Time.com feature August 28, david finch's 60th birthday, he also came to his golden age as a director. In his 30-year film career, he has actually made only 11 films. Not very productive, but definitely high-quality.
After paying homage to Citizen Kane with "Mank," Finch's new work, The Killer, seems to be returning to the orthodoxy of his own "black suspense" film. Of course, this is also the Finch that many fans are happy to see.
Keywords of the work
Keyword one: anti-movie
David Finch, who came from advertising and MTV, naturally never pays attention to the rules and regulations in the film, so many aspects of his work are anti-film. In traditional movies, the expression of the character arc is a U-shaped structure, falling from the apex to the bottom and then bouncing from the bottom.
In Finch's film, the "bottoming out" link is missing.
In "Seven Deadly Sins", Finch uses brutal images to show violence, precisely because he knows that the audience is looking forward to the rise after the bottom line: the detective will eventually capture the prisoner, and the dark city will eventually usher in the light.
But he trampled on that line, and the police, as a symbol of justice, ended up even helping the criminals "perfectly carry out" his criminal plan. After 7 days, sin did not diminish; In the next 7 days, it will not change.
Such a script is not for the sake of the audience's aesthetics, but for the director's aesthetic appeal and appear reasonable. The soul of the whole film is that "sins are innate and people turn a blind eye." In this way, the "beginningless and endless" of the film is closer to the "legal dilemma" in reality.
In addition, Finch's film is still anti-routine. In "The Zodiac", the escape of the only survivor, Catherine, is completely ignored, and the story jumps directly to the passage where Catherine is rescued. In "The Vanishing Lover", the story is constantly interrupted, and the audience is forced to look for a logical self-consistency from his narrative.
Finch didn't want to make a simple feature film, he wanted the audience to be involved in the rhythm of the narrative. "The Vanishing Lover" is no longer a preset product, but is constantly being reinterpreted as the plot develops; The previous plot is also constantly being given new narrative functions.
The audience's acceptance process becomes a part of the film production - there is no doubt that this audience's participation in the narrative and acceptance of the result process is not the function of the film, but an integral part of the advertising narrative.
Keyword two: modern mythology
Religious elements, in Finch's films, are also everywhere. In "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", fundamentalism becomes the motivation of the perpetrators. Not only were the victims of the Jews, but the perpetrators killed people strictly according to the means mentioned in the Bible.
In this way, mortals wish to transgress Jesus and exercise the function of Savior. But paradoxically, mortals carry original sin from birth, and when he becomes judge, he inevitably makes religion a scapegoat for slaughter.
In "Fight Club", Taylor uses the model of Jesus' missionary mission to establish his own religion, he selects "twelve disciples", and then uses "fighting" to cure chronic diseases; Eloquent, he used great arguments and rhetoric to consolidate his religious foundations.
Taylor's suicide and resurrection correspond to jesus' miracles.
But Here Finch alludes to Christianity with anarchism; And by imposing mass fanaticism and violent absurdity on stories, it is clear that he gives religion a whole new perspective.
This is especially true of the "Social Network" that caused an uproar because it did not win an Oscar.
In the film, Finch set up a person who will definitely rebel against him - Zuckerberg. From the beginning, he was firmly on a set path, even if he lost his close friends and family for this reason. On the surface, he is stepping into the most successful position; But in a cultural sense, he also became the loneliest person in the world when his power and wealth reached the peak.
In the final scene of the film, everyone leaves, leaving Zuckerberg alone, continuing to type the keyboard.
This is a typical writing method of Greek mythology, a narrative routine of Western literary classics. From a narrative point of view, this is another typical and clear Oedipus story.
Keyword three: photographic technical school
Finch is a rare "techno" in Hollywood, especially his ingenious use of cameras and special effects. This skill does not come from directing school, but from his years of experience working in advertising, MTV and special effects.
It's often said that there are a million ways to shoot a shot. But in Finch's case, there are only two: right and wrong. During the filming of his debut film Alien 3, Finch began to make a fuss about photography. A large number of close-up shots, the repeated use of dissolved mirrors, and the lighting effects of large contrast between the faces of the characters all make the film cloaked in a "black magic" effect.
The most colorful clip in the whole film comes from the use of anamorphic lenses. Finch created the visual effect of "alien subjective lens" on the screen. The distorted effect is amazing. It also shows the isolation, hatred and inescapable escape between species.
While filming The Seven Deadly Sins, Finch decided to expand on the "low-key lighting method" pioneered by Gordon Willis and The Godfather. In the first shot, the dark night, the heavy rain and the faint light of the two flashlights create an oppressive atmosphere.
Years of MTV shooting, so that Finch especially fond of the study of photography techniques. Together with Kevin Hauge, he expanded the expressiveness of digital photography with films such as Fight Club, Mind Games, and Shudder Space.
As for "Mank", which won the ASC Association Award, it used digital technology to exquisitely simulate the grayscale characteristics of infrared black and white photography.
If "Roma" rewrites the cliché that "digital cannot reach black and white film", then this simulation of "Manke" completely rewrites the expressiveness and scope of digital black and white.
The last time a feature film was shot on infrared film and achieved good results was 1964's "I Am Cuba".
Unreliable narrator
Born in the 1960s, Finch grew up under the influence of the Beat Generation and was filled with dissatisfaction with American society. He didn't want to go to film school to learn things, saying he didn't want to "make movies in a stable way."
Has been doing behind the scenes, there is no day to come out, but Finch after several years of work understands that his goal is still to direct. Finch hasn't been quite sure if hollywood's approach works, even though it's a narrative that's yielding impressive results. But Finch still wants to transform it.
Finch's greatest contribution to the feature film lies in a certain inconsistency between his narrative logic and the audience's perception. Unreliability in value and judgment highlights his irony, forcing the viewer to develop a new understanding of individual morality and rethink human nature.
In The Seven Deadly Sins, John is a serial killer who misjudges himself as waking up ignorant people; He feels that the murder he committed is a masterpiece, and there is a huge gap between his actions and the narrative. Mills, on the other hand, fell into his trap and smiled at the angry sin he had committed.
If the story ends here, it will at most be a certain transformation of Hollywood. But Finch also sets up a Schamerse perspective, so that the audience vaguely recognizes that the author does not agree with this concept - so that the re-denial of negation does not form an affirmative value judgment. Finch's subversion of Hollywood, from which it arises.
In the second half of "The Vanishing Lover", Nick expresses his love for Amy in the media in order to escape the murder allegations; And Amy also pushed the boat along the water and returned to Nick's side. At this point, the audience can already understand that under the peaceful marriage, it is depression and panic.
The shallowness of the theme is also the reason why Finch has been criticized for not being recognized by the academy. In the academic evaluation system, his specialty in reversing the plot, the black style, is not the ability of the director, but the skills of screenwriting and photography.
As a result, Finch only received two Oscar nominations for Best Director, which is understandable.
10 little things about David Finch
01 is a neighbor of George Lucas and has worked at Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic and has worked on special effects for Star Wars: Jedi Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark 2.
02 Incomplete statistics, Finch has been the director of choice for films such as "Black Dahlia", "Mission Impossible 3", "Spider-Man", "8mm", "Cat and Mouse Game", "Batman: The Mystery of the Shadow", "Confessions of Dangerous Thoughts", "Hannibal" and "The Amazing Spider-Man". Later, due to various reasons, the trip could not be completed.
03 After graduating from Ashland High School, he didn't apply to college and went straight to work at the studio of Oscar winner and documentary filmmaker John Coty. Because of his proficiency in business, he jumped to Industrial Light and Magic a year later.
04 The reason why Finch will shoot commercials and MTV for more than ten years is because in Hollywood at that time, no one would invest in a kid who did not go to college and only did special effects to shoot feature films. In order to fill his stomach, Finch and his friends set up a production company, starting with MTV and advertising.
05 In all of Finch's films, the cameras are either fixed or designed and tracked in advance. He barely has to hold the camera. In Both The Social Network and The Vanishing Lover, there is only one shot, shot handheld.
06 Finch likes to constantly retake shots to achieve the effect he needs. For a two-hour film, he can generally shoot 200 to 300 hours of footage.
07 On March 1, 1995, he won the Grammy Award; In 2014, he won the award again. The interval is nearly 20 years. And this is also the longest interval in the history of the Grammys, the same person for the same award.
08 In 1989 and 1990, he was nominated for an MTV Award for three different MTV films. At the same time, he is also the only director in history to have been nominated twice and three times.
09 Before taking over Alien 3, Rennie Haring and Vincent Ward both left the crew, leaving Finch with a mess. Twentieth Century Fox didn't give Finch extra money and creative freedom, and even the crew on the set looked down on Finch. Suffering from a lot, he even put down the cruel words of "I'd rather die of colon cancer than direct a movie".
10 Finch has developed two series for HBO. One is a sci-fi film with a cyberpunk style, because Finch needed $100 million to produce a season and failed to get support from HBO; The other tells the story of a rising director shooting MTV in Hollywood in the 1980s. Obviously, this will be Finch's autobiographical American drama. But HBO was not satisfied with the story and called off the project halfway through filming.
Author: Yun Qijun
Edit: Zhen Zi