Poster
Korenaga, Ron
(Rikkyo University, Rikkyo)
Gestural display of understanding :the practice
of viewing commercial film
This research aims at examining the viewers’ practical way of understanding
commercial films such as “This is a commercial of dishwashing
liquid.”, “This ad appeals for preserving user’s health.”, etc. For
this purpose, this research focus on their way of visualizing how
they fi gure out what they saw. Above all, my attention is paid to the
viewer’s gestures in organizing verbal elements of a commercial fi lm
into a consistent understanding as advertisement.
However, there are some diffi culties in describing clearly what kind
of knowledge is practically utilized by viewers during the viewing
because they seldom specify by words what kind of images they are
watching. Therefore, this research conducted an “experiment” on
the viewers which are based on the idea of “breaching experiment”
(Garfi nkel[1967]) ;setting a situation where they are asked to fi nd
the original order of scenes in a commercial fi lm which are randomized
by cutting the original fi lm into some parts.
Conversation analysis was applied to the interaction between two
viewers who were asked to talk to each other about the task. Especially,
the gestures by viewers during the talk were examined.
Analyses of transcript data suggested the process of viewing advertisements
as follows ; First, viewers identify the actors in advertisement
by using MCD (Membership-Categorization Device, Sacks[1972]). Second,
they identify the sequence of a fi lm by making use of ordinary
knowledge of daily conversation which is constructed as ‘adjacency
pair’(Scheglof and Sacks [1972]) and ‘Q-A sequence’(Sacks[1972]).
Thus they fi nd the plot appealing, according to neutrality and universality
of advertising discourse.
At this presentation, from the analyses of video data, I focus especially
on how gestures of viewers highlighting the transcripts of the
film are interrelated to the process of understanding ; identifying the
categorization of the actors and constructing the sequence of the
scenes.
