Semiotics of Cinema

Generally, in the simole words, the literary meaning of ‘Semiotics’ is the study of signs and symbols and (the study) of their meaning and use pertaining to the art of cinema.
The study of cinema as an art – the study of cinematographic expressiveness – can be conducted according to methods derive from linguistics because cinema is also a specific language.
The ‘language’ indicates language in general viz – English, French, urdu, Japanese etc., that is, the human linguistic capacity – and their “language system” is the social aspect of language, where as “speech” is utterance, the actual practice, of a language system.
When approaching the cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between two positions” the cinema as a language; the cinema as infinitely different from verbal language. One must not forget their cinema tells us continuous stories; it “says” things that could be conveyed also in the language of words, yet it says them differently. There is reason for the possibility as well as for the necessity of adaptations.
Still photography – a close relative to film, or else some very old and very distant second cousin – was never intended to tell stories- whenever it does, that is imitating the cinema, by deploying the successively that film unfolds in time. Even if the photography wants to tell a story it becomes cinema where two juxtaposed photographs when go from one to two images, is to go from image to language.
The film montage – whether its role is the triumphant one of yesterday or the more modes one of today – and the film narratives – a triumphant now as it was in the part are only the consequences of the current of induction that refuses not to flow whenever two poles are brought, sufficiently close together and occasionally even when they are quite far apart. The cinema is language, above and beyond and particular effect of montage. It is not because the cinema is language that is can tell such fine stories but rather is has become language because it has told such fine stories.
The semiotic of cinema can be conceived of either as a semiotics of connotation [to suggest something in addition to the main means (connoting disapproval or derogatory) an idea suggested or implied by a word in addition to its main meaning]
Any kind of same scene filmed in two different light would produce a different impression and so would be the same technique used on a a different subject.
We know since the observations of theoretician like Bela Balazs, Andre Malraux, Edgar Morin, Jean Mitry and many others that the cinema was not a specific language from its inception. Before becoming the means of expression familiar to us if it was a simple means of mechanical recordain, preserving, and reproducing moving visual spectacles whether of life, of the theatre or even of small mise-en-scene which were specially prepared and which in the final analysis remained theatrical – in short a means of reproduction. Even the pioneers of “cinematographic language” – Milies, Porter, Griffith – could not have cared less about formal research conducted for its own sake; they cared little about the symbolic philosophical or human “message” of their films. But with the fast growth of cinema as a populat art of mass communication, now a days, the basic figures of thhe semiotics of cinema – montage, camera movements, scale of shots, relationship between the image and speech, sequence and the lasrge syntagmatic units (grammar fules) have become the whole same in “small” films and in “big” or as a semiotics of denotation (to be a sign or symbol of something, to indicate something, to mean something).
The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art.
The art of cinema is located art: the property aesthetic orderings and constrains – versification ( the art of writing verse), composition, tropes [ a word or phrase used in a way (gfigurative), or metaphor] in the case; framin, camera movements and light “effects” in the second-    served as the connoted instance, which is superimposed over the denoted meaning. In cinema the semiotics of connotation are represented by the meaning of spectacle reproduced in the image, or of the sounds duplicated by the sound track.
As for connotation, which plays a major role in all aesthetic languages, its significance is literary or cinematic “style”, genre (the Epic, the western and, “symbol” (philosophical, humanitarian, ideological, and so on ), or “portic atmosphere” – and its signifier is the whole denotated semiological material, wheter signified or signifying.