Culturally Significant Symbolic Faces: for a Sociosemiotics of Faces in Films

Every now and then, watching a movie, we come across faces in which we recognize a significant value, because they represent some important cultural models we use to assign a meaning to our experience of the world. By way of example, I will work on the faces of the protagonists of two recent films, La vie d’Adèle. Chapitres 1 & 2 (Kechiche 2013) and Jeune femme (Sérraille 2017), comparing them with the faces of the protagonists of some older movies, such as Shrek (Adamson and Jenson 2001) and Avatar (Cameron 2009). I will argue that the way those faces are portrayed is similar to the narrative structure of the stories of the characters they belong to and that the sings and narrative structures used to construct the discourses about the world in those films are at the same time similar to the ones of two important cultural models about what it means to be young men and women in our times. Moreover, as these cultural models are different but interconnected, I will argue that the most meaningful faces at the cinema change, due to the transformation of the cultural models they derive from and that a sociosemiotic method based on a structuralist vision of culture can help to identify which are the most culturally significant symbolic faces on the big screen, and not only there.