Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Filmic Discourse One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a full-length novel written by American writer Ken Kesey which was published in 1962 and occupies an important position in the history of American literature.In 1975,the film adapted from the novel was released in the United States and won five awards.At home and abroad,the study of the novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is very mature,but the study on the linguistic field of filmic discourse is not abundant.One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells a story that Mc Murphy who pretends to be mentally abnormal is sent to a mental hospital to escape from the forced labor in prison.His arrival brings severe impact to the spiritless mental hospital.One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest uses various symbolic resources such as sounds and images to construct meaning,so it is a multimodal discourse.This paper,based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and Van Leeuwen’s Auditory Grammar,makes a multimodal discourse analysis on visual modality,auditory modality and the combination of visual and auditory modalities of the filmic discourse One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest directed by Milo? Forman in 1975 in order to study how various modalities in this filmic discourse establish meanings.From the perspective of Visual Grammar,37 representative shots are selected to analyze how the visual modality constructs representative meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.From the perspective of Auditory Grammar,a section of cuckoo’s cry,two pieces of background music,two parts of dialogue between Mc Murphy and the Big Nurse,and two parts of dialogue between Mc Murphy and Chief are selected to analyze how the auditory modality constructs meaning.From the perspective of the integration of Visual Grammar and Auditory Grammar,two scenes which combine visual and auditory modalities are selected to analyze how visual resources and auditory resources cooperate to construct meaning.The research finds: Firstly,on Visual Grammar,the narrative process in the representational meaning can show the ongoing events and actions for the viewers and play a role in promoting the plot and portraying the characters;the conceptual process plays a role in constructing and reflecting identity of characters.Interactive meaning reflects the relationship between characters in the filmic discourse and the emotional resonance between characters and viewers.Compositional meaning realizes the reasonable layout of the characters and scenes,and the combination with the representational meaning and interactive meaning suggests the characteristics of characters and the theme of the filmic discourse.Secondly,on Auditory Grammar,on one hand,the cooperation of the background music and environment sound plays an important role in highlighting the theme of the film;on the other hand,the social distance between characters can be reflected by the volume and the pitch of the dialogue.Thirdly,from the perspective of the integration of visual and auditory modalities,visual and auditory modalities in the filmic discourse One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest cooperate to build the overall meaning and make the scene more authentic and reflects the mood of the characters.The multimodal discourse analysis of the filmic discourse One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest not only expands the research dimension of the film,but also helps the audience understand the role of various semiotic resources in the process of meaning construction,and gives the audience a new perspective to understand the multimodal filmic discourse.