This study explores two stylistic features in the films of contemporary Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-Wai: colour and sound. In particular, it focuses on how transitions in colour palettes (e.g. from a natural colour spectrum to a monochromatic effect of black-and-white) and specific sound resources (such as silence) function as important semiotic resources in the films, even when they appear to create a disjunctive effect. The study draws on two perspectives on communication to explore film. The first is the metafunctional hypothesis of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, which theorises that the communicative dimensions of texts can be explored from three simultaneous ???macro-functions???: the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. The second is multimodal communication, which stresses that multiple semiotic resources are used for meaning-making purposes and that meanings created multimodally are multiplicative in essence. From this theoretical basis the study aims to illuminate two inter-related objectives. First, that the meaning potentials of colour transition and sound are construed and enabled by the co-ordinations of meanings across different co-present semiotic resources ??? known as intersemiosis in the study. Second, that the semiotic capacities of the two resources can be usefully explored from a functional perspective. Drawing especially the notions of intersemiosis and resemiotisation the study shows that colour transition and sound are multivalent resources in Wong???s films. In other words, their meaning potentials are metafunctionally complex and are never static. The thesis argues that colour transition and sound should not be seen as having ???a??? meaning, but rather, that it is the semiotic complexities among the co-patterned resources that shape the meaning-making potential of the resources, and in turn, help contribute meaning potentials to the films.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258795 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Pun, Betty Oi-Kei, School of Modern Language Studies, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Modern Language Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Betty Oi-Kei Pun, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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