Investigating ideology, manipulation, and text interpretation in documentary films

The paper will start by introducing the research project behind my recent monograph, entitled Multimodality, Ideology, and Manipulation (Castaldi, 2025). The study integrates audience research (e.g. Schrøder et al., 2003) and multimodal critical discourse analysis (e.g. Machin and Mayr, 2012) to investigate “how individuals discursively constitute themselves” (Castaldi, 2021, p. 56). The approach takes a narrow reading of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, where ideological dissemination is seen as the work of civil society, rather than political society, and therefore focuses on the mass-mediated genre of travel and cultural documentaries.

The research assumes that multimodal semiosis is infused with ideologies, as the choice of signs is always motivated (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2020, p. 10). The approach, however, acknowledges the agentive position of the individual in ideology formation and, through the analysis of three case studies, aims to shed some light on the whole process of mass-mediated communication, from production to reception, with a focus on manipulative processes.

The paper will conclude with a discussion around the challenges of investigating the reception of multimodal texts. Here we will take stock of what research using different approaches to reception studies has shown to date, and we will consider possible trajectories for future research.