Semiotics: A study of signs A Semiotic Study on War Posters Acknowledgement This report wouldn’t have seen the light at the end of the tunnel had it not been for Dr. Seema Khanwalkar who encouraged & challenged us & settled for nothing less than our best efforts. Focus The following study is set during the times of World War II when the bigger national powers ‘sceptre’ed the world colosseum & used war propaganda to score high on the sympathetic quotient of the nation & in turn the world. The focus of this study is to understand & analyze this phenomenon through the U.S. war propaganda & how the super power used it to their advantage to turn tables amongst the global audience. Hypothesis The hypothesis statement for the entire study is ‘USA used propaganda posters during the war with subliminal texts so that the civilians would get influenced, in turn mobilizing opinion the way the ‘thought leaders’ had anticipated’. Introduction A historical backdrop Submitted by: Karan Chandna (e7019), Komal Lath (e7023), Kshitij Pandey (e7024), Niyati Sharma (e7036), Rajeesh R. (e7041), Shradha Agarwal (e7056), Subhamoy Das (e7058), Varun Attrey (e7062)
This was a group assignment that we had submitted for institutional purposes. The assignment looks into the intricate details of the war posters published by US during World War for their propoganda.
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Transcript
Semiotics: A study of signs
A Semiotic Study on War Posters
Acknowledgement
This report wouldn’t have seen the light at the end of the tunnel had it not been for Dr. Seema Khan-
walkar who encouraged & challenged us & settled for nothing less than our best efforts.
Focus
The following study is set during the times of World War II when the bigger national powers ‘sceptre’ed
the world colosseum & used war propaganda to score high on the sympathetic quotient of the nation &
in turn the world. The focus of this study is to understand & analyze this phenomenon through the U.S.
war propaganda & how the super power used it to their advantage to turn tables amongst the global au-
dience.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis statement for the entire study is ‘USA used propaganda posters during the war with sub-
liminal texts so that the civilians would get influenced, in turn mobilizing opinion the way the ‘thought
leaders’ had anticipated’.
Introduction
A historical backdrop
The face of human kind got a deep ridden scar in 1945 when the universal mayhem named World War II
came to an end with the explosion of an atom bomb in the Japanese territory of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
The world wide turmoil which commenced in the late 1939, divided the world into two powers viz. Allies
& Axis till the unfortunate event happened in the Asian quarter of the world. The Allies emerged victori -
ous & as a result United States of America & the Soviet Union grew to be superpowers of the world.
Their quest for global dominance left their clothes stained with the blood of innocent civilians across the
globe. However, in order to have an upper hand in the political arena as well, these superpowers re-
sorted to use of lens, propaganda & dynamic war journalism in order to mobilize the masses. Propa-
ganda posters were deployed in order ‘to paint the town red’ so as to capture nation’s military triumph
This analysis concerns a semiotic analysis of posters whose similarity is based on the fact that all concern the posters prepared as propaganda by the USA (In conjunction with the Allied powers) to coerce the Axial powers, and all were found in the within the textual context of war posters.
We therefore present a ‘semiotic deconstruction’ of the posters that have been chosen (please refer to the Annexure) in terms of their status as signs, whose associative meanings not only gave a favourable impression of the country, but also the sublime power context in which they were situated and high-lighted; thus illustrating Umberto Eco's claim that the medium and message may be 'charged with cul-tural signification’.
Paradigms
The use of Umberto Eco’s theory is very significant in this regard as the ‘paradigm’ in which the war posters have been based, are heavily influenced by the social paradigms (the angst against USA which was rising and therefore to mellow it, Germany was made to look like a devilish country) , economic par -adigms (the economic unrest). The medium being posters used for propaganda and the message being ‘exuding power by USA among the nation and the rest of the world through sings, symbols, iconography etc.
Iconography and Codification through symbols…Signified and signifier
Although all of the posters do not physically represent the product, they all provide an important iconic representation of both the propaganda and what the codification, should stand for. Thus, analyses of all the posters strongly focus upon the visual imagery, and the ways in which this imagery generates the ap-propriate signified concepts (or emotional overtones) which promote the image of the product. Take for instance the colour red that has been very prominently and overtly used to signify the bloodshed caused by Nazis and therefore mobilize opinions against the Germans who belonged to the Axis Powers.
The fonts used also have a startling impact on the way the message can be perceived. Poster 3 for in -stance shows ‘warning, our homes are in danger now’. The very fact that the typography and word con-structions (the semantics, syntactic and paradigmatic) meaning emerges strongly that Germany is one that is destroying the world and that to protect your homes, you need to support your country – USA.
The visual imagery when ‘decoded’ very bluntly describes the 2 powers – Japan and Germany trying to assert their power( the globe focusing on USA, their expressions of complete power and disgust over the USA and the very fact the placement of the text)
The signifier Hitler with his facial expressions, hand gestures and body language signifies contempt for the world and USA in particular. In Poster 2, the shoe kicking the white house bearing a Nazi symbol which lies in the paradigm of the social construction of the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The concept was to show the ‘blitzkrieg’ phenomenon and again the linguistic semiotics – ‘we’re fighting to prevent this’, shows the extent to which USA went to protect its atrocities and justify the horrific deeds.
Thus an overview of the analysis as was presented in class covered the way the posters were designed, their historical perspective as to why each poster was made and the backdrop of it being constructed. We then peeled the onion layer bit by bit to unravel the deeper texts hidden within the codes of its con-struction like visual imagery, fonts, colours, the people who were depicted (Eg. Poster 1 showed surren-der by the blue collared workers post the Great Depression), the syntactic, pragmatic and semantic meaning of the visual text, the appeal which it then generated and the overall effect it had on the masses.
Applying the theoretical framework:
Barthes expressed his view that a newspaper photograph, posters are, ‘objects that have been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ide-ological norms which are so many factors of connotation
There are many decisions taken by the poster creator such as; focusing, subject, angle, that pro -duce various representations, and readings, creating different connotations. From the choices made from the paradigm sets of these signifiers, and the syntagmatic relationship between them, it is possible to decode and compare the posters