comes to co-exist with something else. Human beings can
represent the world in signs, language and images.
Consequently, we live in a world of things and of
representations of things (Irwin, 2002: 229).
Visual media, and specifically cinema, are fundamental
representations of (un)reality and also of its signs. With the visual
technological development experienced in recent years, representations have
achieved a reproduction of the image that breaks the traditional relationships
between the sign and the referent. Therefore, the (un)reality that we
perceive in films has developed to a point where we need to understand the
relationships of our world with the image if we do not want to be confused
with/in the reproductions. In short, semiology in cinema, the study of the
filmic signs we create to represent (un)reality, is fundamental to comprehend
the world in which we live today.
Baudrillard (1993: 50-57) describes the evolution of western culture
regarding the relationship of reality and its representations, their signs and
images as occurring in three well differentiated stages. He denotes the first
stage the counterfeit, a period that extends from the Renaissance to the
Industrial Revolution and whose chief characteristic is that signs reflect a
basic reality; the intention of art was to imitate life. The second stage, which
he calls production, lasted throughout the Industrial Revolution and refers to
mechanical reproduction. The third stage, the simulation, introduced
previously in this thesis, occurs in the moment in which we live today, and is
based on information, cybernetics and hyperreal. In this period the definition
of the real becomes ‘not only what can be reproduced, but which is always
already reproduced, the hyperreal’ (Baudrillard, 1983, 146).
Semiology of cinema in Roland Barthes’ (1972: 5) terms reaches the
point where it can be seen as a semioclastia: the deconstruction of the
system of signs that surround us and the attribution of the latent cultural
messages that they invoke. Cinema is therefore composed of cultural signs
which are semiologically more complex than the word in its relation to the
referent. The cinematic image is constituted by a ‘galaxy’ of signifiers not
based in a fixed structure but in networks and therefore with infinite
interpretations (Barthes, 1981: 108). This ensures that each film is different
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