Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film The Shape Of Water

With the rapid development of science and technology and the widespread use of the Internet,people have entered the multimedia era,and the transmission of information is no longer limited to the text mode.Traditional discourse analysis methods that take text as the research object ignore the expression of non-text symbols.Multimodal discourse analysis emerges at the right moment and gradually becomes a hot topic of discussion among linguists.It is quite clear that the meaning of a discourse is not entirely determined by the language itself.Instead,it should also be reflected through various non-language modalities,such as gestures,colors,expressions,and things known to both speakers and listeners,so as to jointly express the meaning.Based on Halliday’s systematic functional grammar,Reading Images:the Grammar of Visual Design,co-authored by Kress and Van Leeuwen,puts forward a comprehensive and systematic analysis method of multimodal discourse—visual grammar for the first time.Visual grammar mainly studies how conceptual functions,interpersonal functions,and textual functions of language are realized in multimodal discourse.The conceptual function is mainly realized by the narrative process and conceptual process of the representational meaning;the interpersonal function is realized by the social distance,contact,attitude,and modality that represent the interactive meaning;the textual function is realized by the information value,salience and framing of the compositional meaning.Van Leeuwen’s auditory grammar studies the role of various human voices,music,or natural sounds in the communication process.It principally consists of three parts: perspective and social distance,melody,and sound quality.Therefore,the focus of discourse has been shifted from the description of internal linguistic features to the development of external elements.Film is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse and an important material for multimodal analysis.The film The Shape of Water,which sweeps through the major awards,integrates a variety of modalities and brings a perfect audiovisual feast to the audience.This thesis selects the film The Shape of Water as the research material,basedon the qualitative analysis method,and intercepts a large number of shots and sound segments from the video resources to analyze the visual and auditory modalities and explore how they are implemented in the film.Finally,the relationships between visual modality and auditory modality are briefly analyzed.Through detailed analysis,the research achieves the intended purposes and reaches the following conclusions.Firstly,in terms of visual modality,the narrative process in the representational meaning mainly plays a role in promoting the development of the plot,and the conceptual process not only reveals the close connection between Elisa and the water or the sea,but also shows the personality characteristics of the characters in the film.For example,Elisa dares to get rid of racial confinement and boldly pursues true love and Richard tends to show his authority and status.Interactive meaning triggers an emotional resonance between the participants in the image and the audience.By speaking for the disadvantaged group,the film expresses to the audience that romantic and warm love can transcend all.Compositional meaning proves that the placement of any person or thing in the image,together with the adjustment of the lens,shooting methods,and the changes of colors,are of particular significance and all point to the ending that the protagonists dare to pursue the innocent love against the background of the Cold War.Secondly,in terms of auditory modality,filmmakers generally reflect the public distance,social distance,personal distance or intimate distance between characters through the loudness of sound.Pitch changes can mobilize the audience’s hearing,as well as indicate the character’s emotional changes,including sad and suppressed or excited and exaggerated.The sound quality shows the voice characteristics of the film characters,whether they are high or low,loud or soft,breathy or nasal,rough or smooth,tense or lax,thus highlighting the good and warm personality of the decent,and the villain’s overbearing character.Thirdly,in terms of the comprehensive analysis of visual modality and auditory modality,they appear in a relationship of reinforcement or non-reinforcement,that is,one modality complements and supports the other modality or the indispensable relationship between the two in order to achieve the effect of audio-visual integration,thus the collective construction of the meaning of the film is completed.In short,this thesis aims to affirm its effectiveness in presenting the theme of the film through multimodal discourse analysis,and to accuse the power of losing humanity and achieving the purpose by any means.This film shows that all marginalized people can fight against the dark and cruel world with love by uniting together.