The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film In The Mood For Love

With the rapid development of science and technology, people are exposed to an information era, flourishing with multiple modes of message rather than language alone. Multimodalities such as video, image, color and music, can be of great importance to convey message like language. In recent years, many scholars both at home and abroad have been engaged in this field and gained abundant achievement. Based on Functional Grammar of Halliday, Kress and Van Leeuwen set up the first and comprehensive multimodal discourse analysis framework in their book Reading Images:the Grammar of Visual Design, in which they discussed the realization of three meta-function meanings in static images. Film is a combination of images, sound, color and language, thus the thesis tries to apply multimodal discourse analysis to film study.The thesis adopts both qualitative approach and quantitative method, in which the former is the dominant one. Firstly, the thesis makes a review of both film study and multimodal discourse analysis. Secondly, the author tries to propose a framework based on the Visual Grammar to analyze the film In the Mood For Love. Thirdly, the thesis analyzes the multimodalities in the film and their relationships. Then with the guidance of the proposed framework, the thesis conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of many static shots to figure out the realization of representational, interactive and compositional meanings respectively. Finally, the thesis makes a synthetic analysis of one group of dynamic and continuous shots to figure out the overall meaning constructed by three meta-function meanings together.With the foundation of Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, the thesis takes the film In the Mood For Love as the database, not only testifies the applicability and feasibility of the theory, but also expands the scope of the multimodal discourse analysis, and provides a new perspective for the viewers to appreciate the film as well.