Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Filmic Discourse A Star Is Born From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

Modern science and technology are always being updated and improved.It has given birth to the new media era,and the development of multimedia technology has made the study of multimodal discourse more and more important.Film,as the seventh art,is a very innovative form of expression.Filmic discourse is composed of elements such as picture,sound,color and text,etc.It is a mixture of multiple modal types.It belongs to multimodal discourse and is an important research material for multimodal discourse analysis.A Star Is Born is one of the most popular movies in the world in 2018,with a global box office of more than 400 million US dollars,IMDB score of 8.0 points,MTC score of 88 points,and won 8 nominations of the 91 st Academy Awards,including Best Picture,Best Actress,Best Original Song,etc.The film uses a variety of modalities to complete the expression of audio-visual language.This thesis takes the filmic discourse of the film A Star Is Born as the research object,and is supported by visual grammar theory,analyze and discusses how the filmic discourse highlights the meaning and theme of the film,in order to help Chinese audiences better understand the collision and integration of American traditional music and new pop culture,broaden the horizons of film and television research,and provide a comprehensive perspective of interdisciplinary integration.This thesis is theoretically supported by Kress and Van Leeuwen’s framework of visual grammar.Visual grammar gives a detailed explanation of meaning’s realization in the field of multimodal discourse through three meta-functions,which are ideational function,interpersonal function,textual function.Corresponding to the three meta-functions,visual grammar proposed three new meanings,which are representational meaning,interactive meaning,compositional meaning.According to visual grammar,two different representations of representational meaning,namely narrative representation and conceptual representation,fulfill the ideational function.While four elements of interactive meaning,which are contact,social distance,attitude,and modality,play great tribute to interpersonal function.And three factors of compositional meaning,namely information value,salience and framing achieve the textual function.This thesis adopts qualitative research method.Taking the filmic discourse of A Star Is Born as the research material,36 representative shots were selected for case analysis and extended to the representational,interactive and compositional meanings of each shot.This thesis mainly focuses on the following concerns:1)In the filmic discourse of A Star Is Born,how are the film’s representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning expressed?2)What types of modalities are employed in the film,and how do these modalities interact to create a holistic meaning?Through the analysis of the filmic discourse of A Star Is Born,this thesis draws the following conclusions: the representational meaning of the film is mainly achieved through narrative representation and conceptual representation,revealing the relationship between different characters in the film and constituting the core of the film’s scene scheduling.Interactive meaning is mainly accomplished through contact,social distance,attitude,and modality,reflecting the complex and subtle relationship between film characters and audiences.Compositional meaning is primarily achieved through information value,salience,and framing,to highlight the meaning and themes of the film by the representative and interactive elements in each shot integrated with each other.Through the three meanings of the visual theory,combined with the comprehensive discussion of the various shots of the film,it is found that there is a complementary relationship between the different types of modalities in the film.Complementary relationship consists of strengthening relationship and non-strengthening relationships.Interaction of these two distinctive types between the various modalities complete the meaning construction and themes of the film.This thesis completes the case analysis of filmic discourse from the perspective of linguistics,proves that the multimodal discourse analysis theory is applicable to filmic discourse,and further expands the scope of application of the theory.In addition,the cross analysis of linguistics and film studies provides a dual perspective for the study of film,and provides more possibilities for the multimodal analysis of filmic discourse in the future.