SEMIOTICS

Semiotics or Representation in a Specific Film Sequence

Semiotics or Representation in a Specific Film Sequence

Introduction

Semiotics derives from the Greek semeioun, meaning “to interpret as a sign.” According to contrastive studies, the signs can be conventional or non natural; that is, its meaning, determined by a society's implicit or explicit agreement to assign a certain hermeneutic value to a thing. The colours, gestures, objects, and all phenomena thus behave like languages, shifting their meaning across time and place and according to context. Semiotics collapses the division between the study of language proper and that of any system of constructing and assigning meaning. One of Saussure's initial steps was to divorce the word as a linguistic sign from its referent: Thus, language denotes not objects in the real world but concepts, thereby becoming a self-referential system of signs that shift in relation to each other as new words, coined, and as hackneyed words acquire contemporary nuances, and meanings.

Language is the chief sign-system of most cultures, but other signs are all around us, from traffic lights to body language, from high fashion to football crowd behaviour. The impulse of semiotics is to see the human being as above all a signifying creature, one that makes meanings, and has a need to find meanings everywhere. In this sense, it relates to Hermeneutics, although semiotics tends to be interested in the structure and performance of signs rather than the process of their interpretation. For the semiotician, the sign is purely conventional (Saussure used the word 'arbitrary', which is misleading in English, since it suggests that a sign can mean anything we like), taking its sense from its place in a pattern, not from a logical link to its referent.

Discussion

In film adaptations, the rendering of Fagin's otherness further complicates by the act of repositioning Jewish within cultural and political contexts subsequent to World War II and the genocide of the Jews. Musical applications of semiotic theory have been attempted since the early 1970s (Silverman, 1984, 101). One of the earliest exponents was the musicologist Jean-Jacques, who developed a system of analysis in which a musical work, divided up (or 'segmented') into synoptic units; these units, and then compared with each other, without any pre-existent assumption of their musical meaning or value—in other words, such considerations as harmonic function, mode, or genre, deliberately excluded from the start (Corrington, 2000, 89). The units are arranged into 'paradigmatic tables' of similar occurrences, from which general rules of their derived use (Corrington, 2000, 92).

Implementation of Semiotic Conceptions: Lean's Fagin

Lean's adaptation (with screenwriter Stanley Hayes) represents Fagin with an enormous hooked nose--as in the Cruikshank illustrations--and makes him speak with a lisp, another stereotypical Jewish trait, though the term "Jew" never recurs in the script. Close-ups of Fagin's chipped teeth, shaggy eyebrows and matted hair, profile shots emphasizing his "Semitic" nose, as well as the effect of his droning voice, are all cinematic techniques that visually and verbally translate what the lexical choices of the novel construct as a monstrous otherness ...