Alice franklin cop essay

Page 1

Alice Franklin Write a semiotic analysis of a series of related illustrations. As semiotic texts what sort of reality do these illustrations construct and how they do so? I will be looking at the way woman are perceived within horror films. I am interested in how through codes used in horror movie posters, we have created an ideology of women being a helpless victim and how as a culture, we don’t question this. I will be analyzing semiotics in three different horror movie posters, reading the denotations and connotations, to reveal the hidden meanings portrayed in the media. The main researchers into semiotics are Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce. Semiotics consists of many different things, signs, codes, myths, ideology etc. all playing a part in analyzing text, media, art works and so on. Saussure describes it as being “a science which studies the roles of signs as a part of human life”. Semiotic analysis normally uses information we share collectively as a culture, meaning we might not necessarily speak the same language, but we could interpret a piece of art similarly because of a shared understanding of the signified, connotations and codes, which in turn create myths and ideologies, “what enables us to communicate conceptually are certain shared features at the level of the signified.” Myths, being like the meaning of ‘myth’, a story or belief in something that we cannot see literally (denotation), but still believe it is true somehow (connotation). These codes and myths then create ideologies, things that we as a culture accept, but do not question the authenticity of. We as humans are very advanced thinkers, we could find a hidden meaning in everything if we think about it, “We only think in signs”, Peirce. A lot of art works have hidden meanings in them, which is why semiotic analysis is a really good way in order to break down the meaning of a piece. By analyzing three horror movie posters, I will be able to detect what the connotations are and answer the question easily, creating similarities between the three individual pieces. Both classic and modern horror films seem to all follow the same format, in which women, traditionally, are the most vulnerable of the sexes and they use this myth to their advantage, creating story lines of helpless, very attractive young women looking for a dominant male figure as her savior. But why as a culture have we created this ideology, which we do not question why the woman is always the one seeking help. Would a man not ask for help from a woman if being chased by a man with a knife? Or do men only ask women for help when they want to use the oven? As sexist as people were when the classic horror films were made, the notion of women being the weaker sex has stuck and somehow has not been questioned as times have moved on. Why are the killers/monsters always perceived to be male, even when they are wearing a mask and could be of any gender? But of course, women should be seen and not heard, it’s not a womanly thing to do, to start a killing spree and be smart enough to get away with it. Should we not be reassuring women that we can stand up for ourselves? We have seen strong female roles in other genres of film, such as Lara croft and female superheroes, which unfortunately seen as more of a sex symbol by males, rather than the heroines which they are. Most importantly, the question I am


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.