Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

etween shots, which might be seen as the minimal units of the syntagmatic change of
the editing code, but rather between whole syntagmas’. 6 Likewise, if I considered the
frames in comics as units of meaning, I would obtain plenty of information but not all
relevant for my purpose.
I looked for informantes: ‘los elementos que definen en su literalidad todo
cuanto se pone en escena’. 7 Later for indicios, which give us information about a place
or a person but without stating it directly. 8 In Calzonzin Inspector, for example, the
journalist always carries his notepad and wears a stereotypical hat, the soldier wears a
uniform, the indigenous are dressed in their traditional clothes or in raw cotton clothing,
for example. Moreover, according to the way the characters speak and dress, the
activities they develop, the content of their dialogues, and their function in the plot, we
associate them (or not) to people from the ‘real world’, recognising in them their
function as an archetype. 9 The same is true about the mise-en-scène. These help to relate
the scenes to places that we know and can label, such as a farm, an urban house, a
spaceship, Mexico, and so forth. According to Umberto Eco, the viewer/reader performs
this action by comparing ‘the world such as is presented by the text with his own “real”
world, that is, the world of his (presumed) concrete experience’. 10 In La Familia Burrón
there are constant references to Mexico City which allow me infer that in fact, the
stories take place there. Some are obvious, like a reference to la lagunilla, 11 a well-
known area in Mexico City for buying cheap things, or signs on the buses indicating
that they are going to popular sites in the city. 12
I paid attention to elements with a deeper content and with more relevance to the
6
Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics.
Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p.57.
7
Casetti and di Chio, Cómo analizar… p. 112.
8
Ibid., p. 113.
9
Ibid., pp. 115, 160.
10
Eco, The Role of… p. 37.
11
Gabriel Vargas, La Familia Burrón, 17165, p. 13.
12
For example Vargas, La Familia Burrón, 17160, p. 19.
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