The analysis of this audio-visual language comes from my intuitive feeling. There are only a handful of male and female protagonists in the same frame of a movie about love? This is unbelievable, there are joking comments that it was the cold war version of lalaland, I would say you go and see lalaland, there are definitely more than two people walking or dancing in Hollywood with the same frame (I cut this film I'm sure). In contrast, what the Cold War wants to describe is not just the so-called love. Its restrained lens language and the chosen square screen ratio of 1.37:1 are all to create this kind of predicament (you think about the current How wide is the standard screen, how wide is the current anamorphic screen, and the square must not be able to be displayed~), this difficulty not only comes from the awkward and complicated hearts of the two protagonists, but also from the hidden pervasive political atmosphere. .
The tone of the film: aerial view
At the beginning of the film, there are many long-range shots as shown in the picture. Generally, there is one person or one (several) cars in an open environment. People and cars account for a small proportion of the picture, and the meaning of manpower is overwhelming. . This is also the root cause of the tragic tone of the entire film.
The following pictures all contain a large space of people and the environment. The overhead shot shows the weakness of people in the environment, and the environment in the big vision highlights the weakness of people.
Body as occlusion for blurred foreground
The presence of a large number of bodies always emphasizes the background of this love story, an era when many people were caught up in the political torrent of the Cold War. The nearly square width of the picture has formed a cramped field of vision that does not conform to the viewing habits of modern people, and the illusory occlusion added to the foreground makes the picture suffocating. In particular, the function of foreground occlusion is performed by many other bodies, which to a certain extent again refers to the reality of the individual being limited by the environment and the original sin of communism - no ego.
The picture below shows the male protagonist looking for folk songs, and the foreground is a folk singer.
The picture below shows the male protagonist looking at the female protagonist over many carnivals in a bar in Paris.
Defocused foreground occlusion is also accompanied by direct body appearance. As shown in the series of pictures below, the administrative manager of the song and dance troupe stood on a high platform outside the building and spoke to the farmers below, encouraging them to compete and get the chance to enter the song and dance troupe and change their own life and destiny. In the foreground is the peasant's hat below, which is shot upwards, showing the authority and dignity of the speaker's representative.
According to common sense, the next scene should have been the audience's reaction, but the scene of the male protagonist and the female leader of the song and dance troupe standing aside to watch was inserted. The shot inserted in the middle acts as a cut-off montage, and it also implies that the male protagonist and the team did not have a close connection from the beginning. So it makes sense that he left without hesitation at the end of the film. But there are still a lot of bodies on the right side of the foreground, and the male protagonist cannot avoid these bodies and the communist environment they represent.
After this alienation effect was achieved, the reaction shots of the people who were shot overhead were put in.
The framing did not fill the screen with all the characters listening to the speech, but left space for the land and cattle in the background. First, it indicated that they were farmers and their living space was this muddy land; The cow and man who mooed in the middle were drawn into the same space for a comparison to satirize the hypocrisy of communism's so-called collectivism. This was advertised as a ruthless and lofty competition, and the view from above made the peasants more powerless and weak.
Body occlusions like this are described in this analysis for the first time in the same box as other examples that repeat the same motif.
stage and reality
The film does not use off-screen music independent of the narrative to render the atmosphere, but based on the needs of the plot setting, the singing performed directly on the stage becomes moving music, which not only enhances the vividness of the film text, but also conveys the emotions on stage through these folk songs. The true voice of the heroine to the hero.
We noticed that most of the time in the film, the characters are in neutral gray, and at most there are dreamy contour lights on the side edges, so the facial expressions of the characters appear restrained. But only when the spotlight is on the stage, the brightness of the picture suddenly improves a lot, and the heroine is very bright. Open heart. This character flaw, which reversed performance and let go, reality and stage, caused the tragedy of love between the two, which the director directly expressed with lyrics and lighting.
Rarely framed
The most obvious audio-visual style of this film is to deal with the relationship between the male and female protagonists. The first half of the film—from the beginning to the second time before the heroine arrives in Paris—is the stage where the relationship between the two is sprouted and established, and it is so important. In the process of emotional development, the number of times the male and female protagonists are in the same frame is very small. The only few times in the same frame, the positions and angles of the male and female protagonists in the picture all imply the meaning of strong women and weak men.
Instead of the ratio of the commonly used movie screens such as 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.85:1 standard widescreen, this film uses a 1.37:1 retro square screen , which is the aspect ratio configuration of old movies, and the film 50 the background of the era. In order to be more in line with this sense of history and the times, the director gave up the color idea at the beginning and decided to use black and white color and 35mm film format. In addition to creating a sense of history, the square screen will make the bodies of the two people limited by the frame, which can better reflect the characters' distressed psychology; in addition, they are rarely in the same frame when the width is limited.
The first time in the same frame: women before men after men
The female protagonist is dancing in the middle shot, and the foreground is the hand of another dancer in the lower left corner. It is always emphasized that this is not only the scene of the female protagonist. There are many other dancers in this scene, but the male protagonist is from the back side. The projected gaze is always inseparable from the heroine, and the audience can perceive the thoughts of the hero toward the heroine without seeing the facial expressions of the hero. This scene was shot with a shallow focal length, so although the upper body of the male protagonist was in the camera, it was in a defocused state. From the very beginning, it established the tone that the central character of the story is the female protagonist and the male protagonist is silent.
The second time in the same frame: women's high men's low
This paragraph first used a positive and negative dialogue. The male protagonist played the piano and asked the female protagonist to audition. In this opportunity, the male protagonist looked up at her and asked her why she was in prison. I still like myself. This is the first close communication between the male and female protagonists. Then there is a setting shot that encircles the two of them. The heroine is standing and is located in the center of the composition of the picture. The natural light from the window on the right side of the picture and the left side of the heroine's body makes the heroine's body show bright colors. Strong. The male protagonist is sitting in a low position, with only his back and in the lower right corner, in the dark part, with only a little edge metering on the top of his head. The male protagonist looks up to the female protagonist, and this subtle sense of strength and weakness between the sexes spreads in this small space.
The third time in the same frame: staring at each other
The male lead and the female leader of the orchestra are leaning against the glass together. We see the defocused woman in the glass (above the female person in charge) with her head on her left hand, her gaze aimed at the glass wall, and the male protagonist's gaze is also directed towards the defocused woman. Here it directly becomes the virtual image of the male and female protagonists in the same frame. After a while, the manager of the orchestra came again, also leaning against the glass wall.
When the other two left and only the male protagonist was left face-to-face with the woman, a close-up of the woman appeared.
The reaction shot of the woman who received the male lead's desire came so late that the scene where the two were in close contact with each other was immediately followed by the scene.
The third time looking at each other in the mirror develops to the bottom where the two people have sex scenes in the same frame. After being transformed into an entity, the close-up of the female protagonist's face still occupies most of the screen, while the male protagonist still faces away from the camera, and the audience can only see his frontal profile instead of the front in the body performance of the two actors at most.
The fourth time in the same frame: merge and then divide
Two people lie down and rest in a couple shape on the grass. When the two are still in a peaceful state, the male protagonist's eyes are slightly closed, and the female protagonist stares at the male protagonist and speaks to the male protagonist. The audience in front of the screen still cannot see the positive image of the male protagonist in the two shots.
This peaceful and peaceful time together was very short. The woman began to speak and confessed that she was entrusted by the administrative manager to monitor his whereabouts and judge his thoughts. Although he claimed that he was covering the other party, the man was still angry and got up immediately. Instead of catching up with the man's movement trajectory, he remained still, and the square frame was immediately left with only the woman's face on the grass, and the same frame of the two was suddenly broken.
After the female protagonist pierced the window paper, the male protagonist left naturally angrily, and then framed the two in the same frame again. However, the smaller back of the male protagonist in the background is weak compared to the larger back of the female protagonist in the foreground, and the male protagonist's weak position has been reinforced by the image.
The unwilling female protagonist was angry at the male protagonist's departure, so she turned around and jumped into the water. The male protagonist heard the voice and turned back. It turned out that the woman was floating peacefully in the river. The next scene changes from day to night. It is a split shot of the male protagonist and the female protagonist looking at each other affectionately by the bonfire. The two occupy a frame again, and the frame is a close-up of the upper body of the two. There are sparks flickering constantly at the bottom of the screen, and the shadow of the flame is projected on the face—the top of the screen, creating a shadowy feeling, creating an ambiguous atmosphere where the two are tempted by each other but yearn for each other.
The fifth time in the same frame: the second time looking at each other
The director uses the mirror again as a medium to refract the heroine's gaze and reflect the heroine's expression. The virtual image of the heroine in the picture takes on the imagination and speculation from the audience, so the mirror becomes the heroine's psychological grudge and an auxiliary for the projection of desire.
The next heroine couldn't restrain her love for the male lead, she found it from the narrow train aisle, and had a private meeting with the male lead. head.
This is probably because the male protagonist here asked the female protagonist to flee to Paris together, because the subsequent splitting and closing plots were all triggered by this suggestion, so the director arranged for the male protagonist to show the audience his own plot here. leading position.
The development of the fifth time and the third time is very similar to the development of the same frame. It can be seen that the use of mirrors is no coincidence. We know that the distance between the virtual image in the mirror and the character in front of the mirror is twice the distance between the character and the mirror. The heroine is constantly projected into the mirror to observe the world. It is conceivable that the heroine is alienated from the heart.
The sixth time in the same frame: one front and one back
This co-frame is the first co-frame of the second phase. The male protagonist is waiting for the female protagonist at the bar. Once the female protagonist appears, the male protagonist has no close-up shots from the front, and turns his back to the audience.
The seventh time in the same frame: a normal couple
This is the first time that two people appear in the frame at the same time. The ambiguous effect created by the narrow square is more obvious than that of the standard wide screen. This is how couples generally open up.
In fact, when it comes to this, the repetition of the same frame will come to an end for the time being, because the latter two people have begun to become normal. but! Even if the next stage is the cohabitation stage, and the two often appear together in the picture, there are still slight signs of that trend of strong and weak relations and instability. The next part of the appearance and separation will describe the visual language of the gap between the two.
Appearance and separation
1. Live at one end
Several scenes in the film during the cohabitation period in Paris that show the estrangement of the hero and heroine are worth analyzing. The point here is how the separation of appearances and appearances is represented in the picture until they finally part ways.
This kind of composition rarely appears on a square screen. It is different from the same frame shots that did not appear when the relationship was unstable before, and it must be a close contact when it appeared. To live at one end of each other without committing crimes indicates that the relationship between the two will usher in a turning point of "dividing".
2. The virtual image in the mirror
In the same frame, there are two similar examples in which the virtual image of the heroine is refracted by a mirror instead of the actual heroine. The fuse that led to the above-mentioned slap-slap incident in cohabitation in Paris was a dinner party attended by the hero and heroine. The heroine's heart was shaken at that time, and she had doubts about the hero's love. The director used the interaction in the mirror to tell us that estrangements and rifts had already formed in the middle, but the male protagonist did not know it, and only one drunk female protagonist understood this.
This scene requires a careful audience to realize that it was originally a photo of the heroine in the mirror, rather than directly facing the heroine herself. Pay attention to the side of the heroine's bangs, which is consistent with the side of the actress standing in front of the mirror when she is leaving home. This is the "metaphor" the heroine herself said when drinking in front of the mirror.
The picture below is in front of the mirror before going out. The male protagonist asked himself in front of the mirror if he wanted to wear a tie. The woman said yes, but he did not wear it at the later dinner party. Again, we feel that conflict is the result of accumulation.
3. Fan-Out Mirror
And so the real score came. After the female protagonist came to Paris for the second time after getting married and took the initiative to find the male protagonist to live with the male protagonist, the two had the same daily life, so they have always been in the same frame. Towards the end of the episode, women and men are walking on the streets of Paris, men show women their work, women throw them away, men ask women why they are unhappy, women say that Michelle fucks her six times a night , the man grabbed her elbow and slapped her directly. The woman staggered back a few steps and fell out of the frame again, leaving only the man in the frame.
In order to express the relationship between the two and the political environment that affects the relationship between the two, the director put a lot of effort into the audio-visual language. Of course, this is more reflected in the picture, and the sound part is less (of course, because I don't know much about music, I only know that the songs inside are super nice~), there is no background music from outside the picture, which makes the film's feelings more restrained, and we can't deny that the wonderful Polish folk songs are the sincerity of this love (although it has experienced doubts and disagreements). Trust, but the two are genuinely in love and sincere) adds a touch of color.
The director's allusions to the Cold War environment are subtle rather than direct and enthusiastic. For example, in the dinner party during the cohabitation period in Paris, the female protagonist asked the male protagonist why he put himself in prison and came from the country. The male protagonist bluntly said that this was In order to highlight your personality, it is very popular here, and the heroine can't understand it. This difference in concept is actually an ideological opposition. Doesn't it mean that political persecution is necessary to express the Cold War environment!
View more about Cold War reviews
