Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Cognitive Turn in Film Theory
- 2 The Body on Screen and in Frame: Film and Cognitive Semantics
- 3 Not What Is Seen through the Window but the Window Itself: Reflexivity, Enunciation, and Film
- 4 The Institutional Context: A Semio-pragmatic Approach to Fiction and Documentary Film
- 5 All in the Mind? The Cognitive Status of Film Grammar
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Cognitive Turn in Film Theory
- 2 The Body on Screen and in Frame: Film and Cognitive Semantics
- 3 Not What Is Seen through the Window but the Window Itself: Reflexivity, Enunciation, and Film
- 4 The Institutional Context: A Semio-pragmatic Approach to Fiction and Documentary Film
- 5 All in the Mind? The Cognitive Status of Film Grammar
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The compatibility of Chomsky's theory with semiotic views of symbolic function remains to be explored, but will probably find its explanation when both can be integrated into the fabric of a more comprehensive cognitive science.
(Thomas Sebeok)The problem for us is not… to complete semiotics, but to transform it.
(Michel Colin)My aim in this book has been to outline the film spectator's cognitive capacity as theorized by the cognitive film semioticians, whose work is united by the same project: to combine film semiotics and cognitive science, with the objective of modelling filmic competence - that is, the spectator's knowledge or intuitions about filmic meaning. To offer an outline of this work I have had to mediate between the insights of the Language Analysis tradition and cognitive science (the twentieth century version of epistemology). As we saw in Chapter 1, these two traditions are usually opposed to one another, since the Language Analysis tradition replaces the epistemologists' assumption that we have immediate access to our own thoughts with the assumption that we only have indirect access to our thoughts via language and other intersubjective sign systems. Chomsky's linguistics creates a synthesis between epistemology and Language Analysis, thus avoiding the idealism and first person perspective of epistemology and the (quasi) behaviorism of the Language Analysis tradition. Chomsky's work on competence therefore epitomizes what this book is all about.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cognitive Semiotics of Film , pp. 141 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000