Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Roland Barthes was a semiologist; basically he was paid to look at texts.
Texts may be:
Open-unravelled, in many threads E.g soaps
Closed-only one obvious thread to pull on E.g Children programmes
Barthes decided that these "threads" are called narrative codes,there are five codes:
Action codes:
Any action that implies a further narrative action E.g a gun fight
Enigma codes:
Refers to any element in a story that is not explained and therefore exists as an enigma for the audience, raising questions that demand explication.
The semantic code:
Any element in a text that suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation.
The culture code:
Any element in a narrative that refers "to a science or a body of knowledge." In other words, the cultural codes tend to point our shared knowledge of how the world works.
Sam, work on your explanations, specifically the symbolic. You could think of a rich businessman stood smoking a cigar next to a poor starving child. We'd think how and why has this happened?
ReplyDeleteSimilarly if you think back to the Eisenstein montage with the bongs and bings played whilst religious iconography is displayed in the background we inferred a symbolic meaning that religion was bad.