Multimodal Discourse Analysis On English Movie Posters

With the rapid development of multimedia and computer technology, multimodal discourse springing from the end of last century has gradually become one of the hot topics in the field of linguistic study. It is a comprehensive discourse which has integrated multiple communicative modes, such as sound, text and image to convey information. The present study aims to make a multimodal discourse analysis on English movie posters based on the theoretical framework of visual grammar. It adopts qualitative methodology and makes a multimodal discourse analysis on English movie posters from each independent visual perspective, namely representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning.This study has the following findings. The theory of multimodal discourse analysis has great feasibility and practicality in explaining movie poster, which, as a visual means of conveying information, plays an equal important part in visual communication and social culture as language. Movie poster is a representation of multimodality with the purpose of conveying basic information about the movie as much as possible to the audience. Most of the posters follow a certain way of expressing multimodalities. But because of different personal styles of designers and the need of artistic expression, the movie posters have different emphases on the aspects of multimodal discourse analysis. In terms of representational meaning, the represented participants in the poster of the movie which is about the complicated interpersonal relationship will be placed in the most conspicuous position, taking up the largest place; if environment also plays an important role in the movie, the designer of the movie will definitely represent it as background in the poster so as to enable the audience to observe and make some associative thinking about this environment; the focus of the posters of movies which mainly reflect the inner world of a certain character will be on his or her eyes and facial expression. In terms of interactive meaning, most of the movie posters are depicted from frontal angle and at an equal eye level, so the audience could see the faces of the represented participants clearly and make further speculation and imagination to construct interactive relationship with them; most of the movie posters have high modality, such as saturated and bright color, which would leave a deeper impression on the audience. In terms of compositional meaning, the spatial arrangement of a poster is basically in accordance with information value-the most important information in the center, the relatively true information at the bottom; segmentation lines in multi-framed posters are formed by the changing of the color to represent each frame clearly. As a kind of multimodal discourse, movie posters could not interpret the essence of the movie from an independent aspect. They need to integrate representational, interactive and compositional meaning in an organic mode. In doing so, they could represent the best effect of movie posters as "advertisement" of the movie.This study has deepened the understanding of multimodal discourse analysis theory and broadened its applicatory scope. At the same time, this study gives some help to the poster producers on how to design scientific and reasonable movie posters so as to attract the audience, and it provides a brand new angle for the audience to appreciate movie posters, which has improved the viewers’artistic appreciation ability to some extent.