ABSTRACT
Theo van Leeuwen was a student of the Amsterdam Film School in the late 1960s, three things that interested him at the time of his schooling were film, jazz and semiotics. He decided that semiotics was going to be his main activity, and started to engage more seriously in academic work, especially work with Gunther Kress and PhD thesis. He found inspiration in critical discourse analysis, with the way Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress, engage with social theory and relate it to the detail of language, in the way he believes Halliday intended. Language has specific resources for expressing modality: the modal auxiliaries, Film does not have these, but it can express modalities, degrees of realism, in its own ways. So, Leeuwen thought he could now combine his knowledge of filmic signifiers with Hallidayan semantic-functional concepts, and he discovers French structuralist semiotics.
