<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > prescript</h1>
After watching Li Cangdong's "Poems" in the fourth grade, I began to really contact movies, until I read my freshman year in film majors, I felt that I was not engaged in art, I was too stupid every day, and the most dashing time was still when I was talking about movies with friends before college. Recently wanted to make a film, has been at home to pull the film to study, freshman year to learn a semester of technical work, the brain is full of technology, there is no creativity, feel more than enough and insufficient. Two days ago friends have gone to see "Xiao Wei", I also followed the wind, after watching "Xiao Wei" suddenly felt a sense of heart, so hurried to write it down, although the writing felt that the words are not enough to express the ideas in the mind, but still very pleased, has seen the thinking from technology to art trend. This change is extremely difficult, although most of the friends around me are not optimistic about this movie, but I am grateful for the film "Xiao Wei". Although I personally think that the film still has a lot of shortcomings, I think it is a film that is quite inspiring for me to think about my present moment.
(Not to mention technical photography or lighting techniques here, I think the light is a bit cei.) ）
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > inertia with the audience</h1>
Since the beginning of the film, the existence of the camera movement itself has been continuously constructed, because the camera continues to move like the human eye, and the concept of "viewpoint" can be greatly strengthened. In the context of traditional filmmaking, the "viewpoint" is a narrative attribute in the sense of the more inclined play formed after countless montage collages, which to some extent has nothing to do with the image itself and is "invisible"; in this film, the "invisibleness" of the viewpoint is weakened by the director.
The titles of the three segments of the film were written out - "Mu Ling, Yi Ming, Wei Ming". This form of floating subtitles is generally used in plays to set some kind of expectation for the audience, and in this film this expectation is the expectation of "viewpoint". The chapters of a character generally correspond to the following story from the perspective of the character, which is the first step in the visualization of the "viewpoint".
It is reasonable that when the title of "Mu Ling" appears, we will generally think that this is a comprehensive description of the living state of a character like "Xiao Wu". The film seems to have done this, highlighting the helplessness of the mother in the play, and making a slightly negative depiction of the role of the son, basically portraying the "marginalized" but extremely important image of the mother in the family. However, on this basis, this film has made a further and more biased treatment of the lens body.
The film's most filmed scenes in the first chapter are to shoot the mother's "image in the mirror" and the mother's heel. The front heel is an extremely common shot, and it was used by the director in this film to further strengthen the mother's sense of "point of view" and strengthen the audience's self-belief that the role of the mother is "omniscient and omnipotent" - after all, I follow you wherever you go, and I know what you do. On the other hand, although the image in the mirror is not as common as the front heel and the back, it is also a relatively sparse and ordinary framing in literary and art films. We all know that in the past, the mirror portraits of masters mainly highlighted the paranoia and inner complexity of the characters, and sometimes they were also used to imply that the person was mentally ill. In this film, the mirror is generally a fixed shot, starting with a human face in the mirror, and then shaking to the other side according to the scene schedule, shaking to the real person. In a large number of moving shots, interspersed with such fixed shots is a sense of outlet, before the camera begins to shake, we look at her own face in the mirror with the character, this is a rather private moment, there is no contradiction and conflict, we just look at ourselves along the heroine's own line of sight; and after the camera begins to shake, we seem to return to the real space full of contradictions and conflicts with the heroine from the private space of self-examination, and greet a new round of chicken and dog jumping life together.
The emergence of the above two types of shots and subtitles is the same effect, reinforcing the mother's point of view and further creating a sense of the audience's complete presence in the mother's life in the family.
And the film has a superb shot scheduling near the end of the mother paragraph. The mother returns to the room (this paragraph is not a replacement time), put socks on the husband, the nurse hands the husband a diagnosis sheet, the mother goes out with the diagnosis sheet to the triage desk, a huge handheld follow-up shot, the camera follows the mother to the triage desk, and then the mother and the nurse begin to talk, the camera is temporarily fixed, and the mother and the nurse are filmed in the front side of the camera. This dialogue is a little nonsense in a sense, because the nurse is not a role in the real sense, and the contradiction in the dialogue between the two is not the core contradiction. Combined with the perspective of the scene and the camera, this dialogue scene is more like a kind of "examination" of the mother that pulls out of the perspective, and the nurse subtly becomes the point of view at this moment. By the time our mother makes up for it in vain, we already know that we can't accomplish the biggest goal she faces from the beginning of the film, "covering up her husband's lung cancer." After a period of shaking, the nurse handed the forged diagnosis form back to the mother, who turned around and took the photographic maneuver, as if ready to follow.
When I read this passage, I thought that the mother's exit from the ward itself was in a sense an "escape" from the outbreak of the core contradiction. When the mother leaves the triage desk to return to the ward to face the outbreak of contradictions, according to the previous design of the camera point of view throughout the film, the camera should follow the mother back to the ward, and then let the audience face the mother. Because of the depth of empathy, my heart as a viewer is resistant to the transformation of the camera's perspective from the female nurse to the mother, which is the innate resistance of people to facing tragedy.
At this moment, the camera suddenly stopped after a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, stopped in front of the triage table, and allowed the mother to walk to the deep ward. Near the end of a passage from Mu Ling, the camera suddenly breaks the previous principles of lens design in this film, abandoning the movement of the mother and taking the mother as the viewpoint, but choosing to suddenly change into a distant, restrained, unknowable perspective on the characters. It turned out to be exactly what I wanted, and the camera didn't keep up.
In fact, for the current film, the audience's experience with the film itself is rich enough, whether it is the progress of the script or the connection of the camera. Occasionally doing film criticism, I often mention the word inertia, and the audience's interpretation of the film has the inertia supported by long-term experience.
In the first half of the film, a large number of long shots of the design camera are designed, and first of all, a very visual point of view is constructed, and we may have a certain dull feeling about the editing, but we are sensitive to the movement of the camera. Because of the large heel heels of the first half, we equate the viewpoint shift with the camera movement, perhaps for the first time we feel that the movement of the lens itself is so important. When the camera moves, the viewer thinks he's going to face tragedy, but he doesn't. The mother in the panoramic frame composition of the camera gradually drifts into the depths, and then continues to perform in the direction of the camera (thanks to the nurse). The strong expressiveness of the composition and performance is not yet discussed, the pause of the camera makes the audience's expectations disappointed, and the audience suddenly has a feeling of "lost" - it turns out that we can't really (or we "don't deserve") to go with the characters in the play. The audience's original self-belief in the mother's role suddenly became "the original mother role is so complicated" because of the sense of distance.
The next shot directly connects the family who have seemed to be reconciled, sitting together in the car home. The audience avoids the most central point of contradiction (the mother goes back to face the father who learned the truth), and in a sense, it is the audience itself that "escapes" the face (because we have some kind of resistance). On the one hand, it is difficult for us to glimpse the outbreak of a family emotional dispute, and suddenly, the audiovisual language and the play at the same time open the distance between the audience and the family at this moment, leaving blank, the emotions come up. At this time, the film suddenly has a hint of Hou Xiaoxian's taste - intimate images, a large number of blank spaces, and a strong sense of perspective on the play and audio-visual. It is at this moment that the camera's perspective changes from a God-like omniscient perspective to a fairly third-party perspective where we can only see some things and not others. Just as the flickering camera at the beginning and end staggers into the house and staggers out of the house, we simply observe all this rather intimate image as an "interloper" and leave. We don't have access to the most emotional moments (like the death of our father, the mother facing our father), or the director feels we shouldn't see them.
Mr. Lu Xun said a sentence in "Small Miscellaneous Feelings" that was overused: "The sorrows and joys of human beings are not the same, I only think that they are noisy." This passage has been published by various people in their own space to express their "disappointment" with the world. But in fact, if you really understand and accept this passage, you will not really use this passage to cry out injustice. At present, there is no shortage of emotional catharsis in literary and artistic creation, but I often think that artistic expression is not to vent emotions, but to deal with emotions, and more importantly, to deal with the relationship between the audience and creation. Cheap images are always pursuing empathy, but it is difficult for people in real life to truly empathize, let alone viewers and creators who are separated by a layer of screens? The most important attribute of the camera is mechanical reproducibility, and reading some contemporary texts in recent years seems to be pursuing a certain mechanical reproducibility. Mechanical reproducibility represents a restrained, calm observation and realistic recording of emotions. I always feel that some people still have unrealistic requirements for creation and audience, always trying to drown the audience with emotion, and rejoicing that the audience can shed a few cheap tears, which can only be said to be sad.
The good thing about this work is that this is the first time I have seen "restraint" in the current Chinese film (of course, the second half of this film is not restrained enough). The director's control of the audience is in place, the audience is safe and self-satisfied to do their own position, not like other films, looking like the director Fei fei this old pull the audience to the audience's head and scolded: "Cry to me!" ”。 The camera paused in the distance, and as we watched my mother drift away and make a sad performance into the camera, I suddenly realized that I was just an audience member. I often think that the most important thing for a work is the audience, what is the relationship between the audience and the creation, which is the most important thing to think about. How to create a private image, the first half of this work is very well done.
Returning to the audiovisual design of the first part of this work, it is extremely elaborate. I sometimes think that the audiovisual aspect of all films is somehow "constructing-breaking" the cycle. It is precisely because of the high level of construction that breaking appears to be powerful. The film has been built for so long, but the break is so sudden and powerful, it is worth learning. In fact, the development of film to the twenty-first century is no longer a young art, and the audience already has their own understanding of film in their minds. We often say that film is the "audiovisual language". The so-called language is passed down. Since the audience already has an understanding, how to use these existing understandings is the focus of contemporary cinema. Some understandings can be continued, some understandings can be broken, and the same logic is placed within the creation of a film, using the paradigm of construction- breaking to hit the sense of power. As a latecomer to the film, you should use the audience's "inertia of watching the movie" to make a fuss. It is always advisable to use force to exert force.
posters
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > the escape of youth - Achilles and the turtle</h1>
Talking about "adolescent escape" is not a new topic, this film is a film about "escape". The core of the film is the relationship between the son and the mother, and to some extent the father is actually only a secondary character. As a work about escape, this film comes up with a new interpretation - Achilles and the Turtle. In Achilles and the turtle, I always thought that Achilles was the male protagonist, and this film tells me that the male protagonist turned out to be a turtle.
The male protagonist of this film has two anxieties in total: the small one is that the college entrance examination is approaching and he has to decide whether to go abroad; the big one is that his father will die, how to deal with his relationship with his mother. (Although in most traditional Chinese families it seems that the former is more important Ha)
(As for why a father's death is directed at the point where the son has to deal with his relationship with his mother.) I grew up in a single-parent family, and with my mother, I didn't understand the complexity of relationships in some traditional families. But it can be seen simply that there is a considerable gap between the son and the mother, we all know that the growth of teenagers is basically unclear about what the relationship between their parents is, this layer of estrangement has a father as an intermediate bridge, the time is not counted, the father will die, the contradiction will break out, and the father is dead, the son and the mother are in the same space (think if you live in a house with the people you hate), it is more clear, from a certain point of view, this film is a film that relies on space to shape anxiety (I will talk about this later). ）
The progress of this film is basically a countdown process, but the film itself seems to be less clear, which is one of the failures of the film, the logic of the film's play is: the male protagonist must inevitably make a choice and grow at a certain time (the college entrance examination time will not change, the father will die). This is a line that runs through the whole process, but the film itself does not give too many time clues, so that the anxiety of time is blurred, and to some extent, the metaphor of "Achilles and the Turtle" makes people scratch their heads.
The male protagonist is a senior in high school, but he is still wavering in the face of the college entrance examination, and he does not know whether he wants to go abroad or continue the college entrance examination. There are several countdowns to the college entrance examination in the film, and the countdown to the college entrance examination is particularly interesting, and it is a very, very important symbol that can shape anxiety. On the other hand, there is a somewhat precise but somewhat vague countdown — father has half a year to live. If you look closely, it is not difficult to see that the time of the two overlaps, and the son's classroom is still 167 days away from the college entrance examination, which is about half a year.
In the past films, when talking about the escape of teenagers, they often give two kinds of fulcrums, one is external, the protagonist is caught in some kind of life quagmire, and he can no longer change himself, so he can only escape; the other is internal, the protagonist has already given up on himself in his heart, so he chooses to escape. The answer given in this film is that the male protagonist seems to believe in the fable of Achilles and the turtle, believing that things that are continuous will become eternal (this is the line in the play), and that the things that are counting down will never come.
In fact, I am particularly touched by this matter, especially the people of our 2020 epidemic year college entrance examination. Because all kinds of countdowns are always postponed - art exam time, back-to-school time, college entrance exam time. The countdown is always increasing the number of days, and sometimes I suddenly feel as if all the exams will never come, always in a continuous countdown, like Achilles and the turtle, Achilles is always a little distance away from the turtle. Because of this, I have been playing before the college entrance examination, continuing a loose state, I always feel that this current, evasive, do not have to face the choice of the state can continue like a countdown, like Achilles in the state of chasing turtles to reach eternity. The male protagonist of the film is obviously the same person as me, caught in a chaotic self-deception.
The male protagonist and his friend were punished by the director of the teaching on the playground, and the director of the teaching jumped out of the sentence for no reason: "Tell me how Achilles caught up with the turtle?" The male protagonist suddenly began to run violently when he heard this—he was the turtle who was afraid of being chased by Achilles.
The film depicts the male protagonist and his friends running to the mountain forest to play before the college entrance examination, using a telephoto lens to shoot the male protagonist alone in the mountain forest, and the horizontal space is compressed into a weak vertical space (just like the poster of this film, is this trick learned from Bi Gan?). Among them, the male protagonist delusionally stops the passage of time and fails in the end, which is also my regret. In the long period of freedom, the imagination time will stagnate as desired, but when the face comes, it is already prepared, and the teenager's mouth is mostly like this.
The fulcrum of the film for the male protagonist is full of novelty, and even to some extent can be called "in line with current affairs", but the final ending I really did not understand, the anxiety of time is always focused on how to solve anxiety, asking questions is the artistic level, solving the problem is the technical level, but this film seems to escape this part, resulting in the first half of the film has a very good look, the second half of the look is very poor, especially the surreal fragments, like the dream of the Taoist, do not know what to do. (It may also be that I can't understand it, and I'm a little sleepy when I see the back.) At the end, we know that Achilles finally caught up with the turtle, but the turtle still had to make a choice, and the growth and change that the choice brought.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" ></h1>
Space Anxiety: I've always found space anxiety to be a particularly interesting thing. Teacher Xu Haofeng said that places such as Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are small, anxiety is serious, people have problems with their spirit or life, and they can only jump into the sea, unlike China, people who live badly in the north run to the south. Later, I read "One Sentence top ten thousand sentences" and deeply believed that Yang Baishun changed his name three or four names, traveled all over the country, or survived, if this person lived in Taiwan, he would have to jump into the sea.
The school area of the junior high school is very large, there are six or seven teaching buildings alone, and there are five canteens. But the high school is small, there is not even a serious playground and canteen, only three teaching buildings. In junior high school, if you are not used to eating in one canteen, you will go to another canteen to eat. Boys and girls have enough places to hang out in love without necessarily meeting acquaintances, and it is said that there are also people who steal in unoccupied classrooms. But this thing is not good in my high school, you have to endure the gaze when you fall in love, if anyone has a vendetta against whom can see you a dozen times a day. Including smoking, junior high school recess exercises can only hide in the toilet to smoke (as in the film), all smells, it is estimated that the smell of smells too much, so sometimes I feel that the brains of high school classmates are a bit sick, very strange, I think this should not be my delusion.
According to this logic, if the male owner's family has enough money to buy several houses, the male owner can move outside, at least he does not have to face his mother, he does not have to deal with anxiety so urgently; if he still lives in a room, without his father in a room, the two must face each other. It can be seen that money can solve many things. I originally had a theory called "checkout theory", which is that if you shoot a few people eating out, you must shoot a clip of checkout, in fact, this is also a logic, but it will not be repeated.
Lifeblood! Such a debut is truly amazing
To watch the first release, please pay attention to my eponymous public account: Classic Movie Recommendation Officer