Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film Avatar

As the science and technology advance quickly and the Internet and multimedia are extensively in use, multimodality has become an integrate part of daily life in the world dominated by visual culture. The mono-modal text is not the only way of communication, and there are many other multimodal texts such as sound, music, dynamic and static visual images, electronic media, color etc. Multimodal discourse refers to those discourses that generate the integrative meaning through the interaction of two or more semiotic modes of communication, for example, the multimodal texts mentioned above. As one of the critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) is explored and innovated by many researchers based on the systemic-functional grammar and social semiotics. Among these researchers, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996,2006) are the most representatives. They set up VG (visual grammar), which is derived from the systemic-functional grammar by Halliday, and put forward the first systematic and comprehensive framework for analyzing the multimodal discourse.Based on the VG by Kress&Leeuwen (1996,2006), this thesis has made a MDA of some shots selected from the movie Avatar with the help of the proposed framework of MDA of movie text. The mainly research method is the qualitative study to present the interaction of multimodal text from three aspects, namely, the representational meaning, the interactive meaning and the compositional meaning.The research reaches its expectation. Through the case study of the film Avatar, it is found that the visual grammar can be well applied in the filmic discourse. Not only does the research expand the fields of multimodal discourse analysis, deepen people’s comprehension on it, but also provides the audience with a new perspective of appreciating the film by reflecting the role of modalities other than language in disclosing the theme of the film and ultimately elevates their appreciation level on this film.