Film as Civilizational Palimpsest: Tracing Marine and Agricultural Longue Durée Imprints in Visual Aesthetics Narratives
Abstract
The comparative study of cinematic aesthetics between Western and Chinese traditions reveals profound influences from their underlying civilizational foundations. While Western film aesthetics, shaped by maritime civilization, emphasize dynamic movement and Visual hegemony, which are theorized by Virilio's "dromology" and Panofsky single point perspective. Chinese cinema is deeply rooted in agrarian civilization, drawing from the "Three Distances" principle of classical landscape painting to construct its unique visual language with multi-dimensional cavalier perspective. Despite extensive research on cross-cultural film analysis, the role of civilizational longue durée in shaping cinematic form remains underexplored. This paper examines how marine and agrarian civilizational genes manifest in film aesthetics, focusing on spatial composition, perspective selection, and ideological encoding with the aim of reaching dynamic and static organic coordination and unity. By integrating Braudel's historical framework with film theory, this study aims to provide a systematic comparison of Western and Chinese cinematic paradigms.The review uses Eisenstein's montage as theoretical tools for Western cinema and san yuan perspective for Chinese film—while addressing challenges in cross-cultural visual analysis. Ultimately, for the sake of a more nuanced understanding of how civilizational heritage continues to influence contemporary filmmaking, this work offers insights for global film theory and comparative media studies.
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