University of Jyväskylä | JYX Digital Repository

  • English  | Give feedback |
    • suomi
    • English
 
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
View Item 
  • JYX
  • Opinnäytteet
  • Väitöskirjat
  • View Item
JYX > Opinnäytteet > Väitöskirjat > View Item

Perceiving the visual in cinema : semantic approaches to film form and meaning

Thumbnail
View/Open
22. Mb

Downloads:  
Show download detailsHide download details  
Published in
Jyväskylä Studies in the Arts
Authors
Valkola, Jarmo
Date
1993

 
The study examines the contents and co-ordination of perceptual, cognitive, stylistic and semantic elements of film form and meaning, understanding cinema as a medium of re-experience, of discovery and creation. It is a phenomenon in which meaning arises as a function of perceptual, emotional, and intellectual activity, in which the world is grasped as a dynamic presence. According to the study one can understand cinema's universe as a kind of microcosm, a world with its own order and logic but also a world with associations and connotations related to its viewing process. One can speak of cinematic semantics, with which one can understand the exploration of cinematic meanings concentrating on specific cinematic things such as exploring the meanings of moving images, succession, montage-combinations and camera-effects. According to the study a film shot is a descriptive unit more than a narrative one because narratives are made up of descriptions and a narrative is a subtype of description. Cinema is a performance art like theatre, but cinema is also a pictorial art, and pictorial signs are iconic in one respect and arbitrary in every other. In cinema montage is thinking through images because cinema is the only form of art which is a succession of images in the same space. Cinema "syntax" in itself is a creative force, because it makes possible the formation of a large number of film phrases and requires audience participation. The concept of orchestration plays an important part in the formulation of a cinematic master plan. The functions of orchestration are related to those of editing because, in a way, the writing of a script also starts the editing process: it deals with the thinking through images and an image is always a mixture of various elements with many things happening simultaneously. Orchestration is some kind of superstructure, which refers to the elements of the cinema and has to do with the quality of the film. According to the gestaltpsychologist way of perception the meaning of the stimulus is to function as an interface between two kinds of texts, the one being the object itself and the second being the spectator's mind, which alone contains the meaning that it associates with the text's otherwise empty signifiers. The meaning in cinema's visual perception is constructed in the mind. Visual considerations carry relatively more weight in the structure of cinema than it seems, yet they are hard to describe and assess. In short, if we are to understand how the visual qualities of the cinema work, we evidently need a different sort of critical and theoretical approach than what is usually practiced. The study contains analyses of different kinds of films. Fritz Lang's M is an example of a synthetic film form condensing many present tendencies. It is structured around a rigorous organization of the film's formal articulations. In Un Chien Andalou Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali are exploring and using conscious irrationality to facilitate finer and deeper meanings. The bewilderment results from how flexibly and routinelike the spectator's thinking recognizes the film's contradictions and symbolic impossibilities. Maya Deren's film Meshes of the Afternoon is an example of modernist fragmentation and the pluralization of subjectivity, identity and the denial of unitary consciousness. Busby Berkeley's dance numbers give possibilities for the abstract and constructive tendencies of high culture to approach the populist level. They contain a flux of ideas, in a criss-cross of semantic operations. ...
ISBN
978-951-39-7891-4
Keywords
Berkeley, Busby. Buñuel, Luis, Deren, Maya. Lang, Fritz, Meshes of the afternoon (elokuva : 1943) Un chien andalou (elokuva : 1929) M - eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (elokuva : 1931) analyysimenetelmät elokuvailmaisu elokuvaohjaajat kuvallinen ilmaisu merkitykset (semantiikka) muoto semantiikka surrealismi taidefilosofia tulkinta visuaalisuus visualisointi Motion pictures
URI

http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7891-4

Metadata
Show full item record
Collections
  • Väitöskirjat [3177]

Related items

Showing items with similar title or keywords.

  • Interactionist Approach to Visual Aesthetics in HCI 

    Silvennoinen, Johanna (Springer International Publishing, 2021)
    Visual Aesthetics has gathered interest among scholars in HCI research. The growing interest stems from examinations of the aesthetic-usability effect (“what is beautiful is usable”), and possibly vice versa. Thus, numerous ...
  • Huoli kuvasta : merkitys, mieli, materiaalisuus 

    Tanhuanpää, Ari (University of Jyväskylä, 2017)
    This research is a hybrid of a monograph and a multiple-article dissertation. Its theoretical starting point is a phenomenologically based view of the being of the image, in which Georges Didi-Huberman´s work plays a ...
  • Not One Power, But Two : Dark Grounds and Twilit Paradises in Malick 

    Backman, Jussi (State University of New York Press, 2023)
  • Conclusion: Lessons Learnt With and Through Visual Narratives of Lived Multilingualism, and a Research Agenda 

    Melo-Pfeifer, Silvia; Kalaja, Paula (Multilingual Matters, 2019)
  • Visual Parameter Selection for Spatial Blind Source Separation 

    Piccolotto, N.; Bögl, M.; Muehlmann, C.; Nordhausen, Klaus; Filzmoser, P.; Miksch, S. (Wiley, 2022)
    Analysis of spatial multivariate data, i.e., measurements at irregularly-spaced locations, is a challenging topic in visualization and statistics alike. Such data are inteGral to many domains, e.g., indicators of valuable ...
  • Browse materials
  • Browse materials
  • Articles
  • Conferences and seminars
  • Electronic books
  • Historical maps
  • Journals
  • Tunes and musical notes
  • Photographs
  • Presentations and posters
  • Publication series
  • Research reports
  • Research data
  • Study materials
  • Theses

Browse

All of JYXCollection listBy Issue DateAuthorsSubjectsPublished inDepartmentDiscipline

My Account

Login

Statistics

View Usage Statistics
  • How to publish in JYX?
  • Self-archiving
  • Publish Your Thesis Online
  • Publishing Your Dissertation
  • Publication services

Open Science at the JYU
 
Data Protection Description

Accessibility Statement

Unless otherwise specified, publicly available JYX metadata (excluding abstracts) may be freely reused under the CC0 waiver.
Open Science Centre