The Image and Evolution of the Cinematic Body in Pre-modern, Modern and Post-modern Perspectives

Abstract

With the development of Western body studies, the film body has also been included as an important research category; feminism, power discipline, and the body of desire are all important horizons in film body studies. Contemporary body studies are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary and have multiple narrative and symbolic functions in film writing. With the method of textual analysis, this paper takes the socio-cultural composition as an entry point to discuss the different images and functional evolutions of the film body in the pre-modern, modern and post-modern contexts, respectively. In pre-modern society, nature has not yet been demystified, and the cinematic body exists as an aesthetically oriented corporeal body; modern society has been stamped with rationality, order, and authority since the Enlightenment, and the cinematic body has become a symbolic body, a consumed and aphasic Other. The post-modern society’s questioning of rationality, rebellion against modernity, and consciousness of de-anthropocentricity have led the cinematic body to carry, on the one hand, fear of the loss of subjectivity and, on the other hand, a fascination with the usurped gods of creation. According to Bazán, cinema is all about placing the body in space. The body is matter, and cinema is the restoration of material reality. Therefore, cinema is the body, and this article synchronises the cinematic body’s evolution with the body’s evolution from a new perspective of social process and gives a macroscopic interpretation of the “evolving body”.