Once or twice, I rode a small electric donkey through the empty Beijing at night. I saw the deliveryman carrying his girlfriend on the back seat. This scene made me feel romantic. After a hurrying day, the deliveryman’s last trip , carrying his lover home.
This is the picture I saw, and I was moved by that scene, but as a bystander, I can only reach there.
A lot of times, we just live in a closed bubble, going to the same places, doing the same things, seeing the same people, or just going back and forth with ourselves every day. We have passed countless people on the subway, people on the road, people on the screen with our fingertips, just passing by.
And this world is clearly full of richness, endless distances, and countless people, how are they living on this day and this moment? I wanted to dive in, dive into the real life they unfolded to me from their first perspective.
So when I started watching the documentary "A Day in the Life", I had a strong desire to pry, so although it didn't have a complete storyline like a regular movie, it filled me with the desire to watch it. The topic itself has a strong experimental nature, and life itself is an adventure.
The material of this documentary comes from a total of 4,500 hours of video from 190 countries and regions. Netizens all over the world use their own first perspective to record what happened on an ordinary day on July 24, 2010, ordinary or extraordinary. matter.
Compared with traditional documentaries, the director follows the interviewee's life or work, interspersed with interviews in which the interviewee is sitting in front of the camera. This UGC creation method is new. Seeing the fisheye lens, the shaking pictures, the vlog-style records, the actions of the person being photographed telling the photographer not to take pictures... These roughnesses that are completely different from the professional camera crew with long guns and short guns make you feel very real.
Think of Xu Bing's "Eyes of the Dragonfly", and there is a similar effect. Xu Bing cut the surveillance video installed on more than 20 computers into a feature-length film, covering today's China, including suicide, Internet celebrity, live broadcast, transgender, love, labor...
"A Day in the Life" expands the scope to the whole world. You can see husbands who lost their wives, the moment animals are killed, people who have been hit by a car 5 times and are still cycling around the world, gays and grandma coming out of the closet , the boy who called to consult his mother before confessing, the girl who made people see hope under the war, disease, carnival and riot, birth and death...
As if "seeing all the Chang'an flowers in one day", in the time of a documentary, we have the perspective of God, watching all beings on the giant egg of the earth, watching the various forms of life, and the diversity of folk customs, but we also watch To the common love and fear of mankind.
The girl who made a video call with her husband who is far away in another hemisphere, dressed up in front of the video and dressed up like she was going on a sweet date. In the video, she cried silently after saying bye, making you seem to see another world in the world. a self.
How to cut the numerous fragmented materials into a complete film tests the creator's idea.
In the editing, it can be seen that after a relatively complete short story is staged in "A Day in the Life", it will cut into a parallel picture. Some people wake up from the street, wake up from the bed in the bedroom, wake up from the tent, Wake up from a cabin seat...or different people are beating eggs, different people are brushing their teeth, it's like you're listening to a concert, first a solo, then a chorus of various parts, then another Solo, and chorus, solo is "continuation of the procedure of low eyebrow letter", and multi-part chorus is "big beads and small beads falling on a jade plate", so the film has a sense of rhythm.
If you watch "The Gate of Life" and "The World in the World", you will have very strong emotions of pain, and in "A Day in the Life", there are also human tragedies interspersed, but they do not deliberately exaggerate, but treat everything in life with the same To present tragedy with the same equal and ordinary attitude as joy, sorrow and sorrow.
In the messy and cramped room, a father asked his son to say good morning to his mother, and a photo of the mother smiling brightly was placed in a wooden frame, letting people know that the mother of the family was gone.
The brutal process of the sheep being shot, the cheerful ballad still rang in the background; thousands of revellers were still swaying when 18 people were squeezed to death at the entrance of the tunnel; the sick mother was lying on the bed, and the son was still jumping up and down; What's in my pocket?" "A small medicine bottle, in order to survive, I have to take the medicine in it every day"...
Tragedy doesn't just appear in the image of tragedy, when it happens, life goes on. Joy and tragedy are eroding each other, and the seemingly calm way of handling gives life a deep tension in the still waters.
The girl at the end of the film, who was expecting something extraordinary to happen one day, sadly realized at the last moment of the day that nothing happened all day. Ordinary she, living an ordinary life, does not feel how good she is, and admits that she is not the kind of person who deserves in-depth communication, although she hopes to be such a person.
The girl's confession is cherished and resonated with the truth. It condenses 4,500 hours of material from all over the world, allowing you to see the richness of life intensively for more than an hour, but when the focus is narrowed down to an ordinary person's day, it is likely to be an ordinary day.
In ordinary life, we expect small miracles, but miracles don't happen very often. We aspire to be the person we once dreamed of being, but the reality is skinny. This is not warm or even boring life, closer to the truth of life, but we still have to live day by day.
I once heard a sentence on the clubhouse that made me feel instantly healed when I was bereaved at that time. The general idea is that ordinary life requires more courage than fighting and adventure (referring to mountain climbing and diving). Faced with the powerlessness of life, these pains The fatigue that brings you will not disappear just because you wake up from sleep. The things that make you tired are still there and will come back. You have to work hard to live, which is courage.
At the end of "One Day in the Floating Life", when the Kongming lantern rises, it seems to have the meaning of the sun rising as usual. At the end of the film, the snail crawling slowly on the earth as fragile as an egg is like every little you and me, no matter if tomorrow will be better, still working hard.
Author｜Ye Danying
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