Cinematography techniques and their interpretative power

Francesca Proni

doi:10.4396/20220606

Francesca Proni

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4396/20220606

Keywords: cinematography techniques, iconicity, theory of depiction, multimodality, discourse coherence

Abstract

Schlenker’s proposal of “Super Semantics”, which is aimed at the extension of the application field of formal semantics to non-linguistics objects, based on the assumption that language represents one of the vast modalities of human representation, paved the way for many studies and approaches in the field of depiction. This extension is allowed by iconicity, which is a property that can be retrieved not only in language (gestures) but also in pictures. In this paper I will try to present the most relevant studies in the field of depiction, such as the ones by Abusch and Greenberg, to underline those concepts which are suitable to the development of my own proposal. In fact, with this work I am willing to investigate the mutable relation between natural language and cinema throughout some examples of cinematography techniques that may replicate the way in which verbal discourse produces meaning. More specifically I will focus on those modalities and characteristics that establish a coherent cinematographic discourse.

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