Document Type : Original Article
Author
Children ̓s and Young Adults ̓ Literature, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran.
10.30480/dam.2024.5160.1861
Abstract
Cinematic opening sequences and posters serve as advertising-artistic tools, in addition to their role in introducing films. Nowadays, typography is utilized in film opening sequences and posters to enhance the artistic and commercial prominence of the title. Typography adds a visual-artistic dimension to the text. Typographic titles in films and posters contribute to the formation of meaning in two ways: extratextual interaction and intratextual interaction. Extratextual interaction refers to how the title interacts with its surroundings, including music, adjacent images, and moving visual plans in the background. Intratextual interaction, on the other hand, involves the interaction between the reading aspect and the visual aspect of the title or its typographic form. This article specifically focuses on intratextual interaction in the titles of children and youth films. This analytical-descriptive study aims to explore the interaction of meaning between the two reading and visual aspects of typographic titles in the opening sequences of films and cinematic posters. The approach of this article is based on the Scott-Nikolajeva theory of the five-fold interaction of text and image, which addresses the interaction of writing and the intertextual reference of the image (extratextual interaction). However, this article innovatively focuses on intratextual interaction (the dual visual and reading aspects of the text) by employing their classification method. The examples chosen for this article have been purposefully selected and include the titles of seven films and cinematic posters for children and the youth: "City of Cats," "Tall Girl," "The Elephant King," "The Secret Life of Pets," "No Fly Zone," "Dolphin Boy," and "Up." These examples were chosen not only for their innovation and artistic significance but also because they cover all types of the Scott-Nikolajeva classification. The prevalence of typographic play in the titles of children and youth films and posters, along with the existing research gap in this area, necessitates this investigation. Based on the findings of this study, in the opening sequences of films and cinematic posters, the film title plays a role not only through external interaction with neighbors such as music and background visual plans but also through internal interaction in five diverse styles of meaning-making: symmetrical, complementary, expanding, combined, and contradictory.
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