A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Filmic Discourse

Multimodality is a technical method to analyze meaning potential of differentsemiotics in communication. With its occurrence, the theory of multimodal discourseanalysis comes into being and is further improved. Multimodal discourse analysis isthe analysis of several or all of the different semiotic modes in a text orcommunicative event. The goal of multimodal discourse analysis is to integrate andcorrelate the representational, the interactive and the compositional meaningspresented by those different semiotic modes. Previous studies mainly focus ontheoretical researches and static texts at home and abroad. All of those studiesdemonstrate that the research of multimodal discourse analysis still needs to furthercomplete and improve by enlarging other study fields, for instance, dynamic texts.Therefore, this thesis selects the filmic discourse Les Misérables (2012) as the objectof study to explore its meaning potential and multimodal characteristics. The filmicdiscourse belongs to the field of dynamic texts as its visual semiosis is presented in adigitalized video format.Stemming from Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, the thesis firstlyformulates representational, interactive and compositional framework of the system.Next, the thesis explores the filmic discourse Les Misérables’ meaning potential andmultimodal characteristics with randomly sampled images based on the threeframeworks of representation, interaction and composition. The thesis furthergeneralizes multimodal characteristics of films as a genre based on Les Misérables’multimodal characteristics.According to the study of the filmic discourse Les Misérables, the thesis testifiesthat representational, interactive and compositional framework of the system can beused to analyze films as a genre or other texts. Moreover, this thesis finds out thefilm Les Misérables’ multimodal characteristics in representative, interactive andcompositional meanings. In addition, the thesis generalizes multimodal characteristics at a higher level---films as a genre on the basis of an analysis of thefilm Les Misérables’ multimodal characteristics. Those multimodal characteristics offilms as a genre are useful to analyze filmic discourse, and can aid viewers tounderstand films’ meaning potential.