The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film The Pursuit Of Happyness From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

With the rapid development of science and technology, text cannot meet people’s demand for information, so other modalities such as videos, images, music, color, motion have joined the line for people getting information. The traditional way of discourse analysis has developed into multimodal analysis. And in the region of multimodal analysis, Kress and Van Leeuwen make great contributions and they propose Visual Grammar in Reading Images, which is a first and full-scale system, providing theoretical foundation for multimodal analysis.This thesis makes a multimodal analysis on the film The Pursuit of Happyness by the way of quantitative and qualitative research and case analysis and draws the following conclusions. Firstly, the film images can be illustrated by representative meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Secondly, the film images not only have visual forms, such as images, words, but also contain auditory forms, such as sound, music, verbal language. Thirdly, there are certain relationships among modalities to express the meaning of the film images better, such as complementary relationship, non-complementary relationship. Fourthly, the film images are the synthesis of different modalities, and the meanings of the film images are expressed by the integration of different modalities, such as visual image and sound, visual image and sound and music, visual image and words, visual image and music.The research theoretically widens the range of the multimodality analysis and testifies the feasibility and possibility of Visual Grammar applied to the analysis of the film. In real life, the thesis improves the ability of people comprehending the multimodality and also provides a new perspective for people appreciating the film.