The Visual Culture Out Of The Cover Of "Movie View"

Movie View started its publication in November1999, when Chinese filmindustry began to flourish, and various film magazines began to reform. To go withthe tide, Movie View converted from Journal of theory into Journal of entertainment,and become a representative of successful conversion. Movie View has beenexploring the developing way for more than10years, which defines a unique textstyle for it. Not only does it broke the dominance of the old movie magazine PopularFilm, but also win readers’ favor by rich contents and qualified pictures. Movie Viewproduces great economic benefits by advertising, and heads the circulation list of itskind, known as "First Journal for Chinese fans".This paper studies the covers of Movie View, which are published from1999to2012. The study inquiries the meaning within the covers on visual culture, combinedwith Chinese culture and film development at present, and reveals the reference of itsvisual representation in the cover, combined with the relevant knowledge of semioticstheory.This paper mainly consists of the following sections.The introduction part is about the background of this study. It reviews andoutlines the achievements of processors in the research of cover and visual culture,and shows the research methods, innovation points and samples selection.The first chapter studies the ontology of Movie View by describing its basicstatement. On the basis of outlining its funding background and developing history,the author introduces its cover features.The second chapter analyzes the visual representation of the cover elements ofMovie View. The chapter analyzes the cover elements of386samples from semioticperspective. At the first part, the tone, the compositional elements, and the genderimage of the character are focused on to understand the intention and construction ofMovie View cover.According to the statistics, the use of colors in Movie View cover is centralized.There are no more than three colors in the cover of odd issue. By calculating the titlecolor, the background color, and the headline color, the author finds that brown, gray,black, red is the usual tone of these cover elements on distributed theme with aconsideration of the region and time readers live in. By analyzing the composition ofelements, the author finds that Movie View upholds the focus of character and still, so that the character inhabits the majority of cover. However, by analyzing the genderimage of the character, the author finds that Movie View cover does not fall into thestereotype of "cover girl". There are more male images than the female images. Byanalyzing the cover composition in Designing, the author finds it around Chinesereaders’ favor although it is always related to foreign films.After analyzing above variables, the second part of this chapter considers thecovers with domestic movie as samples and take them into deep study. For MovieView issuing at home has a close relationship with the development of Chinese filmindustry, this part inquiries the ideological construction of the visual symbol in coverswith the development of Chinese films since the foundation of Movie View.Chapter3makes a system reflection based on above study. According to thestatistics and analysis, this paper explore the relations between Movie View cover andChinese film development, and the weakness on brand building and advertising.The epilogue summarizes the whole paper. Using content analysis method, thispaper explores the meaning construction of "Movie View cover, including the visualmessage, social property and suggestions on its defects, through interpreting thevisual representation of the elements of Movie View cover with visual culture andsemiotics theories.