''The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative

place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.''

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)

What is semiotics?
Umberto Eco states that: ''semiotics is considered everything that can be taken as a sign.'' Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as signs in everyday speech, but of anything which stands for something else. In a semiotic sense, si gns take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. While for the linguist Saussure, semiology was a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life, for the philosopher Charles pierce semiotics was the formal doctrine of signs which was closely related to logic. He declared that every thought is a sign. Semiotics and that branch linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs whereas semantics focuses on what words mean, semiotics is concerned with how signs mean.

Visual semiotics
Surrounded with symbols, images and various signs, human being has always strived to signify them and utilized for communication. The meaning comes out of an interaction between message and its reader (audience). While handling a text, one must consider not only its components but also the relation between those components, all the impressions it has created and the techniques used for creating such impressions as well.

The symbol in semiotics

There have been many definitions of the symbol, which is a problematic word to define. In semiotics, one prominent definition regards the symbol as a sign which is differentiated from the icon and the index. A sign has a 'signifier' and a 'signified'. The English word table, for example, is a signifier, and its signified is the thing (or concept) that it represents, which is the table itself. For a symbol, the relationship between the signifier and signified, which is sometimes called signification, is arbitrary: the word table does not in any way resemble the object that it signifies. The written words of English are in fact symbolic, as they do not resemble what they are supposed to signify. As Berger points out, the problem of meaning arises from the fact that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional. In other words, signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, and they can mean different things to different people. An icon is a representation that has some similarity with what it refers to. An index indicates that something else which the sign is associated with occurs at the same time, or is adjacent to it. Hence the sign points towards the existence of another sign, such as the relationship between fire and smoke. Peirce categorized three ways in which signs stand for their referents: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. An iconic sign/referent relation is based on resemblance a depiction of a dog in a

drawing or photograph, for example. An indexic relation is one in which the sign is in some actual proximal or physical contact with its referent (such as a wind sock to tell wind speed and direction). A symbol, such as a nation's flag, stands for its referent through convention in other words, its meaning is arbitrary and based upon agreement or habit.

Film and advertisement

Film has been made a part of our lives- a dominant mode of human expression, relatively little studied and understood at a time when the study of other, perhaps similar modes, such as verbal language, painting, and music, have developed venerable bodies of theory and analytic methods. Those wishing to study film face a confusing and sometimes confounding choice of approaches. Shall one look at a film as art? Is film like painting, theater, storytelling, or music? Shall one look at film as communication? This presupposes a definition of communication and commits one to a position that as yet has scarcely been adequately clarified, let alone accepted. Recently some attention has been given to the consideration of film as language. Shall it be studied as a subset of linguistics, using verbal language as a paradigm for the analysis of film? In conceptualizing film from a semiotic standpoint, it becomes quite clear that one of the basic suppositions employed by de Saussure, Morris, Sebeok, and others is the notion of a relationship between signs themselves and between signs and their users and context. A sign is not a phenomenon in and of itself; a "thing" becomes a sign only because it has a specific relationship to other "things." Research that deals solely with the effects of a film on its environment, without relating this to the filmmaker who made it, is ignoring a necessary relationship defining the film process; that is, the relationship between the sender, the message, and the receiver.

Film semiotics in particular:

Since film is not a language-system, their structure is radically different from that of natural languages and therefore involves units of different nature, size and boundaries.

Examples in Godfather:
An example of the cognitive and emotional components of the psychological facet working together with the perceptual facet of focalization can be found in 'The Godfather'. Several scenes in this film are restricted to the perspective of Michael Corleone, thus corresponding to Genettes internal focalization, but these scenes are not presented entirely from his optical viewpoint. An example is the sequence at the hospital, when he discovers that his father has been left unprotected and is about to be attacked by rival gunmen. Clearly functioning as the central focus of the scene, Michael does command several optical point-of-view shots, and the acoustic material in the scene is also presented as the character would hear it. Much more important, however, is the way the character serves as the psychological and emotional center of interest: his quick reactions, his intelligence and his courage are emphasized throughout. Although the majority of the shots in the sequence deviate from his strict optical perspective, the psychological and cognitive focus is consistently oriented to him. Genettes narrow sense of optical focalization is insufficient to account for the decisive revelation of Michaels character expressed in this scene; in film the psychological facet of focalization often expresses the overall meaning of an individual sequence.