Abstract

Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) is an emerging field in communication and information science. While Critical Language Study examined verbal choices, contexts and meanings, and implicated power relationships, MDA explores images, music, sound, gesture, and so on. Not medium-specific, it can (and does) focus on anything from colour, typography, and layout in newspapers, advertisements, and websites, to interior design, architecture, costume, product design, packaging, and soundscapes in avant-garde art installations. Film, television, and media scholars have long been concerned with relationships between multiple codes, discourses, intertexts and paratexts, technical and cultural determinants, myth and ideology. Does MDA offer a useful toolkit -- or does it reinvent narratological, mise-en-scene and semiotic analysis with new terminology? This paper experiments with MDA in examining Michael Winterbottom's film Jude (1996), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). While post-structuralist adaptation theory rejects notions of 'fidelity' and translatability, MDA insists that, within a given social cultural domain, the 'same' meanings can often be expressed in different semiotic codes. Is this really so?