Blog Five: The Importance of Understanding Communication

My life’s ambition is to work in the film industry as a director. This is a career where the ability to not only communicate, but understand communication and the power it holds is paramount to being successful in the field. A director must communicate with his or her cast and crew and must understand how to translate information from the script to the soundstage to the big screen. 

To be a successful individual I must be able to communicate, whether through my work (engaging an audience requires communication skills) or in everyday life (communicating with my employers, co-workers, business partners, etc.) The key to understanding communication is starting at the beginning, at it’s foundation and working your way from there.

To begin at the very basis of communication, we start with Hermeneutics. Hermeneutics (deriving from the name of the Greek god Hermes, who would translate divine language into human language) is the science and philosophy of communication. It is how we humans interpret and make sense of the information that is presented to us. Next, we move to semiotics.

Semiotics is the “science of signs.” Semiotics is a way of “reading” images and decoding things that are multi-layered such as film, television, books, etc. and making sense of signs and mythologies

After decoding the signs of semiotics, we arrive at the narrative, a story with a well-established structure. A narrative is a discourse in which time is enacted, where there is a beginning, middle and end.

The narrative can be broken down further by placing it in a genre. A genre is a category in which a narrative can be placed and structured even further. As someone interested in the film industry, I am fond of many different genres of film, from the dusty Western with it’s tough but soft-hearted sheriffs to the hard-boiled PI’s and femme fatales of the black and white Noir. Genres will take narratives that are similar in content and structure and group them together to make them even easier to interpret.

I believe that understanding these concepts will lead to a better understanding of communication and hopefully the ability to better communicate with those around me. I believe that this basic knowledge would be very practical and useful to have as a film director, a career that is really focused entirely on the art of communication.