探索电影的意义地图——美国电影批评中的文化地理学研究

Exploring the Map of Meaning in the Film—— Cultural Geography Research in American Film Criticism

电影在以影像方式再现现实环境的同时也构建象征环境,引发特有的视觉感受和理性认知。大卫·波德威尔曾经指出,好莱坞电影通过赋予角色周围的环境以心理意义,使物理环境成为内在心理的外在表达,努力把电影空间转变为故事空间,从而将电影批评与研究引向了文化地理学领域。文化地理学以人类文化空间组合及其发展演化规律为研究对象,分析地表各种文化现象的分布,探讨文化景观、文化起源、文化生态环境以及环境的文化意义。美国电影批评中的文化地理学研究便将地理空间作为重要的电影文本代码,从探讨空间运用的社会意义、发掘自然场景的审美功能、辨识地缘意象的叙事价值等角度,研究电影中景观与空间关于社会政治经济变迁的隐喻性表达,使文化地理学的研究方法成为电影批评的学术延伸与逻辑增长点。

The film reproduces the real environment in the form of images and at the same time builds a symbolic environment,triggering unique visual experience and rational cognition.David Bordwell once pointed out that Hollywood films worked to transform cinematic space into story space by conferring psychological significance on a character’s surroundings,rendering the physical environment an external expression of the protagonist’s psychology,thus leading the film criticism and research to the field of cultural geography.Cultural geography takes the human cultural space combination and its law of development and evolution as its research object,analyzes the distribution of various cultural phenomena on the earth surface,and explores the cultural landscape,cultural origin,cultural ecological environment and the cultural significance of the environment.Regarding geographical space as an important film text code,cultural geography studies in American film criticism research the metaphorical expression of social,political and economic changes of the landscape and space in the films from the perspective of discovering the social significance of space usage,exploring the aesthetic function of natural scenes and identifying the narrative value of geographical images,which makes cultural geography approach an academic extension and logical growth point of film criticism.