CCTP-719: Film Theory: Semiotics: A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

"The semiological investigation starts from the principle that if there is to be communication, it must be established and governed by the way the emitter organizes a message. He does this according to a system of rules socially conventionalized (even at the unconscious level) which makes up the code" (Eco 592).

This is a little like physics explaining its existence on the basis that things fall down.

But wait, Eco continues: "...the more Semiology advances, the more it recognizes the social motivations - transformed into communicative motivations and rhetorical determinations - of those aspects of our behavior which are presumed to be creative and innovatory" (Eco 593).

In other words, only the Semiotic experts can tell you if something is creative or not.

I recently was reading an article on how to be a better photographer (but I don't even own a camera). The take-away from the piece was that photographers are able to pull interesting compositions out of reality by examining reality from an aesthetic perspective, instead of a semiological one. You see, when we walk up to an old barn we don't really look at the barn. We recognize the barn from our vast mental warehouse of previous barns seen live, in images, in stories, movies, drawings, etc. The barn before us is more an idea of a barn to our mind than an unique barn. A good photographer though can ignore this impulse and see the barn for its aesthetic properties. More often than not, the word aesthetic has a negative connotation (oh no, codes!). But in the case of the photographer, this ability to focus on the surface and ignore the powerful mental demands of categorizing this barn is what gives the photographer the ability to find beauty in what is otherwise a sea of "codes."

Have you ever watched a film you've already seen on television and not remembered anything? Nothing seemed familiar? No images stood out? The camera shots, colors were all bland and uninteresting. Compare this to seeing a great film. I first saw Citizen Kane when I was about fourteen or fifteen (my father thought it would be good for me). I recently saw it again and I could remember large swaths of the three hour film. Was this because of Orson Welles's "encoding"? Or what this do to his aesthetic (and thus "ambiguous") artistic decisions?

Sonora's examples of encoding in film trailers (and also some of my favorite youtube videos of re-imagined trailers - also check out "10 Things I Hate About Commandments" and "Must Love Jaws") was a very pertinent example of how semiotics works. These codes are very real. A multi-billion dollar industry is based on them. All of advertisement and marketing utilize codes in order to make the consumer associate things with their products. If anyone would have figured out these codes, it would have been the advertisers because their entire existence is based on exploiting them. However, last night I saw a commercial with for a cell phone service that was based entirely around a woman's two-foot long armpit hair.

Are these people insane? If semiotics breaks down in non-artistic pursuits like this, what hope does it have for film?

Trailers are anti-art. They make art into a 30-second commodity in order to put butts in the seat. Terrible films are little more 80 minute long trailers, blatantly communicating to audiences through established codes of American movies. Great films are aware of their use of codes and by being self-aware can play with expectations and even attempt to leave a clean "ambiguous" series of images to convey its story.

Am I suggesting that semiotics is a made-up, pretentious form for analysis? A little bit. But I do recognize that codes exist and vary according to cultural normals. Here's a great example of how studios remake film posters for foreign markets ("Weekend at Bernie's" in the United States on the left, and in Poland on the right)