Structuralist and Semiotics

Structuralist film theory is how a film coveys message through the use of codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are use to conduct meaning in communication.

                                                                                                                                Structuralism is a method of analyzing a film beyond it physical structure. Meaning you look beyond what is being shown. Just like Louis Althusser’s most influential concept, that is influence by methods of structuralism, the symptomatic reading the art of reading a text,but not focusing on what the text is obviously saying rather you focus on what it leaves out or what it deliberately covers out what althusser called as “structuring absences”.

   There are different things that define a structure of a film or a community. First Is an idea from Claude-Levi Strauss an anthropologist who made famous the structural study of myth. He believes that myth defines what the culture of one country or one person is. He argued how important it is for a society to have their own myth to establish their own identity and culture.

Another method is through cultural artifacts, clothes, lifestyle choices Roland Barthes argued that these can define the deep structures through which social meanings could be classified.

While semiotics is semiotics is the study of symbols in films, meaning symbols in each film can be understood depending on different structural analysis used.