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place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.''
What is semiotics?
Umberto Eco states that: ''semiotics is considered everything that can be taken as a sign.'' Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as signs in everyday speech, but of anything which stands for something else. In a semiotic sense, si gns take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. While for the linguist Saussure, semiology was a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life, for the philosopher Charles pierce semiotics was the formal doctrine of signs which was closely related to logic. He declared that every thought is a sign. Semiotics and that branch linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs whereas semantics focuses on what words mean, semiotics is concerned with how signs mean.
Visual semiotics
Surrounded with symbols, images and various signs, human being has always strived to signify them and utilized for communication. The meaning comes out of an interaction between message and its reader (audience). While handling a text, one must consider not only its components but also the relation between those components, all the impressions it has created and the techniques used for creating such impressions as well.
drawing or photograph, for example. An indexic relation is one in which the sign is in some actual proximal or physical contact with its referent (such as a wind sock to tell wind speed and direction). A symbol, such as a nation's flag, stands for its referent through convention in other words, its meaning is arbitrary and based upon agreement or habit.
Examples in Godfather:
An example of the cognitive and emotional components of the psychological facet working together with the perceptual facet of focalization can be found in 'The Godfather'. Several scenes in this film are restricted to the perspective of Michael Corleone, thus corresponding to Genettes internal focalization, but these scenes are not presented entirely from his optical viewpoint. An example is the sequence at the hospital, when he discovers that his father has been left unprotected and is about to be attacked by rival gunmen. Clearly functioning as the central focus of the scene, Michael does command several optical point-of-view shots, and the acoustic material in the scene is also presented as the character would hear it. Much more important, however, is the way the character serves as the psychological and emotional center of interest: his quick reactions, his intelligence and his courage are emphasized throughout. Although the majority of the shots in the sequence deviate from his strict optical perspective, the psychological and cognitive focus is consistently oriented to him. Genettes narrow sense of optical focalization is insufficient to account for the decisive revelation of Michaels character expressed in this scene; in film the psychological facet of focalization often expresses the overall meaning of an individual sequence.