Notes on Genre & Semiotics

- MINELLI: genre/”auteur”. Flamboyant style, “oscar wilde of Hollywood,” combines high fashion and art with pop genre. Design à painting, implementing into Hollywood. Flamboyant color, camera (cranes, pans instead of shot/reverse shot). Acting style is like a mannequin (back to soviet notion of actors as objects). Collision of high and low culture. Structural oppositions in Gigi: youth/age, male/female. Gigi wanter her individualism through marriage (reinforces the musical and heterosexual marriage though the setting (France) makes it seem like she is being a rebel and individual).

“Thank heaven for generic structures” (Baudry)

- Raymond BELLOUR: looking for repetition/rhyming. Segmenting/Analyzing, strict structural analysis. Micro-segments, “scenes”, macro-scenes all reiterate the same themes. Hollywood as a controlling/unifying machine. BAUDRY: genres are about resolutions. Astaire à freedom vs society (stasis), Gene Kelly à Utopia. What does Gigi and Gaston marriage symbolize at the end? Marriage conquers all (with a wink, Honore).

Roland Barthes and Semiotics

- Semiotics: where does meaning come from? Tools of structural analysis: binary oppositions (we make sense out of the world by comparing and contrasting). Masculine vs feminine. Syntagmatic structures (a + b + c) ßà horizontal (word-word rules) vs paradigmatic structures, which are vertical, (elements to be substituted). Language and mind come in 2 axis (vertical and horizontal) à shot/reverse shot, Kuleshov effect and eyeline matching. The grammar of cinema: semicolon, commas, periods à what are their cinematic equivalents and their meaning? BARTHES and the rhetoric of the image. Barthes finds 3 messages in the Panzini ad. 1) Linguistic: based on the language codes, à “Panzini” and sense of “Italianicity,” language codes anchor the image, “fixing the floating signifieds,” thus linguistic structure has a REPRESSIVE function, Barthes suspicion about its inscribed function opens door for reading against the grain… finding what the image is trying NOT to have us think. 2) DENOTED IMAGE – the photograph is a message without a code (vs. painting) and no apprenticeship needed and allows the myth of naturalness = easy recognition of image’s referents (bag, the cans, tomatoes…) 3) Connotations (coded and uncoded iconic meaning) = Rhetorical function to test the symbolic/cultural meaning. Different sorts of knowledge: national, cultural, practical. Barthes: any complex communicating cluster of codes can constitute as text: Panzini ad, novel/poem, song, film. Text implies that there are multiple semiotic systems at work, “competing voices/structure/systems” What are cinematic codes/signs? Long shot vs close-up, hand-held vs crane. We as viewer/spectator/critic should go into films or any other text and see the various codes/signs and what they imply. SEMIOTICS IS EVERYWHERE. Semioticians will praise films that punch holes in Classicism, call attention to different semiotic systems, camerawork, editing, etc. Even simple scenes are complicated for semioticians, for example: the Panzini ad.