The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond Let Cinema Speak

by Piazza, Roberta

• ISBN13: 9781441136978
• ISBN10: 1441136975
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-17
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Linguistic investigation of the dialogue of Italian cinema, using concepts and methodologies from pragmatics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis.

Author Biography

Roberta Piazza is a Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Sussex, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. x
Background and introduction	p. 1
Background and aims of the study	p. 1
Relevance of dialogue in the context of a film	p. 7
The organization of the study and core notions	p. 15
Organization of the study	p. 20
'If you could say it with words, there'd be no reason to paint'. The verbal-visual interrelation in cinema	p. 27
Introduction	p. 27
Methodology for the investigation of the verbal-visual interaction	p. 28
The categories of anticipation, post-hoc commentary and conflictuality	p. 34
A final reflection on the verbal-visual relationship	p. 43
Methodology of the study: the focus on the representation of conflict in film	p. 45
Introduction. General aims of the study	p. 45
The verbal dimension. Conflict as the lens for the analysis of film dialogue	p. 47
The visual dimension	p. 52
The data	p. 56
The methodological framework for the study of conflict in film	p. 58
Conclusion	p. 63
Confrontational discourse in comedy and the disengagement of dramatic talk	p. 65
Introduction	p. 65
The tool kit for the analysis of conflict in comedy and melodrama	p. 66
Questions of film genre and the definition of the corpus	p. 67
The analysis of film dialogue. Verbal confrontation in Italian comedy	p. 69
The analysis of conflict talk in melodrama	p. 85
Discussion of the results and concluding remarks	p. 98
Spaghetti and American Westerns: textual conflict between opposing masculinities	p. 105
Introduction	p. 105
The Italian and American Westerns	p. 107
Irony as the expression of verbal conflict in Westerns	p. 110
The linguistic scholarship on irony	p. 114
Analysis: the cowboys' use of irony	p. 119
Beyond words: multimodality	p. 136
Discussion of the results and conclusion	p. 145
The struggle for narrative autonomy in Antonioni's When Love Fails	p. 149
Introduction	p. 149
The background of the study of Antonioni's film	p. 150
Contextualization of the study and methodology	p. 152
The film	p. 156
Verbal-visual analysis	p. 157
Final discussion and conclusion	p. 181
Conflict of shifting identities in Mohsen Melliti's Me, the Other	p. 183
Introduction. The director and the film	p. 183
The discourse of identity	p. 184
Performing identities: from plurality to duality in Me, the Other	p. 188
Conclusion	p. 212
Concluding remarks	p. 215
Notes	p. 227
References and filmography	p. 235
Index	p. 253
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