Semiotic impasse: The cinematographic issue

Following Saussure’s tradition of semiotics, the present essay argues for the constructed character of cinematic semiosis. It is framed in the wider epistemological discussion regarding the arbitrary or motivated status of semiosis in general. The essay begins with a summary of the main onto-epistemological premises composing the definition of the sign at the level of langue. Then, it situates the areas of contestation of the premise of social construction, when cinema is the semiotic system under consideration. It proceeds with a critical presentation of two large groups of arguments against cinematic semiosis’ socially constructed status, and attempts to refute them. On the one hand, it investigates arguments founded on an assumed naturalness of the semiotic system’s relation to referent reality; on the other, arguments founded on the shared human nature of the sign users. Finally, the essay examines the way such arguments become significant in the context of the larger debates over aesthetic realism and the biological foundation of the social and human sciences. It concludes with certain observations on the ideological character of the naturalization of the social and its political implications.

This article proposes new categories for analysis in the field of semiotics of the audiovisual image, and offers references to other prior studies. The concepts introduced (going from units of signification, synchronic and diachronic approaches, to the meaning of audiovisual shot types and angles in semas) could be applied to television, films and video materials. Problems related to iconism, audiovisual language existence and denotation are also mentioned.

Gramma. Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2012

The paper investigates the ways through which semiosis in general and cinematic semiosis in particular reach toward the “exo-semiotic” realm. It attempts a meta-semiotic and epistemological approach, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s tradition of semiotics, and particularly on Louis Hjelsmlev’s model of the sign-function, as introduced in his 1954 essay “La stratification du langage”. It investigates the sign-function’s relations to its referent and to its expressive materials, and then attempts to apply Hjelmslev’s model to cinema. I hope to achieve the double aim of re-situating some lingering debates in cinema theory, while also exemplifying some questions regarding semiosis in general. The paper starts by summarizing the main axes of Saussure’s definition of the sign and its formalisation by Hjelmslev. It then shows how the de-essentialisation of semiosis leads to significant re-arrangements of the traditional premises with regards to the sign’s relation to both the referent and the expressive medium. Finally, it surveys the central issues that formed the discipline of the semiotics of cinema, stressing the conventionality of the cinema sign-function and the heterogeneity of its expression-plane. The paper thus shows that Saussure’s and Hjelmslev’s insights with regard to general semiotics can assist in untangling theoretical misunderstandings with regard to how cinema functions, while understanding cinematic semiosis can contribute to deepening and enriching our understanding of the function of semiosis in general.

Languagescapes. Ancient and Artificial Languages in Today's Culture, 2020

There exist texts, often of a ludic or manifestly artistic nature, that seriously query the univocal relationship between signifier and signified, the epistemology of the expression-content type. They are texts written in "impossible" languages, a-semic alphabets indecipherable by statute, which are however able to emanate enormous amounts of meaning for common readers, sometimes catapulting them into a playful childlike dimension, as well as challenging semioticians and linguists, even making them reconsider the theme of idiolect. This amounts to the opening up of a crisis not in any given language, but in the idea of language itself, and perhaps in the idea of the signs that should constitute it. This occurs, for example, in Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, in Kunizo Matsumoto's Art Brut, and in certain moments in the cinema of Leos Carax. In these cases, marked and obsessive emissions of signifiers do not coincide with precise signifieds, even if, on account of contextual and plastic specificities, they invite decrypting. The act of writing, for these authors, is often first of all the manifestation of an agency, which produces a text leaning heavily towards the phatic side. This happens when the obsession of putting the world into language clashes with parts of the world that refuse to be language-ized. The objective of this essay is to investigate this rich and not very explored context, which challenges some of the inner certainties of semiotics itself.

2018

The present paper investigates the ways through which semiosis in general and cinematic semiosis in particular reach toward the "exo-semiotic" realm. It attempts a meta-semiotic and epistemological approach, based on Ferdi­nand de Saussure's tradition of semiotics, and particularly on Louis Hjelsmlev's model of the sign-function, as introduced in his 1954 essay "La strat­ification du langage". It investigates the sign-function's relations to its ref­erent and to its expressive materials, and then attempts to apply Hjelmslev's model to cinema. I hope to achieve the double aim of re-situating some lin­gering debates in cinema theory, while also exemplifying some questions regarding semiosis in general. The paper starts by summarizing the main axes of Saussure's definition of the sign and its formalisation by Hjelmslev. It then shows how the de-essentialisation of semiosis leads to significant re-arrangements of the tradi­tional premises with reg...

Cross-Inter-Multi-Trans - Proceedings of the 13th World Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, 2018

Declaring in an academic environment that one deals with semiotics of cinema, or with semiotics and cinema, is always a risk, often met with sceptical grimaces. The term “semiotics of cinema” evokes an era which is perceived as being antiquated, crystallized on the names of Eco and Metz and on a structuralism which many, perhaps justly, consider outdated. The problem is not to be underestimated: if semiotics does not possess the tools with which to approach the cinema fully in its epistemic horizon, then it has failed from the start, since much of the sense we experience daily has a filmic basis. Asserting the death of semiotics of cinema thus amounts to endorsing the death of semiotics itself. It seems suicidal for a discipline to exclude itself from one of the domains which it should regard as fundamentally preeminent. In order to overcome this impasse, therefore, it could be worth starting a programmed dialogue between the semiological apparatus and the instruments of film studies and aesthetics, abandoning a hegemonic propensity which is anachronistic in this era of crisis of the human sciences. The purpose of my contribution is to propose some theoretical bridges that demonstrate how this debate would be fruitful in order to attest how semiotics has never been more alive.

Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema, 2018

Christian Metz's concept of the 'imaginary signifier' is in some sense oxymoronic. Metz claims that the signifier in cinema is absent, but this assertion rests on conflating the signifier and the referent. This chapter links these contradictions to Metz's continuing allegiance to the notion of the image as defined in the phenomenological approaches of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Here, the image is defined primarily by an analogy with the real. Lacan, by contrast, situated the image as a conjunction of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The author's analysis extends beyond the mirror stage essay to describe a relation of the subject to the image that is more productive for an understanding of cinematic space and time.

There is a paucity of texts concerned with an examination of and engagement with Deleuze’s concept of the sign. And more broadly, not much has been written on the potential of semeiotics for a semiotic analysis of the moving image. There have been inroads into this problem, but these have only gone as far as to consider the moving image in relation to the typology Peirce builds around the representative condition of the sign. I will make clear how Deleuze’s use of Peirce and development of a semiotics is much more complicated and yields a great potential for future semiotic analyses of the cinema.

French under the title Essais sur la signification au cinema-TRANSLATOR. ** Except in one case, where the repetitive passage was too long and was removed, the reader being informed of this deletion in a footnote. † It is principally in Chapters 3, 4, and 6 that the reader will encounter these rather exhaustive notes. This is especially true of Chapter 3, "The Cinema: Language or Language System?" which is the earliest of the articles reprinted ´ xi xii PREFACE On the other hand, I have allowed myself to make various minor corrections and adjustments in wording, for the purpose of clarification. The exception is Chapter 5, "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film." I have taken this opportunity to bring together (and to add to considerably) three earlier articles bearing on related topics, but each one giving only a partial treatment (furthermore, there were certain discrepancies among the articles). This chapter has, therefore, not heretofore been published in its present form, although many of the passages in it have been published. In attempting to improve the phrasing of the original articles, in adding notes wherever necessary to account for more recent developments, and, finally, in striving, in Chapter 5, to give a general and current description of the main problems at issue, my goal has been, in the still new and developing field of film semiotics, to present the reader with a work as coherent and up-to-date as its nature permits. I wish to express my thanks to the five publications in which the texts that make up this volume originally appeared: Revue d'esthetique, La Linguistique, Cahiers du cinéma, Image et son, and Communications, as well as to the Centre d'Étude des Communications de Masse (École Pratique des Hautes Eludes, Paris) which publishes Communications, the Polish Academy of Sciences, which organized the international symposium where one of the papers that constitute Chapter 5 was first read, and the Festival of the New Cinema (Pesaro, Italy), which organized the round-table discussion during which the last chapter in this volume was originally presented.