The Construction Of Film Metaphors By Visual Element

This paper is an exploration of how visual elements participate in the construction of movie metaphors.Metaphor is a common form of ideographic expression in movies.Pasolini even pointed out that "films survive by metaphor" in "The Poetic Film".However,the current study of film metaphor or the metaphorical interpretation of a single film lacks certain universality and theoretical depth,or regards the study of film metaphor as an appendage of language metaphor,ignoring the particularity of film art form.Andre Bazan,a famous French film theorist,said: "The better way to understand film is to know how it tells stories." Similarly,the best way to understand film metaphor is to know how it is constructed.Therefore,this paper examines the construction mechanism of movie metaphor.Combining Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory and the emerging multimodal metaphor research,the first chapter of the paper first discusses that metaphor is essentially a cognitive mode of thinking of human beings,and movie metaphor is a cognitive activity that constructs and expresses concepts through audio-visual elements,and on this basis outlines the overall construction process of metaphor from thinking to audio-visual symbols,laying the groundwork for the development of metaphor construction below.The second to fourth chapters take the visual elements as the specific research object,and according to the logic from simple to complex,from micro to macro,divide the construction of metaphor by visual elements into three parts to investigate.The second chapter discusses the construction of metaphor by independent visual elements.Independent visual elements are the smallest unit of metaphor construction and the basis for visual elements to participate in metaphor construction.Objects with specific physical properties and their actions,role modeling and performance,color selection,light and shadow changes are common ways for independent visual elements to participate in metaphor construction.The third chapter explores how different visual elements construct metaphors under the combination and arrangement of directors.The visual elements in the screen screen are often not appear alone.The distance between visual elements,the position they appear in the screen,the proportion of space they occupy,and the angle of presentation may all be deliberately arranged by the director.This arrangement,composition,and shooting of different visual elements are scene scheduling.A large number of films in film history show that scene scheduling is an important way for directors to construct metaphors.The fourth chapter focuses on how the lens based on visual elements constructs metaphor through later editing.With different visual elements as the core,the splicing between shots,the urgency of editing rhythm,and the combination of editing and special effects all create more possibilities for the combination of metaphor.The fifth chapter discusses the significance of metaphor in the study of film aesthetics and the practice of film art by combining the cognitive and rhetorical characteristics of film metaphor,and puts forward the reflection and prospect of the development of film metaphor in combination with the current domestic film works.In order to avoid the exploration of the construction mechanism of movie metaphors becoming a simple transfer and insertion of universal linguistic metaphor research,the article closely combines the creative examples in movies and the creative discussions of relevant directors in the argument,and conducts a special research on the unique characteristics of film art such as scene scheduling,shots,and montage in the construction practice,striving to maintain the freshness and independence of the research on the construction mechanism of movie metaphors.