Customer Reviews

New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (Sightlines)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As the book's title implies, it is intended for an academic audience--one interested in knowing how semiotics, which has traditionally been applied to the written word, relates to film. Since this book is searchable, a casual perusal of the back cover and table of contents should be sufficient to alert the reader to the book's style as well as as its highly academic treatment of content. Nor does it disappoint the serious student in this regard. Relevant theorists and theory are thoroughly examined. (Daniel Chandler's online introduction to Semiotics should be most welcome to someone unfamiliar with it.)

The book is useful to the serious student of film--how it negotiates meaning between creator/s and viewer/s. Semiotics, despite the author's claim to be a discipline, is more of an analytical method of how a cultural artifact like film goes about its communication work. Like any analytical method, it has developed a specific vocabulary that has been refined and modified over time via the input of various theorists and schools of thought. This can make reading a bit tedious, especially for someone new to the language, history, and concepts.

Ultimately, however, this book and others like it, are intended to shed light on how movies communicate and what makes one "good" and another not so good. For anyone seriously interested to the answers to these questions who isn't simply intellectually lazy, mastery of terminology is extremely useful and hardly a waste of time. Easy answers given in everyday language is available but for a very different audience than the one for which this book was written.

I gave the book 4 stars because the authors don't make much effort to make their explanations more accessible to those without a PhD, which they could easily have done with a little effort. To their credit, however, they do use some techniques such as bolding for new terminology. However, they would probably have fared better had they demonstrated expertise in creating text that is more "user-friendly."

If you've ever sat through film studies and wondered what on earth was going on, don't fret.

There is probably something to be gained from studying how we watch films, but unfortunately most of those engaged in the world of film studies as academics aren't interested. Instead, many are content to wallow in unreadable texts with long, impressive terms that, in the end, have little at all to do with films.

Studying modes of production, the words of the filmmakers themselves, trends, etc, we can figure out a lot about films. But that's not good enough for some people because it's too straightforward and obvious. Instead, an entire vocabulary needs to be invented--poststructuralism, film semiotics, etc, etc, in order to mask the quite obvious fact that we still don't know a thing.

If we had any concrete understanding of how films 'work' on our minds, then someone could write a book that a 12 year old could read and understand. Instead, we get books like this: inpenetrable, heavy, intellectual tripe.

If you believe there is actually a 'theory' to film, and that such a 'theory' can be applied to a large body of film and work, then this might be for you. If you're more interested in the real world, on planet Earth, you may want to avoid the subject altogether...