Wednesday, 3 November 2010

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is how things link together, say between different films, photographs, adverts and so on. It’s almost like semiotics how signs and signals refer to each other to make a contextual link like a pun for example.
All the examples I can think of right now are all in children’s films, and this is usually because adults need something to entertain themselves as well, when sat in a dark cinema watching some character they would fall asleep, but if there is another level of wit and humour, along with a small reference to an adult film, this can make it entertaining. Like the example in the lecture of Madagascar and the visual and oral reference to Planet of the Apes.
Also spoof films such as the Scary Movie franchise are all based around intertextuality. Without the original films this branch of the film industry wouldn’t have developed.
From a model perspective, all models must be intertextual otherwise they would not be models? They need a level of meaning to gain the audience’s attention and understanding otherwise they just wouldn’t work. 

Semiotics

Well since dear old Alan gave us the seminar on semiotics before we had the lecture, our group kind of had a leg up...
Signs, Signification, Signified, Iconic, Arbitrary, Paradigm, Syntagm and on and on and on. So many words with definition which you have to remember.
Thinking about semiotics and the meanings of iconic and arbitrary, no matter how realistic you make something to be iconic, as a human you will always know that it is not the real thing, but usually something pretty close to it. Looking at something that is arbitrary, as shown in the lecture, something as simple as a circle with two dots and a line can be interpreted as a face. But because of the lack of detail there, the two dots and a line becomes symbolic. It becomes the very basic sign for a face.


Like when the Police have ‘training’ days for fake catastrophes and they use fake bodies with injuries and others for actors. These must be iconic to some degree other wise it will take away from the reality of the practice. Same within horror films like Saw and Hostel for example. The gruesome scenes need to be iconic otherwise it will not be believable! And it would look like the film would have a very cheap budget. Just even comparing the Saw images above to something like Starship troopers for example (I love Starship troopers by the way), the Saw effects and models of the injuries blood and guts are a lot more believable. The lionk below is a link to a part of the film, about 6mins in is where a guy gets his leg chopped off.