Book Review: Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean

Abstract

Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean, Routledge: London, 2012; 330 pp.: ISBN 978 0 415 88351 1 (hbk)This book is a collaboration between Karl-Heinrich Schmidt, whose background is in electronic document description and modeling, and John A Bateman, whose work includes static document description, multimodality and discourse semantics. Although at times somewhat densely packed, the book is an intelligently and lucidly written argument and presentation of a methodological and empirically grounded framework for the exploration of 'how films mean' .Bateman and Schmidt take a semiotic approach to the study of film; not one reflecting the structuralist semiotic approach to language of the 1960s but one that incorporates more recent developments that pursue a social semiotic approach to language and discourse. The theory primarily informing their work is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which offers a discourse semantic analytical perspective and a system and stratal view of language. Language in the SFL model is an open dynamic system which exhibits both change and stability due to the dialectical relation between instance and system. Bateman and Schmidt argue that this view of language is very applicable to the study of film, particularly the interpretation of strata relevant for interpreting film and the different features of those strata in relation to filmic meaning. Further, a social semiotic view enables the authors to take into account 'the relations between individual, society and ideology' (p. 39) and provides the grounds for accounting for the ways in which meaningful phenomena organize inferences at each stratum and in response to different contexts. The main focus of the book is on investigating the 'basic principles of organization' of film (p. 292), which is, essentially, a focus on the 'textual' function (known as 'textual metafunction' in SFL theory) of a semiotic system. Thus, the authors are interested in the textual logic of a film, and the way in which the textual metafunction brings together 'ideational' and 'interpersonal' meanings.An important aspect of Bateman and Schmidt's work is the interpretation of films as types of 'cinematographic documents' . Both authors' backgrounds in document theory and their interest in formalizing the basic film syntagmas developed by Christian