ABSTRACT
In film, much information considered as part of the discourse’s meaning is often not explicitly mentioned. The recipient is, however, able to infer the information depicted implicitly in the realm of the text because of his/her general experiences of how films work and narrate a story. We know, for example, that changes in camera perspective do not necessarily interrupt the film’s general continuity and that zooming in on certain objects in the story-world may have a specific function. David Bordwell therefore indicates that “[i]n watching a film, the perceiver identifies certain cues which prompt her to execute many inferential activities—ranging from the mandatory and very fast activity of perceiving apparent motion, through the more ‘cognitively penetrable’ process of constructing, says, links between scenes, to the still more open process of ascribing abstract meanings to the film. In most cases, the spectator applies knowledge structures to cues which she identifies within the film” (Bordwell 1989: 3). These cues and knowledge structures are the starting point of this article which aims at presenting how filmic meaning is comprehended and interpreted on the basis of inferential strategies and defeasible reasoning. It focuses on the textual qualities of filmic discourse, coherence and structure, which control the viewer’s meaning construction out of the various modalities. The combinations of sounds, images, music, gestures, etc. are interpreted with the help of pragmatic information sources, such as world and film knowledge as well as the information available in the discursive context, to logically conclude the film’s unfolding structure. Consequently, this article will provide a systematic tool for film analysis that supports the description of how filmic meaning can be formally analysed: the logic of film discourse interpretation, developed first in Wildfeuer (2014).
