Semantic Analysis and Comparison of Family Structure in Iranian Cinema of the 70's and 90's: A Case Study of Leila and the Ice Age

Family representation in the media expresses dominant discourses about its structure and patterns, and the media can create, confirm, or modify these discourses. This article looks at how family rules, structures, and patterns have evolved over the past few decades, and how cinema has played a role in this transformation and discourse, and in what ways, tools, as well as the changes in the family's current and cultural structure are coded for.

Because we deal with animated images, music and words as media texts, we use a qualitative approach with semiotic approach to examine visual cues in selected cinematic films.

The purpose of this comparative study was to compare the two decades of Iranian cinema in the 70s and 90s with a focus on Leila (Dariush Mehrjui, 1996) and Ice Age (Mostafa Kiaei, 2014). Social and ideological cinematic films in the course of the last two decades from 1970 to 1996 shown that the context of fundamental changes in the family structure and its constituent components such as rules, boundaries, roles and patterns of communication has been identified.

The findings confirm that changes from technical to social and ideological codes have made serious changes, and these factors have caused the family structure to collapse.