A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Movie Posters-a Multimodal Discourse Analysis Perspective

As a popular and fashionable art, movies are warmly welcomed. Movie posters, as a way ofadvertisement, are the main method of publicizing movies and achieving mutualcommunication with the audience. At the same time, movie posters, which consist of text,painting, photography and other forms of visual art, can precisely convey the movie’s innerconnotations and artistic pursuits. Besides, being the product of social cultures and time, indifferent countries and cultural backgrounds, movie posters are characterized by various forms.Multimodal Discourse refers to the compound discourse that contains image, chart and soon besides text. In Multimodal Discourse Analysis, language plays an important role inproducing meanings with other social semiotics, such as image, color, sound and layout. Amongthe three theories in Multimodal Discourse Analysis, visual grammar put forward by Kress andVan Leeuwen, ranks as the most important in constructing the framework of the analysis ofimages.Combing quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis together, this research choosesChinese and American movie posters as research objects, whose number are respectively100.Integrating systemic-functional linguistics, this study takes visual grammar as the theoreticalframework and makes a comparative study about Chinese and American movie posters from theperspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The main questions addressed in this thesis arelisted as follows: What is the situation of multimodality, to be more specific, the status of visualgrammar, in Chinese and American movie posters? How do Chinese and American movieposter designers make use of the visual grammar, respectively the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning, in the process of designing movie posters soas to achieve the mutual communication with the audience? What are the differences andsimilarities between Chinese and American movie posters based on respectivelyrepresentational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning? What are the causesbehind the appearance of the differences in mutual communication?The aim of this thesis is to analyze the differences between Chinese and American movieposters in achieving representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning through the use of semiotic resources such as image and text. For the reason that this thesis isbased on cultural analysis of two countries, so during the process, it shows the differences incultural backgrounds and ideologies. As the main method of advertisement, movie posters aimat passing information to the audience so as to achieve mutual communication. So the practicalaim is to gain implications for a better mutual communication with the audience.After the comparative study, the major results are listed as follows: In the first place, inanalyzing movie posters by the use of representational meaning, for a better mutualcommunication with the audience, both Chinese and American movie posters prefer to creatediagonal or vector to stand out the major theme. In the second place, demand images are foundoccupy a large amount in Chinese movie posters and in this way, the social relationship is setup. While, the intimate relationship is established by using more offer images. In the third place,the Chinese movie posters are inclined to make color contrast to attract viewers’ attention andleave them a deep impression in compositional meaning.