This study aims at exploring the representational meaning encoded in the 'marital conflict' scenes of two famous American movies: Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and Enough (2002). The analysis investigates the stressful and hostile interactions between the spouses and the participant roles they perform in the selected film excerpts. For this purpose, the study applies Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual transitivity system to image shots of these film excerpts in which the question of 'who does what to whom' is answered showing who is the active 'doer' and who is the passive 'done-to', consequently detecting power relations in marital conflictual situations. The study finds out that both husbands in the two film texts are portrayed as aggressors and are predominantly represented in the powerful roles of actor and reacter asserting their control over their wives by physical and emotional abuse, whereas the two wives are portrayed as weak and powerless and are predominantly shown in the passive 'done-to' roles of goal and phenomenon. The analysis asserts the assumption that dynamic film image can convey meaning in the same way as language does and that it can be explored from a systemic functional perspective. |
