In today's multimedia world , we often dismiss the silent film era as being a very short time and consisiting of salpstick commedy with stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.. 

In fact the slient era lasted for nearly fourty years and in that time the great Alfred Hitchcock made 9 very important films, Dwan directed Douglas Fairbanks (snr) in Robin HoodIand Eisentien's seminal Battleship Potemkin was made. The features films were often over 2 hours long and sometimes lasted over 4 hours. It was the silent era that establishe dHollywood as the centre of the world's film making during the first world war (1914-18).

In the United Kingdom film studios were established on Shoreham Beach and in nearby Hove (Sussex). The Gainsborough stuidos in North London where young Alred Hitchcock started his career, Paramount opened in Islington and the candel Stuios in Borehamwood were producing a large volume of pictures in the early 1900s. 

SEMIOTICS AND THE FILM GENRE IN A LITTLE MORE DETAIL

There are two dominant models of what constitutes a sign. These were defined by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Ferdinand Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of the following parts:

a 'signifier' (significant) - the form which the sign takes; and

the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.  

The actual sign is the whole that results from these two constituent parts. i.e. The association of the signifier with the signified.  [1]

 This relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred by Saussure as 'signification', and this is represented in the Saussure’s diagram by the arrows. The horizontal line marking the two elements of the sign is referred to as 'the bar'.  
 
A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. One cannot utilise a meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified Therefore a sign is a recognisable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier (the word 'open') could also refer to a different signified (and thus be a different sign) if it were on a push-button inside a lift ('push to open door'). Likewise, many signifiers could stand for the concept 'open' (for instance, on top of a tetrabrik, a small outline of a box with an open flap for 'open this end'). Each of these unique pairings will constitute a different sign. 
 
Thousands of years before Saussure, Aristotle noted that 'there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signified'[2] Likewise Plato's Cratylus Hermogenes urged Socrates to accept:” whatever name you give to a thing is its right name; and if you give up that name and change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier, just as we change the name of our servants; for I think no name belongs to a particular thing by nature"[3] Even William Shakespeare famous line (if quoted correctly)  'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", shows that the arbitrary nature of language is nothing new.

Another example of how arbitrary signs evolve can be found in the original design for the traffic lights of Red, Amber and Green. Red which signifies STOP has always been associated in Western cultures as a sign of danger. Amber as a neutral sign and green was used in signalling systems for over two thousand years. These colours formed a code which was then applied to the layout of the traffic light system. This chosen layout thus adopted the maxim that Saussure applied “The individual has no power to alter a sign in any respect once it has become established in the linguistic community”
 
The other main model for signs is that by the great American philosopher and master of logic, Charles S Peirce.  His formula was that of the 'semiotic' and of the taxonomies of signs. His model was made up of the following parts:

·        The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material);

·        An Interpretant: this is not an interpreter but rather how the sign makes sense.

·        An Object: to which the sign refers. 
 
“A sign (in the form of a “representamen”) which is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen”'(Peirce). Peirce also refers to the interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant 'semiosis' 

Charles Peirce ideas were used by the film pioneers. Eisenstein was quoted as saying “He (Peirce) understood the relationship of the communicator who tells the story and the audience who are the receivers of the story” [4] Eisenstein two most famous films: October [Oktaybr] 1928 and Battleship Potemkin [Bronenosets 'Potemkin'] 1926, are full of symbolism and signs. Hitchcock also acknowledged Peirce in an interview in Photoplay, March 1933

References [1] (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67).[2] Cited by Richards, Ivor A (1932): The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London : Oxford University Press[3] Cited in Harris, Roy (1987): Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the 'Cours de linguistique générale'. London: Duckworth[4] Complete Films of Eisenstein. Trans John Hetherington. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974

Revised November 2006