Yuri Lotman - Semiotics of Cinema

From what I gained from the article, Yuri Lotman was a semiotician who taught at Tartu University in Estonia who wrote a book that came out in Russia in 1973. Because he was a semiotician, he tended to see the different film shots as the building blocks of the cinema world. He claimed that the different shots that made up a scene are kind of like the words that make up a sentence, and that the "syntax" or rules by which we go about using to make up and then speak full sentences is in some respects like the different shots that make up a specific scene.
If Cinema is a representation of what we see, then the shot itself carries a certain amount of information that can have multiple interpretations. Lotman's central argument was that semantics that are used in cinema in order to give scenes meaning, or rather allow them to generate meaning. Every viewer in cinema brings their own home-grown education, socioeconomic class, and own brand of cultural upbringing, so interpretations of a film will always be different. But because everyone interprets things differently, there is a percentage of the audience that will "skim off" several layers of meaning throughout the film/text based on whether or not he or she truly understands it. This notion has many applications for modern day media. And it partially explains why children and people of less physical/mental development enjoy simple shows and movies that aren't terribly difficult to comprehend. Furthermore, it directly implies that texts and films effect our different intellectual and emotional stages of development.