Cohesion in Film Discourse

The aim of this article is to review the existing approaches towards the research of cohesion in film discourse, namely, in its constituent elements such as film text, title, tagline, synopsis, poster and trailer. The importance of cinema for modern culture makes the study of the textual features of the film and its paratexts, including such textual categories as cohesion, especially relevant. The review focuses on the history of research concerning cohesion in verbal texts, cohesive devices in multimodal texts as well as film discourse and its constituent parts. The overview of the existing body of works demonstrates that scholars regard cohesion as a category of text that ensures its formal unity and contributes to successful communication. The ways of expressing cohesion include a broad variety of lexical-grammatical units, complemented by graphic devices and editing techniques in multimodal and audiovisual texts. The analysis of the present body of works on cohesion in film discourse suggests that further advancement in this field requires a more precise methodological framework as well as inclusion of film title, tagline, synopsis and poster into the scope of research.