A Semiotic Analysis Of The Movie Inception Based On Grande Syntagmatique And Visual Grammar

With the development of modern technology,people’s communication ways have changed from a single language mode to multiple modes including texts,images,music and so on.For this reason,multimodal discourse analysis is born to make up the weakness of the traditional discourse analysis.Although fruitful researches in MDA have been conducted recently,related filmic studies are far from being extensive and explicit.Film discourse represents a typical multimodal discourse with various modes construing meaning together.Applying MDA to the analysis of films thus presents an interdisciplinary perspective to better appreciate a film.However,the previous studies about Inception mainly focus on its narrative technique and philosophical meaning.How different modes work together to express the meaning and present the story has not been touched upon.Besides,Inception is well-known for its complexity with a rather ingenious demonstration of people’s dream and reality.To decode the meaning of different images requires a thorough understanding of the certain contexts of those shots.This thesis has explored the transition skills between different shots while rationalizing the meaning of each segment in light of Metz’ grande syntagmatique and analyzed the representative meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of images drawing upon Kress and Van Leewen’s Visual Grammar.Results indicate that representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning play respective roles in a film’s meaning-construction mechanism with the interactive one acting as the most important part to express the theme of the film in Inception;scene,alternative syntagma and subjective insert are typical narration techniques in Inception to create tensions and support the progress of the film;the combination of grande syntagmatique and visual grammar serves as a sound theoretical framework for the analysis of the meaning-construction in a film,which facilitates the understanding of a film from the perspective of both macro level of the story development and micro level of the meta-function of images.