Ah semiotics. Semiotician is someone who is involved in semiotics. It's one of them high falutin college words and I always thought it had to do with finding the underlying meaning in things at least that is what I thought from my university days. I did a little bit of googling and there are pages you can begin to read but I found this line in an intro that basically says it all.
"Modern semiotic theory is also sometimes allied with a Marxist approach which stresses the role of ideology."In other words this guy looks at a film through a Marxist lens and picks out things and signs and fits them into his Marxist template to find the underlying meaning of it all. It's a way of analysing stuff. Cold Mountain isn't a film set in the Civil War era about a love story but a sign of the ongoing oppression of blacks in todays modern world.
Thanks for the analysis. In other words, he's a bigotted ideologue with tunnel vision.