Visual Culture- The Rhetoric of the Image

This weeks visual culture lecture was called The Rhetoric of the Image, and focused on semiotics and realism. It dealt with the idea of constructs and the difference between reality and reality in photographs, the perception of what we think is real, this is what a realist takes for granted as reality. There is a graphic to represent what makes up a sign and how we view it.

The signifier is the word or sound that gives the meaning, and the signified is what is evoked in the mind, the concept that you can see mentally. This is all visual symbolism, a photo of a smoking pipe was shown and the room was asked what it was, the reply was a pipe when in fact its a picture of a smoking pipe, not the actual thing itself. The lecture was quite good as it was all about finding new meaning within art and objects and it's inspiring to try and give your own work new meanings and find new ways to symbolise them.

In our second lecture with our film tutor, we went more into the film aspect of this and discussed French New Wave Cinema, as well as British New Wave Cinema. These were new styles that were created to go against the typical studio produced film, as they had no studio funding and embraced youth. This was around the 1950's which saw the birth of television which saw parents and adults staying in watch the TV while the younger generation went out more to the cinema, the youth had a greater say at what should be played and viewed at cinemas. Main films we focused on was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, along with A Taste of Honey. These were two films we took a look at to get the idea of the style and the content at the time. The whole new wave cinema style was about new trends and making statements and you could tell that by the topics they're tackling, many followed a domestic/relationship theme and appeared almost episodic.