A Multimodal Analysis Of The Filmic Discourse Farewell My Concubine

In recent years, people are entering into a new age as the rapid development of science and multi-media. Language is not the only channel to convey meaning, thus the traditional discourse analysis which mainly concentrates on the study of language can not meet the new demands of modern communication, in which various semiotic modes are applied to achieve the whole meaning. For this reason, the multimodal discourse analysis is thriving and becoming an influential trend in the linguistic field.Taking Systemic Functional Grammar as its foundation, Kress&Van Leeuwen firstly proposed a systematic and comprehensive approach---Visual Grammar in their book Reading Images-Visual Grammar to promote multimodal discourse analysis. They discussed the meaning construction of images from three aspects, namely, the representation meaning, interactive meaning and the compositional meaning. Aural Grammar put forward by Van Leeuwen studied the function of sound from the audio perspective. Based on the two theories, the thesis will come up with two frameworks for the filmic discourse Farewell My Concubine. Adopting qualitative method and the quantitative method, the research selects some typical shots to do multimodal discourse analysis. Under the guidance of Zhang Delu’s theory, the relation among different modalities is also touched upon. By reinforcing or non-reinforcing, they interact with each other to realize the whole meaning of the film and achieve success.The research attains its perspective objective, achieves some conclusions and inspirations. Firstly, it testifies the strong applicability of the Visual Grammar on analyzing filmic discourse. Secondly, the Aural Grammar breaks through the previous study which only focused on image. Thirdly, the analysis on various elements facilitates the deep understanding of audience to multimodal discourse. Fourthly, it not only broadens the research field of multimodal discourse analysis, but also provides a fresh perspective for the audience to appreciate this film or others.