Wenhui Si, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 767-778, Dec. 2024  

https://doi.org/10.3745/JIPS.04.0326
Keywords: City Promotion Films, Impacts on Audience’s Psychology, Signification Mechanism, Signs
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Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, mass media has changed people’s ways of learning and communicating. People, especially the younger generation, are becoming more inclined to visual resources to learn about the world, exchange ideas, and entertain themselves than ever before. A city promotion film plays a vital role in constructing a city’s image and improving its reputation. Hangzhou has been making preparations for the 19th Asian Games, which is a good chance for this city to become more popular in the world and to get a favorable position in global competition. It is of great significance to study how the city promotion film helps Hangzhou successfully create its city image and in what ways it affects the audience’s psychology. This paper selects “Hangzhou is not only a poem,” a famous city promotion film of Hangzhou, as its study object, adopts the French Semiotician Roland Barthes’ signification mode theory to study the signs used in this film and how they work together to signify and create the international image of Hangzhou. In addition, it tries to explore its impacts on the audience’s psychology from the semiotic perspective. It is found that this promotional film mainly employs such visual signs as characters, landscapes, subtitles, and audio signs like background music and voice-over. Various signs are used jointly at three signification levels. At the first signification level, picture signs and musical signs work together to signify the images of Hangzhou as a city of ecological tourism, vitality & innovation, and happiness & civilization, respectively. At the second signification level, the three images of Hangzhou are juxtaposed to signify that Hangzhou is a city with favorable living and working environment. At the third signification level, the multi-dimensional image of Hangzhou as the signifier refers to the ultimate purpose of this film, which is to improve the fame and influence of Hangzhou. This city promotion film is of great significance to make Hangzhou more well-known and successfully satisfies the audience’s psychological needs such as seeking information, being curious, entertaining, and so on.

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