Multimodal Visual Grammar Analysis of Chinese Martial Arts Movie Posters
As a major way of publicity of cinema, film poster is like a window showing core content of film story to attract potential audiences by using words, images and role styles in a single picture space. Poster of Chinese martial arts film, as one of typical Chinese cultural semiotics, is worth to be explored so as to find out how it creates visual meaning to express the theme of movie story and how it catches the attention of potential audiences. This paper applies visual grammar theoretical framework to analyze four posters of Chinese martial arts films in order to find out how do film posters construct their visual meanings and represent core information of Chinese martial arts films. Besides that, the paper also intends to understand how film posters realize the purpose of film promotion in the market of mass cultural consumption.