Interactive Meanings in Movie Posters: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Movie posters are based on the variety of visual and verbal signs that have their own meanings (Dewi, 2022). The present study is based on multimodal analysis of movie posters. Based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics SFL (1960), this research takes Visual Grammar (2006) by Kress and Van Leeuwen as a theoretical framework. Among the three meanings mentioned by Kress &Van Leeuwen in their theory namely, representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. This research only focuses on analyzing the interactive meaning by the interplay of verbal and visual elements used in the movie posters. The current research aims to identify the cultural elements and promotional strategies used by movie makers in the movie posters. Five western (American) movie posters from five different genres (action, thriller, comedy, romance, horror) released in 2024 and 2025 have been purposely selected for the data. Analysis has been done by using qualitative descriptive method. The analysis reveals that the relation between the participants and viewers have been established through the four main components of interactive meaning: visual contact, social distance, modality and perspective. The results indicate that there are many cultural elements used in the movie posters which help to target the specific audience. The results also point to the fact that promotional strategies used in the movie posters by movie makers help to grab audience’s attention.  

Key words: Visual Grammar, Kress and Van Leeuwen, interactive meaning, cultural elements, promotional strategies.