as its referent, it requires an intervention,
manipulation and conveys meaning about that
reality

5. Representation in film (conflating
forms)
 Iconic representation (the image of an object
is not the same as the object)
 Narrative representation (the narrative
representation of characters and events, etc)
 Dramatic mimesis (equivalent to theatrical
representation)
 Representation through film language:
cinematic signs (not only isolated images but
mise-en-scene, movement, editing, etc)

6. Film “reading” and intepretation
 Narrative modes: showing / telling
 Experience of Mimesis: identificación
 Interpretation of the cinematic image
 Denotation/ connotation

7.  F. de Saussure’s sign
 a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and
 the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.
 The sign is the whole that results from the
association of the signifier with the signified
a signifier: the word open;
a signified concept: that the shop is open for business.
A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular
signified. The same signifier (the word 'open') could stand for a
different signified (and thus be a different sign) if it were on a push-
button inside a lift ('push to open door').

8. The construction of meaning in film
 Film can draw on all the other arts for various
effects simply because it can record them.
Thus, all the connotative factors of spoken
language can be accommodated on a film
soundtrack […] (to say nothing of the
connotative factors of dance, music, painting
etc) Because film is a product of culture, it
has resonances that go beyond its
denotation. (Monaco 1981: 131)

9.  As the film theorist D N Rodowick puts it,
'Rather than reproducing the "world"
spontaneously and automatically, as the
ideology of realism would have the spectator
believe, the cinematic apparatus always
operates selectively, limiting, filtering and
transforming the images that are its raw
material' (Rodowick 1994, 77).

10.  As the film theorist D N Rodowick puts it,
'Rather than reproducing the "world"
spontaneously and automatically, as the
ideology of realism would have the spectator
believe, the cinematic apparatus always
operates selectively, limiting, filtering and
transforming the images that are its raw
material' (Rodowick 1994, 77).