Thematic Structure and Film Discourse: A Case Study of the Butterfly Stroke Movie Directed by Mohammad Kart (۲۰۲۰)

Thematic organization or structure as a functional resource shows the textuality as well as the structural cohesive devices in discourse. Thus, it is of great important to look at the various aspects of thematic organization within different discourses so that we recognize how the discourse progression is represented. One of the genres that, despite its great importance, has received less attention is the multimodal discourse of film genre. Undoubtedly, examining the discourse of a film, which is mostly based on one-on-one conversations between the participants, can help to better understand how the meaning is exchanged as well as how the message is organized. Therefore, this study attempted to explore the thematic structure in the film discourse within Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (۲۰۱۴). For doing so, the Butterfly Stroke Film directed by Mohammad Kart (screened for the first time on February first, ۲۰۲۰, at the ۳۸th Fajr Film Festival) was analysed in terms of marked vs. unmarked and simple vs. multiple themes. Findings show that in the whole corpus (۶۸۰ clauses), the theme in ۱۹۲ clauses is unmarked and simple, in ۲۷۵ clauses is marked and simple, in ۱۳۳ clauses is unmarked and multiple and in ۸۰ clauses is marked and multiple. Consequently, the method of development of thematic organization of the movie was mainly based on the selection of simple marked Themes. The results show that the film script has been written in such a way that suggest both the theme as psychological subject and rheme are important at identically, and this helps the viewer to understand the film better and easier due to faster mental processing, thus less computational cost.

کلیدواژه ها:

“thematic structure” ، systemic functional linguistics ، “marked” ، “simple theme “unmarked” ، “multiple theme”