"Tynyanov spoke of the cinema as offering the visible world in the form of semantic signs engendered by cinematic procedures such as lighting and montage, while Eichenbaum saw film in relation to "inner speech" and "image translations of linguistic tropes.
Connotation typically involves emotional overtones, objective interpretation, social values, and ideological assumptions.
[1] As Roland Barthes has said, “narrative may be transmitted through oral or written language; through static or moving images, through gestures and through an organized mixture of all these substances.
Narrators, usually in a voice-over format, are very popular in documentary film and greatly assist in telling the story while accompanying powerful shots.
Another powerful semiotic tool for filmmaking is the use of metaphors, which are defined as a comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics.
Film semiotics was born in a series of memorable debates among Eco, Metz and Pasolini at the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro from 1965 to 1967.
Where current linguistic conventions might use two axes, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, the triple articulation can use kinesics to identify discrete units of time.
“The contextual wealth of this combination makes the cinema a richer form of communication than speech.”[6] Summary of codes[6] Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema (1974)—Essais sur la signification au cinéma (1968): This collection of Metz’s writings on cinematographic problems was informed by insights from structural linguistics.
"[1] Part Two Cine-semiology Dealt with the cinematic sign, The Grand Syntagmatic, textual systems and analysis, semiotics of filmic sound, language in the cinema.
"One of the aims, therefore, of psychoanalytic film theory is a systematic comparison of the cinema as a specific kind of spectacle and the structure of the socially and psychically constituted individual.