Apparatus theory

The film semiotics, a branch of film theory, concerned with the semiotics in film. Each film consists of individual images which together set sequences. This image sequences convey feelings, events and other important content. In order for this content to be understood "right" and are interpretable, exists in the visual language of the film of the code. The film semiotics examines the relationship of the film to the depicted reality, its representation mechanisms and the effect of its layers of meaning.

Approaches of semiotics in the 1960s

Already in the 1920s, comparisons of the mode of action of movies to drawing and understanding the system of language were drawn. Only in the 1960s, however, some basic position approaches were found.

Umberto Eco pursued, analogous to the investigation of language, a structuralist approach and tried to look at the smallest filmic unit, the frame and its components as a basic element of a sign system. Results of cognitive psychology, however, show that the mechanisms of action of the film do not match those of natural language, the film is a content reception apparatus that operates under different rules than linguistic.

Pier Paolo Pasolini took a rather kognitionalen aspect of film semiotics and noted film is "a written language of reality". The imitation of human action is the structuring principle of the film.

Christian Metz eventually took on a similar approach as Eco, however, denied the value of the smallest unit characters; the frame is not noticeable to the audience as such. Rather, the larger unit was to be considered, the sequence that functioned also by linguistic mechanisms, since they and so on could segmentierend, insulating, opponierend act. In considering various strategies assembly Metz made ​​a list of sequence types, which he described as " syntagma of the film".

Psychoanalytic approaches in the 1970s

The understanding draft Eco, Pasolini and Metz, supplemented by other pioneers of film semiotics, such as Jan Marie Peters, Peter Wollen, Yuri M. Lotman and Hartmut Bitomsky, remained largely unrezipiert as structural weaknesses were obvious: the restriction on the comparison with speech was the effect of the medium of film does not do justice. The mid-1970s became the based among other things on Marxist foundations Psychoanalytic film theory, the interpretation of an unconscious acting symbolic language, in the center of the film semiotics. Christian Metz transferred psychoanalytic terms, based on Freud and Lacan, to the active structure of the film.

Since the 1980s,

The film semiotics has increasingly no longer used as a stand-alone, monolithic field of research, but transferred in thinking about film on partial aspects of the decryption of film language using concrete film techniques. Thus, dramatic film structures such as point of view, flashback or parallel installation, nestling in the film- historical context and in the genre structure, analyzed for their interpretability out as isolated aspects such as light, color and sound in the film. Today's approaches are more pragmatic than the early theories and research in the individual case: the communicative interactions between film, filmmaker and audience.