New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond

By Robert Burgoyne, Robert Stam, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

Book Overview

First published in 1992. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics provides a comprehensive lexicon of semiotic concepts. With sections on linguistics, narratology, psychoanalysis and intertextuality, it constructs an indispensable dictionary for film theory, defining over five hundred critical terms. The authors address key aspects of contemporary semiotics and cultural debate, while referring to the work of key figures such as Peirce, Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Propp, Genette, Greimas, Kristeva, Lacan, Metz, Bellour, Heath, Mulvey, Johnston, Rose, Doane, Bakhtin and Baudrillard. The semiotic concepts are illustrated by examples drawn from the films of directors such as Welles, Dreyer, Brunel, Godard, Hitchcock, Varda, Akerman and Woody Allen. Although especially geared to the needs of film students, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics should be useful for scholars in all areas of the arts, philosophy and literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 041506595X
• ISBN13: 9780415065955
• Release Date: March 1992
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An academic treatment for an academic audience

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."