Semiotics and documentary film : the living sign in the cinema / Hing Tsang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tsang, Hing.

Series:

Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]

Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC] ; 11

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Documentary films.

Semiotics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (210 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Boston ; Berlin : De Gruyter Mouton, [2013]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema engages with very vital problems posed by Peirce's philosophy in an innovative and inter-disciplinary fashion by examining how documentary film practice can engage with the question of emergent human agency within a wider biosphere shared by human animals and non-human animals alike. The book is in many ways a celebration of human inquiry, taking liberally from Peirce's semeiotic and parallel ideas within recent visual anthropology. Through an analysis of the work of three renowned filmmakers - Jon Jost, Johan Van der Keuken, and Rithy Panh - Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema reasserts human agency within a global age, dominated by philosophical scepticism and an unquestioning subservience to mechanistic military techno-culture. The author argues that an approach to documentary inquiry, broadly derived from Peirce's sign theory, phenomenology, and overall philosophical outlook, has strong advantages over a temporal formal approaches derived from Saussurean semiology. Nevertheless, this project is also both critical and self-critical. It also bears direct testament to the many tumultuous and life-destroying events of the late 20th century and reminds us of the moral and philosophical problems which we are still grappling with in the early 21st century. Hence - the Living Sign.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgements

Contents

List of tables and figures. Notes on citations and tables

Preface

1 Peirce's Semeiotic and the Living Sign

2 Parallel Developments and Divergences

3 Rupture, Dissent, and Conflict in the Cinema of Jon Jost

4 War and biophilia in the cinema of Johan van der Keuken

5 Terror and love in the cinema of Rithy Panh

Conclusion

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed December 24, 2013).

ISBN:

9781614514114

1614514119

OCLC:

862746333