Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

certain community, our subjective responses trigger a second order of signification, but this
time linked to what the theorists refer to as “intersubjectivity”, which is culturally
determined, and therefore deriving from a given ideology.
The image of Marilyn Monroe can also be understood as an icon of overdosing on
sedative drugs or her phase of depression, and therefore our understanding of that picture
and our reading or interpretation of it is now formed at the ideological level. Metz affirms
that all these elements and levels of order constitute and reproduce a stronger perception of
our cultural belonging and certainly stress our national identity, “the cinematic institution
(…) is also the mental machinery – another industry – which spectators “accustomed to the
cinema” have internalised historically” (Metz 1982:7).
It is also for this reason that semiotics in film theory became interwoven with other
strands, namely theories of ideology and of subjectivity, or Marxism and psychoanalysis
(as described in Part II). The filmic text gained a new dimension and all of these areas of
studies addressed the issue of the spectator and his/her role in meaning-production. Seen as
an ideological operation, rather than being a reflection of reality, film was now understood
as a form of language and a kind of preferred positioning offered to the subject.
Saussure came up with his theory of the sign, presenting itself as a self-contained
dyad: the sign, he argues, can be a representamen, that is, the form the sign takes (and
which is not necessarily material); or an interpretant, that is to say, the “mental effect” or
the sense made of the sign. Many other followers of this model, such as Umberto Eco or
Hjelmslev, substituted the term “sign” for “sign function”, establishing therefore the
relationship between an expression (or a material occurrence) and its content. Here it is
also relevant to state that the interpretant does not refer to the person or the interpreter, but
to the sign. Charles Peirce also formulated his own taxonomy regarding Saussure’s dyad.
His model, in fact, brings a new dimension, offering thus a triadic model: including the
object – for which the sign stands or to which the sign refers. Thus, he concludes that:
A sign [in the form of a representamen] 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 1998:228)
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