Reading Dogville in Brazil: Image,

Language and Critical Literacy

r
Walkyria Monte Mo
o Paulo, Brazil
University of Sa
This paper is a report of a research project on critical multiliteracies and multimodality in Brazilian education. In the context of a growing concern for the
construction of images in contemporary society, the paper discusses the interrelations between image, language and interpretation. The specific object of the
investigation described below is the cinematic image as communication. This paper
discusses the interpretive strategies of university-level Brazilian spectators of the
film Dogville , directed by Lars von Trier, seeking to understand the interpretive
strategies of these spectators in relation to a film whose highly specific visual
language provokes differing cultural interpretations.
Este trabalho consiste num relato de um projeto de pesquisa sobre multi-letramentos
e multimodalidade na educacao brasileira. No contexto de um interesse crescente
pela construcao de imagens na sociedade contemporanea, o trabalho discute as interrelacoes entre imagem, linguagem e interpretacao. O objeto especfico da pesquisa e
a imagem cinematografica enquanto comunicacao. O trabalho discute a interacao
entre espectadores universitarios brasileiros e um filme de arte. Ele procura entender
suas estrategias de interpretacao com relacao ao filme Dogville de lars von Trier, um
filme cuja linguagem visual provoca interpretacoes culturais das mais variadas.
doi: 10.2167/laic232.0

Keywords: image, interpretation, visual literacy, critical literacy, literacy

education

Visual Language: Images as Semiotic and Cultural Discourse

The understanding of images as a form of discourse has increased in
importance as the traditional boundaries of language have become porous and
hard to distinguish. Castells (1999) argues that conventional views of
communication set up an alphabetical order of discourses, exiling images
and sounds to the world of the arts. For Castells, written culture, despite its
acknowledged social benefits, has separated itself from the audiovisual system
and the symbols and perceptions that are so important for the human mind.
This paper takes its point of departure from those such as Castells, who argue
that images have always been central to social communications and should not
merely be regarded as part of the privileged world of the arts.
Studies of images have variously described their different sociohistoric
phases. From the semiotic perspective (Santaella & Noth, 1998), for example,
images follow three paradigms in which photography plays a central role. The
first, prephotographic , phase refers to hand-made images, such as carvings on
stones, drawings, paintings, engravings and sculptures. The second, photographic , phase is said to depict images that are produced by a dynamic
2006 W. Monte Mor
Vol. 6, No. 2, 2006

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Reading Dogville in Brazil

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connection with and a physically fragmented capturing of the visible world, as

in photography itself, cinema, television and video. The third semiotic
paradigm of the image is postphotographic and refers to computer-generated
synthetic images. As Santaella and Noth (1998) explain, these are no longer
optical images which consist of luminous traces emitted by a pre-existing
object (a model), captured and fixed by a chemical apparatus (as in the case of
a photograph or film) or by an electronic photosensitive device (as in video).
Postphotographic images consist of a transformation of a numbered matrix
into elementary dots (pixels) that are visualised on a monitor screen or by
means of a printer.
From a sociocultural perspective, attempts have been made to explain
images within different logics. For example, according to Virillo (1994),
whereas paintings, engravings and architecture follow a formal logic of a
period that ends in the 18th century, photography and cinema both represent a
dialectic logic , characteristic of the 19th century. Video, holography and
computer-generated images
inventions of the 20th century
represent a
logic of paradox , a term based on the dislocation or disconnection between the
real space of the object represented and the real time of this kind of image.
It should be noted that both the semiotic and the sociocultural perspectives
follow a sociohistorical reasoning based on a view of mans relationship with
labour. That is, both the prephotographic and formal logic categories refer to
images produced by mens imagination and the physical labour of their hands.
In contrast, the advent of industry, technology and machinery is present in the
categories of the photographic phase and dialectic logic , where they converge to
produce a product. Photography is thus defined as the capturing of images
through the use of a device that purports to extend human capacity by means
of the camera lens in a dialectical, and thus intervening, relationship between
humans and the environment. Finally, the categories of the postphotographic
phase and the logic of paradox refer to the current computerised society in which
technology is able to merge the time in which the image is produced into the
time that it is presented.
Another overlap between the semiotic and the sociocultural perspectives of
images is in the conception of the shifts in paradigm. For example, in the
photographic phase , as in dialectic logic , images are thought to have changed
from an artefact
a creation of human hands
to a product that is created by
humans with the aid of a device. In turn, in the postphotographic phase , as in the
logic of paradox , it is technology that is deemed responsible for destabilising the
certainties of real time and real space developed by the previous (photographic) phase.
Dialectal logic came of age with television news programmes because
photography and video film enabled the dissemination of factual evidence. In
the early years of the printed press and television, spectators would see images
that would function as proof of the time and space of the reported occurrence.
As television evolved, it further valorised the notion of evidence by first
diminishing the distance between image-capturing and image-releasing and
later extinguishing this distance in live news reporting. In the context of this
development, the notion of what appears to be reality or fiction seems to
become clearer, enhancing the credibility of each of these concepts. A fictional

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and a real work may be distinguished by differential uses of the time

element: whereas fiction demands a certain time between its creation and
exhibition, a factual report may be produced and exhibited simultaneously.
For example, the news report reinforces its real image potential when it is
captured and shown in real time; this effect is enhanced by both the principle
of seeing is believing and the immediacy with which the news report image
reaches its viewers.
In the case of images generated by the logic of paradox , fundamental
epistemological changes are involved, firstly in the notion of real time and
real space; technology enables the construction and reconstruction of images
and actions in apparent real times and spaces. Secondly, in the same way in
which the photographic phase dealt with the fiction/nonfiction boundary in
which real space dominated over real time, the logic of paradox of the
postphotographic phase introduces the principle of the virtual image that
does not depend on reality or external referents to create or construct image
representations.
According to Santaella and Noth (1998), the three logics, or phases, also
refer to differences in the relations between the viewer and the observed
object. In the first phase, the viewer is required to assume a posture of
contemplation and nostalgia, for example, in the presence of hand-made
images; in the second phase, photographs and films require observation and
recognition and succeed in communicating when identification is established
between the viewer and the image. In the third phase, computer-generated
images require an immersion-like relation with their viewers, usually
identified as navigation, with an increased level of interaction between
viewer and image, enabling the viewer to move between being a user and a
coproducer of the image. The limits of pre-established meanings are broken
down, and replaced by the promotion and creation of ones own meanings; in
this postphotographic phase of images adhering to the logic of paradox, the
emphasis is on intervening, creating, and on having a more active role in
communicating through and with images.

The Changing Logic of Cinema Images

Carriere (1995) claims that the image in cinematic discourse has been
responsible for transformations in both theory and practice, especially in the
specific instance of art cinema. Carriere describes how, initially, images on film
were shown in sequential, static takes; later, the processes of editing and
assembling and the juxtaposition of scenes were introduced. Later still, points
of view began to be introduced into the film image to invite particular effects.
The use of special effects began to increase with available technical resources
and the advent of video and computer-generated images brought even more
freedom to the use of images in film.
Carriere claims that the image in art-house cinema has developed more
than in any of the other media, and attributes this to the directors desire to
elicit a particular reaction from the viewer. Film directors constantly seek new
visual languages to provoke viewers to develop new means of reading,
interpreting and interacting with images. This process parallels what in

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127

education has been recognised as literacy, defined as a socially constructed

critical practice of reading, as the interpretative ability of the viewer is
constantly stimulated to respond, resulting in enhanced critical abilities. In this
search by film-makers for new ways of promoting the reading of film images,
these new literacy practices are different from those formally promoted in
educational institutions such as schools or universities.
In his analysis of the development of images in the cinema, Manovich (2001)
highlights the search to convey realism as described by Bazin (1992) and
Comolli (1980): for Bazin, realism functions as an idea, a space between reality
and a transcendental viewer; for Comolli, on the other hand, realism plays an
ideological role
an effect produced between the image and the historical
viewer, in a Marxist sense (Manovich, 2001: 187). Bazin sees realism as the use
of images to reconstruct a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color
and relief (Manovich, 2001: 186) in order supposedly to approximate
perceptual and natural vision. In contrast, Comolli sees the effect of the
realism of cinema images as a means of duplicating the real itself, as part of a
social machine seeking to reproduce economic, ideological and symbolic
values. Manovich (2001) interestingly states that whereas much of cinema
concentrates on the visible rather than on the invisible in its search for the
reduplication of reality through images, creativity in film lies in the ability to
read and deal with the interstices between images.
Manovichs concerns very much reflect the semiotic (Santaella & Noth, 1998)
and sociocultural (Virillo, 1995) conceptions of images, discussed above, and
their fictional-real-virtual characteristics and functions. For Manovich, image
construction simultaneously reveals and conceals projections of social relations
whose fictionality, virtuality and reality depend on the viewers social and
critical perceptions and abilities. These concerns also map out an agenda for
research into the acquisition of critical literacy in the visual modality.

Reading Dogville
In a preliminary step towards addressing this research agenda, I designed a
qualitative research method as a means of studying visual and critical literacy
in relation to the interpretive strategies of university-level viewers in their
interaction with images. Its preliminary results will be presented and analysed
in the next section; its preliminary nature is due to the fact that the selected
data refer to a sampling of a wider public yet to be investigated.1 The subjects
were Brazilian undergraduate students, majoring in English, in Sao Paulo. The
film Dogville (von Trier, 2003) was chosen as the film to be viewed by the
research subjects. The subjects were asked to see the film and register on tape
or on paper their interpretations, with special attention to the films images.
These data were then analysed qualitatively in relation to current theories in
hermeneutics, multiliteracies and multimodality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000;
Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Ricoeur, 1977, 1978).
Dogville was chosen for this part of the research because it is an art-house
film that consists of a narrative blend that includes images in unconventionally
varied modalities. Dogvilles plot uses a linear narrative, describing the life of
apparently ordinary families in an apparently ordinary North American

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community
the Dogville of the title
in the small-town America of the

1930s. Almost all the characters are townsfolk who portray the simplicity, the
apparent absence of ambition and the hard-working life that is said to have
characterised that town. The narrative focuses on various families of the town
and the conflicts that arise on the appearance of another character, an outsider
who asks for shelter. This is a beautiful woman, on the run from gangsters.
While the residents at first hide the outsider, they then demand payment for
doing so
in work and then in abusive sexual favours. In the end, the woman
uses her gangster connections to wreak a terrible revenge on the townsfolk.
The unconventionality of the film lies in its various blends: dialogues
intertwine with a third-person narration, spoken in low tones. The narrator
also appears as a character in the plot. The violent ending comes as a shock in
the wake of a sequence of smooth, coherent and quietly narrated events. The
setting is intriguingly, unconventionally and unrealistically presented: the
viewer sees the town as a theatrical representation assembled on a stage,
the floor of which is marked by lines that indicate the boundaries between the
various environments
the town streets, the residents houses, the guarddogs kennel, the shops and the church.
The visual impact of this unconventional setting was the crucial factor for
the choice of the film as the object for this study of meaning-making in relation
to images. The art-house experimentation with images enhanced the films
multimodal appeal, and we were interested in how viewers made sense of
the various codes on display: verbal, cinematic, theatrical and computergenerated.
As noted above, spectators are introduced to Dogville via a visual
representation of its ground plan (see http://www.dogvillemovie.com for
examples of images from the film). The absence of physical walls allows
viewers to see simultaneously the actions that occur not only in each house
and family, but also those in the street, even when the focus is on a particular
scene. Perhaps a play on social transparency is implied in this: the viewers
are led to question their expectations of what is visible and invisible, thus
raising the interpretative possibility that those settings that are not the focus of
the action
but are still visible
may nonetheless be culturally known and so
remain salient. This possibility is raised powerfully when the woman, Grace, is
raped in one location, while townsfolk are visible to the audience going about
their business in adjacent locations. The absence of physical walls may be
seen as a metaphor that attempts to raise the issue of visibility that any
sociohistorical critique requires.
The ground plan that represents the town of Dogville recalls the visual
codes used in a popular video game, The Sims (http://thesims.ea.com/
index_flash.php). The game can be followed by an easy-to-visualise ground
plan of the house that is the games main location. Besides allowing wider
visibility (through the absence of a roof) and, thus, expanding the possibility of
interaction between the player and the game, the open perspective of the plan
may also be useful and appealing to the player for control purposes. It may
provide the player with the feeling of being like a puppeteer pulling the
strings of the simulated characters in the game.

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129

The analysis of the data from the student viewers identified four positions
arising from the process of making meanings of Dogville : (1) a manichaeistic
good versus evil position; (2) a religious position; (3) a position of traditional
social values; (4) a position in which the viewer who is confronted by a
supposedly incomprehensible visual language refuses to make meanings.
These positions are discussed below.

The Students Meaning-making: Traditional Hermeneutics?

The Brazilian students responses to the unconventional visual codes of
Dogville are apparently conditioned by the sociocultural aspects of their
education. The most frequent comments of the viewers related to the conflict
between good and evil, identifying a struggle between good and bad souls
even in a simple society. Others claimed that there might always be wolves in
sheeps clothing, referring to the role of the outsider, Grace, in the plot, as she
arrives in Dogville wearing a long fur-collared coat and is given shelter by the
townsfolks. In some comments, there seemed to be a difficulty in discerning
between the good and the bad characters, given that the plot sounded
somewhat ambiguous. It is ultimately unclear whether Grace is a wolf or
sheep, victim or brutal murderer. However the purported ambiguity of the
film, which provoked viewers to choose between the good and the evil, also
reflects traces of the viewers own cultural view of the world.
The manichaeism that is present in the student viewers interpretations has
been criticised by philosophers of language, such as Derrida (1978), who
identify it as a Western cultural trope, reflecting, in turn, the values of the
European enlightenment and liberalism which sought to organise society in
terms of clear-cut categories. One example of these socioculturally and
ideologically constructed categories is the distinction between Good and
Evil, that is between Sheep and Wolves. Once transmitted through sociocultural institutions such as the school system, these then form the basis for the
interpretive patterns of members of Western culture. In the use of such
patterns, readers (or viewers) are often unaware that their culturally dominant
manichaeistic view of the world leads them to expect implicitly what should
be valorised, imitated and desired. As a consequence, this implies excluding or
marginalising the negative pole of the manichaeistic dyad. Our concern is to
what extent do the literacy practices of Brazilian education, as an upholder of
the western cultural tradition, contribute to reinforcing this manichaeism? In
the preliminary results discussed here, there is clear evidence of the
persistence of this traditional cultural literacy practice, whose simplicity has
been criticised by thinkers such as Derrida.
In the second most common viewing position, the students framed the
meaning of the film according to the preservation of religious values. In this
interpretation, the student viewers comments stressed the organised, ordinary
life of the townspeople, interrupted by the arrival of a stranger. Comments
focused on the hard life the inhabitants had, the good relationship among
them, and their attempts to overcome their hardships, as expected of those
who live in a brotherhood. The viewers emphasised the inhabitants feelings of
piety, cooperation and solidarity towards each other and towards the

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newcomer. Grace, who asks for help and gets it, as expected, reinforces the
viewers empathy with the townspeople and their sense of brotherhood. To
these viewers, Graces lack of gratitude and trust disrupts the lives of the
townspeople and she submits to her own ill-treatment as a form of penance.
At first glance, this framing position, the preservation of religious values,
maybe subsumed into the dominant reading
the preservation of cultural
traditions
insofar as it appears to echo the manichaeism between good and
evil. However, the means by which the viewers who adopted the second
position constructed meaning revolved around the religious significance of the
newcomers name, Grace, as indicative of a parallel between her relationship
with the townsfolk and that of the life of Jesus in biblical scripture. Viewers
mentioned various other biblically allusive aspects such as the fact that Grace
sacrifices herself to pay back the favours she receives, is betrayed by one of
the townspeople and is reunited with her father in the end, all potent biblical
tropes. In addition, the viewers who adopted this position described Tom, a
town leader and the narrator of the story, as allusive to Moses, in that he is a
conciliator and advisor of his herd. He advises his people to accept Grace in
the town and to give her work so that she feels helpful and part of the
community.
Within the same frame that sees the film as about the preservation of
religious values, some viewers commented on the directors allusion to and
transformation of biblical characters. These viewers understood the outsider as
Jesus, but transformed into a woman (Grace) who plays the role of antichrist,
as she ultimately disrupts and betrays the community. The character of Tom,
one of the town leaders, was read as Moses-the-Adviser transformed into
Moses-the-Betrayer (because he reports Grace to the police); to other students
working within the same frame, Tom is not Moses but Judas.
That viewers are prompted to draw upon a religious frame when making
meaning of Dogville clearly reflects the continuing influence of religious values
in Brazilian culture as elsewhere. Ricoeur (1977) comments on the tradition of
biblical exegesis in which the interpretation of biblical texts was based on
notions of analogy, allegory and symbolic meaning, which would connect the
teachings of the sacred texts to everyday daily life. Ricoeur shows how this
interpretive practice went beyond the domain of religion and reached other
fields such as the reading of literature. Ricoeur further shows how this practice
is limiting in that it inevitably confers authority on the writer of the text,
neglecting both the reader and the locus of enunciation. Despite its limitations
as an interpretive practice, it has been widely disseminated in schools and has
even become culturally naturalised, though it is removed from current forms
of critical cultural literacies. Readings of Dogville from this perspective reveal
the conservatism of interpretative procedures, even amongst many universityeducated viewers.
Some student viewers protocols suggest a third frame, focusing on
sociohistorical and ideological concerns. These viewers commented on how
the director of the film questions religious beliefs and tries to break down
distinctions between religion, society and politics. One viewer commented
Von Trier [the director] shows how religious ideals may enslave men or teach
men to enslave others in the name of an expected sacrifice (. . .) or as learned in

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131

the maxim [known in Brazil] work dignifies man. Here religion is subjected
to a historical critique.
Most of this group of viewers interpretations refer to the work ethic, shared
by various religions, but identified in American society as Puritan. The reason
for such a description, as verified in interviews with the student viewers who
mention it, seems to be the fact that the plot shows a small town in the USA in
the 1930s. From a Brazilian perspective, the work ethic in the USA is
traditionally seen as Puritan. The ideals that are privileged by the work
ethic are sacrifice, piety, mercy, salvation and love towards the other, all of
which are visible in the townsfolks communitarian attitudes and in their
initial relationship with the outsider. These student viewers saw Grace as the
outsider who tried to assimilate herself to a community with whose social
conventions and values she was unfamiliar. To these viewers, the director had
two implicit interests in his film: to make the viewer perceive there were deep
differences between the townsfolks and the outsiders cultures, and to show
that the unknown (that is, what is culturally exterior) is often seen as evil.
Once again, it may appear that this interpretive frame might be assimilated
to the first two mentioned above, in that all the interpretations involve both the
categorisation of characters into good and evil and some allusion to
religious precedents or events. However the third group of viewers go beyond
religious allusions and foreground political and ideological concerns; for
instance, the character Toms role in the community is seen as political. He
leads his neighbours, or fellow-citizens, by adopting a democratic posture
when he organises assemblies in which community conflicts are debated and
everyone has the right to vote according to his/her conscience. Some of these
viewers emphasised the appropriateness of the images of the film that cast
doubts on the democratic decisions. In interviews to cross-check this set of
procedures for making meaning, the viewers mentioned how Tom seeks
support for his own ideas by manipulating the other townspeoples opinions.
In this frame, Tom is the archetypal politician.
The third set of interpretations also made much of the employer
employee
relations as shown in the film. As readers who adopt the processes described
by Ricoeur (1977) focus on religious associations and allegories, so the viewers
in this third group identify in the film associations and allegories of a social
and political nature. For these viewers, the employer
employee relations
apparent in the film resemble the current job relations of neoliberal urban
societies such as present-day Brazil. Thus, the outsider in the film represents
the role of the socially excluded person who arrives in a city (such as certain
immigrants, or migrants) and submissively accepts any type of work
even
overwork
to make a living. The student viewers claimed that the relationships in the film paralleled master
slave relations in which the employer
shows power, authoritarianism, abuse, disrespect and jealousy, whereas the
worker shows submission, humiliation and servility. To these viewers, the
films ending, where all the townsfolk are killed by the newly empowered
outsider, may be explained as the slaves reaction to the oppression and
exploitation suffered.
The third interpretive position also identified another potential theme that
merges both politics and religion, in its concern for the ethics of an eye for an

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Table 1 Summary of main positions from which Brazilian students made meaning of
Dogville
Total

1. Preservation of
cultural traditions:
good-and-evil

2. Preservation of
religious values

3. Political
and social
concerns

4. No meaningmaking

100%

40%

29%

11%

20%

eye as opposed to turning the other cheek. Viewers who made sense of the
film from this position alluded to a supposedly Muslim ethic rather than to a
Christian one, and claimed that the narrative of Dogville should be understood
as the directors version of the 9/11 events in New York and Washington.
When asked to elaborate on this theme in interviews, these viewers based their
understanding on the metaphorical nature of the films images, which were
understood as inviting allegorical readings, and the fact that the plot concerns
an excluded outsider who destroys a social structure. Some of these viewers
also claimed support for this reading in reports they had read of the directors
critical views of American society and US government policy.
The foregoing discussion has shown how different university-educated
Brazilian viewers constructed three different understandings of a film whose
foreign cultural content and experimental imagery invite nonliteral interpretations (Table 1). The visual literacy practices of each of the three main groups of
viewers are conditioned by cultural institutions such as the church and school,
and the naturalisation of certain interpretive practices as common sense (e.g.
that characters in films should be categorised as essentially good or evil).
We turn now to incidences when the viewer resists the invitation to make
meaning of a multimodal text that resists straightforward readings.

When Meaning is Not Made

Three significant signs in the film apparently created an interpretive
difficulty for the student viewers, as they were not taken into account or
mentioned by them. The first refers to the low tone of voice of all the characters
in the film. This low tone would normally be seen as indicating politeness and
gentleness though in the film it is in blatant contrast to the townspeoples cruel
and incongruent behaviour.
The second sign is of the dog in Dogville, a creature that spends most of the
time guarding its house. In the students depiction of the story, no mention
was made of the animal, even though its barking is frequently heard in the
film: it occurs at every sign of risk or danger, such as when a stranger is
approaching the town. Though the barking is heard, the animal is not often
seen. At one point it is shown in a drawing in a strategically marked-off part of
the scenery, indicating the presence of a guard dog. Because of its near
invisibility the dog is not killed at the end like the rest of the inhabitants, but in
the face of and in response to the slaughter, it is in a certain sense restored
back to life, changing its condition from drawn image to one of a live animal,
significantly, an aggressive pit bull terrier. This image may indicate an

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apocalyptical ending in which the beast is revived as if to represent a threat to

the survivors.
The third underdetermined sign is the theatre-like scenery created by von
Trier, with the invisible, imaginary and make-believe walls separating the
various rooms and houses of the town. This image is at least mentioned by
some viewers, whose surprise in relation to this visual aspect of the film is
apparent in their use of adjectives such as surprising, different and
intriguing. Some viewers say they expected that the scenery would be only
an introduction to the film, and it would eventually be substituted by a more
realistic film set. When later interviewed, these viewers added that their
concentration was somewhat disturbed in the first half-hour of the film due to
their expectation that the theatre-like imaginary scenery would turn into a
realistic location.
If it was expected that viewers would see the absence of physical, brick or
wooden walls in the film and so create an explicit metaphor for this absence in
relation to an overall frame or position that guided their understanding, the
expectation clearly failed, for this group of students at least. As we have seen,
the viewers interpretation of the metaphorical aspects of the film tended
rather to be associated with such traditional, religious or moral themes as were
mentioned by Ricoeur (1977). The low tone of voice used by the characters, the
invisible dog and the absence of physical walls resist being shoehorned into
these traditional interpretations. Curiously, the quality of the voices, the
representation of the invisible dog, and the absence of physical walls can all
be related to the sound, colour and relief that Bazin proposed as the
ingredients required for the perfect illusion in realistic cinema. It is the
unrealistic, or unconventional presentation of these three aspects that posed
problems for the student viewers. Yet their very unrealistic (theatre-like)
presentation is equally clearly an important factor in the films visual and
auditory impact.
The merging of the visual codes of cinema and theatre in Dogville is clearly
an example of intermodality or multimodality, understood as the approximation
or juxtaposition of different modes of communication (in this case that of the
theatre and that of the cinema, in other cases, that of the photographic image
and an alphabetic text etc.) in order to create a specific effect not itself readily
available in any one of the specific modes in question. In his studies on
multimodal indigenous writing in Brazil, Menezes de Souza2 (2003) shows
how, for indigenous writers, the perceived shortcomings of the mode of
alphabetic writing are overcome by adding another mode, that of visual
drawings, to achieve the desired communicative effects (see also Costa Pereira
de S. Thiago, this volume). However, Menezes de Souza also shows how this
creates a problem for readers from outside the indigenous culture, who are
accustomed to reading alphabetic texts. For these nonindigenous readers, the
multimodality of indigenous texts goes unperceived or is interpreted in a
radically different manner, generating intercultural problems of communication. These problems arise due to the different cultural values attributed to the
relationship between the alphabetic mode and the visual mode in the
indigenous and the mainstream Brazilian culture. More generally, the multimodal mixing of semiotic codes can be bewildering for readers or viewers who

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do not recognise the array of signs on display as an invitation to construct

meanings. In the earlier discussion of the photographic phase and dialectic
logic of communication (cf. Santaella & Noth, 1998; Virillo, 1994), success
depends on there being both observation and recognition by the viewer of the
object viewed. As multimodal texts mix codes and in doing so destabilise
available conventions, identification and recognition of the objects viewed
become problematised. In such cases, readers and viewers tend to fall back on
variations of traditional readings using familiar aspects of the codes on
display, organised according to conventional reader-positions or frames, and
simply ignoring evidence that would inform alternative understandings.
There was even a small group of student viewers who claimed a total
inability to make any meaning at all of the film (described variously as boring
or senseless). In interviews with these student viewers, many reported their
lack of familiarity with the visual modes of theatre and video games, and this
again may explain their difficulty in dealing with the multimodality of the
film. However, the degree of familiarity required of the conventions governing
the constituent modes on display in multimodal texts requires further research
and is beyond the scope of the present paper. In the meantime, there is
evidence to suggest that the role of multimodality in visual and critical literacy
need to be considered in education in Brazil and elsewhere, especially given
the increased presence of visual multimodality in present-day communication
systems
not least the World Wide Web.

Conclusion
Considering the on-going nature of the research described, these conclusions are substantial but preliminary, and suggest that the interpretive
strategies of the student viewers of Dogville contain contradictory elements
of traditional and emergent cultural world-views, knowledges and epistemologies. Many of the interpretations analysed indicate the predominance of the
dialectic logic of Virillo (1994) and the photographic phase of Santaella and
Noth (1998). However, these student viewers live in a culture (modern, urban
Brazil) where formal logic, dialectic logic and the logic of paradox coexist.
Given the multimodal computer-mediated communication culture prevalent
in present-day urban Brazil, it would seem that the ability to function
competently in the logic of paradox should be an educational priority. Users
of multimodal texts that draw on different visual languages need to develop
interactive capacities as users and producers of the available communication
modes and knowledge, in order to resignify and re-create pre-established
meanings, and take a more active role in communication.
This preliminary research suggests that there is a gap between the
interpretive competences of many young Brazilian urban users of images
and what they need to participate adequately in their cultural environments.
This finding in turn reinforces Castellss (1999) defence of the need for a
network mind in the present network society; Castells contrasts the adequacy
of a network mind with the inadequacy of a typographic mind, which still
characterises much of Western written culture. The typographic mind that
characterises the descendants of the printing press is said to be linear,

Reading Dogville in Brazil

135

sequential and limited, and it may have difficulty in addressing the multiliteracy needs of contemporary culture.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Walkyria Monte Mor,
University of Sao Paulo, Av Prof Luciano Gualberto, 403, Sao Paulo - SP, 05508900 Brazil (walsil@uol.com.br).
Notes
1.

2.

This research involves groups of two Brazilian state universities, University of Sao
Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and foreign universities
in Australia, Greece and South Africa in a cross-cultural literacy project to
investigate young peoples engagement with digital technologies and to consider
the implications for education.
Researcher and coordinator of the Brazilian literacy research team composed of
professors from two state universities.

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