There are four areas of production to understand for our analysis:
Camera:
Shots, Angle, Movement, Composition
Editing:
Cutting, Other transitions
Sound:
Non musical, Musical
Mise-en-scene:
Production Design, Lighting and Colour Design
After watching this presentation by Stuart Hall, I started to understand these higher level theories of representation; the way in which meaning is given to things depicted and/or the different ways the same image can be represented through angles, lighting etc.
He also suggests that there are three different positions that the reader of a text can occupy when trying to interpret a text.
Preferred Reading – the reader fully accepts the text codes.
Negotiated Reading – partly shares the texts code and broadly accepts the preferred reading.
Oppositional Reading – reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation.
Roland Barthes theories concentrated on a discussion of how myth operates in society and he discussed this in the context of denotation and connotation.
Denotation – the literal, ‘obvious’ or ‘commonsense’ meaning of an image.
Connotation – is used to refer the social-cultural and ‘personal’ associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the image. These are typically related to the interpreter’s class, age, gender, ethnicity and and so on> Images are more open to interpretation – in their connotations than their denotations.
Example: a character wearing a Manchester united shirt.
Denotation – what the character is wearing
Connotation – the character is a fan of Manchester United football team.
Semiotics is from the Greek word’ Semion’ meaning ‘sign’. Semiotics or ‘Semiology’, is the study of signs and meanings. For the purposes of such study a sign is any physical object with a meaning.
The three areas of study are:
-the sign, picture, object or sound e.g the Christian Cross
-the system auto which signs are organised e.g Christianity
-the culture within which these signs operate e.g the Western Culture
Saussure was a structuralist and his work developed many ideas associated with semiotic. According to this view, the place of a sign with the overall system gives meaning. Others such as Pierce believe that the creation of meaning from signs is a continual process and is subject to change. From this perspective humans interpret signs and act accordingly.
For Saussure signs have two parts:
Signifier – the actual image, physical, appearance or sound.
Signified – the idea or ideas the sign refers to.
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