Toward a Structural Psychology of Cinema Approaches to Semiotics [AS].

Beginning with the proposition that there exist uniquely cinematic elements of meaning and structure, Stefan Sharff clearly and systematically lays the foundation for "literacy" in cinema--a sensitivity to the aesthetic elements intrinsic only to film. Sharff presents the basic elements of structure, modes of expression, and rules which he argues create a specific "language" and "syntax" of cinema.

This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis, bringing together current work within the fields of narratology, philosophy, multimodal analysis, sound as well as cultural studies in order to cover a wide range of international academic interest. The book provides new insights into current work and turns the discussion towards recent research questions and analyses, representing and constituting in each contribution new work in the discipline of film text analysis. With the help of various example analyses, all showing the methodological applicability of the discussed issues, the collection provides novel ways of considering film as one of the most complex and at the same time broadly comprehensible texts.

This volume represents one of the first major scholarly effort to unravel the psychological and symbolic processing of political advertising. Utilizing survey, experimental, qualitative, and semiotic methodologies to study this phenomenon, the contributors to Television and Political Advertising trace how political ads help to interpret the psychological reality of the presidential campaign in the minds of millions of voters. A product of the National Political Advertising Research Project, this interdisciplinary effort is valuable to researchers in advertising, communication, and consumer psychology since it helps define future work on the relationship between television, politics, and the mind of the voter. This volume, Television and Political Advertising: Psychological Processes, is the first of two, and covers such topics as Models and Theories for Viewing Political Television; Psychological Processing of Issues, Images, and Form; Differential Processing of Positive and Negative Advertising; and The Psychological Contexts of Processing.

Acclaimed for its breakthrough approach and its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s.

This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced ‘layout structure’—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films. With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

Psychology of Learning and Motivation