Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean

by John Bateman, Karl-Heinrich Schmidt

Overview

This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced ‘layout structure’—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films.

With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415754439
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/09/2014
Series:	Routledge Studies in Multimodality
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Bateman is professor of Applied Linguistics in the English and Linguistics Departments of the University of Bremen, specializing in functional, computational and multimodal linguistics.

Karl-Heinrich Schmidt is professor of Electronic Media at the Bergische University of Wuppertal.

Table of Contents

Selected Contents: 1. Analyzing film 2. Semiotics and documents 3. Constructing the semiotic mode of film 4. Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track 5. Foundations for analysis: filmic units 6. The paradigmatic organization of film 7. The syntagmatic organization of film 8. Combining syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis: a detailed example 9. Conclusions and outlook

Editorial Reviews

"By developing a framework for multimodal film analysis, Bateman and Schmidt bridge the gap between accounts that analyse film shot by shot and those accounts who primarily focus on larger units such as scenes. One of the fundamental advances of their socio-semiotic model is that it includes details on lower levels of abstraction as well as highly abstract concepts like filmic genre… As far as I am aware, the concept they develop is unmatched in contemporary film theory and shows how fundamental semiotic concepts still are."—Thomas Metten in Multimodal Communication

From the Publisher