Introduction

In September, 2015, the Globo News TV channel launched its institutional motion sequences Intolerância (Intolerance) and Corrupção (Corruption) during its commercial break. Both motion sequences were illustrated and directed by Israeli designer Noma Bar. The first one mentions global subjects by thematically linking issues such as the war industry and religious fanaticism, which culminates in intolerance, the title of the video. The second institutional motion sequence talks about Brazil’s corruption schemes published by the press called Mensalão³ and Petrolão⁴ and their investigative consequences such as Operação Lava Jato,⁵ which showed the conflict between how the political class works and what were the interests of the working class. Both pieces end with the channel’s logo and their slogan typographic mark: “Globo News. Nunca desliga” (Never disconnects). Hereupon, as these sequences are integrated into the channel schedule and marked as such, they have an institutional status so that they can reiterate Globo News’ strategic positioning as the communication addresser.

In 2016, the motion sequences won the prestigious Bronze Clio Award⁶ for their animation. Globosat’s pay channel qualifies their schedule by hiring the Israeli designer Noma Baras as he is internationally distinguished for his illustration and animation style, whose minimalist figures emphasize and give meaning to the negative space in his images. His work has been featured in major international publications such as The Economist, The Observer, publications from Random House, and the British public television broadcaster BBC. From the semiotic point of view, these sequences offer an instigating content to think semiosis in the production of meaning from the enunciative arrangements that give rise to the articulation of the formants in the plane of videographic textualization expression.

Intolerância was chosen as the corpus to be analyzed because it deals with cultural, religious, ethnic, political, and economic intolerance-driven conflicts between hegemonic powers in the West and political-religious segments in the East, as well as it addresses globalization-related subjects. Such confrontations are transformed into institutional media narratives that reaffirm the ethos of Globo News from Brazil, which is a Latin American country supposedly alienated from these clashes.

It is worth mentioning that Globo News emerged at a historic moment in 1996 when globalization started to take place. Its schedule included national, local (supported by Rede Globo’s structure of affiliate free-to-air channels), and international content (which was based on news agencies and made possible by teams of correspondents who were based in Globo’s international offices such as in New York City and London). By addressing the Intolerância motion sequence, this study aims to identify the enunciative strategies in the process of meaning-making. Based on ^{Floch’s (1985)} theoretical insights in plastic semiotics, the analysis premise is the hypothesis that kineticism is the formant of visuality in audiovisual texts, thus highlighting the relevance of such formant in producing effects of sense.

Kineticism as an audiovisual formant

The analysis of the signification processes of audiovisual products brings into play different theoretical approaches in the communication field, including semiotics. French discursive semiotics focuses on studying the text as an object of meaning at first, as well as an object of communication between two or more subjects. Besides, it seeks to investigate the conditions in which a given language becomes significant. In a previous study, we highlighted that:

Language, understood above all as an object of knowledge, is present in communication relationships and is the link that promotes interaction between subjects. It is not a definable object in itself, but in terms of methods and procedures that allow its analysis and/or its construction, and any attempt to define the language reflects a theoretical attitude that orders the set of facts in its own way (^{Médola, 2019, p. 10}).

Television is a means of communication with its own language and audiovisual origin. Under the semiotics perspective, it is an instrument of internal or immanent analysis of the discourses. Considering that, this study focuses on analyzing the audiovisual manifestation in the realm of visuality, notably graphism, articulated with the expressive sound forms. Noma Bar’s motion sequences on Globo News represent those forms, visually manifested exclusively by using graphic resources. ^{Machado (2014)} assigns the “graphic”⁷ not only to the role of opening and closing shows, but as both the broadcaster logo as a structuring resource in the televisual flow syntagma and responsible for creating the channel’s identity. According to this author, the motion sequence is:

… also an important resource for categorizing the channel schedule, separating units within the continuous transmission flow as if it were a shifter with a purely syntactic function... In that sense, the logo helps to distinguish the differences in the schedule and contributes to, in a certain way, reposition Raymond Williams’ concept of continuous televisual flow (^{Machado, 2014, p. 201}).

Thus, motion sequences play an articulating role in the television syntagma, establishing flows, interruptions, and resuming. More than that, they promote identification; that is, they create a visual, musical and verbal identity, which is articulated from thematic isotopies of the discourses of each of the channel programs. When it comes to institutional motion sequences, discourse contributes to building channel identity through discursive reiteration.

French discursive semiotics allows one to consider the conception of the Saussurian sign and ^{Hjelmslev’s (1975)} theoretical insights. Consequently, the televisual manifestation is approached under the recognition that both content and expression planes are formed by substance and form. Such a premise supports the formulations of theorists such as ^{Floch (1985)}, who developed important advances for the understanding of plastic semiotics and expanded the perspectives for the analysis of syncretic semiotics. By creating reading procedures that can demonstrate semiosis not only in reciprocal presupposition relation between the two planes of languages -that is, expression and content- but also the semi-symbolic relations established from articulating and homologating categories that are understood in both planes, the study of meaning in syncretic semiotics achieved an important methodological advance. The generative path of meaning in the content plane represents a very developed model that applies to the analysis of verbal and non-verbal texts. However, it is worth mentioning that the development of visual semiotics -identifying the eidetic, chromatic, and topological formants of the expression plane of imagetic texts- encouraged studies on the identification of semi-symbolical relations also in syncretic texts such as the audiovisual (^{Floch, 1985}).

Nonetheless, the genesis in the “scripture” of the audiovisual image, whether cinematographic or videographic, generated by analog or digital technology, produces the representation of movement. In this study, we propose to work with the idea of kineticism as a formant of movement representation in the audiovisual expression plane. In studies on mechanics, kineticism investigates the relationship between the movement of bodies and the forces acting on them (^{Newton, 1729/1999}). Taking that into account, adopting that term to refer to the formant of movement representation in the audiovisual record is equivalent to the designations of eidos, chrome and topos in the different visual records of representation of forms, colors and spaces, respectively, in visual semiotics. That is the case since, strictly speaking, formants are articulated in enunciative arrangements to produce effects of sense.

One can view kinetics as a formant of effects of sense of movement in audiovisual recordings from two dimensions: The first is movement projection resulting from the sequential display of the frames; the second, from the electronic record, within the frame setting itself. The thought matrix that supports the understanding of movement in audiovisual media in those two dimensions is philosophical, as Bergson’s reflections since the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century focus on the illusion of movement in the cinema, resumed later by ^{Deleuze in books such as Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983)} and ^{Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1990)}, for example. He discusses in these books the difficulty in thinking movement since classical antiquity, thus showing the possibility of deducing movement of static positions -the photogram in analog cinema-, the sequential projection of which reconstructs movement itself in time.

In 1907, Bergson showed in chapter IV of Creative Evolution how it is possible to deduce movement itself from the immanence of the cinematographic record by illustrating how it detaches itself from space and becomes abstract in time. In the chapter “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion”, ^{Bergson (1911)} argues that:

In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge (p. 332, emphasis in original).

Hence the intrinsic relationship between movement and time, movement and duration, engendering, in the semiotic perspective, the discursive aspectualization, as will be detailed below. Projecting the sequencing of the captured moments, whether in analog records such as film photograms, or the frames of electronic images made by pixels from scanning lines in electronic devices such as analog televisions and videos, or bits in synthetic images from digital devices, implies kineticism as a formant intrinsic to the effect of sense of movement in audiovisual manifestations. The frame sequence as an element of discontinuity establishes the paradox of continuity of movement that is stuck in temporality. In other words, that instant recorded in a frame and projected in succession to the moments cut out in other frames is the first dimension of discontinuity in the continuity flow. Frame successiveness creates the continuity that is particular to movement. However, considering electronic, technological devices, ^{Machado (1995)} explains that:

A frame is different from a photogram as it already carries movement, change, alteration, displacement of figures, colors, and luminous intensity... As a result of its own constitution, video was the first media to work concretely with movement (that is, with the space-time relationship), if we consider that cinema, in essence, remains as a succession of fixed photograms (p. 43).

Thus, one can consider the occurrence of a second dimension of movement within the frame, constituting the genesis of movement in audiovisual media in electronic means. This second dimension is circumscribed in the “intra” frame and also has a parallel in ^{Bergson’s (1911)} philosophy on the sensitive qualities that engender movement.

From the first glance at the world, even before we can define bodies, we can distinguish qualities in it. A color succeeds a color; a sound succeeds a sound; a resistance succeeds a resistance; and so on. Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a state that seems to persist just like that, motionless, waiting for the other to replace it. Each of these qualities, however, has become a huge number of elementary movements in the analysis. Whether one sees vibrations in it, or whether it is represented in an entirely different way, one fact is certain: all quality is change (pp. 326-327).

Considering a second dimension of movement in electronic imaging devices, that is, within the frame, kineticism as a formant in the visuality of the audiovisual representation becomes pregnant as a sensible quality. The kinetic formant articulates the continuous metamorphosis of chromatic, eidetic and topological formants. It is at the core of the manipulability of textualization procedures within the frame, organized in the analogical electronic system of scanning line, as well as in the numerical logic of the digital register as described by ^{Couchot (2011)}.

Mobilizing, in the expression plane, the continuous vs. discontinuous category in the representation of movement, the kinetic formant can be seen as an intrinsic element of the moving image, is also a discursive resource inherent to the aspectual configuration in the audiovisual enunciate, therefore in the content plane. According to ^{Greimas and Courtés (2016, p. 39)}, the aspectualization reveals the implicit presence of an observer on the succession of aspectual semes such as inchoativity → durability → terminativity, temporalizing an enunciate of state or an enunciate of doing. Such aspectual configurations can also be useful for understanding movement as a process in audiovisual manifestation.

From the point of view of the enunciative praxis and the mode of existence of the audiovisual image, the kinetic formant, that is, the form of expression that produces the effect of sense of movement, dialogues with the notion of becoming, according to ^{Fontanille and Zilberberg (1998)}, corroborating for the understanding of this formant as it is interspersed between the categories of continuity and aspect in the production of meaning. For these authors:

The becoming should be approached as a mediation between the term ab quo and the term ad quem of the aspect as it is defined by linguists. The virtualities of the continuum, or even the waits with which the subject changes the continuum, that is, divisibility and orientation, are realized by the becoming and these formal achievements of becoming will be used, after stabilization as a support for aspectualization (^{Fontanille & Zilberberg, 1998, p. 121}).

Thus, considering the relevance of admitting that the audiovisual language hosts kineticism as a formant of the expression plane, which is the main hypothesis of this study, we identified textualization procedures in the analyzed object that show how relevant the kinetic formant is in the content plane for producing sense. Movement visuality in the manifestation of Bar’s award-winning motion sequences for Globo News articulates in the enunciative arrangements to the continuous vs. discontinuous category, producing stabilization within the aspectual configuration of inchoativity, durability, terminology inherent to the process that allows to predict or wait for the movement so that in the reciprocal presupposition of semiosis it can, as we will see, be homologated to the values in circulation in the content plane which are present in the institutional sequence slogan, “Never Disconnects”. That implicitly establishes the fiduciary contract to be an unceasing and continuous source of information for the subscriber.

Intolerância: Continuously Moving Narrativization

Aired throughout Globo News’ schedule, the institutional sequence Intolerância addresses globally important themes debated in 2015, and is guided by speeches from hegemonic nations in the Western world as well as from international organizations. On account of the conflicts engendered by antagonistic interests in different geopolitical contexts, marked by socio-cultural specificities and economic inequalities, xenophobia stands out. It reveals how the events resulting from the purposes of domination, connected to the incomprehension of the others’ cultural and religious habits, create seemingly insurmountable schisms. Intolerance is the clearest result that comes from the obtuse view of the relationship between me and the other. It is shown in different ways and circumstances, and migratory refugee movements, war conflicts and terrorism are global themes. By shedding light on the significant elements from the motion sequence, we aim to understand how these issues emerge as effects of sense of the enunciative arrangements in videographism, giving priority to observation over the audiovisual expression plane formants.

The verbal and imagetic languages in Table 1 are a precarious resource to describe the object being analyzed. Also, audiovisual fruition⁸ is key to observe the role of the kinetic formant as an articulator of eidetic, chromatic and topological formants in the continuous metamorphosis of the speech figures. In that sense, the starting point is the idea that Intolerância’s enunciative arrangements are made possible by incorporating the kinetic formant since the narrative transformations do without cutting planes and textualized in a sequence plan.

Table 1 Description of Globo News’ institutional motion sequence Intolerância 

Scene	Plastic dimension	Oral-verbal dimension	Description
Scene 1		“Economic supremacy...”.	The first scene stands out with turquoise filling most of the frame, which then assumes the figurativization of a sky, where three eagles appear flying.
Transition: Scene 1 to Scene 2			In the transition between scenes 1 and 2, there is a vertical camera movement, from top to bottom, which reveals a skyline silhouette (confirmed by the presence of quadrilateral geometric shapes). The number of birds changes. At first, that number increases, but as the camera moves through the city, only one bird stands out, flying in isolation.
Scene 2		“... is connected to military force”.	In scene 2, the bird that once flew over the city changes its flight direction. It becomes a threatening figure (with its wings aligned and positioned perpendicular to the horizon) coming towards the foreground. As it gets closer, the background reveals a shape standing out in the city: the Statue of Liberty. Therefore, that is not just any city; it is New York. In the same way, the eagle no longer represents a random category of birds: it represents the United States as a war nation. That is because there is a battle tank in the spot that figuratively represents the eye of the eagle, which reiterates the isotopy of belligerence. The text with a voice-over narration highlights the military sense of the eagle.
Transition: Scene 2 to Scene 3			In the transition from scene 2 to scene 3, the camera moves away, allowing the viewer to see the back of the eagle. Simultaneously, coming from right to left (that is, opposite to the Western reading direction), the shape of a military aircraft appears, coming into the opposite direction of the eagle (left to right). The screen that was previously divided into turquoise and red is also divided into a third stripe in white. Three colors are now on the scene. Blue, red, and white represent the colors of the United States flag. However, turquoise blue and white also represent the colors of the Israeli flag. The opposite movement directions of the eagle and the warplane-like white stripe make a second composition.
Scene 3		“Which is connected to the war industry”.	This new composition further highlights the three stripes, which symbolically represent the flags. More than that, the eagle shape becomes smaller and is surrounded by a new shape, that of a bear. The voice-over text goes back to the military issue.
Transition: Scene 3 to Scene 4			The battle tank shape representing the eagle’s eye moves across the scene. It follows the left to right direction synchronously with the zoomin movement of the camera, making the stripes represent the scenario again. There was a redcolored metropolis before; now, the eagle covers the city. The narrative takes place in a different space now. No geometric shapes are representing any buildings. A yellow band appears in continuity with the bird’s beak and then establishes another space, representing a desert, which alludes to the war scenario in the Middle East. A red shape remains constant below the yellow band. The battle tank (no longer an “eye”) continues to move from left to right.
Scene 4		“Which is connected to war”.	The tank no longer moves after shooting the plane. The screen zooms in simultaneously with the cannon barrel movement and is positioned perpendicular to the tank axis. The cannon shot is enlarged, revealing an attack. The voice-over text reiterates the attack.
Transition: Scene 4 to Scene 5		“Which is connected to outrage”.	The tank no longer moves after shooting the plane. The screen zooms in simultaneously with the cannon barrel movement and is positioned perpendicular to the tank axis. The cannon shot is enlarged, revealing an attack. The voice-over text reiterates the attack.
Scene 5		“Which is connected to satire”.	The camera zooms in, and the white shape depicting the cannon shot becomes a new shape: the tip of a fountain pen. The new camera movement reveals that the pen is writing something. Being a fountain pen, far from the day-to-day use, also represents the strength of what was written, identified in the voice-over text.
Transition: Scene 5 to Scene 6			The camera zooms out and reveals the pen’s body, which again is turquoise. The camera axis simultaneously rotates.
Scene 6		“Which is connected to fanaticism”.	The camera zooms out on the shape, which now becomes the shape of an unidentifiable armed man, which the voice-over text describes as a fanatic. “Which is connected to fanaticism”. The tip of the fountain pen releases a drop of ink, which can be interpreted as a tear due to its spatial placement. The chromatic shapes are now upright as a background in blue, white and red, depicting the flag of France.
Transition: Scene 6 to Scene 7		“Which is connected to intolerance”.	The camera rotates and takes away the white and red colors from the background while the back of the head transforms into a dome that refers to the architecture of the mosques.
Scene 7			A new shape appears on top of the dome, centered on the portal: a mast with the crescent moon, a symbol of Islam, at its tip. The oral text outlines the intolerance theme.
Transition: Scene 7 to Scene 8			Next, a downward camera movement removes the dome from the frame and reveals a portal (typical of Ottoman/Islamic architecture). It remains black. The crescent moon in the background is surrounded by a blue strip darker than turquoise that figurativizes the night sky.
Scene 8		“Which is connected to persecution”.	The camera zooms in, thus highlighting the sides of the portal. Its moving shapes resemble two human faces. There are two holes representing the eyes, as well as the silhouette of a nose, mouth, and chin. The moving mouth and eyes indicate that there is a clash between the two shapes. The verbal text introduces the persecution theme.
Transition: Scene 8 to Scene 9			The camera zooms in and goes through the portal formed by the silhouettes of the two clashing human shapes. The horizontal blue stripes with different shades become prominent. This time they represent the ocean and the night sky. A boat shape shows up navigating from left to right.
Scene 9		“Which is connected to escape. Which is connected to tragedy”.	As the camera approaches, the boat becomes more detailed. The black outline suggests there are human shapes on the white boat. They raise their hands as if they were asking for help. The audible verbal text describes them as they were “fleeing”. A new shape appears from left to right. It looks like a bigger boat capable of performing a rescue. The vessel bears the Euro currency symbol, thus representing the European Union. The frame zooms out and reveals what is actually a shark, and its eye (now threatening) is the Euro symbol. The refugee boat navigates towards the shark and morphs into the shark’s mouth, thus suggesting that they succumbed, which is confirmed by the voice-over text.
Transition: Scene 9 to Scene 10		“Which is connected to commotion”.	The shark moves towards the bottom of the sea, leaving only its fin visible. As it swims, it reveals other shapes representing different sharks swimming around the same spot.
Scene 10			The sharks keep swimming in the ocean until they get in formation. There are two differently-sized fins on each side.
Transition: Scene 10 to Scene 11		“Which is connected to the world”.	As the camera zooms out, a new black shape that surrounds the blue ocean appears and reveals a human skull.
Scene 11			The human skull keeps going away from the screen, thus widening its black outline. Two white shapes (two crossed bones) appear behind the skull, representing danger. The frame keeps zooming out until the skull is gone.
Signature		“Never disconnects”.	The Globo News channel logo appears. It says “Never disconnects”.

Table 1 shows the segment sequence of Intolerância’s scenes by using a storyboard in the column related to the visual field that hosts the plastic dimension, while the oral verbal dimension column has the verbal and visual registers. Also, the description column shows some decoupage through verbal language. The plastic dimension and description columns are based on referencing the natural world through figurative projections. The table shows frames captured from each of the eleven scenes, which in turn are interspersed by ten “transitions”, considering that the metamorphoses of the figures inside the frames take place in continuous movement, without any cuts except for the final signature. Such segmentation for analysis purposes has a strictly operational function that allows us to identify the enunciative arrangements that articulate the plastic formants that project the syntactic and semantic elements of the discursive level, that is, actors, time and space that generate the figures and the themes.

A panoramic view of the scene sequence from Intolerância allows us to identify the effect of sense of figures from the natural world graphically represented by colors, which articulate forms within the spatiality limited to the frame. They are the chromatic, eidetic and topological formants in each frame, understood as the register of that moment, which is preceded by an earlier instant and precedes a later instant, thus being the foundation of kineticism representation that produces the effect of sense of movement, according to the Bergsonian analogy of the cinematographic mechanism to understand movement (^{Bergson, 1911}).

Regarding the graphism analyzed in this study, the movement that affects the formants generates figures in a constant metamorphosis process, which results in effects of sense that can be segmented in scenes as proposed below:

• Scene 1. A blue daytime sky and three birds;

• Scene 2. A skyline and an eagle in the foreground;

• Scene 3. The eagle surrounded by a bear;

• Scene 4. A desert skyline with a battle tank on the ground and a plane in the sky;

• Scene 5. A fountain pen upright on its table support;

• Scene 6. The silhouette of an armed militant surrounded by the French flag;

• Scene 7. An Islamic dome surrounded by the crescent moon;

• Scene 8. A portal with Arab architectural aesthetics;

• Scene 9. Two vessels: A smaller one with the silhouettes of people and a bigger one.

• Scene 10. The ocean and shark fins;

• Scene 11. A human skull crossed by two bones.

According to the example of ^{Floch’s (1985)} inaugural analysis in Petites mythologies de l’oeil et de l’esprit: pour une sémiotique plastique, seeing things from the formants’ view leads one to observe the semiosis between expression and content that operates in the process of production of sense. Let us focus the analysis on the first two scenes of the motion sequence. In scene 1, the effect of sense that allows the first two pictures to be read as “A blue daytime sky and three birds” is the result of the enunciative arrangements of the chromatic elements topologically distributed, which then results in figures. In fact, in the first picture, the light blue color is over the entire surface, with no chromaticism nuance, which is something present in all of the sequence scenes. In the second frame, that blue color hosts the movement of three strokes in black, elongated, different proportions, arranged in a triangle that creates the effect of depth by establishing the perspective of an observer looking from the bottom up. Both the blue color and the perspective from the top endorse the semantic reiteration.

The figurative isotopy of the sky also remains in the frames of the transition to scene two, in which other black strokes are moving at the top of the frame, high up, multiplying, referring to the figurative essentiality of birds cutting the blue planar surface. As previously mentioned, movement is generated both in the succession of frames and in the sensitive qualities manifested by the imperceptible scanning lines inside these frames. That way, introducing the color red, which creates rectilinear figures with pointed elevations perpendicular to the horizontality at the bottom of the frame, down below, allows to identify the reference to an urban space, a city in the distance, which is approached in the foreground, also at the bottom of the frame, by the figure of an eagle advancing towards the buildings in red, from which stands out the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. The figure of an eagle is manifested in black, from which the body and eye figures emanate. The eye is then surrounded by the white color that figures the head, and finally yellow, which completes the pointed, downward-facing eagle’s beak.

It is worth mentioning that non-semanticized strokes between the scenes listed mark the transitions. That creates a link that marks a discontinuity between scenes, thus replacing the continuous cut of the images in the audiovisual flow. Therefore, the sequence analyzed in this study follows a path that oscillates between figurative and abstract (^{Greimas, 1984}), continuous and discontinuous. That develops in a temporal continuum, in which both eidetic and chromatic formants are metamorphosed through kineticism, thus assuming new figurative forms. Even though the figures in the transitions have a metonymic character still subject to non-semantization, the transformation process has meaning since the metamorphosis is transparent: The enunciatee is offered with the transformations of forms and their new dispositions in the temporal flow, as follows:

1. The figures of an eagle and a bear morphing into a desert;

2. A shot from a battle tank morphs into a fountain pen;

3. A fountain pen morphing into the eyes of a militant;

4. The militant’s face silhouette morphing into a dome;

5. An Arab portal morphs into two human faces;

6. A ship morphs into a shark;

7. Shark fins move and morph into a human skull.

The enunciative arrangement created by the effect of sense of an uninterrupted movement process, of a transformation of figures in the visuality sphere, is also articulated with the verbal sound language. The text “Economic supremacy...” in scene 1 is complemented by “is connected to military force...” in scene 2, triggering the inchoativity of the sequence. Based on this initial statement, the isotopy of the immediate connection between themes is established through the verbal anchoring of the connective “is connected to...” preceding the development in a cause-effect relationship of the socioeconomic, cultural, and religious forces of which emanate themes manifested as fanaticism and intolerance. The connection between facts reiterates the effect of sense of a continuum. The terminativeness expressed in the communication addresser signature in both graphism and audio “Globo News. Never Disconnects” is a marker of discontinuity in the motion sequence within the scope of the schedule flow. However, the effect of sense created maintains the enunciative contract that provides Globo News with the competence to always maintain, without interruption, the information available to its subscribers.

Both thematic developments and figurative metamorphoses perceived take place in the temporal continuum durability of the motion sequence audiovisual textualization. Visual-wise, such continuity is manifested due to the succession of frames that generates the simulacrum of movement. That is because, as previously mentioned, the supports through which the audiovisual texts are manifested have technical constraints to simulate movement, and the metamorphoses of the figures that produce meaning in the content plane are imbricated in the continuous vs. temporal discontinuous of the kinetic formant as a constituent of the expression.

Let us see how this happens by taking the transition from scene 3 to scene 4 as an example. In its plastic dimension, scene 4 presents a desert skyline. That concreteness is perceived in the expression plane by the articulation between chromatic and eidetic. Through topological organization, that results in the figurativeness of the blue sky, high up, and the yellow soil, down below. In the content plane, the desert is the effect of sense of bare, uninhabited soil. The previous scenes show an urban skyline, notably the United States of America, marked by symbols such as the eagle and the Statue of Liberty. In this new construction, however, the red soil refers to the terracotta coloring of the buildings and is replaced by a flattened yellow figure. Such metamorphosis develops from the figure of the eagle. The yellow of its beak expands horizontally and discards its curvilinear figure to then metamorphose into a rectangle placed at the lower end of the frame.

In turn, the war tank projected from the eagle’s eye that moves from left to right over the desert is not the product of a figure transformation, because, unlike the desert eagle beak, the figure of the tank has been materialized since the previous scene, in which it played the figurative role of the eagle’s eye. In the content plane, this eye-tank configuration is established as a thematic isotopy since the eagle is a military symbol of the US army. Thus, in the figure of an eye, the tank still has a meaning of military strength. The eye-tank moving through the beak-desert implicitly allows us to realize that the influence and power of the United States Army Eagle reach the East as the eagle had been previously encompassed by the figure of a bear (the symbol of Russia). This movement (eagle to the right and bear to the left) metamorphoses a new figurative space: the desert, formed by the yellow and blue of the eagle and the white of the bear. The desert, however, represents the Middle East, which is placed in a central spot in the United States-Russia conflict.

Conclusions

The motion sequence Intolerância attributes to Globo News, the communication addresser, an actantial role as an information articulator that focus its local view on global issues such as economic supremacy, military strength, religious fanaticism and cultural intolerance, thus discussing themes related to semantic categories of inclusion vs. exclusion, as well as equality vs. inequality, which permeate public debate in Western nations. Both concreteness and complexity at the discursive level of the categories derived from such themes corroborate, at the semio-narrative level, to create the base category identity vs. alterity in the content plane.

We also must consider that the narrative in Intolerância’s discourse makes clear the look at facts related to the other, the foreigner. By broadcasting such a sequence with the marks of institutionality in their channel schedule, this enunciator operates in order to reason about global themes and addresses a local recipient, limited to the channel’s subscriber: the Brazilian audience. Mediating this communication addressee’s permanent access to information on what happens in the world provides the addressee with a continuous knowledge about global issues. It is an attribution of modal competence donated by an addresser who seeks to reaffirm the ethos of being a permanent information channel, without discontinuity, as it “Never disconnects”. This is the value object implicit in the relationship between Globo News and its subscribers.

Finally, in addition to highlighting the ideology and values aligned with Globo News’ Western vision as the communication addresser, our goal in this study was to advance the understanding of how the kinetic formant of the audiovisual expression plan is textualized in enunciative arrangements to engender the effects of sense in the content plane. By choosing the motion sequence Intolerância to show kineticism as an expression formant of the audiovisual text in creating effect of sense in the temporal flow, it was clear how the continuous vs. discontinuous category, present in both Intolerância plane of language, was established by replication. The establishment of this same category in a semi-symbolic relationship reaffirms the construction of Globo News addresser’s ethos. This is due to the discontinuity of the institutional motion sequence inchoativity that is opposed to the continuous incessant effect of the slogan “Globo News: Never disconnects”, which is particular to the simulacrum of a journalistic work committed to the dynamics of events.