Semiotics Preliminary Exercises 2

Semiotics: Ferdinand de Saussure's Theory

Examining the: Characters, costumes, acting, setting, color, lighting, audio, etc.

Ferdinand was a French linguist that theorized that a sign is made up of two parts, the Signifier and the Signified. Ferdinand identified semiotics as a scientific discipline and referred to it as semiology. He argues that written or spoken language is the predominant form of communication among people, although it is not the only form. Semiotics permits audiences to identify different codes in his theory: sign= signifier + signified. He believed that the signifier is dependent on the signified. 

Signifier is: A sign's physical form/object (such as a sound, printed word, motion, gesture, event, pattern or image). Signified is: The meaning or idea expressed/conveyed by the signifier. Examples of this theory can be seen in the movie "The Hunger Games" in the scene of one woman and one man being chosen to represent "District 12" in battle. The signifier was the expressions on the women and men's faces when the day came to be chosen as tribute to the "Hunger Games". What was signified was that they were all afraid that they were not going to make it out of the Games alive. 

Plot of the movie, a brief synopsis: The Hunger Games is a movie in which women and men from the ages to 12 to 18 years old enter an event called "The Hunger Games" where one man and one woman fight each other to the death and only one of the two come back alive.

Ferdinand uses his theory to gives the audiences an idea of what is happening in the film. The audiences would then know that they would have reacted the same way in situation with so much detail.