How do we understand films? How do we construct meanings out of the interplay of the various modalities in filmic text? These questions are still up to date in contemporary film theory and multimodal discourse analysis. The talk wants to give a general overview of how these questions are focused and answered with the help of advancements in text linguistics and discourse semantics. It will show general parallels between verbal and filmic discourse and introduce recently developed tools for filmic discourse interpretation. With the help of some filmic examples, it will furthermore give illustrations of concrete film analysis at work.

1. Film Discourse Interpretation
Janina Wildfeuer
Bremen Institute for Transmedial Textuality Research
Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Science
Bremen University

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What is it about?
How do we understand films?
How do we construct meanings out of
the interplay of the various
modalities in filmic text?

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„Understanding film…“
• analysis of the semantic content
• analysis of the dynamic unfolding
text/discourse
• analysis of information processing

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Filmic Meaning Construction
"Understanding is mediated by transformative acts, both
"bottom-up" – mandatory, automatic psychological processes -
and "top-down" – conceptual, strategic ones. The sensory data of
the film at hand furnish the materials out of which inferential
processes of perception and cognition build meanings.
Meaning are not found but made. […]
Comprehension and interpretation thus involve the
construction of meaning out of textual cues. In this respect,
meaning-making is a psychological and social activity
fundamentally akin to other cognitive processes.”
(Bordwell 1989: 3)

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Inferential View on Text/Discourse
How do we understand what is going on in
sentences and texts?
– We just work out ‘what is going on’...
(traditional pragmatics)
– We ask for clear textual cues that provide
explicit guidance about how interpretation is to
proceed.

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Discourse Mechanisms for Language

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Linguistic Examples of Discourse Relations
Paul arrived. Max greeted him.
– If we add b into a discourse interpretation then
we might deduce that b adds to a narrative
– If Narration (a, b) then a happens before b
temporal sequence:
Narration
event a event b

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Linguistic Examples of Discourse Relations
Max fell. Paul pushed him.
- If we are adding b into a discourse interpretation
and b causes a then we might deduce that b is an
explanation of a
causal relation:
Explanationevent a event b

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What kind of structure is text structure?
• discursive, not syntactic
• defeasible/ abductive (Peirce)
/ non-monotonic
Formal and functional models
of discourse semantics
Kamp, Asher & Lascarides, Martin, Polanyi, Webber

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Theory of Film Comprehension
THEORIE DES FILMVERSTEHENSLOGIC OF FILM DISCOURSE INTERPRETATION
1. level of identification and arrangement of the
meaning-making entities
2. level of coherence and structure
1. logic
2. logic
constructing logical forms of discourse
relating the logical forms via discourse
relations
Wildfeuer 2013

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2 Steps of Film Discourse Interpretation
1. ask for the multimodal construction of
narrative events in the film: intersemiosis
of the various resources
2. ask for the combination of these events
into a coherent structure via inferring
discourse relations

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Film Discourse Interpretation
1. step:
Interpreting Narrative Events
of the Filmic Discourse
level of identification and arrangement of the
meaning-making entities

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1. Step: Interpreting Narrative Events

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1. Step: Interpreting Narrative Events

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Film Discourse Interpretation
2. step:
Inferring Discourse Relations
between the Events
level of coherence and structure

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Logic of Film Discourse Interpretation
(Wildfeuer 2013)

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Discourse Relations in Film
temporal sequence

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Discourse Relations in Film
causality

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2 Steps of Film Discourse Interpretation
1. ask for the multimodal construction of
narrative events in the film: intersemiosis
of the various resources
2. ask for the combination of these events
into a coherent structure via inferring
discourse relations
1
2

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What for…?
• work out how filmic material constructs meaning
• work out clear textual cues within the artefact
= semantic basis
further interpretations

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What for…?
• work out how filmic material constructs meaning
• work out clear textual cues within the artefact
= semantic basis
interpretations

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Example: El Vendedor de Humo
(Maestro, 2012)
available online: http://vimeo.com/42329392

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El Vendedor de Humo

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El Vendedor de Humo

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El Vendedor de Humo

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El Vendedor de Humo

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Causality in Film

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What for…?
• analysis of the
propositional/semantic content
• analysis of topics in the text
• evaluation of topics
• questions of genre, style, aesthetics
etc.?
analysis
interpretation

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What for…?
Website German Film Academy, „Classic Movies in School“ |
http://www.deutsche-filmakademie.de/no_cache/herzlich-
willkommen/aktuelles/meldung.html?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=279&cHash=
0594f5ed6d2c84f69fc632cbcb682811 |
„Watching classical movies – understanding film“

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Thank you very much for your attention!
wildfeuer@uni-bremen.de || www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/bitt || http://extra.neous.de