Initial indications for the semiotics of a movie genre: the musical film

Abstract

This article applies certain indications of method, suggested by Yuri Lotman, concerning how the semiotic effects of a text introduced within another text can work in a movie genre especially prone to such phenomenon: the musical film. In order to study the incidence of said phenomenon, three musical filmes are analysed: South Pacific (Josha Logan, 1958), West Side story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961), and My fair lady (George Cukor, 1964). The analyses are made to show how varied can be the ways in which the hypotheses we derived from Lotman appear; these hypotheses speak of the forms to integrate, or contrarywise to clearly separate, the subtexts which in the film are acted, from those which are sung or danced.

Keywords

• Gênero cinematográfico
• Filme musical
• Semiótica
• Subtextos
• Yuri Lotman