Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Poster of the Movie Octagonal

Abstract

With the development of multimedia and the Internet, meanings are expressed in diverse forms. A movie poster is a multimodal discourse that integrates text, image, color, composition, and other elements, which not only gives the audience visual aesthetic enjoyment but also conveys the theme of the movie in a highly concise and effective way. Based on the theory of Visual Grammar, this study taking the poster of the recent popular movie Octagonal as the research object, conducted a multimodal discourse analysis on the poster in a qualitative way. It studied the expression of the meaning of the poster from three dimensions, namely representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning, and explored the role of the design of the poster in conveying the theme of the movie.