The study of film semiotics, which began in France in the 1960s, explores the nature and role of symbols and structures in film expression systems, breaking away from the classic studies in the first half of the last century that focused on film ontology and creation theory. The film theory period marked the "independence" of film theory from the film production system.

In short, film semiotics is a methodology that applies semiotic theory to study film as a language, a special symbol system and ideographic phenomena. In 1964, French scholar Metz published "Film: Language or Speech", which marked the birth of film semiotics.

Code refers to the transformation rules of different symbol systems when conveying a set of information and the agreed rules that ensure that people participating in the communication process can understand it, such as the grammar of a language. The same code is systematic, homogeneous and consistent.

Movies contain multiple codes: specific codes, pan-codes, sexual codes, and sub-codes. The scientific-spirited film semiotics theory’s attempt to analyze films using the structuralist semiotic model has been fiercely criticized from the beginning. In essence, it is a static, closed, and isolated structural analysis that is divorced from the social and cultural exchange network, and it is difficult to grasp the true meaning of film works.

In the early 1970s, the research focus of film semiotics began to shift from structure to structural process, from representation results to representation process, and from static systems to dynamic systems.

Then psychoanalysis entered film semiotics, forming a second film semiotics that studies film mechanisms based on psychological structural models. This is not to replace the first film semiotics, but to combine psychoanalytic research. Enter, marking new directions in film semiotic research. The second film semiotics combines the psychoanalytic research model and semiotics to make an analogy between the film picture structure and the psychological structure;

The attempt to establish a multi-level, open system mainly answers the question of "film text (or "What is the relationship between representation, discourse) and the subject of movie viewing?" This question expands the deep audience psychology aspect in the study of film semiotics and forms a new perspective for studying film phenomena.

Extended information:

To put it bluntly, semiotics still has to be linked to culture. The reason why semiotics is important is that it can be applied to any humanities discipline. Therefore, it is true that semiotics is outdated. I only know one, but not the other. Semiotics does have its rigid disadvantages, but behind semiotics is the entire cultural study, and movies cannot exist without culture in the current context.

I would like to remind you that movies are weak coding, which means there is no fixed and unique answer. The coder and the programming process are highly subjective, while mathematics is strong coding because there is always a corresponding answer. .

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-Film Semiotics