Interpretion Of The Movie "Die Welle" With Film Semiotics

In 2008, Germany released an anti-Fascism and realistic film "Die Welle", which tells the story of a "dictatorship" teaching experiment that happened in the campus, and ended in tragedy. It caused a strong reaction in the community after its publication. And its story prototype was adapted from a real event in the United States.On the basis of enormous materials and researches, this article will take the film semiotics as a starting point. By using the research methods of literature research and text analysis, this paper tried to interpret the symbol system of the film, in order to reveal the mutual supporting relationship between each symbolic elements in the movie, and their mutually reinforcing role in the structure of the film. And then, we could finally point out that the profound meaning of the movie was "against the dictatorship". The feasibility and significance of interpreting the movie "Die Welle" with semiotics is that there is a coincidence between the "lying" feature of semiotics and the "pseudomorph" feature of film in order to reflect the real. At the same time, every film needs semiotic system to filling and architecting, this determines the "Die Welle" itself is a symbol system contains numerous subsystems. And the meaning of the film is expressed through the symbols encoding and decoding.Through research, I found that:this film continued the tendency of realism of Germany after World War Ⅱ. It shows us an anti-authoritarianism macro symbol system which has "language" rules, and fills with microscopic symbolic elements (characters, lines, scenes, props, color, music, etc.) which is the specific "language" and well-designed to show the theme of dictatorship. Not only these symbolic elements structure the film, but also create a wealth of characters for us. Besides, they are involved in the plot and boosting the development of the story. Finally, it puts the theme of anti-dictatorship deeply in the ideology of the crowds.