فصل النظرية ، البنيوية ونظريات الإشارات ٢-a .. كتاب فهم السينما

emphasis on the theoretical aspects. As Metz pointed out, signology is concerned with the orderly categorization of single symbols into structures of different kinds, while structuralism is the study of how different symbols perform their function within a single structure and within a single film. Traditional texts used by French critics in literature. This method requires a detailed examination and analysis of a specific work in all its technical complexities, accompanied by a complex formation on how these specific techniques work in producing a unified aesthetic effect.

Structuralism is one of the most popular forms of film analysis and it combines many other methods with it. The most famous structuralists are in Britain and they often combine the techniques of signology with the techniques of author theory. For example, Jeffrey Noel Smith's book (Loshinovskonti) is a study of the work of one author in which key themes and specific stylistic repetitions are analyzed. Other structural studies combine two or more approaches.

In a number of issues of the British newspaper (The Screen) in 1972, for example, the editors of (The Cinematographic Papers) (which at that date were Marxist in their editorial position) presented a group text "from" a reading of John Ford's film Young Mr. Lincoln).
The analysis combined the methods of Marxist analysis, structuralism, and the author's theory (10-25). This analysis, like other structural analyzes, was linked to the internal symbols and signs of the film with the important external symbols (i.e. political, social, and commercial) that were part of the overall meaning of the film.

Other structural critics use the methods of signal science to explore specific genres of film. Jim Keats's book (West Horizons), for example, distinguishes themes, structures, and formal elements in Westerns by Anthony Mann, Bedbutcher, and Sam Pekinpah (10) - (26). Colin MacArthur's book (26) Underworld USA) is a structural analysis of gangster films and the genre called black film. MacArthur explores 'images' in these genres by analyzing symbolic categorizations of signs in the work of Lanck, Houston, and Fuller. Exploring he, Kazan, and others.

Many of these critics were influenced by the theories of the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in fact to characterize these English critics.
themselves from structuralists in other disciplines, they often referred to their field as cinematic structuralism. Levi-Strauss methods depend on examining regional myths that are believed to express specific hidden structures in thought in the form of symbols. These myths exist in different forms and usually include the same buildings or similar binary structures or pairs of poles. We usually find them in dialectical conflicts. They are in a permanent state of fluidity. dynamism. Depending on the analyzed culture, these poles could be agricultural (water versus drought) or sexual (male versus female) or young generation versus old age) and so on. Because myths are explained with signs and symbols, their full meanings are hidden in antonyms.
Mostly by its creators, and Levi Strauss believes that once you understand the connotations of the myth, it becomes a neglected template.

Film structuralists use these dialectical methods to explore not only the 'inner culture of film' but also how these references express hidden forms of ideas in the outer culture that makes up the film's social framework. For example, in his article “The Science of Cinema Signals” published in the book “Signs and Meaning in Cinema,” Peterwalen, for example, examines John Ford’s Western film “My Love Clementine” in terms of its different binary structures. A large number of dichotomies in a complex aesthetic construction (10-27).The film ostensibly deals with the story of Wyatt Earp.Alan Ford uses the story structure primarily as a way to explore the construction of a frontier society.Some of the film's poles are fictitious. The horny, cultured Boston-born fighter (Doc) Holliday versus the well-mannered, uneducated Western boy (Wyatt Earp) and so on, according to Alan Ford looks at the growth of Tombstone) in a mythical sense as a wasteland about to be transformed into a garden (in the Christian sense, the wasteland becomes the promised land flowing into The American frontier region has many disparate and sometimes conflicting cultural traditions and at other times a fusion of eastern and western Indian, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon, male and female, young and old, secular and religious, civilized and primitive, individual and collective, traditional and experimental. Despite falling into emotionality and dialogue flaws, Ford manages these dual themes with surprising complexity, Whalen concludes. The church dance scene is the focus of the film and contains a number of symbolic ideas. The foundation and floor of a church were finally built in this frontier community and most of the townspeople attend the celebration as the musicians begin to blare their lively melodies, the dancers choose their partners and frolic under the blazing western sky as the American flag flutters in the air above their heads. The jig is led by Wyatt Earp (Henry) (Fonda) and the urbane Bostonian Clementine Carter (Katie Downes) and the characters embody the moral center of Ford's world. The dance itself is a symbolic embodiment of the reconciliation of opposites that Ford feels represents the genius and dynamism of America.

Some structuralists insist that the only effective cinematic criticism relates to the theme itself, that is, to those aesthetic units found in a single film. All other external and historical considerations may be interesting, but in the end they are irrelevant, as these critics claim. Perkins' book Film as Film takes this position and argues that film can only be judged in terms of its richness and complexity in fusing its (interior) aesthetic units The discrete pieces of symbols and signs in an intricately emotion rich artistic construction

coherent.

With the film structuralists have criticized a number of points. The first of which is that a person’s “myth” may be a repeated template for another person. It can be claimed that Ford’s (mail carriage), for example, all its formal splendor consists of a story and an ordinary theme that was consumed by other mediums of expression at the beginning of the century in the concept of Levi-Strauss. In this regard, it is easy to attack Perkins' tendency to analyze films outside their historical framework, as there are some poor films "composed with surprising complexity, and yet they only deal with tired ideas and outdated conventions. Many typical films fall under this category, such as westerns by Bud Butcher, Weeping by Douglas Cirque, and horror films by Terrence Fisher. Many of these films are technically distinguished by good directors and even wonderful in some of their effects, but the lifeless material cannot be revived.

In the end, it all depends on how something works, as Pauline Kael points out. Robin Wood, who himself uses specific structural techniques, criticized the cinematic structuralists for their overly mechanical ways and their constant tendency to equate quantity and quality. The techniques of structuralism and signology are mere (tools) suitable for analysis as indicated by (Wood), but on their own these tools cannot tell us about the (value) of signs and symbols within the structural film if every other cinematic theory represents its quality as the quality of its practitioners. Intelligence, taste, passion, knowledge and sensitivity decide the value of good criticism, not necessarily the theoretical means used.