Jurij Lotman (1922-1993)

The Tartu-Moscow Semiotic

school
Jurij Lotman.
Semiotics of Cinema (1973)
V. V. Ivanov.
Eisenstein and Modern Semiotics
Boris Uspensky.
Poetics of Composition (1970)

The history of film theory

Classical film theory (1915-1945): the silent film
paradigm
Modern film theory (1945-1972): structuralism,
formalism and semiology
Contemporary film theory (1968 to present): film
and ideology, postmodernism, and cultural
studies.

Classical film theory

(1915-1945)
Eclectic participants
Various and inconsistent methodologies
Broad range of questions addressed
The silent film paradigm

Classical film theory

(1915-1945)
Silent film paradigm (Noel Carroll)
Is cinema an art? Is so, what are its defining
characteristics? How is it alike or different from the
other arts?
If cinema is an art, what defines its specificity as an
artistic medium? What are cinemas constitutive
forms?
What criteria of evaluation are needed to judge its
aesthetic and social significance? How do
spectators perceive, understand, and take pleasure
in films?

Modern Film Theory

(1945-1968)
Work concentrated in academic contexts:
universities and film schools.
Search for a consistent and unified methodology
Common philosophical background.
Formalism
Structuralism
Semiology: can film be considered a language?

What is semiotics?
Semiotics studies cultural and art as sign
systems.
A sign is the materially expressed substitute for
objects, phenomena and concepts which is used
in the process of information exchange in a
society (1).
Semantic relations
Syntactic relations
Syntagmatic relations

Semantic relations

/kat/

A semantic relation combines

expression and content.
Expression comprises the sensuous or
representational components of the
sign.
Content is what these components
represent.

Conventional signs
Pictorial or iconic signs

cat

The illusion of reality

Understanding film as a
combination of iconic and
conventional signs.
A dual relationship to reality.
The world which [film] presents is
simultaneously the object itself
and a model of the object (16).
Art does not simply render the
world with a lifeless automatism
of a mirror. In transforming
images of the world into signs, it
saturates the world with
meanings (13).

The illusion of reality

Cinematography resembles the world which we see. An
increase in this similarity is a constant factor in the evolution of
cinema as art. But this similarity is as unreliable as the words of a
foreign language which sound like words in our own. That which
is different pretends to be identical. The illusion of
comprehension is created where no genuine comprehension
exists. Only by understanding the cinema can we be convinced
that it is not a slavish copy of life, but an active re-creation in
which similarities and differences are assembled into an integral
tension-filledsometimes dramaticprocess of perceiving
life (4)

The film shot

as a basic semantic unit
The nature of the shot is to transform the image as a sign.
The world of the cinema is the world which we see plus discreteness.
It is a world divided into pieces, each one having a certain degree
of autonomy, as a result of which we have the possibility for multiple
combinations, not available in the real world. The world becomes a
visible artistic world (23).
The shot acquires the kind of freedom inherent in the word. It can
be isolated, combined with other shots according to semantic,
rather than natural affinities, or it can be used in a figurative . . .
sense (23).
Only the cinemauniquely among all the arts employing visual
imagescan construct the figure of a person as a phrase located in
time (23-24).

A visible artistic world

Elements and levels

of cinematic language
Marked and unmarked elements.
Semantic value is by nature dualistic, requiring
opposed terms.

Any unit of text can be an element of cinematic

language (visual image, graphics, sound) if it has
an alternative, including non-use of the
alternative, and thus does not appear in the text
automatically, but is associated with a certain
meaning. It is, moreover, necessary that both in
its use and its non-use a perceptible order is
manifested (rhythm) (34).

Montage
Montage and syntactic combination.
Montage as the principle of juxtaposition of heterogeneous
elements, their conflict and higher unityas a result of which
every element, within the context of the whole text, is both
unexpected and regular. . . (51).
The artistic text speaks to us in more than one voice, like a
complex, polyphonic chorus. Complexly organized partial
systems intersect, forming a sequence of semantically dominant
moments (73).

Narration and
syntagmatic organization
1. Montage of shots.
the union of smallest independent units, in which semantic
meaning is still not a part of each unity in isolation, but arises
in the process of the joining of units (70).

2. The cinematographic phrase or segment.

An elementary syntactic whole (sentence): a complete
syntagm having internal unity and bounded at each end by
structural pauses (71).

3. Supra-phrasal units.
Open-ended combinations of segments into larger
groupings.

4. Plot.
The text divided into parts that are structurally specialized
and which have a specific, bounded semantic character.