Assignments: Batch Two: Assignment 15

Offer a semiotic analysis of the montage sequence from The Parallax View (Pakula 1974).

Guidance

For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module, see the general criteria.

What Key Features Do I Look For?

  • Familiarity with relevant texts
  • Evidence - the stronger the better
  • Argument - coherent and balanced
  • Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories
  • Understanding of relevant concepts
  • Reflexivity - reflections on methodology
  • Examples - insightfully analysed
  • Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: The most relevant lecture for this topic is Lecture 10: The Parallax View (Pakula 1974).

You will need to apply (and demonstrate your understanding of) key semiotic concepts including (most importantly here) paradigm and syntagm. Your primary concern is likely to be with paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis. Many interesting questions could be pursued but you need to decide what is feasible for you within your word limit. Possible questions include the following. How is meaning generated in this sequence? What is the relation between the images and the words and/or between the visuals and the sound-track? How does the relation between the images and the words change? Note that many images are used more than once, sometimes in versions that are differently cropped or with a colour filter or flipped over: how does this contribute to the shaping of meaning? What paradigms can the images usefully be grouped into? Some images appear in in close proximity more than once: can you spot any patterns? Show how the whole sequence could be broken up into smaller syntagms. What is the contribution of the cutting-rate? Since the sequence is a series of photographic stills (including some photographs of paintings), include in your reading the semiotics of photography and of art. This is an assignment for which the inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is likely to be an advantage: these should be incorporated electronically rather than literally cut-and-pasted and should be labelled 'Figure 1...' (etc.). Only some of the books on the suggested reading are explicitly semiotic and you may need to recast their insights within a semiotic framework.

The following links offer essential resources (use the usual password). These are from a working research archive set up by me and Nigel Orrillard: you are asked not to make these resources available to anyone else and to use them purely for purposes of study within this module.

Some suggested reading

Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!


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