Analysing political discourse in film language: A multimodal approach

Audiovisual products, due to their intrinsic multisemiotic nature in which each mode contributes to the construction of meaning, have widely proven to be ideal material both for research purposes and for teaching. This is especially the case of films which, despite their fictional character, have often been used in the context of language learning (see among the most recent works, Kaiser, Shibahara 2014; Bruti 2015) because they are actually considered as “an authentic source material (that is, created for native speakers and not learners of the language)” (Kaiser 2011: 233). Particularly interesting is the case of political drama films, as they represent a good opportunity to analyse a quite faithful representation of political discourse, which is strongly characterised by bodily behaviour (Poggi, Pelachaud 2008). More specifically, gestures, gaze, facial expression, pauses, and intonation all convey meanings and have a persuasive import in communication (Poggi, Vincze 2008). The present paper intends to explore the ways in which non-verbal elements co-occur with certain rhetorical strategies often employed in political discourse, such as parallelism, metaphor, and simile. (Beard 2000; Partington, Taylor 2010). For this purpose, some extracts from political drama films such as The Ides of March (2011, George Clooney) and The Iron Lady (2011, Phyllida Lloyd) will be analysed. Due to the paramount importance of both audio and visual elements, a multimodal approach will be adopted (Jewitt 2009). More specifically, the first step in the analysis consists of the selection and creation of video clips where relevant communication exchanges are present. These will then be investigated with the multimodal annotation software ELAN (Wittenburg et al. 2006) to determine how various semiotic resources work together to construct meaning in political discourse. Particular attention will be paid to the interplay of verbal and non-verbal signals (e.g. gaze direction, hand/arm gestures, body positioning, etc.) in order to provide useful tools for research and teaching in ESP contexts.