A Multimodal Stylistic Analysis of the English Poster: Dune

Abstract

Movie poster is an integration of multimodal meaning containing verbal mode, image, font, layout and color. Compared with monomodal text, the interaction between multiple modes can more efficiently convey the information of a film to the audience, attracting the audience’s attention. In the paper, the English poster of the film Dune is selected as the object of study. Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Kress and Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG), as well as with reference to the multimodal stylistic analysis path of Lei Qian and Zhang Delu, this paper explores foregrounding features’ significance of multiple modes in a poster and their intermodal relationships for the overall construction of multimodal text. The results show that there is a synergistic relationship between different modes, and that the foregrounding features of font, layout, image and color contribute to the poster’s meaning construction.