A Study Of Audience Identification In Biographical Films

The figure biographical film is a category of film that presents the life of a person and expresses the qualities of their character.In terms of its social function,the biographical film naturally possesses a certain empirical documentary value;in terms of artistic creation and reception,the external aesthetic representation and internal emotional value of the biographical film cannot be ignored.The dual nature of the biopic thus determines that it is significantly different from other genres and subjects in terms of the selection of the biographer’s story,the assessment of commercial factors,the social psychological projection,and the artistic fictional processing.With the coupling of different “forces”,biographical films present a complex internal logic that shapes the audience’s “identification”.Based on this,this dissertation attempts to explain the mode of audience identification in the context of biographical films from an occult perspective,and attempts to correlate traditional film studies with interdisciplinary research by using empirical methods to conduct semi-structured interviews with audiences in order to provide new ideas for the interpretation of biographical film theory and criticism.Looking at biographical films from the perspective of reception aesthetics,we can find a path of subject-object relativity that begins with the biographer’s prototype and leads to the audience through the creator,constituting an undirected dynamic structure between“biographer-creator(actor)-audience”,with each specific path ending with the audience,and the audience’s subject identity being confirmed.The author thus distinguishes two basic modes of identification with biographical films through the differences in audience identification orientation: the first is the “cognitive-identification” mode and the second is the“emotional-identification” mode.The distinction between the two lies in the principle of artistic creation that favours historical facts or imagination.As a reflection of the empirical approach,the results of the interviews from the qualitative study are presented and coded in the first section,providing a degree of factual evidence and details to complement the classification of the modes of identification.Based on the distinction between the modes of audience identification,the main part of the article develops the representation,logic and results of the “cognitive-identification” and“emotional-identification” modes respectively.In the“cognitive-identification” mode,the viewer appeals to a relatively rational cognitive sphere to reach a form of “identification”through the visualisation/visualisation of the actors’ physical bodies and biographical events.This mode is guided by the consistency or high similarity between the film narrative and the objective facts,revealing a documentary style that aims to restore empirical perceptions,leading the viewer to automatically associate the “distracting” experience with the real,and to create a deep interrelationship between the texts in the portrayal of different aspects of the same biographer and his or her life story,which in turn leads to the character This leads to a reflection on the ethics of biography in the creation of biopics.In the“emotional-identification” mode,the emotional rhetoric of intuitive sensory stimuli and the actors’ performances,as well as the audiovisual “atmosphere” carefully created by the director,pull the audience through the emotional ups and downs,appealing to a more emotional sphere to achieve The “identification” pattern.This mode of action is effective in moving from lyricism to “emotion”,and in exploring the aesthetic style of the heart.Such a creative attitude has yielded positive results in concrete cinematic practice,but it also carries potential risks.On the positive side,the emotionally driven mode of identification is in line with the essential requirement of the new biography of “life-writing”;on the negative side,the strong emotional attachment to the archetypal biographer with a strong “I-ness” tends to homogenise the image of the biographer in the image world,and to a certain extent dissipates the individual audience.To a certain extent,this dissolves the diverse emotional resonance of the individual viewer,and in turn fosters the voyeurism of the spectacle of the other.Based on the analysis of the similarities and differences between the“cognitiveidentification”and“emotional-identification”models and the compilation of empirical evidence,the author offers a three-dimensional interpretation of biographical films.On the one hand,I use two Chinese and foreign biographical masterpieces as examples to discuss the idealised identification of the audience under the dialectical unity of“cognition”and“emotion”,i.e.the documentary narrative is in line with cognition and the sensible lyricism triggers an emotional and holistic identification,whose characteristics On the other hand,by criticising the current situation of audience identification,a tendency towards identification based on“negativity”is summarised and refined.On the other hand,by criticising the current state of audience identification,we have distilled a tendency towards a negative identification,which in practice is highlighted by three principles: anti-imitation,anti-grandstanding and anti-meaning.In short,audience identification,in relation to biographical films,constitutes the cause of the category at the epistemological level while constituting the effect of the reception system,and the study of identification is essentially an ontological study of biography and will effectively The study of identity is essentially an ontological study of biography and will effectively feed into the creative practice of the category.