Yamustafa!

      Part One cont'd The Cinematic Signifier: A History The study of signs and the developments in the field semiotics has given the critique of cinema a big leap ahead, although after more than seventy years of cinema’s birth, film studies as a discipline moved from the mere feature-like reviews of the journalist to the systematic study of film as a form of expression that needed fundamental understanding, as well as studying individual texts. The strong consistent flow of American genre cinema seemed to give the impression that cinema is indeed approachable through the systematic methods of text analysis driven from structural linguistics. “Semiotics promised to track down the units of representation in the aesthetic system [of the genre conventions, and structuralism] to account for the specific narrative shape of the values represented.” However, it seems that the disciplined approaches of linguistics to the study of sign in cinema proved to be t...

  Through its century-long history of existence, cinematic expression has continued to reside, at least in its mainstream manifestations, in the domain of prose . The many possibilities for the articulation of meaning, with which the new medium was born, have lent themselves to the rationalistic nature of a particular kind of prose, namely that of narrative. What came to be known as Narrative cinema dominated the new medium and, influenced by the long history of literature and the novel, has assigned itself to a certain relationship with reality .[1]   It is indeed a legitimate question to investigate why cinema, and its language , has been deemed, since the early beginnings, as  a  narrator rather than a poet, while there are no innate proprieties that force such  a  characteristic upon the new medium. In the contrary, cinema in essence, we will argue, is rather a close relative to the traditions of poetry than those of prose. ...