Friday 9 March 2012

Semiotic Study of signs and how we make sense of them

The media concepts which I will be using in this blog post was the concepts of media language which is connected to media language, representations and audience. The production I will be analysing in this blog is the first production.

In my first production I use examples of signs which are connected to semiotics such as money, the safe, the boxing gloves, the lamp, cards and the boxing photos of past boxers on the wall. The money has a denotation of employement and success, whereas it has a connotation of power, empowerment, corruption and sumpremacy. Whereas the boxing gloves has been used to connote connotations of patrichal ideals and mannerisms, masculinity and its also portrayed in my films opening production as a way of remmembering his past and it has also been used to connote the archetypical characters which we usually associate with the genres of sports drama and relates to gangsterism and as a way to connote the personality of the central protagonist as someone who is obsessive and someone that can easily be manipulated.Which represents my central protagonist as someone who isn't able to find any purpose or humanity within his existence and is only able to find his purpose, identity and embrace more of his identity throught his co-existence and connection with the sport of boxing. I have also used the boxing gloves as a way to represent traditional beliefs with capitalism and to represent how my character is going to have to change his own mythology and lifestyle to adapt to societities beliefs and identities to achive some kind of existence.The denotation of the boxing gloves is the it conveys, rivalry, violence and saddism. The colour of the boxing gloves are black which has been used to convey death, masculinity, leadership etc. I have used the lamp as a way to signify how I as a director isn't just exploring the structure of our society and the characters that co-exist within it but I'm using it as a way to convey to my audience how I want my audience to make an analytical assessment of my character but I want them to make a more knowledgable and unfamilar assessment which they question their beleifs in capitalism and I use it as a way to personify the obssessive behaviour of the characterisation of my character. I have used the photos in my garage to convey how I want to convey how the character use it as away as a reminder of his progress in the world and how his moulding his personality as a way to connect with other boxers on a falled and emotional level. I have also used the cards as a denotation of power, whereas the connotation of the cards is to convey how the character has a false sense of power and he is basically a reflection of a media text, like a cog in a machine as Charlie Chaplin says and its also a reflection of how the protagonist isn't basically in control of his fate and existence and how his political society is determing his identity and existence, which represents him as a victim of capitalism and I have also used it as a way to reflect and marxist and postmodernist mythologies of the world. The Safe is basically denoting protection and secrey and signifying a simulacra of boxing, emancipation and how the characterisation of my character has loss all sense of power and reality in the world. The money is basically used to personify, how my character is being portrayed as selfish, corrupt, exploitative and I have used it as a way to convey his false sense of power and I have used it as a way to scrutinise the capitalist system from a marxist point of view.

Ferdinand Du Saussure was a swiss linguistic whose ideas  laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century.Saussure is one of the founding fathers of semiotics. His concept of the sign/signifier/signified/referent forms the core of the field. Equally crucial, although often overlooked or misapplied, is the dimension of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis of linguistic description. I would also put those concepts under linguistics as although Saussure saw the relationship between the two concepts when apllied to a figure, he wanted people to find a difference between those two when applying to them because he wanted people to connect with the figure on an analytical level, while exploring there own ideologies which are connected to the figures. Whereas Barthes went further to gain a descriptive analytical anlysis of figures through other concepts such as denotation, connotation etc.

1 comment:

  1. Some good work on your analysis. My only real criticism is on your style rather than content - you should use more paragraphs to separate out your points.

    Good notes on de Saussure, even if largely gathered from wikipedia... I would avoid discussion on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of linguistic analysis until you get to uni - A-level examiners will not expect to you to write at that level.

    Matt

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