1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910815136403321

Autore

Tsang Hing

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Boston ; ; Berlin : , : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

1-61451-411-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (210 p.)

Collana

Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC] ; ; 11

Disciplina

070.1/8014

Soggetti

Documentary films

Semiotics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.