Trabajar con la aplicación “Pesada dinámica”

The analysis of the characters’ sequences of SA and their illocutionary forces, which explicates their intentions, and the perlocutionary effects, as their emotional reactions, demonstrate that the mother and daughter are more strongly associated with a kind of expressivity in terms of the illocutionary forces of the SAs on which they draw. The expressivity of their SA sequences is classified into three categories of illocutionary forces, proposed by Harnish and Bach (1979): expressive, constative, and directive. The frequency of each illocution is summarized in Table 6.4.

Table 6-4. Classification of characters' illocutions in the piano duologue scene

As Table 6.4 shows, Eva exhibits more instances of directives (question and requestive) than Charlotte (7 vs. 1). Directives, as Harnish and Bach (1979) point out, express the speaker’s attitude toward some prospective action by the hearer and the

Category of illocutions Eva Charlotte

Expressive 0 2

Directives 7 1

intention that their utterance, or the attitude it expresses, be taken as a reason for the hearer’s action. As the analysis of their illocutions demonstrates, Eva frequently draws on directive, especially when she insistently asks Charlotte’s opinion concerning the way she plays. Drawing on directives, and specifically question and requestive, contributes to representing Eva as more other-oriented and under-confident: she desires to be valued and recognized by her mother. Such characteristics, when accompanied by the film’s multimodal aspects, particularly her paralinguistic aspects, such as her voice, and outfit (discussed in 6.2) communicate a sense of hesitation and insecurity. Furthermore, Eva displays more instances of expressing her emotions, particularly her resentment (ES 10, 12, 14), in comparison to her mother, who seems reticent in showing her emotions. Eva’s expression of affect is also disclosed by her facial expression, which makes her more emotionally involved than Charlotte in this sequence. Indeed, her varying facial expressions when Charlotte is playing the piece verifies this claim.

On the other hand, Charlotte exhibits more instances of constatives (assertive, descriptive, informative and suggestive) than Eva (14 vs. 6). According to Harnish and Bach (1979), constatives express a speaker’s belief, intention and desire that the hearer have (or form) a like belief. In fact, Charlotte’s types of constative SAs are consistent with her social role as a prominent pianist; she displays teacher-like behavior, even though she may not have any intention to do so (e.g. her assertive and teacher-like tone when she directs Eva how to play the piece, or when she folds down the music stand before she starts playing). By using constatives, Charlotte also appears more confident and assured. Her confidence and power are also enhanced by her self-assured facial expressions, her confident performance and her bold red outfit. Although at certain points, she expresses her emotions, she instantly pulls herself together and returns to her usual assertive disposition.

6.8 Summary

By analyzing the opening sequence and also two different parts of the same sequence in the middle of Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978), this chapter showed how SAs, performed by various modalities, contribute to create and develop the main characters (Eva and Charlotte). The SA analysis in this chapter included the narrator level, as the film involves a VI or character-narrator, who provides viewers with their initial impression of the main character (Eva).

The multimodal analysis of the three excerpts of this film shows how the characters are created by means of dynamic interaction between their pragmalinguistic behaviours (SAs), paralinguistic acts (gestures and facial expressions) and the cinematic techniques (mise-en-scène, camera work, costume, and music) in a situated context. It was also argued that SAS contribute to viewer’s understanding non-prototypical SAs, such as those carried out non-linguistically, and via music. The analysis also discussed that characters are constructed as the result of their tendency to draw on specific illocutionary forces: Charlotte’s ego-centric, self-absorbed characteristics and Eva’s other-oriented, under-confident and impulsive behaviours are consistent with the types of SAs and the illocutionary forces the characters draw on.

7. Analysis (3): Ten (2002)

7.1 Introduction

Chapter 2 discussed the cognitive processes involved in film comprehension and Specifically character construal, the process through which viewers plausibly comprehend a film and form impressions about the characters by drawing on their prior knowledge stored as different types of schemas. Drawing loosely on theories and approaches from social cognition (Lingle et al., 1984; Hamilton and Sherman, 1994; Fiske and Neuberg, 1990), constructivist film theories (Bordwell, 1985) and linguistics, particularly SAT (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), a cognitive model for comprehension of film character was proposed in which the comprehension of cinematic character involves three planes: social schema (social categories and stereotypes), film schema (the knowledge of film style, narrative and genre), and pragmalinguistic schema (the knowledge of language and language in context, among which the research’s focus is on SA with a schematic approach). This aforementioned cognitive model was applied to two art films, The Piano Teacher (2001) (Chapter 5) and The Autumn Sonata (1978) (Chapter 6), whose narrative, characterization and cinematic style deviate from the conventions of mainstream cinema. As the third and final analysis of the current project, this chapter applies the proposed cognitive model to Ten (2002), an art film by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

Kiarostami’s cinema has developed an auteur-inspired style drawn from neorealist stylistic and thematic practices (such as using non-professional actors, deploying out-of-studio locations, dealing with everyday life issues and so on) which results in the recognizable and distinctive aesthetic structure of his films. Although Kiarostami is loyal to the conventions of the neorealist tradition, he deviates from it and tries to customize neorealist heritage to create a specifically novel narrative and experiments with the documentary/fiction hybrid (the aesthetic, formal and stylistic aspects of Kiarostami’s work are further discussed in detail in Appendix 5).

A typical characteristic of an art film is that its narratives tend to favour novel – or less conventional – structures which viewers often have trouble identifying. Such narratives seem to cross the usual storytelling modes of mainstream Hollywood film whose fundamental narratives feature linear (narrative) trajectories and causality (see

Appendix 1). As pointed out in 4.2.3, Ten is an exercise in serial narrative revolving around 10 episodes in a serial fashion. The film involves the main narrative (the story of Mania and Amin as the two protagonists) which is illustrated in a series of four car trips. The reason for considering the episodes featuring Mania and her son as the narrative is that they constitute a complicating event as the essential and qualifying condition of a narrative (see also 2.7.1). Temporally, the episodes which show Amin and Mania take up the bulk of the films’ running time (4 episodes out of 10). Mania and Amin’s episodes wander off in an unexpected, random direction and link all the other episodes which are ill-formed in terms of narrative structure as none of them involves a complicating action. The other episodes are bound together by the permanent presence of Mania, which obliges viewers to consider different episodes as a whole and as ‘the story of Mania’.

In terms of narrative comprehension, Ten is challenging because viewers are presented with the difficulty of constructing a coherent story from the disjointed episodes as they watch the film. Ten’s episodic structure in which the narrative is rendered in 10 separate segments demands that viewers are more active, as, according to King (2005:97):

[the audience needs to] backtrack, to revisit material, to identify repetitions and points of difference, to establish a very different dynamic, a structure akin to a spiral in which the ramifications of nuances are explored rather than a linear narrative that offers a single movement towards resolution.

The film’s mode of narrative does not allow viewers to form a mental representation of the states of affairs portrayed based on their prototypical narrative schema. In other words, the film’s episodic structure prevents viewers from intuitively filling the slots of their narrative schema.1 _{Ten’s episodic narrative structure affects the}

1 _{There are other examples of art films whose narratives are rendered in episodic fashion. Michael}

Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000), for instance, with its fragmented structure, composed of cross-sectional events which establish different self-enclosed but interwoven sub-narratives. The sub-narratives are framed at the beginning and the end of the film with a pair of matched scenes in which the deaf children mime words to each other, foregrounding the theme of (mis)communication and alienation. The stories of four characters, to whom we are introduced in the first scene, overlap and run parallel over the course of the film; however, they are not arranged in any fixed pattern or order which allows the spectator to arrive at a definite interpretation. Angela Schalenec’s Orly (2004) is another example of a film which features an episodic narrative. The story revolves around three different sub-narratives, all taking place at the same time in Orly airport, Paris. In the first narrative, Juliette, frustrated by her own absent-mindedness, starts a conversation with Vincent, both are French living abroad and one has decided to return. In the second narrative, a mother and son wait to board a flight to go to her ex-husband’s (his father) funeral. In

way that characters are presented and hence, influences viewers’ character impression formation. In fact, the structure of the narrative in the context of character presentation and development can affect the way viewers understand them, as in an episodic structure, characters’ (social and personal) attributes are revealed and evolve at different stages (episodes) of the narrative. The viewer needs to track the main characters in four irregular episodes interrupted by another six episodes in order to form an overall impression of them.

Having outlined the introductory notes, the structure of this chapter is as follows: section 7.2 deals with the general visual aspects of the film, particularly its use of digital video (DV) as the most important cinematic and stylistic aspect which allows an autonomy in narrating and character creation which is not motivated by the director’s decisions.

Section 7.3 describes the narrative structure of Ten and argues how the episodes featuring Mania and Amin develop a narrative in terms of the essential components of narrative schema. It also discusses the plausible cognitive process through which viewers assemble different parts of the narrative together and comprehend the episodic narrative involving Mania and Amin in terms of Branigan’s (1992) narrative schema.

Section 7.4 discusses the levels of SA in three categories: the audiovisual inviting act of the director (7.4.1), the cameras’ indirect act of describing and narrating, which explains how the camera works implicitly and explicitly create the characters by showing them directly and by depicting the context/setting in which they appear indirectly (7.4.2) and the characters’ SAs (7.4.3). Section 7.5 deals with the first impressions that viewers make in terms of the initial SA exchanges between mother and son in the opening scenes. Section 7.6analyzes two parts of episode 10 in order to show how Mania and Amin’s dominant SAs with various illocutionary forces characterize them in the course of their duologues. Section 7.7 discusses the structure of Mania and Amin’s conversation. Here, particular aspects of Mania and Amin’s conversational structure based on the suggested checklist for character creation (see 2.3.1) which considers aspects such as turn distribution, disruptions and topic control as implicit cues

the third narrative, a young couple on holiday surreptitiously snap each other’s photos. In both Code unknown and Orly, the stories or episodes of different characters or couples run in parallel. However, the striking difference between the episodic structure of Ten with other episodic-narrative films mentioned with is that in Ten, the episodes constitute micro-narratives evolving around one main character (Mania). Although each episode can be considered almost self-sufficient and separate from the others, they are thematically related as they are connected through Mania’s presence.

of characterization are further discussed to demonstrate how the impression which has formed about characters based on their use of SAs is further enhanced and verified by aspects of their conversational contributions such as turn taking, interruptions and topic control as implicit/indirect character cues. As discussed in 4.2.3, the rationale is that Mania and Amin’s power struggle and their attempt to grab the power from each other is also disclosed in the structure of their conversation. The linguistic exchanges between the main characters in The Piano Teacher and Autumn Sonata do not show such a power struggle revealed in conversational aspects such as topic change and systematic disruptions. However, in Ten, as will be discussed in detail, such conversational aspects are of high importance as they reveal a critical power struggle which is rather marked with respect to the character’s differing social roles.

Section 7.9 explains how viewer’s impression of characters is plausibly formed in terms of the continuum of the impression formation model (2.6.1) and based on the SA and conversation structure analysis. Finally, the most notable points of analysis in are revisited and summarized in 7.9.