What It Can Do And What It Can’t Do

When Structural Linguistics gradually became popular in non linguistic field in1960s, the First Film Semiotics was created. It makes use of the principle of Saussure’s Structural Linguistics in the film field, then developed a new theory—the Semiotics of Film. Film Semiotics had broken the limitation of the classic film theory by its scientific and detailed analysis method, and made film analysis embarked on the scientific road. However, because its theory was borrowed from linguistics field, it has many faults, such as copy blindly and not suit for the nature of film.This paper will study on the main theories of the First Film Semiotics, these theories included the Film Language and the Narrative Section Combination theory by Christian Metz, the Poetic Film theory by Pasolini and the Articulations of the Cinematic Code by Umbert Eco, which represent the main contribution of the First Film Semiotics, I believe the comments on them is absolutely the criticism about the Film Semiotics.In the first part of the thesis; I will quote and explain the theories of the three scholars. Metz considered that the articulations of the cinematic code didn’t exist, so he focused on the study of the syntactic rules of film. If Metz can be considered as the explorer of combination relation, then Pasolini is the explorer of paradigmatic relation. Pasolini put forward the Poetic Film theory, he believed that the directors needed to break through the traditional narrative centrism, and advocated the film which owned a strong personal style. Nevertheless, Eco explored from a different direction with Metz, based on the three-pronged method of semiotics by Peirce, he put forward the Ten Codes of Film, and take this as an opportunity, he divided the codes into three levels.Because their theories exist some logical loopholes and other weaknesses, so in the second part of the thesis, I will analyze them, point out the weaknesses and extract good aspects. The Narrative Section Combination theory of Metz exists the problems about classification confusion and no overall classification from micro level, and at the macro level, the theory is also too rigid, however, its analysis for classic movies is more feasible. Pasolini’s Poetic Film theory is difficult to achieve, but it seems to be forward-looking. The Three Section of Film Symbols theory of Eco is questionable from the theoretical origin, but it can do a lot of work on the analysis of film pictures. The Narrative Section Combination theory and Three section of Film Symbols has great practical value,So in the last part of this chapter, I will take the movie the godfather as an example, analyze it’s narrative structure and symbol image by the above theories.In the third part, I will focus on how the First Film Semiotics can be used in Genre Film and Author Film, it can combine with each of them and constitute a local film symbol system, which can be seemed as the prototype of Genre Film and Author Film, I believe that this will be where the First Film Semiotics can glow again.