Reviewed by Jana Ukušová

The book Film Discourse Interpretation: Towards a New Paradigm for Multimodal Film Analysis (2014) by the German researcher Janina Wildfeuer addresses the issue of a film’s understanding through the prism of inferential reasoning.

It tries to examine how films’ textual qualities affect the meaning-construction process of the viewer and how they trigger his interpretation process based on the multimodal content of the film and his world and film knowledge. This approach therefore combines both cognitive and linguistic viewpoints.

The main goal of the book is to provide the reader with a methodological formulation of the logic of film discourse interpretation using the discourse semantics approaches and more general approaches to film analysis and interpretation. The notion of logic relates explicitly to narrative logic, that is how the narrative is being constructed in the film. It takes into account not only the aspects of time and space, but other logical and associative relations as well, and offers a classification of discourse relations, providing for the film’s coherence and structure.

The given methodological framework is illustrated on a rather large spectrum of film genres. The author provides an analysis of film extracts from the following genres: a drama film The Lives of Others (2006), a science-fiction psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), a romantic comedy Amélie (2001) and a psychological drama Requiem for a Dream (2004).

Compared to other current approaches to film analysis, the author’s contribution to the given field consists in a new, comprehensive approach, trying to find points of intersection between the interpretation process of the recipient and the overall structure and coherence of the text, as well as allowing for further analysis and examination.