Cinema poetics in South Africa’s post-apartheid animation narratives: a case for semiotic add-ons

Abstract How can we know whether the meaning that was in the film is the same as the one we get when we watch it? This article proposes that meaning must transgress between diegesis and non-diegesis, and between the real and the fictional through a semiotic process. The article is thus about how meaning is communicated from the film to its audiences. It uses the concept of narrative metalepsis to critique the theoretical possibilities for cinema meanings across three semantic pathways: ideational, spectatorship, and textuality. It first examines the semiotics of an idea, of spectatorship, and of textuality to highlight the different paths that meaning travels from the film to the viewer. Second, it proposes the existence of a semiotic level where meaning resides neither in the film’s diegesis nor in the viewer’s non-diegesis. Third, the article proposes diegesis split as a new space with the potential for enhancing our critique of cinema semantics and semiotic enquiry. The article argues that, in reading a film, the meaning and the moment of interpretation are asynchronous, and consequently, proposes two semiotic add-ons: semantic diegesis and meso-diegesis to account for this diegesis split. The discussions are based on Noko Mashaba , an animated short film set in post-apartheid South Africa.