On Cinematic Imagination In Pai Hsien-yung’s Novels

In literature, novel is a comprehensive form of literature, belonging to the least pure category of literature. Novel has more contents than poetry and prose and the time-space design and the character creation in a novel are more free and broad. Movie is a comprehensive art and it is a blend of literature, music, painting, science and technology and different categories of art. Although novel and movie are two different art forms, they have common features: such as emotional catharsis, spills, and other emotional thinking perfusion. As an expression of human emotion, and their manifestations in existence, it is natural that novel and movie are closely related. Pai Hsien-yung’s literary works have been adapted for movies and TV plays and even dramas, mainly because his literary works have a strong sense of image. This thesis attempts to reveal the relation between Pai’s novel writing techniques and ways of expression in movies and make an in-depth exploration and interpretation of a cinematic narrative tendency in Pai’s novels by using the method of text reading. Making an interdisciplinary research on novel and movie will become another innovative perspective to discuss the aesthetic connotation of Pai’s literary works.In the first chapter, the theories about cinematic imagination are listed, the artistic features of Pai’s novels are briefly discussed and the previous researches on Pai’s novels are given. In the second chapter, by analyzing Pai’s novel text from language(imitating the movie language), time-space design and montage narration, a long-neglected fact can be demonstrated: there is a aesthetic pursuit of cinematic imagination in Pai’s novel text. In the third chapter, the origin of “cinematic imagination” in Pai’s novels is explored from these aspects, the influence of Western literary theory and Chinese traditional aesthetics, the artistic features shared by novel narration and movie narration, and then the reasons why there is a cinematic narrative tendency in Pai’s novels are deeply analyzed. In the fourth chapter, the value of studying “cinematic imagination” in Pai’s novels is summarized.