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

mediated through the codes with which our culture organizes it, categorizes its
significant elements or semes into paradigms, and relates them significantly into
syntagms. (Fiske & Hartley 2003:47)
In this context, Fiske seems to emphasise (albeit indirectly) that film uses all three
forms mentioned above: icon (related to sound and image), symbol (oral and writing) and
index (of the effect of what is filmed). Moreover, signs are not meaningful isolatedly and
thus “conventions or codes” are all important to make it possible for the signs to be
interpreted in relation to each other. Our perception of the everyday world, Fiske declares,
involves these codes which are truly determined by one’s culture, but I would also add
human perception of the world is itself constructed, rather than being simply given. At this
point, what we watch on the screen is always a reproduction or a “re-presentation” of the
real, and, as Nichols notes, “perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that
can re-present it within our mind. The force of the apparent identity is enormous, however.
We think that it is the world itself we see in our “mind’s eye”, rather than a coded picture
of it” (Nichols 1981:11). I would distinguish here the terms “code” or “coding” or even
“coded picture”, as Nichols mentions, as these are not simply “conventions” but rather sets
of connected conventions, which can help with the correlation of signifiers and signifieds.
In the quotation above, Fiske also refers to the two fundamental types of
relationship that signs enter, also according to Saussure: paradigmatic (Saussure actually
used the word “associative”) and syntagmatic. The first consists of a virtual set of units
and they normally concern substitution, as in degrees of comparability or the alphabet and
the way the letters are combined with one another to form words. The second, the
syntagmatic relationships, relate to positioning or the “horizontal” arrangement into a
signifying whole. From a structuralist semiotic point of view these two dimensions (which
are often called “axes”, where the horizontal axis is the syntagmatic and the vertical axis is
the paradigmatic) are a key distinction as they determine the value of the sign in its
combination and differentiation of relations. 77
77 “In the case of film, our interpretation of an individual shot depends on both paradigmatic analysis
(comparing it, not necessarily consciously, with the use of alternative kinds of shot) and syntagmatic analysis
(comparing it with preceding and following shots). The same shot used within another sequence of shots
could have quite a different preferred reading. Actually, filmic syntagms are not confined to such temporal
syntagms (which are manifested in montage / the sequencing of shots) but include the spatial syntagms found
also in still photography (in mise-en-scène / the composition of individual frames)” (Chandler 2007:86).
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