New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

MINIMAL UNITS 31
deploys all three categories of sign: icon (through resembling images and
sounds); index (through the photo-chemical registering of the “real”); and
symbol (in the deployment of speech and writing). In their essay “Quia Ego
Nominor Leo” Ronald Levaco and Fred Glass perform an exemplary
Peircean analysis of the logos of diverse Hollywood studios (Levaco/Glass
in Bellour 1980). The classical MGM studio logo features the celebrated
MGM lion circled by a film strip on which is written “Ars Gratia Artis,”
under which we see a garlanded mask, placed, in turn, above the words
“Metro Goldwyn Mayer.” The diverse planar surfaces of the logo put in
play iconic and symbolic elements, thus foiling nature—the lion—and
culture—language. But the symbolic is thoroughly intermeshed with the
iconic. The word “Metro,” for example, is inscribed in Roman characters,
while “Mayer” is inscribed in neo-Gothic. The polysemy of the mask,
meanwhile, plays a mediating role, evoking the classical masks of both
tragedy and comedy (and thus the lofty dignity of classical art) and the
racist portraiture of safari films (evoked by the mask’s stereotypically
African traits and thick lips). The mask’s hybrid construction thus points
on one side to the classy artsiness claimed by the “Ars Gratia Artis” and on
the other to the primitive power of the lion. Taken together, the iconic and
symbolic signs designate the broad orientations of MGM productions—
primitive adventure, sentimental tragi-comedy and spectacular epics.
Many semiologists, in their analysis of pictorial representations, draw on
the notion of codes. Originating in information theory, a CODE is defined
as a system of differences and correspondences which remain constant
across a series of messages. Exported into linguistics, the concept came to
be synonymous with langue or “language system.” Code usually refers,
however, to any systematized set of conventions, any set of prescriptions for
the selection and combination of units. The MESSAGE refers to the
meaningful sequences generated by the coded processes of communicative
utterances. The term code has extensive applications; in sociology, as Metz
points out, it refers to transpersonal codes of behavior or collective
representations; in administrative language, the term crops up in such
phrases as the “highway code,” the “zip code” and the “telephone code,”
all instances which conform to the original definition as examples of
conventionalized systems which remain constant across numerous and
various particular messages. (Within textual analysis, a code is always a
construction of the analyst, and not something inherent in the text or found
in nature.) Within film analysis, the notion of code postulated the existence
within a film of relatively autonomous levels of signification organized as
part of an overall system.
Umberto Eco drew on Peirce, and on the notion of “codes,” in his
analysis of the filmic analogon. In his essay “Semiology of Visual
Messages” (Communications 15), Eco inventories the following codes
operative within the iconic sign: (1) PERCEPTIVE CODES (the domain of