Semantic Construction in Receiving the Film Discourse: Image, Narrative, and Imagination

Abstract

The meaning of discourse is not formulated in a film through a continuous narrative of a story, but through a multiple construction that formulates meaning in a fundamental and cumulative way.  Each film is a set of narrative and artistic scenes and sequences that are directed, constructed and organized to produce the meaning of the discourse. The film’s discourse mobilizes all the signs and actions that have been cut and then composed to build the connotation of the film. Thus, the production event of the cinematographic discourse differs from the film discourse itself and the interpretations that will accompany the reception of that discourse. It is this differentiation that makes the structure of the meaning more multiple and complex depending on the staging adopted by the director and according to the creative perspective of the discourse in the film. The film "Clash", written and directed by Egyptian director Mohamed Diab, provides a different model in its construction of a cinematic connotation that occurs and develops in a limited and locked space. The events of the film take place only inside the police van, where the characters and actors are overcrowded. Through this spatial, psychological, and existential narrowness, the image in the film takes on its aesthetic dimensions, far from the norm in Arab cinema. The image becomes a critical determinant not only of the narrative and dynamic evolution but also of the rhetoric and artistic vision of the film. For all this, the article intends to analyze the discourse in the film "Clash." This will be achieved by exploring the phases of semantic construction and by analyzing the semiotic and hermeneutic characteristics of this construction, using discourse analysis and pragmatic semiotics. The study found two findings. The first is that the process of image formation in the film is the focus of discourse, as well as the basis of imagination and narrative. The second is related to the fact that the film's significance was formed only within the larger narrative context that defined the vision of creative writing and directing.