A Study On The Film "Life Of Pi" From A Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the advent of multimedia era, the science and technology developed so fast, and the single language symbol is incapable of expressing a single complete thought. At this time, the appearance of multimodality happens to remedy the defect, and it increasingly becomes the indispensable part in our daily life. Information is delivered by the combination of video, picture, text instead of the single text alone. Then in 1990 s, mutimodality analysis is becoming a hot trend in western academia.Multimodal discourse refers to the communication with two or more than two symbolic resources, that’s to say, the discourses meaning is generated its integrative meaning by the integration of various semiotic modes together, such as language, picture, sound, action and so on. Since the rise in multimodal discourse analysis, it becomes popular among the researchers both at home and abroad. Especially when Kress and Leeuwen put forward the visual grammar in the book Reading Images, which is fit for image analysis and lays the foundation as the theoretical framework of image analysis. Based on Halliday’s functional grammar, Kress and Leeuwen put forward three ways to express the meaning of the image: representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. The three meanings can conduct a comprehensive analysis of the image to help viewers have a better understanding of the film information.Life of Pi is a popular novel by Yann Martel and the director Lee adapts it into an adventures films. It has aroused great concern among people since it released. And it got four prizes of Oscar in 2013: “the best director, the best cinematography, the best visual effects and the best original score”. This film not only wins acclaim around the world, but also arouses the attention of the amount scholars in academia. Many scholars conduct the research from the perspective of the theme, subtitle translation, textual cohesion, the artistic about the film. But few scholars pay attention to multimodal discourse analysis to make a study.This thesis, based on Kress and Leeuwen’s visual grammar as the theoretical framework, selects some shots in Life of Pi to make an analysis from a perspective of representative, interactive and compositional meanings. It deals with how the different semiotic systems construct meta-functional meanings in the film Life of Pi. What’s the relationship of different modality forms and what’s the character of the film discourse from a multimodal perspective? This research not only expands the theoretical use of multimodal discourse analysis, but also offers a new visual angle for appreciating the film, and helps enhance the deeper understanding of the film.