Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Movie Black Swan

Since its advent in the1950s, discourse analysis has undergone a series ofsignificant developments especially after the introduction of HallidayanSystemic-functional Linguistics (SFL). However, during the past decades, the focus ofdiscourse analysis has always been on written language, which seems insufficient inthe mass media era of the internet.With the development of modern technologies, people usually apply severalkinds of semiosis to express meanings or create information in communication.Multi-semiotic, also multi-modality, includes spoken and written languages, images,diagrams, spaces and other resources used to construct meaning (Baldry and Thibault,2006; O’Halloran,2004). Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) emerged inresponse to the request for a developed theory capable of interpreting multi-semioticmodes apart from written language. MDA is an emerging paradigm in discoursestudies which extends the study of language per se to the study of language incombination with other resources, such as images, scientific symbolism, gesture,action, music and sound (O’Halloran,2011).In recent years more and more scholars at home and abroad have conductedextensive research on the multimodal discourse analysis. Their researches ofmultimodality are mainly from four perspectives: interactive sociologic perspective,cognitive perspective, stylistic perspective and functional semiotic perspective. Thefunctional semiotic approach to MDA is developed from HallidayanSystematic-functional Linguistics (SFL), examining a multimodal discourse in termsof the three meta-functions: the ideational function, the interpersonal function and thetextual function (which are called representational meaning, interactive meaning andcompositional meaning in Visual Grammar). But the study of dynamic discourses, forexample filmic discourses, is just on its starting point, and most of the studies paymore attention to only one kind of meaning or one movie, so there is much room to do further research.This thesis, based on Kress and van Leeuwan’s Visual Grammar (1996,2006)and O’Halloran’s (2004) multimodal filmic discourse analysis system, makes amultimodal analysis of the movie Black Swan focusing on three metafunctionalmeanings. It takes ‘Mise-en-Scène (the shot)’ as one unit to analyze this movie, andhas selected four shots to do the analysis. The thesis attempts to study how the threemeta-functions of images (the representational meaning, interactive meaning andcompositional meaning) are realized in the dynamic flux and the feasibility ofO’Halloran’s (2004) multimodal filmic discourse analysis system.This thesis has reached the expected goal. It gives out new evidence to thefeasibility of MDA on dynamic text. It is a new try to analyze filmic discourse fromthe viewpoint of three visual meanings. Not all the modes presented in O’Halleran’smultimodal filmic discourse analysis appear in a shot. The elements (modes) are evenchanging from time to time in dynamic text meaning construction processes. Themodes in the process of meaning construction are not arranged randomly, but followthe principle to complement and interact with each other so as to generate a coherentdiscourse and realize representational meaning, interactive meaning andcompositional meaning.