英文摘要
Cultural studies of film has been developed enormously in past ten years. It puts emphasis on textual and contextual analysis or else. Under this atmosphere, not few Hong Kong films have been expectedly examined from the perspectives of geography, otherness, disappearance or so. On one hand, they enrich the scope of film studies. One the other hand, the growth of film technology, such as cinematography, has not received sufficient attention. This paper is to review the nature of cinematography and its function on analyzing/criticizing filmic text. By investigating Chinese Box, the validity of cinematography study would be justified. What is cinematography? It is a kind of form/technology/configuration to express one’s idea of visual image of reality in film production. In which, there are involving many techniques, such as the general composition of a scene, the lighting of the set or location, the choice of cameras, lenses, filters and film stock, the camera angle and movements, and the integration of special effects or else. By nature, cinematography is situated in the scope of technical form. Practically, content should be expressed through the media; content and form are two sides of a coin. When discussing cinematography in details, we inevitably analyze the correlated content/idea in the film to verify the validity of cinematography. In the paper, it is not our task to distinguish the very nature of form and content. We only want to mention some avant-garde films, the content is to illustrate beauty of figures/colors/movement and the form is content itself. For most of narrative/fiction films, form and content are intermingled, and through the image on the screen the form is revealed.