Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture

Writing at the end of the 1970s, Raymond Bellour claims that the semiotics of cinema 'never truly existed except in its first incarnations as pure methodological space, as programmatic overture to a work or as a merely virtual study'. In this book chapter I map some of the contours of this methodological space as it came into being in late 1960s and 1970s British film culture, tracking some of the crucial figures, texts (translations and critical essays), publications, pedagogical spaces and institutions, almost all centred on London, concluding with the importance of semiotics for the politics and aesthetics of a number of independent films in Britain in the period, by the London Women's Film Group, the Berwick Street Collective, and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen.