Both movies and literature are a way of human expression, and both have the artistic characteristics of time form, so the similarity between the two is narrative. Contemporary narratology research and the common phenomenon of film adaptations of literature have shown that narrative is the root of the similarity between film and literature. The basic categories of narrative texts include narrative methods, narrative angles, and narrative discourse. Therefore, by analyzing the connection between rhetoric, narrative methods, narrative angles, and narrative discourse techniques, we can clearly see the relationship between film and literature. Concrete manifestations of narrative similarity.

1. Narrative is the root of the similarity between film and literature (1) Theoretical basis. The fundamental difference between literature and film is the difference between written word and visual image, a difference that on the surface seems to separate them into different worlds. To cross this seemingly infinite barrier, the best way is to regard both words and images as symbols, the purpose of which is to convey a certain meaning. From this perspective, words and images are both components of a larger ideographic system - a component of "language" in a broad sense. Both literature and film start from their most ideal starting lines, one from pictures, the other from words, and they move towards the same goal, which is to perfectly express meaning. It is at the philosophical level of the meaning of the text and human understanding that literature and film have established an essential connection. As Gadamer said: "The universality of the hermeneutic perspective is all-inclusive... In the final analysis, Goethe's assertion that "everything is a symbol" is the most comprehensive summary of hermeneutic thought. It shows that everything indicates other things. "[1] The most fundamental connection between literature and film is that both have the art of time. The characteristic of shaping the image is to unfold the narrative of the image on the flow line of time. Novel is an art of time. It is the accumulation and combination of words one by one in the continuation of time, forming the story image of a novel in the human brain. Film is a spatial art that appeals to vision, and it is also an art of time. The movement of film determines its time characteristics, that is, one picture after another moves and develops in the continuous time, and finally constitutes the screen image of the entire film. It is the unfolding of images in the duration of viewing that makes movies have narrative properties similar to literature in theory. The difference is that "literary narratives are developed based on time, which is mainly regarded as a linear sequence, while movies seem to complete the narrative through the concept of simultaneity." "Indeed, narrative is the most solid intermediary between novels and movies, and literature and visual language have the most mutual penetrability." [2] Film narratology, like literary narratology, is an important branch of contemporary narratology, and both have strong backgrounds in structuralism and semiotics. In general narratology and semiotic research, both literature and film are involved. Even early Russian formalist literary theory also included the study of film theory. Since Christian Metz introduced Saussure's semiotic principles into the study of film theory and published "Film: Language or Speech?" in 1964, film narrative research has gained its own independence. Character, at the same time, is more closely linked to literary narrative. Because, Metz’s research shows that “since the research on film and literature has established the same consistency in content analysis, it has also established consistency at the level of expression. In other words, in the past, film and literature were only based on language. The content of expression (object, subject matter, scope...) is connected in terms of research, and now it is connected in the way of language expression." [3] (2) Factual basis. From the day it was born, film has been a means of telling stories. Films such as "Factory Gate", "Baby's Lunch" and "The Arrival of the Train" are only one or two minutes long, and although they are not very exciting, they do tell stories. By 1915, the famous American director Griffith used montage techniques to shoot the two-hour "The Birth of a Nation". In just 20 years, movies had the ability to tell complex stories and could be compared with novels. Comparable. The film "draws heavily on the ancient form of novels and literature. Because it is the novel that transmits the literary heritage to the film, thus allowing it to obtain inspiration and sources from it." [4] 79-80 As the first real masterpiece in the history of world cinema is adapted from Thomas Dixon’s novel "The Clansman", the century-old film history is ultimately a combination of film and literature (and drama as well). ) relationship history. There are two important facts here. One is that "movies are actually increasingly following the path of novels, and have achieved remarkable results." [5] A large part of the works in film history are adapted from literary works, and among award-winning films, the proportion of adaptations from literature is even higher. Most of the world's famous novels have been adapted onto the screen, many of them more than once. No wonder Winston said, "Movies can indeed be on a par with world literary masterpieces." [4]48 Many famous writers are also famous film screenwriters and even film directors. The second is that "a very significant impact that novels have on the development of the art of film is the form of narrative and storytelling."

[4] 81 Films have learned a lot from literature, especially novels, such as reflecting real life through the creation of characters, better expressing theme ideas through material selection and cutting, and making the work better through the arrangement of persons, clues, and structure. Become an organic whole, through the use of various narrative techniques and rhetorical methods, make the work more perfect, more refined and more expressive, etc. It is precisely because there are so many references and uses that we once couldn't tell each other apart. In the early 1980s, there was a big discussion about the relationship between film and literature in our country. There was even a saying that "movies are literature completed on the screen." "Such a view.

2. Specific manifestations of the similarity between film and literature (1) Narrative method. 1. Expression. The mode of expression is one of the modes of narrative. The main modes of expression in literature include narrative, description, discussion, lyricism, etc. These modes of expression also exist in movies. Except for the different media used - the former is language and the latter is pictures and images, other aspects include The purpose, meaning, function, effect, etc. are very similar. For example, "narration", common narrations include narration, flashback, sub-narration, interlude, supplementary narration, etc. It is also similar in movies. Here are examples of flashbacks and sub-narrations. Flashback is to narrate the ending of an event or one of the most prominent fragments to the beginning of an article or movie, and then return the narrative of the article or movie to "sequential narration." This technique can often highlight the center, create suspense, exaggerate the atmosphere, form waves, produce fascinating effects, and avoid a straightforward narrative in structure. For example, in "Lawrence of Arabia", at the beginning of the film, the protagonist Lawrence is riding a motorcycle on a rugged country road. Two cyclists suddenly appear in front of him. He cannot avoid them and flies into the trees beside the road. Narrate the life of Lawrence. The flashback technique here highlights the protagonist's adventurous and humane personality, and also attracts the audience. Sub-narration refers to narrating two or more things in parallel. It can write complicated and complex things clearly and in an orderly manner. In the movie "Jurassic Park", Nedley destroys the park control system, steals dinosaur embryos and escapes but is eaten by the dinosaurs. Dr. Grant, Lex and Tim are avoiding the dinosaurs. Hammont, Marr Den and Dr. Sutter worked hard to repair the system in the control center. These three clues were narrated separately, making the complex relationship of these events clear. Another example is discussion and lyricism. There are two main types of discussion in literary works: the author's comments and the comments of the characters in the work. Correspondingly, there are mainly these two types in movies. If it is the discussion of the characters in the play, it can be said directly by the character. If it is the author's comment, it can be done with the help of voice-over or pictures. For example, in the Russian film "Scorched by the Sun", the portrait of Stalin painted on a huge canvas wrinkles like water ripples when blown by the breeze. This is actually the film director's evaluation of Stalin as a character. There are two categories of lyricism in literature: direct lyricism and indirect lyricism, and movies also correspond to this. Direct lyricism in movies is often expressed directly by the expressions and movements of the characters in the play, while indirect lyricism relies on means such as empty shots, music, and songs. 2. Structural method. Film texts and literary texts have many similarities in narrative structure: beginning, end, transition, coincidence, etc. For example, in the first half of "Xiangyin", Tao Chun's abdominal pain was mentioned and expressed through the mouths of characters several times, which foreshadowed the later discovery that Tao Chun had cancer. Therefore, the subsequent plot development seems reasonable and natural. "Blue Bridge" begins with the protagonist standing on Waterloo Bridge holding a lucky charm and reminiscing, and ends with recollection. The two ends are the current time and space, and the middle is the content of the memory, echoing from beginning to end, and seamlessly integrated. There are echoes in the content before and after, such as the film "Dead Poets Society". Teacher Keating stood on the table during class, inspiring students to be good at looking at things and thinking about problems from different angles, and asking students to take turns to stand on the table to experience the feelings. . Later, when the school blamed Keating for an accident and tried to drive him out of the school, the students ignored the provost's shouts and stood on the table one after another to express support for Keating. Another example is "omission". In literary creation, we summarize real life, omit redundant time processes when composing the plot, and omit unvalued parts when describing characters. This is omission. It is an indispensable means of literary creation and an artistic technique of film. Martin said, "Film is the art of omission." [6] In the movie "Tess", the scene where Tess kills Alec: Tess cried sadly on the table. She looked at the knife that Alec had inserted into the beef, her eyes filled with anger. , the next shot shows Tess hurriedly coming down from upstairs and going out in a hurry. Mrs. Bruce, the apartment manager, was sitting downstairs embroidering and inadvertently saw the expanding blush seeping from the ceiling. She curiously stood on the table and reached out to touch it, and then covered her mouth with her hands in horror. This plot is very subtle due to the omission, and the murder scene is not shown, which plays a role in maintaining Tess's beautiful image in the minds of the audience. (2) Narrative perspective. The narrative perspective is the perspective from which the narrative article observes and tells the content of the story. [7] The confirmation of the narrator's identity provides an overall narrative perspective for the film's narrative. Different narrative perspectives establish the distance, scope and degree of involvement between the narrative subject and the things being narrated, thus expressing the author's narrative judgment. Mainly reflected in two aspects, one is "who is the narrator" and the other is "what is the character's perspective". "Who is the narrator" is what we usually call the person.

The most common pronouns in texts are third person and first person. For example, in Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Blue, White, Red", the identity of the film's narrator is "the audience present in this article", that is, the third person "other" - the narrator is narrated subsequently Things are done, so the right to judge the story is given back to the audience. The film "Old Things in the South of the City" retains the novel's first-person self-narrative style. The entire film is presented from Xiaoyingzi's perspective, so the audience can easily identify with the protagonist's feelings. In literature, the first person can be expressed directly with words such as "I" and "we"; in films, first person narration usually uses voice-over. If "person" is the intuitive expression of the narrative perspective, then "character's point of view" is the implicit way of the narrative perspective. The viewpoints of characters in literature can be narrated directly by the narrator, but this cannot be the case in movies. It must be expressed through lenses. Sometimes a single lens cannot convey the relationship between viewpoints and needs to be coordinated with the previous or next lens. For example, in the shot of Sabrina meeting Julie in "Blue", the previous shot is a close shot of Sabrina facing the camera, and the next reverse shot is a close shot of the two of them taken from behind Sabrina. Only from this can we To be sure, the character's point of view here is an objective point of view, not the character's point of view in the play. On the other hand, the expression of film is more complex than literature. It has at least two narrative levels: the visual layer and the auditory layer. The visual layer includes images, composition, light, color, etc., while the auditory layer includes dialogue, sound, Music etc. Because of this, French film narratologist Fran?ois Joost divides the narrative perspective of movies into visual perspective, auditory perspective and knowing perspective. If we correspond to this division, then the narrative perspective of literature can only be the perspective of knowing. Therefore, the narrative perspective, including person and point of view, is one of the manifestations of the similarity between film and literary narratives, but the film narrative perspective is more complicated.

(3) Rhetoric. Narrative discourse exists in the form of words in literary texts and in the form of images in film texts. Similarly, rhetoric, as the main expression of narrative discourse skills, also has its own corresponding means in film and literature - film rhetoric directly Pictures and images are used as rhetorical means, while literary rhetoric uses language and characters as rhetorical means. However, from the perspective of the effect achieved by rhetoric, the two have similarities, such as the use of metaphors and symbols to express the author's implicit thoughts, the use of contrast to highlight differences, the use of repetition to express emphasis, etc. There are many similarities in rhetorical techniques between movies and literature, but that does not mean that all literary rhetoric can be found in movies. Those rhetorics created with the help of vocabulary's unique pronunciation, tone, and semantic skills, such as homophony, rhetorical questions, hypothetical questions, Calls, imitations, truths, palindromes, parallels, displacements, etc. cannot establish a corresponding relationship with the rhetoric of the film. According to the characteristics of its own medium, movies make full use of metaphors, symbols, repetition, exaggeration, metonymy, comparison, foil, presentation, personification, pun and other rhetoric. For example, "metaphor". Movies are a typical metaphorical art. Because natural objects are directly used as ideographic symbols, the relationship between "metaphor" and "noumenon" usually appears to be the same, rather than the similar relationship of literary rhetoric such as metaphor. The code composed of physical objects in the movie cannot be strictly distinguished from the encoded object (the object itself). In this article, the ontology in the natural sense and the metaphor in the cultural sense appear at the same time. In Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", in the balloon dance scene, the big balloon is shaped like a globe to symbolize the dictator Hingel's ambition to rule and play with the entire world, and this balloon If he accidentally kicks it, it means that he will eventually fail. In the Italian film "Cinema Paradiso", the protagonist falls in love with the banker's daughter, but due to the disparity in family status, it is destined to be a dream. The director used barriers such as railings, buildings, and wooden curtains to separate them. When they went on an outing in the wild, they met the banker. At this time, the banker's position in the picture just separates the two young people. Although the banker did not say a word, the picture has already given us the meaning of "they can never be together again." Another example is "symbol". Symbols and metaphors in movies are very close. Generally speaking, metaphors are temporary and local new meanings generated by the juxtaposition or "collision" of pictures, while symbols are things in the pictures that repeatedly appear and are stably connected to their cultural meanings, such as The conch from the film Lord of the Flies. At the beginning of the film, the conch is fished out of the water and made into a trumpet blowing tool. As the conch is used as a gathering tool and used again and again, it acquires the symbolic meaning of "power and regulation" throughout the film. In the film "Raise the Red Lantern", the enclosed Chen Family Courtyard appears repeatedly in different clips, so it has gained symbolic meaning - the epitome of feudal society. The "theme prop" lantern in the film has also become a symbol of joy, favor, and glory in the feudal courtyard. When the light is on, it represents "happiness", and when the light is off, it symbolizes all misfortunes.