Roland Bathes- semiotics

Biography:
Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the North Sea before his son was one year old. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, where he earnt a license in classical letters. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. It also kept him out of military service during World War II and, while being kept out of the major French universities meant that he had to travel a great deal for teaching positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance of major degree-awarding universities, and did so throughout his career.
His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work, Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in the Mythologies collection that was published in 1957).
Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with another French thinker, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism (a label that he inaccurately applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes' rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such as Marxism.
By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He travelled to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, he wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was developing similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes' writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense, critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva.
In 1977, he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work, Camera Lucida, is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette.
On 25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by François Mitterrand, Barthes was struck by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March at the age of sixty-four.

Theory:
His theory focuses on the cultural influences of mythology and the 'bourgeois' society. Meaning the media, litrature etc. show signs of cultural influences.
The term, which was spelled semeiotics, derives from the Greek σημειωτικός, (sēmeiōtikos), "observant of signs^" (from σημεῖον - sēmeion, "a sign, a mark")
For example a $ sign can mean U.S. currency in literal sense; though, it can also represent wealth, or is stereotypical for robbers.

In Dog Soldiers:
The idea of Dog soldiers, literally is Werewolf's Vs Humans. However, it could represent Mythology and how it is becoming a dying pass time, for example many arent told about myths as a child as itis less as a social norm, this film could be trying to revive the idea of Mythology being real.

G325 Section A: 1b

1. sound: dramatic, non diagetic music to build tension.
Editing: fast paced editing to create dramatic effect,POV shots were black and white to give realistic effect because animals cant see in colour.
Cinematography: used alot of match on action shots, and quick snapshots, also alot of POV.
Mise-en-scene: using the woods gives good effect because of the dark lighting, also isolated house.

2. The genre of the film is an action/horror it shows this by using quick editing and alot of use of blood, also dramatic music. There were elements of comedy throughout the film as well.
The other conventions used in the film are science fiction, because of the use of werewolf's, could be described as fantasy/thriller.

3. The film does fit into Todorov theory, because there is always a state of calm before the conflict and then resolution. in the film this can be shown at the start of the film; where all the soldiers are shown having a laugh and being calm, where as later they are in constant threat of the werewolf's, and later it resolved, when all is blown up.

4. Males: masculine, heroic, deterministic, brave, confident, daring, just blokes really.
Females: only one female character, fairly masculine, similar to male characters, more serious than males, deceptive/traitor.

5. the armed forces can be seen as heroic, daring, down-to-earth, caring of all (but werewolf's), deterministic.

6. aimed at males aged mid teens + because of its violent nature plus its action influences, and also the fantasy influences.

7. this film would be a 15 because it involves blood, swearing and violence though it is still like a fantasy.