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Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

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message. This kind of analysis, according to Lauro Zavala, ‘centra su atención en el<br />

enunciado y sus condiciones de enunciación […]. Las herramientas centrales del<br />

análisis son la descripción y la microdescripción’. 5<br />

In order to undertake an analysis of comics and films, the methodology was<br />

based on that by Francesco Casetti and Federico Di Chio in Cómo analizar un film.<br />

Specifically for comics I used part of the methodology suggested by Román Gubern in<br />

El lenguaje de los comics, and some of the ideas of Miguel Ángel Muro Munilla in his<br />

work Análisis e interpretación del cómic. These scholars present semiotics and narrative<br />

tools which help to segment, describe and analyse the sources, drawing out important<br />

information about the use of humour and the expression of social dissent.<br />

My analysis started by recognizing the segments of the text and reducing them<br />

to smaller units. The segmentation was made according to the images and dialogues<br />

which created and animated the scenes, starting with longer fragments and later smaller<br />

ones. This work facilitated the analysis since it allowed me to observe a wider segment,<br />

including series of sequences, by choosing a topic (such as corruption, abuse of<br />

authority, etc.) to identify and thus analyse it. An example of how this was done is the<br />

sequence in Tívoli in which the lawyer Licenciado Pantoja is describing in the present a<br />

meeting that he attended weeks ago where the Mayor decided to demolish the cabaret. If<br />

the scene was analysed by shots or scenes I would get plenty of information but not all<br />

of it relevant for my aim. By opening the semantic unit it was possible to discover how<br />

humour was used to break moments of stress, even when the joke appeared not to be<br />

related to the topic. I can also support this segmentation with the idea of macro-<br />

punctuation proposed by Christian Metz in which the segmentation ‘intervenes not<br />

5<br />

Lauro Zavala, ‘El análisis cinematográfico y su diversidad metodológica’, Casa del Tiempo, 30, 3<br />

(2010), (pp. 65-69).<br />

<br />

[accessed 7 October 2010]<br />

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