Semiotics and structuralism

How does a film mean anything at all? A shot of a rose is a picture of a rose, but in context it can signify love, death, beauty, England or a brand of perfume. Semiotics, the study of signs, and structuralism, the search for underlying patterns in cultural forms, gave film theory its most systematic tools for answering such questions. This lesson introduces the linguistic foundations, the attempt to describe film as a language, the analysis of narrative structures and myths, and the post-structuralist turn that unsettled those systems.

These ideas underpin much of the theory in Lessons 6, 8 and 9. Auteur-structuralism, introduced in Lesson 4, is one application. Here we look at the methods themselves.

Saussure and the sign

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose lectures were published after his death in 1916, argued that language is a system of signs. Each sign joins a signifier, the sound or written form, to a signified, the concept it calls up. The relationship is arbitrary: nothing about the sound of the word tree resembles a tree, and other languages use different sounds for the same concept. Signs gain meaning not from their connection to things but from their differences from other signs in the system. Tree means what it means partly because it is not bush, branch or free.

Saussure distinguished langue, the underlying system of rules shared by speakers, from parole, individual acts of speaking. He also distinguished two kinds of relationship among signs. Syntagmatic relationships connect signs in a sequence, such as words in a sentence. Paradigmatic relationships connect signs that could replace one another in the same position, such as the different nouns that could fill a sentence's subject slot. These distinctions would become central to film analysis.

Peirce's three kinds of sign

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce developed a different classification. An icon signifies by resemblance, as a portrait resembles its sitter. An index signifies by a physical or causal connection, as smoke indicates fire or a footprint indicates a foot. A symbol signifies by convention, as words or traffic colours do. Peter Wollen argued in 1969 that cinema is unusual because it uses all three at once: a film image resembles its object, is physically caused by it, and is organized by cultural conventions. Different theorists emphasize different aspects: Bazin the index, as Lesson 3 showed, Eisenstein the symbol and conceptual montage, and many directors the icon.

Barthes: denotation, connotation and myth

The French critic Roland Barthes applied semiotics to popular culture, from wrestling to advertising, in Mythologies (1957). He distinguished denotation, the literal meaning of a sign, from connotation, the additional cultural meanings it carries. A photograph of a soldier saluting a flag denotes a soldier and a flag; it may connote patriotism, loyalty or empire. Barthes called the second-order system of connotations myth: the way a culture turns its particular values into something that seems natural and obvious. This is close to the idea of ideology in Lesson 6, and Barthes's method became a standard tool of ideological criticism.

Metz and the question of film language

The most ambitious attempt to build a semiotics of film came from the French theorist Christian Metz in the 1960s. He asked whether cinema is a language in Saussure's sense. His answer was nuanced: cinema is a language without a langue. It lacks a fixed vocabulary of units like words, since every shot is new and contains an indefinite amount of information, and it has no strict grammar. Yet films do use conventions of combination that viewers learn, and these can be described.

Metz proposed a classification of the ways films combine shots into larger units, which he called the grande syntagmatique. It distinguished an autonomous shot, such as a single long take forming a whole episode, from various kinds of syntagma made of several shots. The table summarizes his categories in simplified form.

The grande syntagmatique was designed for classical narrative cinema, and critics found many segments that resisted classification. But it showed how viewers understand time and space through learned conventions, and it encouraged precise segmentation of films, which remains useful. Metz later turned to psychoanalysis, as Lesson 8 shows.

from collections import Counter
segments = ["scene", "scene", "ordinary sequence", "alternating syntagma", "scene",
            "descriptive syntagma", "episodic sequence", "scene", "autonomous shot",
            "scene", "alternating syntagma", "scene", "ordinary sequence", "scene"]
c = Counter(segments)
for kind, n in c.most_common():
    print(f"{kind:22s} {n:2d} ({n / len(segments):.0%})")

scene                   7 (50%)
ordinary sequence       2 (14%)
alternating syntagma    2 (14%)
descriptive syntagma    1 (7%)
episodic sequence       1 (7%)
autonomous shot         1 (7%)

In classical films, scenes usually dominate, as in this invented example. A film built mostly of autonomous shots or parallel syntagmas would immediately look modernist or experimental, which shows how segmentation can support stylistic claims.

Structuralism: myth and narrative

Structuralism extended Saussure's method beyond language to cultural systems. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss analysed myths as structures of binary oppositions, such as nature and culture, raw and cooked or life and death, which myths try to mediate. Film critics adapted the method to genres and auteurs: the western, for example, can be read as a structure of oppositions between wilderness and civilization, individual and community, East and West. Will Wright's study of westerns, mentioned in Lesson 5, combined Lévi-Strauss with the work of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp.

Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) found that Russian fairy tales, despite surface variety, share a fixed sequence of up to thirty-one functions, such as a lack or villainy, the hero's departure, a test, receipt of a magical agent, struggle, victory and return, distributed among a small set of character roles: hero, villain, donor, helper, princess, dispatcher and false hero. Critics have applied Propp's scheme to popular films, showing how closely many adventure stories follow folk patterns.

Barthes's five codes and the reader

In S/Z (1970), Barthes analysed a short story by Balzac sentence by sentence and identified five codes through which readers make sense of narrative. The hermeneutic code poses and delays answers to enigmas; the proairetic code organizes actions into sequences; the semic code builds characters through connotations; the symbolic code organizes oppositions such as male and female; and the cultural code draws on shared knowledge. Film critics adapted these codes to analyse suspense, character and cultural reference in films. The hermeneutic code, for example, describes the way a mystery or thriller withholds information to keep viewers engaged.

Post-structuralism and intertextuality

By the late 1960s, thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and the later Barthes questioned whether stable structures underlie meaning at all. Derrida argued that meaning is always deferred, produced by endless chains of difference, never fully present. Kristeva introduced intertextuality, the idea that every text is a mosaic of quotations and transformations of other texts. Barthes's Death of the Author, discussed in Lesson 4, belongs to this turn.

For film criticism, post-structuralism encouraged readings that emphasize ambiguity, contradiction and the play of references. Intertextuality is especially useful for contemporary cinema, which constantly quotes, remakes, parodies and builds franchises. A film may mean differently to a viewer who recognizes its references to earlier films than to one who does not.

Using semiotics today

Semiotic tools remain valuable for precise analysis. Denotation and connotation help separate what is shown from what it suggests. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic thinking helps analyse editing and choices: why this shot rather than another possible one. Segmentation helps describe structure. Structural analysis reveals deep patterns in genres and stories. The main danger is mechanical application, treating categories as boxes to fill rather than tools for interpretation. Cognitive theorists (Lesson 11) also argue that viewers understand images through ordinary perception, not by decoding them like words, so the language analogy should be used carefully.