The Narrative Function Of Moving Images And Camera Movement

Film as the "seventh art" following architecture, music, painting, sculpture, poetry and dance, has its unique characteristics:in addition to some sharing patterns of manifestation with other art, one of the most significants is the moving image. Since film completes a narration through a serial of transitions of images in sequential time, its characteristic of moving image is vividly shown not only by the mobility of characters and objects in the frames, but also by the images mostly produced by various camera movements.By analyzing the formation, the characteristics and the modes of camera movement as well as the narrating principle, this thesis attempts to demonstrate, from the ontological perspective, the decisive role that moving image plays on film narrative, and the radical influence of camera movements pattern on the plot during the narrative process. In the purpose of confirming the self-discipline of film and obtaining a more profound grasp of its language, the thesis, from the filmic ontological perspective, combined with semiotics and narrative theories to show that camera movements as a special kind of filmic symbols had a narrative ideographic aspect forming the denotation and connotation which to be proved has been contained in its own characteristic of double time in moving images, and that camera movement form the variety of narrative pattern through diversification of photographic elements, while establishing a groundbreaking role played by the sequences of camera movements in the construction of film context.