Stills from "Waltz with Bashir"
Make movies using real and fictional speculation
Lately we seem to be competing with the real view of the movie again. For the real view in the movie, from the academic level of discussion, everyone is generally tired of it. And to figure out this concept, it is necessary to use philosophical knowledge, so everyone feels that it is troublesome and has already decided not to discuss it. Even the true view in the documentary, everyone often tries to avoid this topic. But for film authors, when creating, there seems to be a simple understanding of reality, but everyone feels embarrassed, because it is difficult to explain these issues clearly in accurate speculative language.
But recently, I have watched dozens of films by young filmmakers and found that many creators have used the boundary between real and fictional speculation as the content of their creations. I found that seven or eight films (including short films) had a consistent tendency to make their work look like a documentary or a feature film. This kind of film is not uncommon in the West, and it was also available in China before, but it has not appeared on such a large scale.
Some of the inspiration for this kind of film conception, I guess, was obtained in the process of studying film in school, that is, learning to know the "boundary between fiction and non-fiction" is an enduring topic, and challenging it will be a possible avant-garde. I have seen some works, and the author knows how to use the confusion between the two to make a fuss, but I think this is operated from the perspective of learning and knowledge, and I can feel that this kind of creation lacks passion, is very stylized and rational.
There is also a kind of creation, which may be due to the long immersion in the world of cinema, feeling the uncertainty of boundaries, the film was born from its own thinking, speculation and the process of exploring the relationship between film and life, and put the ontology of film and the ontology of life together to discuss, so such films are particularly organic and fascinating. This kind of film, which has been discussed more recently, is Wang Xiaozhen's "Love Poems".
"Love Poems" shows the director himself and his wife making a film. The director forces his wife to perform, but the wife has resistance, so she suddenly plays a play, so that the audience knows that this paragraph is a negation of the previous paragraph. So, which passage is true? Its structure reminds me of the brain-burning sci-fi film Inception. The film has been shortlisted for the upcoming First Film Festival.
In the past, some scholars believed that the sixth generation of directors "has film in their blood", meaning that they are very similar to the French New Wave directors who spend all day in the cinema watching movies. But I think in China, the real immersion in movies is a new generation of filmmakers. And not just immersed in watching, they spend every day with video cameras and various video production tools and computer games, they have the opportunity and ability to think deeply about the film itself. Therefore, the degree of their life and image companionship has surpassed that of any previous generation of filmmakers.
Moreover, the creation of a feature film in the form of a documentary can not only bring a natural philosophical depth and metaphysical color to the film, but also facilitate the stimulation of a particularly interesting meaning. And in general, it is also more economical in terms of production, easier to operate, especially suitable for beginners. A classic example of this is the American Witch Blair.
The above example of making a film using the boundary between real and fiction takes place mainly in the field of feature films. People also like to name them "pseudo-documentaries," but the name is sometimes too pejorative. Creators have tried to challenge traditional film taxonomy, but if you look closely, many films can still distinguish them. But in some movies, the audience is really completely indistinguishable, such as "Love Poems" is such a case. However, the director himself should be clear about the boundary between the real and the fiction of a certain clip, but he just won't tell you.
Using real and fictional speculation to make a film is a fun and thought-provoking format. But relying on this alone is not enough for a film, and the moving thing about Love Poems is not only the play on the boundaries of form, but at the same time the concentration of emotions it contains. In the process of performing, the husband and wife in the film leaked out the problems and emotional events in their previous daily lives, which made it easier for the audience to be brought in and sighed.
The paradox of animated documentaries
Another kind of discussion about reality is in the field of documentaries. Recently I hosted a small forum online about animated documentaries. This is a particularly interesting topic.
The concept of animation documentary, which combines animation methods and documentary appeals, is itself an extreme challenge, and the core issues in it are also related to reality. Because in the form of cinema, we think that the documentary is directly admitted from life and the external world, it is very "objective" in itself. A camera or camera is a tool in itself an objectified artistic tool. At the beginning of the birth of cinema, the artistic qualifications of cinema were questioned and related to this. It is believed that although the shooting of the camera has to be artificially arranged, after the arrangement is completed, the intake of the external world is almost automatic, which is completely different from the manual feeling of painting.
The painting of animation, on the other hand, is a product of complete handiwork. Today's hand-drawn often uses computers and wacome handwriting pads to assist, plus other software to complete, but this is still considered hand-drawn, requiring their own heart and brain to direct the fingers to complete the operation. It is completely subjective. Of course, the three-dimensional animation produced by the current CG technology is different from the hand-drawn in the past, but the effect it produces is still different from directly picking it from the outside world.
One is a representation of subjectivity in cinema, the other is a representation of objectivity in cinema, and now it is necessary to combine the two to create a subtype of "animated documentary", which feels like a mental challenge. At a time when formal innovation seems to have come to an end, the challenge itself is naturally meaningful.
In 2018, there was a biographical cartoon about Buñuel, "Buñuel's Turtle Labyrinth", which told the story of Buñuel's early filming of "Land Without Grain". The latter is a documentary filmed in 1932. Buñuel, who had lost the opportunity to continue filming in France for becoming an offensive religious man for "The Golden Age", came to Spain and used the money his friends had won the lottery to make a documentary about the poor mountainous regions of the Midwest. Through this cartoon, we know that "Land Without Grain" is a documentary full of fakes.
Buñuel wanted to photograph the extreme living conditions of the people of the Las Herdes Mountains. They had to shoot the goat falling off the cliff, and it couldn't wait, because the goats were used to moving on the cliff, so he had his companion shoot and kill a goat, and the camera filmed the fall.
In order to express the harshness of survival, the director also bought a donkey and several boxes of bees, and then opened the hive and let the bees sting the donkey. He also created a custom of having mountain people tear off chicken heads by hand during a ritual because Buñuel had severe moa disease.
At this point, we can understand. "Buñuel's Labyrinth of Turtles" presents the reality in an animated way, while "Land Without Food" is faked in the form of a documentary. Therefore, the art form of documentary cannot be guaranteed to be real, and what is expressed in the form of animation is not necessarily unreal. So why should we insist on using documentaries to dig up the truth?
The principle of true indexing of animated documentaries
As a result, animated documentaries have become a reasonable and legal existence and something worth pursuing. I think the concept of animated documentaries can be justified under certain premises, but the above defense is not convincing. This is not an effective defense.
This is really a complicated topic. Researchers believe that the earliest animated documentary was "The Sinking of the Lusitania" in 1918. The work is an animated demonstration by the cartoonist of the sinking of the Royal Cruise Ship Lusitania, in which the scenes of the producer's work are filmed in a documentary manner at the beginning of the film, and then the largest proportion of the entire film is animated. To classify it as a documentary, I think there is no doubt about it.
But an important case of animated documentaries is 2018's Waltz with Bashir. The film is almost entirely animated, hence the name "fully animated" documentary. It animates the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, mainly the director and his comrades reminiscing about that experience. But its voiceover is documentary, mostly true to the interviewees' narration. Animation is based on the content of these sounds, so the animation part still has a very tangible relationship with reality.
Of course, at the end of the film, the director still uses a small piece of real imagery. In an animated scene, a group of women are crying, and the picture is turned into a documentary way, and the sound is obviously continuous. This is actually to illustrate the relationship between everything shown in the animation and reality, and these animation pictures have a basis for reality and an index of reality.
This film is considered to be the most classic case of animated documentaries. In fact, "The Sinking of Lusitania" is called an animated documentary, and everyone can recognize it as a documentary that uses animation to help illustrate the facts. But "Waltz with Bashir" is considered to be the most suitable case for animation and documentary. It doesn't start out as a documentary, but it first shows the hallucination of an interviewee — a pack of dogs running wild around the city, so the work is more like an animated feature film.
It's just that as the narrative line evolves, we see how it differs from ordinary cartoons. We gradually felt that the sound behind the picture was different from that of ordinary cartoons. The film is called an animated documentary, which I think is acceptable because it still fits the principle of indexing about authenticity. Although it does not use realistic pictures, does not show the faces of the narrators, and does not use cameras to visit and shoot places where wars have taken place, the existence of these sounds is still an important basis for its relationship with reality, and it still fixes the audience's expectations for this kind of film on the search for real information. But for conservative film scholars, the concept of this kind of animated documentary seems to be a bit reluctant, and it feels that it is really a chicken concept.
The postmodernist view of reality in documentaries is advanced and reinforced by the advent of digital technology, and its logic is that the advent of digital graphics technology (CG) has strengthened the film's ability to forge, and we can casually create a scene of the deceased US president's speech and convince the audience. As a result, the relationship between the image and the real index is changed, so we talk about the real is illusory. Moreover, our understanding of things is often one-sided, and everything we capture with the camera is only the appearance of things. Things have a different nature. And the essence of reality can not be filmed with a camera, then we should not waste any more effort to seek the truth.
I certainly disagree with that view. The advent of digital virtualization technology has made it difficult for us to identify the real or not, but the producer still has to have their own principles and not to betray the trust of the audience. A film will be discussed in the broader reality and longer term, we will have many opportunities to gradually approach the truth, and the audience is a force of supervision. And the authenticity of documentaries has already exposed its problems before the advent of digital technology. For example, Flahadi's documentary work in the 1920s and Buñuel's "Land Without Grain" mentioned above have been falsified, but hasn't the concept of documentary been used for at least a hundred years? How can we deny all documentaries by falsifying some documentaries? And years later, when we watch the faces and living environments of the people in The Land Without Food, we still get more knowledge than any anime that claims to be true. The face of the character, the folds on his face, and the expressions created by suffering cannot be faked.
Because the camera captures phenomena and appearances, does it not have any value in terms of authenticity? In fact, a person with modern experience has his own consciousness about the production process of documentaries. Just as we say don't believe everything a person says in the mirror, he may be a liar, but I don't think this person's lens is worthless, because we have our own understanding of the fact that people can lie. We're watching a guy lying in front of the camera, and on that level, it's still incredibly real.
As for subjectivity, this concept is even more speculative. Recently I watched a very interesting animated documentary called "Me and Vingist and a Dead Friend". Director Liu Maoning did not consciously realize that he was making an animation documentary when he was making it, but after that, he was chased by many people as an animation documentary, and the director found it particularly interesting. It can be seen that the concept of animated documentaries can be used within a certain range, but we still need to continue to deepen the discussion and try to form a consensus on its definition.
Source Beijing Daily
Author Wang Xiaolu
Process Editor: Wang Mengying