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"Semiotics and motion pictures"
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Cinematic metaphor : experience, affectivity, temporality
Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework?s application to media and multimodality analysis.
Book
The Semiotics of Light and Shadows
Lighting and shadows are used within a range of art forms to create aesthetic effects. Piotr Sadowski’s study of light and shadow in Weimar cinema and contemporaneous visual arts is underpinned by the evolutionary semiotic theories of indexicality and iconicity. These theories explain the unique communicative and emotive power of light and shadow when used in contemporary indexical media including the shadow theatre, silhouette portraits, camera obscura, photography and film. In particular, Sadowski highlights the aesthetic and emotional significance of shadows. The ‘cast shadow’, as an indexical sign, maintains a physical connection with its near-present referent, such as a hidden person, stimulating a viewer’s imagination and provoking responses including anxiety or curiosity. The ‘cinematic shadow’ plays a stylistic role, by enhancing image texture, depth of field, and tonal contrast of cinematic moments. Such enhancements are especially important in monochromatic films, and Sadowski interweaves the book with accounts of seminal Weimar cinema moments. Sadowski's book is distinctive for combining historical materials and theoretical approaches to develop a deeper understanding of Weimar cinema and other contemporary art forms. The Semiotics of Light and Shadows is an ideal resource for both scholars and students working in linguistics, semiotics, film, media, and visual arts.
eBook
Multimodal Film Analysis
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?
eBook
Japanese mythology in film
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.
eBook
Cinema and Semiotic
'Meaning' in cinema is very complex, and the flood of theories that define it have, in certain ways, left cinematic meaning meaningless. Johannes Ehrat's analysis of meaning in cinema has convinced him that what is needed is greater philosophical reflection on the construction of meaning. In Cinema and Semiotic , he attempts to resurrect meaning by employing Charles S. Peirce's theories on semiotics to debate the major contemporary film theories that have diluted it.
Based on Peirce's Semiotic and Pragmatism , Ehrat offers a novel approach to cinematic meaning in three central areas: narrative enunciation, cinematic world appropriation, and cinematic perception. Attempting a comprehensive theory of cinema – instead of the regional 'middle-ground' theories that function only on certain 'common-sense' assumptions that borrow uncritically from psychophysiology – Ehrat further demonstrates how a semiotic approach grasps the nature of time, not in a psychological manner, but rather cognitively, and provides a new understanding of the particular filmic sign process that relates a sign to the existence or non-existence of objects. Never before has Peirce been so fruitfully employed for the comprehension of meaning in cinema.
eBook
The language of film
\"Becoming an effective filmmaker involves being deliberately mindful of the structures and conventions that allow film to communicate meaning to a global audience. The Language of Film explores complex topics such as semiotics, narrative, intertextuality, ideology and the aesthetics of film in a clear and straightforward style, enabling you to apply these ideas and techniques to your own analysis or film-making. With full-colour film stills, in-depth case studies and a wide range of practical exercises, The Language of Film will help you to make the transition from consumer to practitioner - from someone who just responds to the language of film, to someone who actively uses it. In the second edition, a new chapter examines how sound contributes to narrative and space to tell stories, create imaginary worlds and shape the realist (and often non-realist) effect of cinema. Along with two case studies from the first edition, Seven (dir: David Fincher) and Citizen Kane (dir: Orson Welles), the second edition also includes five new case studies: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (dir: Ben Stiller), Dead Man's Shoes (dir: Shane Meadows), Hero (dir: Yimou Zhang), Berberian Sound Studio (d: Peter Strickland) and Psycho (d: Alfred Hitchcock)\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
New vocabularies in film semiotics : structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond
First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
eBook