Film Language
Film language written by Turner. In his article, he stated that film is the same as words which contain connotative meaning. Also, the film will be influenced by culture. The shooting angle, the position of character in the image and the special light settings to emphasize some kinds of features are all have social meanings.
When the film is being edited, its way of presentation is also being edited. Visual appearance has its own language system that the way audience understand the film. There is a way called semiotics to help us to understand this special language system. Semiotic treats social meaning as the production of “signs”, and sign could be anything which is important. Meanwhile, sign could be two parts, one is “signifier” such as images and words, another is “signified” which means a kind of concept in our mind. As long as we understand how the semiotic works then we are able to use it to produce the signifying practices of films.
Film requires to combine camera, lighting, background setting, sounds and many other independent elements together to make film meaningful, which means the signifying system. Due to this feature, it different from simply writing. As this background, to understand films rely on the capability of decoding from audience and the ability of producer to construct the different scenes.
The signifying system is basically made up by camera, lighting, sound, mies-en-scene and editing.
The camera positioning is important during a film, because it can determine the perspective that audience can watch the progress of the film narration from. For example, a low angle shot will make character more powerful, different angles can give audience totally different hints about characters or subjects. Other camera feature such as composition also includes cryptic meaning to help with narration. Lighting is a significant method to express emotion and structure the personality of character and another usual way to use lighting is making the film more realistic.
Sound plays key role during a narration. For instance, music sometimes can indicate how the evolution of the story and catch audience’s attention to make them predict the following scene.

Music makes film more emotional, bring kind of realistic feeling into the film and help it to interact with audience. Set design, costumes, the spatial relations and the placement of objects are all contribute to the narration, this kind of background setting called mies-en-scene. It’s impossible for audience to memorize all mies-en-scene from different scenes, but we as audience will definitely unconsciously learn much from the rise-en-scene. We can easily recognize a character’s identity from their costumes and see the background setting of them. Editing makes film more naturally and help with narration invisibly, it is very important for a film. Editing is not simply paste different scenes together, two scenes put them together could be another totally different story. A good editing is help to express the film, meanwhile it assist the audience to understand film. All these systems make up signifying system, film can not make sense with only simple one system. This is why film as a signifying practice.