69249454-chandler-semiotics

160
SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
Some film genres tend to be defined primarily by their subject-matter
(e.g. detective films), some by their setting (e.g. the western) and
others by their narrative form (e.g. the musical). Less easy to place
in one of the traditional categories are mood and tone (which are
key features of film noir). In addition to textual features, different
genres (in any medium) also involve different purposes, pleasures,
audiences, modes of involvement, styles of interpretation and
text–reader relationships (an issue to which we will return shortly).
CODES OF REALISM
All representations are systems of signs: they signify rather than
represent, and they do so with primary reference to codes rather than
to reality. Adopting such a stance need not, of course, entail a denial
of the existence of an external reality but it does involve the recognition
that textual codes which are ‘realistic’ are nonetheless (to
some degree) conventional. ‘Realism is not reality,’ as Christian
Metz put it (Metz 1968/1974, 21). From the Renaissance until the
nineteenth century, Western art was dominated by a mimetic or representational
purpose which still prevails in popular culture. Such art
denies its status as a signifying system, seeking to represent a world
which is assumed to exist before, and independently of, the act of
representation. Realism involves an instrumental view of the medium
as a neutral means of representing reality. The signified is foregrounded
at the expense of the signifier. Realist representational
practices tend to mask the processes involved in producing texts, as
if they were slices of life ‘untouched by human hand’. As Catherine
Belsey notes, ‘realism is plausible not because it reflects the world,
but because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar’
(Belsey 1980, 47). Ironically, the ‘naturalness’ of realist texts comes
not from their reflection of reality but from their uses of codes which
are derived from other texts. The familiarity of particular semiotic
practices renders their mediation invisible. Our recognition of the
familiar in realist texts repeatedly confirms the ‘objectivity’ of our
habitual ways of seeing.
However, the codes of the various realisms are not always
initially familiar. In the context of painting, Ernst Gombrich has