Context, Convention and Complexity in Film Meaning

As Lindley and Srinavasan note regarding film, “Particular cinematic devices can be used to create different connotations or subtextual meanings while dealing with similar diegetic material” [5]. In language, different ‘illocutionary forces’ create different meaning from the same ‘propositional content.’ However, linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle thinks this points not to infinite elasticity of meaning, but rather to five kinds of speech acts that encompass meaning production. Each of these analyses, the cinematically-oriented and the language-focused, holds lessons for a computational semiotics that seeks to richly reflect reality (and imagination) and be usefully humanand machine-manipulable; context and convention are pivotal to both. This paper examines the productive comparisons and contrasts that the disjunctions and intersections of these approaches afford.