Image Of The Multi-dimensional Fable

The series of "Red Films", Zhang Yimou's early creations, have made great achievements in visual arts. Through the application of various kinds of visual methods, these movies have not only realized the bodily pictorial beauty, but also achieved narrative meaning, unique cultural suggestion and certain commercial factors. Under the organic control of visual methods, the ontological beauty, the presence of narration, the cultural meaning and the commercial value have been combined, which brought these movies huge success in various aspects. However, the present research related to visual arts in "Red Films" always only covers "beauty of form" aspect while neglecting the rests, which requires completeness. Meantime, all these "Red Films" have been adapted from novels. That is to say, a research, which is based on the rules and the transformation from textual to visual codes in the adaptation procedure, is born to own a large quantity of both visual materials and the original textual stories as comparison resources. Therefore, the comparative adaptation perspective is the perfect gateway for analyzing visual methods in "Red Films" and would be constructive in understanding the various and irreplaceable role of visual arts in these films. As such, in the hope of investigating the unique role of visual methods in "Red Film" adaptation, I try to enter from the comparative reading between the novels and the films, analyze this series of films in three aspects: narration, cultural meaning and commercial value, and understand the function of visual methods in Zhang Yimou's films through a more integrated perspective beyond the present research. Meantime, because the visual system in a movie can be considered as the movie itself to some extent, I try to combine the close textual reading with the theoretical explanation and historical inspection, hoping to investigate the certainty of these films' success, and then obtain more inspirational thinking about "Film" as an independent art category.Besides, the visual adaptation strategies have provoked lots of criticism upon Zhang Yimou and his films, claiming his probable catering to "Orientalism". This paper is also in hope of investigating the reasonable and unreasonable aspects of those criticisms, and looking for support of these visual adaptations on the basis of a close reading and theoretical carding.