Ten years ago, a small-budget film was released in China.
Its schedule is sandwiched between the main theme blockbuster "The Founding of the Nation" and the Hollywood blockbuster "Transformers 3".
It is conceivable that the box office is dismal, only more than five million, counting other costs and box office accounts, this movie can be said to be at the bottom.
But it has been fermented by word of mouth, and has been constantly mentioned in the past decade, and has won many film awards at home and abroad between 2010 and 2012.
Dai Jinhua called this film one of the best Chinese films of that period, and Wu Xiaobo wrote an article to pay tribute to the film's creators.
It tells the story of a group of laid-off workers in the late 90s who built a piano in an abandoned factory.
The film is "The Piano of Steel"
1. The elegy of the workers
"The Piano of Steel" looks like an absurd comedy.
After a group of workers were forced to be laid off, their lives were embarrassing, their wives and children were scattered, but they still hated the "bumping" of private work, and did not want to "emancipate their minds" in order to make a living, so they petitioned to keep the factory chimney and build a piano together in order to keep Chen Guilin's daughter.
This unrealistic move seems completely unimaginable, even ridiculous, and absurd in today's "everything looks at money".
It's as incomprehensible as a middle-aged programmer suddenly running to say crosstalk, of course, unless he says that he has become the partner of Guo Qilin, the prince of the crosstalk industry.
And this group of ordinary laid-off workers, they are the true portrayal of the northeast workers in the late 90s. Most of these people are post-50s or post-60s, who have worked in factories for most of their lives and have first-hand basic industrial skills.
They are simple-minded, obedient to arrangement, embedded like screws in the industrial machines of the state. They are the working class, the masters of the country, who have dedicated their lives, their faith, and even their lives to the factories and the country.
However, in the late 1990s, the old industrial zone in northeast China, once the country's heavy industrial base, was hit by an unprecedented impact.
Because of the country's overall economic transformation and poor operating efficiency, a large number of factories that had created great wealth and value have closed down, and the factories that are still insisting on it have to lay off a large number of workers.
On the eve of the turn of the century, the wave of layoffs swept through the entire northeast in an instant, countless workers lost the iron rice bowl on which they depended, and the factories they were most kind to were also emptied, leaving only a rusty factory shell on the northeast land.
In "The Piano of Steel", the old walls crawling with dead vines, the collapsed factory roofs, the corners of the buildings piled with waste and the decadent and chaotic factory workshops depict the panorama of the decline of the old industrial era.
The workers' once-proud identity and values became worthless overnight, like fish that had been suddenly fished ashore and didn't know how to breathe for a while.
In "The Piano of Steel", Chen Guilin was stolen a piece of meat, and this plot reminds me of a true story:
The son of a laid-off worker stole a piece of meat, and after being arrested, the whole family was ashamed and embarrassed, and the worker's family wrapped a poisoned dumpling in a large Chinese New Year's Eve, and the whole family was poisoned to death.
It can be seen that most of these laid-off workers still retain the spirit and dignity of workers.
They look down on people who do business, and they don't look down on people who sell art and sing, but in the end they still bow down to the real life of poverty. Some of them have become self-employed and started small businesses, some have found work everywhere with their own craftsmanship, and some have become two-person actors...
"The Piano of Steel" vividly portrays these workers abandoned by the times:
The second brother-in-law, who can't pull down his face, still has a sense of honor and self-esteem as a worker, and can only stay at home and have nowhere to go;
Wang Gong, an intellectual engineer who remained in Russia, always regarded himself as a worker and tried his best to keep the chimney of the factory;
Chen Guilin can also play the piano well, Shuxian also has a good voice, they formed a performance band, selling and singing everywhere.
It can be seen that compared with other workers, Chen Guilin has actually accepted the market economic reality of the decline of the factory and the way of doing business, he can sell art or sell box lunches in order to make a living, and he also told the second sister "to emancipate the mind to earn money."
However, when he is stolen from a piece of meat by a "mentally emancipated" pickpocket who has become morally degraded, he realizes that the effects of social transformation have already permeated every aspect of life.
The wife ran away with the counterfeit drug seller, and the daughter proposed that she would follow whomever bought the piano.
From equal distribution and collective life, to today's ways out and destinies, the changes in society are no longer as simple as letting Chen Guilin make a living in a different way, but have rewritten everyone's concept of life and value.
Gone are the days when we worked together within the factory system and valued honor over money.
Therefore, rather than saying that Chen Guilin's wife is unfaithful and his daughter is not filial piety, it is better to say that social changes have taken away the families and lives of traditional workers.
The only choice in front of Chen Guilin was to agree to her daughter's needs and buy her a piano.
This comes at the cost of abandoning the posture of the working class and identifying with modern values.
However, the general poverty of the workers led him to abandon the idea of buying a piano completely, and stealing a piano also encountered resistance. He could only rely on the productive instincts of the workers and unite a group of people to make a piano.
In the process of chen guilin's seven warrior-like summoning, he connected the portraits of the workers who were both unique and united with each other.
Shuxian is the only female character in the group, and she embodies the spirit of the female worker of that era.
She is warm and cheerful, yearning for love, and Chen Guilin appears to be saccharine and incompetent in front of her.
She has the righteousness and unity of the workers, and takes the initiative to help Chen Guilin when she borrows money everywhere.
At the same time, she was restrained and lonely. When Chen Guilin was trapped by her family, she said that the ambiguous relationship between the two was nothing more than "taking what they needed".
She never said love, but expressed love in repeated actions and efforts.
Shuxian is like a goldfish in a slender test tube in her room, like a potted plant that does not see the light of day, trying to bloom the energy of life in a depressing and cramped space.
Ji Ge is obviously a big brother who is good at hosting justice, and the film imitates the configuration of Hong Kong gangster films to set off his big brother status when he appears.
But unlike the gangster boss in Hong Kong films, he sees himself as part of the working group, so he is sympathetic to the workers' friends, and he is also full of responsibility and responsible for his work to the end.
Fat Head can be said to be one of the most idle, he plays mahjong to steal cards, dances with people, and does not do business.
It was only when his daughter was bullied that he finally showed his dignity and responsibility as a father.
As the former leader of the country, a nominal father, the workers are facing the dilemma of unemployment and a sharp decline in social status in the restructuring of state-owned enterprises and social transformation.
It is through the crisis of the daughter that the film reminds the father of anxiety, as a metaphor for the crisis of workers' identity, referring to the historical reality of the decline of the working class.
Therefore, when fat head and fast hand put down their personal grudges, and the workers collectively went out to find people who bullied the fat head daughter to settle accounts, the film showed their strength and momentum as a whole for the first time.
This is the moment when workers, after being laid off, re-identify with each other in a collective atmosphere, identify with a common goal, and finally re-recognize the identity of workers.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why this group of people can temporarily give up the work of making a living and return to factory labor to produce a piano.
When we no longer examine the persistence of this group of people from the perspective of modern people, but return to the context of that era of change to experience the persistence of workers, this story is no longer an absurd comedy, but more like a sad elegy.
Just like the helplessness of the fat head in the face of those teenagers, there is no way to vent, and a piano cannot save the daughter who is determined to run away.
The vision of reliving the lives of workers in the old days will eventually sink into an unwilling memory like those two collapsing chimneys.
2. The absurdity of history
Although the story of collective piano building is very "realistic" to reflect the situation and psychology of the workers of that era, "The Piano of Steel" still seems to be an absurd comedy.
When Chen Guilin discovers that Wang Kangmei and Shuxian are having an affair, the film does not emphasize the dynamic and tension of the images highlighted by "Rashomon" or "Lola Run", but instead allows the camera to watch the three characters chasing each other from a distance, so their actions look very funny.
"The Piano of Steel" is full of such comedic treatment.
The camera is always in a fixed position coldly watching the characters face each other, chasing and fighting.
I liken this treatment to watching a person with headphones singing and dancing with disgust.
The characters' unconscious embarrassment and antics are captured in their entirety by the camera, and in a kind of stage-style scheduling, the film reinforces the sense of distance brought about by the bystander perspective.
Distance prevents you from overidling with the characters, and thus produces a comedic effect.
The spectator camera perspective is also a perspective based on a certain historical distance, which comes from the director's deliberate stylization.
Let's look back at the absurd funeral at the beginning of the film.
The camera slowly moves to the left, and a small band led by Chen Guilin and Shuxian wears black ponchos in the rain and sings the Russian song "Three Sets of Cars".
Suddenly, the sound of funeral family members stopping came from outside the painting, allowing Chen Guilin to change to a more cheerful song "Backgammon".
At the end of this paragraph, the film presents a panoramic view of this funeral:
In front of two huge factory chimneys, a solemn spiritual hall, a cheerful folk music.
This kind of grave-bungee scene sets the tone for the entire film at the beginning of the film, a tone that tells the tragedy in a ridiculous way.
At the same time, it is also a metaphor for the film itself.
It undoubtedly suggests that this is a funeral about traditional state-owned industries and the declining working class.
And the voice of the halt can also be understood as the director's deliberate intervention, he did not want the funeral to appear so heavy, he wanted to put on the cloak of comedy for the elegy of the working class.
Let this worker's memory, which seems absurd to the contemporary, but is very real in nature, be narrated in a comical way.
Thus the history of the transition period referred to in the story text takes on an absurd character.
The film is a postmodern narrative that consumes historical distance while dissolving the authority of history.
Perhaps the story of the workers may seem absurd, but it points to real memory; history, though it may seem real, is absurd.
3. "Steel" and "Piano"
Perhaps the most puzzling part of "The Piano of Steel" is the abrupt climactic ending:
Chen Guilin disbanded the piano-making team, gave up custody of his daughter, and the chimney retained by the collective petition was also destroyed in the explosion, and the billowing smoke gradually obliterated the workers.
After the song "Hawthorn Tree", the sorrow of the working class suddenly turned into the bravado of a Spanish bullfighting dance, and Chen Guilin and his co-workers began to cast the steel piano in a high atmosphere.
In this passage, the film cross-edits the magnificent Spanish cabaret performance and the process of making the piano.
The bullfighting dance, in a marching gesture, reflects the romantic and passionate side of the workers when making pianos.
As the title "The Piano of Steel" suggests, "steel", which symbolizes material and industrial attributes, and "qin", which symbolizes spiritual culture, stand at both ends and are unified in one word.
Some argue that it is a dual production of material and spiritual goods exclusively to the workers.
Indeed, just like the scene in the film where Chen Guilin plays "To Alice" alone in the snow after stealing the piano, the film portrays the spirit and life force of the workers leaping above the material with romanticized surreal scenes.
This time, the piano was no longer made to keep the daughter, so it did not have any realistic appeal.
Rather, the workers, in the face of the passing of an era, a great turning point in their lives, do their utmost to prove the traces of their existence and the dignity of being a working class.
The steel piano, bulky and coarse, played with a rough industrial metallic texture, played every note is not very accurate, but it can still flow out of warm harmony.
It symbolizes the hardness and softness of the laid-off workers of that era.
A spiritual romance based on matter, but beyond matter.
With this romance, they interpret the last passion of the changing times.
With this passion, he openly resisted the subversion and coercion of society.
If the story told in "The Piano of Steel" is an elegy sung for the working class ten years after the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, then the director is also using the absurd and romantic stylization of the film itself to practice the spirit and beliefs of the working class.
Ten years after the release of "The Piano of Steel", in the face of a series of social and life problems such as "996" and "Midlife Crisis", in the face of the fact that the working class has not changed,
We may be able to seek inspiration from the undetermined memory of the worker revealed in The Piano of Steel.
In this sense, "The Piano of Steel", and the spirit of fighting against the mediocrity and frustration of life that it expresses,
Should not be forgotten.