Semiotics study for cinematic lighting

Semiotics study for cinematic lighting

Abstract
There are three international languages: mathematics, music and cinema. Cinema hasn’t been immunized against being attracted to the lingual and linguistic models. The concept of film language was already present in the writings of some early theorists of the cinema. With the advent of structuralism and semiology in the 1960s, the concept of film language was deeply explored by theorists, so the concept of film semiology was arising which emphasized that the language of the film was not like any other literary languages, but is a special type of language, which uses many codes to form a structure and rules of the movie. These studies dealt with the language of the film as a single block (only a few of which dealt with the lighting element), although the film codes are loaded on its audio-visual elements as independent units. This poses the problem of the research; that relies in the problematic of linguistic of the cinematic lighting as an independent film unit. Is cinematic lighting a language or a language system? And is the concept of linguistic sign can be applied to it? and what is the relation between the signifier and the signified? Does it lack the equivalent of the arbitrary linguistic sign, denotation and connotation? The research aim is: To study the extent of how linguistic cinematic lighting can be. The research presents a hypothesis: that cinematic lighting is linguistic. The importance of the research is; if this hypothesis is correct it puts lighting within the rank of the universal languages that can be understood in different cultures. The research follows the descriptive and analytical approach in presenting and analyzing the content of lighting in films.