How the Director Shapes the Core Artistic Appeal of Film

Abstract

Cinema’s essence lies in images, a visual medium that precedes language and sets it apart from other arts. According to Mackendrick (2005), "Film can also tell stories purely in movement, in action and reaction" (p. 3). The director can convey the story directly to the audience’s senses through the construction of the film’s visual language. However, the progression of film technology has increasingly directed audiences' attention toward cinema’s textual dimension—that is, its non-visual elements such as narrative meaning, dialogue, and thematic depth. There is less and less discussion about film visual design. These aspects are undoubtedly important, but when we become overly immersed in the "literary" qualities of cinema, we often overlook the painstaking effort that creators invest in its purely visual language—the very elements that fundamentally distinguish film from other art forms. This paper uses Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite as case studies to explore the aspects of visual design through which directors can shape a film's unique artistic appeal. This study adopts a case analysis approach, providing close readings and comparisons of key scenes from the two films to examine the directors’ creative strategies in the use of visual framing and mise-en-scène, lighting and color tone, and props. The findings suggest that the director, as the core of film creation, not only constructs a unique artistic style through visuals but also evokes emotional and social resonance through them.