The article will be divided into three parts: 1. Explain the literary origins of the nesting pattern and its relationship to cinema narrative, and analyse the nesting tactics commonly used in films under Hollywood’s classical narrative. 2. Describe the variations in nested structures in films made in the 1990s, focusing on self-reflexive nesting, which emerged as a new model beyond conventional nesting during this period. 3. Distinguish the literary style of embedded narratives from the visual recognition mode and provide an (...) example of how the latter is used in films to create impossible puzzles. (shrink)

In a 1995 interview, contemporary American composer John Zorn stated: ‘I got involved in music because of fi lm […] There’s a lot of fi lm elements in my music’ (Duckworth, 1995, p. 451). Scholars and critics have since widely noted these cinematic elements, with emphasis being placed on Zorn’s genre of so-called ‘fi le card compositions’. Whilst these studies have primarily concentrated on how the arrangement of sound blocks – the disjointed segments of Zorn’s compositions – can be compared (...) to cinematic montage, this article instead focusses on how sound blocks suggest the visual aspects of cinema. To delve deeper into the visuo-cinematic qualities of Zorn’s fi le card compositions, an idealised cinematic listener will be constructed, aided by various psychological, semiotic, philosophical and fi lm theories. I will suggest that a listener occupying a hypnogogic state projects moving images, akin to those of cinema, onto what Bernard Lewin fi rst called a ‘dream screen’. These projections occur due to intertextual associations made between fi le card compositions and the artistic fi gures to whom they are dedicated. These images combine with the sounds that brought them into being to form an audio-visual diegesis, which can be considered a type of half-imagined fi lm. The cinematic listener then actively draws out of this diegesis a narrative, via the semi-conscious process Boris Eikhenbaum called ‘inner speech’. I will conclude by giving some broader justifi cation for the methodology that brought this cinematic listener into being and suggest how the cinematic listener may be further utilised to provide musical analyses for fi le card works. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships (...) between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these. (shrink)

Popular movies present chunk-like events that promote episodic, serial updating of viewers’ representations of the ongoing narrative. Event-indexing theory would suggest that the beginnings of new scenes trigger these updates, which in turn require more cognitive processing. Typically, a new movie event is signaled by an establishing shot, one providing more background information and a longer look than the average shot. Our analysis of 24 films reconfirms this. More important, we show that, when returning to a previously shown location, the (...) re-establishing shot reduces both context and duration while remaining greater than the average shot. In general, location shifts dominate character and time shifts in event segmentation of movies. In addition, over the last 70 years re-establishing shots have become more like the noninitial shots of a scene. Establishing shots have also approached noninitial shot scales, but not their durations. Such results suggest that film form is evolving, perhaps to suit more rapid encoding of narrative events. (shrink)

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.

Narratives are an integral part of human expression. In the graphic form, they range from cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the Bayeux Tapestry to modern day comic books (Kunzle, 1973; McCloud, 1993). Yet not much research has addressed the structure and comprehension of narrative images, for example, how do people create meaning out of sequential images? This piece helps fill the gap by presenting a theory of Narrative Grammar. We describe the basic narrative categories and their relationship to a (...) canonical narrative arc, followed by a discussion of complex structures that extend beyond the canonical schema. This demands that the canonical arc be reconsidered as a generative schema whereby any narrative category can be expanded into a node in a tree structure. Narrative “pacing” is interpreted as a reflection of various patterns of this embedding: conjunction, left-branching trees, center-embedded constituencies, and others. Following this, diagnostic methods are proposed for testing narrative categories and constituency. Finally, we outline the applicability of this theory beyond sequential images, such as to film and verbal discourse, and compare this theory with previous approaches to narrative and discourse. (shrink)

This article surveys the current debate among analytic philosophers and film narratologists about the logic and phenomenology of cinematic narration. Particular attention is given to the question of whether every film that represents a fictional narrative also represents a narrator's fictional narration.

Improvising selected tools from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s inter-semiosis framework, this study explores how, between global and local, TV commercials in India often reframe a cultural third space producing new discursive forms and identities. Three commercials from the food and beverage category are selected on the basis of the country of origin of the endorsing company and the patterns of glocalization. Multimodal discourse analysis reveals that the commercials construct the glocal identity in several ways. In the Knorr Soups commercial, the (...) melody of the title song is contemporary pop, whereas the delivery style and crooning are distinctively Western. The language is predominantly Hindi with deft use of selected English words. The Funda Mint commercial casts a rebel voice-support executive who rejects the pseudo-glocal identity and asserts his true identity. In the Cadbury Bournvita Folk commercial, the two boys represent the global and the local in the realm of creativity. The study advances the knowledge of product positioning and brand identity involving the intersemiosis of discursive elements from different cultural spaces within the contemporary Indian consumerist culture. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to reflect on the application of Semiotics to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interface analysis. To accomplish the objective the article presents an example of semiotic analysis of a blog interface but the methodology proposed, conveniently adapted, may be applied to any kind of digital interactive environment. The analysis reconstructs the interface sense production device (including the surface of the page and the link architecture), identifies implied users and exchange scenes of the blog and concludes (...) with some reflections on interface evolution and hybridation. Finally, the article proposes future trends for a Semiotics of HCI. (shrink)

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility, affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship and instead enter the reality of the film’s (...) immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach the microphone from its adherence to space, the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. (shrink)