With such an impression, I watched this film. After more than an hour, my reaction was: what the fuck is he trying to say?
However, after watching it for the second time, there are many themes and details It gradually became clearer. When I watched it for the first time, I felt that the very loud music also made sense. Then I discussed it with everyone in class today. After watching the film again, there were only two words in my mind: awesome. The more you look, the more awesome it is .
There are many aspects to be said, not just the famous kino-eye theory of DA Kaufman (the director's real name). The following things we discuss in class are of course over-interpreted, but I feel that Exactly what such an experimental film of provoking aspires to achieve.
---Cityscape (image), and political propaganda and criticism
The film's title, with the cameraman, reflects one of its very important themes: Thinking about filmmaking itself. However, this theme is presented through another theme of the film, that is, the documentary of the Soviet urban scenery. For this reason, this film is classified as a documentary by us. What we intuitively see is the Soviet city And all aspects of people's lives, which further reflect the director's political ideas.
The two most prominent keywords are workers and industrialization. Cities in the Soviet Union are industrialized cities, and there is no doubt that the development of industry is also the most important part of national policy. The movie wakes up the city with a whizzing train, and then we see Buses and trams are constantly flowing on the city streets. The huge chimneys are smoking, the coal carts pulled by workers are full of coal blocks, the wheels of the sewing machines are constantly turning, and all kinds of gears are turning in an orderly manner... This is how An industrialized image is what the director wants to show.
close-up of various gears
It is the great workers who drive these machines. The workers have happy smiles on their faces, they work hard and are always efficient. Not only men, but women. They are typists, operators , weavers, sales assistants; at the same time, they stack paper boxes, assemble cigarettes... This series of shots is slowly accelerated, dazzling. In our opinion, this is almost the same as a machine, it is the exploitation of people, but the director The way these pictures are juxtaposed makes the labor scene like a symphony; they are so skilled that the movements of their hands become so beautiful. What's even more interesting is that in that group of pictures, the director who edited the film His wife is also among them.
The filming and editing, in the director's opinion, belong to the great collective of workers; the perfect cooperation between man and machine. This is the ultimate beauty of industrial production
. Proof of the emergence of a new Soviet society. Many sweeping and cleaning scenes in the film seem to symbolize a break with the imperialist Russia of the past. In the film, there is a section showing marriage, divorce, death, and the birth of a new baby . This is everyone's life cycle. Likewise, the old Russia is dying and the new Soviet Union is being born. Interestingly, the director puts the mother who is giving birth with the funeral, while the child comes out of the mother's womb. Before that moment, the picture gave an illusion that the mother was dying in agony. It seemed to be a painful death, but it was actually the birth of a new life. Isn't this talking about the Soviet Union? In 1929, after the October Revolution, society The Soviet Union, which is still in a precarious state, seems to be experiencing chaos leading to its demise, but the director tells us that this is an illusion. In fact, the society has been reborn.
This passage also exemplifies another theme. Bringing such personal matters such as funerals and childbirth to such a direct photographic approach makes us think about the intrusion of the camera into one's life. This is more appropriate in the context of the Soviet Union , because "big brother is watching you all the time". Surveillance footage is also a type of footage, and movie footage can also become surveillance footage. The professor said that in another film the director gave all the children in the film a camera and let them To monitor and record the violations you see, and report them to the state. Surveillance has therefore become one of the Soviet social values exported by this film.
However, the director is not only praising, but also criticizing. A theme that has been shown throughout is the class conflict. The poor sleep on the street, the rich sleep on soft beds. The workers work hard, while the eldest ladies of the rich go shopping in carriages. Being female workers When they create valuable beauty with their own hands, rich women are doing beauty. The director's disdain for the latter is obvious. In my opinion, this somewhat reflects the director's criticism of society. The real Marx Everyone in the society is equal, there is no class, and the Soviet society where the director lives still has such a big gap between the rich and the poor, which shows that the revolution has not yet succeeded, and this society that is still undergoing adjustment still has a long way to go.
Some other very typical Soviet notions include love/advocacy of sports, as it is a productive leisure activity. and critique of fascism.
--- Film Eye
director thinks Film Eye, kino -eye, the film lens, is more powerful than the human eye. In fact, it can be said that he treats the camera like a god. The first shot of the film starts, we see a huge camera, and the person holding the camera. The film just started Not long after the start, people were seated in the cinema, and after the projectionist adjusted the projector, we saw two clock-like objects slowly colliding and emitting a dazzling light, just like God and Adam in Michelangelo's Genesis painting Fingers touch. At that moment, life is born. And here the camera plays the role of this god.
Why is the camera so good? Because the camera finds its logic in the illogical chaos of everyday urban life. There is a scene where the lens is shaking dazzlingly, and a human eye appears at the same time as the chaotic city scene. Two lenses Alternate until they appear simultaneously in a multi-exposure picture. The human eye receives all the influences of this complex world without filtering, but the cinematographic lens finds logic in it and does what the human eye cannot. Everything.
---The destruction of movie illusions
Finally, I think the most interesting theme is this. One of the most classic film illusions in film and television is the speeding train that seems to rush out of the screen. Someone recorded a picture of the train coming. It was so dynamic and so real that the audience at the movie theater thought the train was going to rush off the screen and ran away. This is a joke-like story that the speeding train became The most classic film illusion. Interestingly, at the beginning of this movie, we also saw this scene. The photographer knelt on the rails and took the camera to shoot the speeding train. The next second, we saw a few frames of the photographer and a montage of the speeding train. In the next second, our view is under the speeding train. The train seems to run over the photographer's head, we thought. But the next second, we Seeing that the director took out the camera buried between the rails, and he was unscathed. In the next second, the sleeping man woke up, and then the whole city woke up.
What a clever presentation Illusion breaks the process of illusion. The director believes that the commercial films of Western capitalism make people fall asleep and make people immersed in the illusion created by the film and cannot extricate themselves, and what he has to do is to break the illusion and wake people up from the illusion , always remind people of the distance between themselves as the audience and the film. Therefore, there are many things that are unreasonable at first glance in the film, which are deliberately put in to disturb the illusion.
At this point of the discussion, I suddenly found that this concept coincides with Yasujiro Ozu. In another Japanese film class, I discussed why Ozu has so many "anti-natural" film language. For example, the camera is almost motionless, and many low Angled shots, when two people are talking, the camera is usually 180 degrees completely reversed, and then the two talking people should be looking at each other, eye-line matches with each other, but the people in Ozu's film seem to be completely facing the audience Speak. One explanation is that Ozu reminds the audience that they are watching a movie, and are not completely immersed in the world created by that movie. Movies are not life itself, movies have their own limitations, so people who watch movies should I can feel this sense of distance at any time.
Two people with completely different backgrounds and different styles have reached a consensus on this matter. It seems that the film people are thinking about the question of what distance the film should keep from the audience. of.
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