Yuri Lotman and Semiotics

Yuri Lotman was a semiotician, which is someone who studies the act of signs and their significance in books, media, and everyday life. He says that in cinema the shot is the basic unit of measurement. The order in which shots in a movie are taken affect how the viewer interprets the shots and the scene taking place. He says that we do not notice every sign in a movie and that is why we can watch movies multiple times and notice new things. Which in my experience watching movies is completely true, also watching a movie multiple times helps you understand it even better. The way we take what a scene is suppose to mean semiotically is affected by the kind of shots used, the sequence of shots, music, sound effects and other technical matters relating to film. With out some aspects of those we would not know what is going on in the scene taking place. I think with reading this article about Yuri Lotman it helped me understand that pretty much everything in a movie is set in place for a reason and that semiotics is in our life whether we notice it or not.