Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema engages with very vital problems
posed by Peirce's philosophy in an innovative and inter-disciplinary fashion by examining how
documentary film practice can engage with the question of emergent human agency within a wider
biosphere shared by human animals and non-human animals alike. The book is in many ways a
celebration of human inquiry taking liberally from Peirce's semeiotic and parallel ideas
within recent visual anthropology. Through an analysis of the work of three renowned filmmakers
- Jon Jost Johan Van der Keuken and Rithy Panh - Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living
Sign in the Cinema reasserts human agency within a global age dominated by philosophical
scepticism and an unquestioning subservience to mechanistic military techno-culture. The author
argues that an approach to documentary inquiry broadly derived from Peirce's sign theory
phenomenology and overall philosophical outlook has strong advantages over atemporal formal
approaches derived from Saussurean semiology. Nevertheless this project is also both critical
and self-critical. It also bears direct testament to the many tumultuous and life-destroying
events of the late 20th century and reminds us of the moral and philosophical problems which we
are still grappling with in the early 21st century. Hence - the Living Sign.
