Comparing multimodal film texts. The case of the movie Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the issue of comparison of two movies linked by the relationship of remaking. Its specific aim is to show that the complexity of multimodal texts, to which filmic texts and therefore remakes belong, does not prevent the analyst from examining the contrastive elements of such films and multimodal film texts in general. As a corollary, the present paper outlines a framework for a comparative multimodal analysis of two movies, the relevant illustrations coming from Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009). The basis of our comparative analysis is the narrative-compositional structure of filmic texts as discussed and amply illustrated in Post (2017). The sample multimodal comparative analysis presented in the last section of this paper relies on the selected instruments of Post’s (2017) proposal, Krzeszowski’s theory of contrastive analysis (1967, 1990) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. This approach to film texts is compatible with Tabakowska’s (2001) theory of cognitive translation, the main theoretical concept of which is Langacker’s (1991) image schema, well fitting the aforementioned compositional level and the narrative-compositional of filmic texts. It is believed that with the instruments selected from the works enumerated above, it was possible to construct an interpretive model capable of revealing relevant differences and similarities between two multimodal filmic texts linked by the relationship of remaking.