-Tarkovsky "Sculpting Time"
Although Tarkovsky has only made seven feature-length films in his life, all of them can be regarded as classics. And "Mirror" is right in the middle of the seven movies. It is not only a transition point connecting his film career before and after, but also the most outstanding and special one in the director's film. "Mirror" is Tarkovsky's "first decision to freely express the most important memory of his life in film". It is a miraculous experiment on his own film theory, and it can be said to be his unique film language. The most concentrated expression of. Gregor of Germany also commented in his "World Film History": "The film "Mirror" is like an irregular rock that stands out in the landscape of today's Soviet films. For a long time, no Soviet film has been used like it. Unique and free language. For a long time, no Soviet film has explored Russian or Soviet self-consciousness so deeply."
The storyline of "Mirror" is very simple. It tells the story of a seriously ill man (in a sense Tarkovsky himself) when he died, his childhood, his parents, his wife and children, and the dreams and dreams of his time. memory. These fragments of memory are organized through a carefully constructed narrative structure and a unique film language to become a poetic film.
There is a passage in the film where the protagonist's son recites Pushkin's letter for a woman in black. The letter says that the Russian people have resisted the threat of Western Christian civilization to Asian civilization, but they have also become foreigners in the Western world. This kind of embarrassment in identity due to a special geographical location is the most important feature of the Russian nation, and Tarkovsky’s films also reflect this conflict and integration characteristics. In the following, the three regions of the Soviet Union, Europe and Asia (mainly Japan) are used as the starting point for analyzing the language and style characteristics of the film "Mirror".
1. The Soviet Union-the secret inheritance under the alternative
1. Poetry films in the former Soviet Union-rhythm and editing. Since their
debut, some people call Tarkovsky "the poet of film". If it is not classified, people are the easiest List "Mirror" as "Poetry Movie". But the director himself hates modern "poetry movies" very much, thinking that they are "blindly pretentious and pretending".
The two most representative trends of poetry films in film history are the poetic realism represented by Jean Renoir in the 1930s in France, and the "poetic films" of the former Soviet Union. The "Poetry Films" of the former Soviet Union are divided into the early montage school and the film genre started by Du Fu Renke in the broad and narrow sense. Now let's discuss the similarities and differences between Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and his film ideas and these two schools.
1.1 Eisenstein and Montage
The master of the Montage school, Eisenstein believes that the collision between film shots has the characteristics of poetry, and emphasizes that the characteristics of this kind of poetry lie in its form and function. The core of his montage theory is rhythm and symbolism. He believes that the use of editing can combine two different concepts to produce a new third concept. But Tarkovsky has a negative attitude towards this. He believes that this kind of montage editing is a kind of despotism of thought, because when the director presents the puzzles and riddles to the audience, he has already given a unique and standard answer to each shot. This deprives the audience of the right to watch movies and runs counter to the essence of movies.
And he himself believes that "correct and complete editing of a movie means natural integration of separate scenes and shots." It can be said that editing is the key to the success of "Mirror". The poetry between the lens changes is the most striking point in this movie. In fact, after the director has finished filming his most precious memories and dreams, these fragments lacking inevitable logical connection with each other cannot be arranged in accordance with the narrative structure of traditional movies. After cutting out more than two dozen versions and greatly adjusting the sequence of the entire story, Tarkovsky finally found a way to "naturally combine" the shots. The film finally took shape, and the poetry finally emerged from this editing combination. Exudes.
For "Mirror", how to transition from one shot to another, from one theme to another, is a very difficult task. Both memories and dreams are erratic. You can't know when it starts and when it ends. A memory (dream) may inspire another memory (dream) in any unexpected place. In order to reflect this elusive texture in the movie, Tarkovsky uses physical, psychological, and emotional associations to condense the various segments naturally. This is a sensual and anti-rational montage, which runs counter to Eisenstein's theory.
For example, in the first dream of the film, the last scene allows the young mother to meet the elderly mother through a mirror; the next scene is smoothly taken back from the memory to the present, the camera is only facing the room, and the elderly mother and son are transmitted through the sound He was talking on the phone, telling him the news of the death of his former colleague in the printing factory; the next shot will turn to the memory of the young mother in the printing factory. Through this kind of sensory association, Tarkovsky made the story naturally experience the transition between "dream-reality-memory" with only three shots.
Another example is the last scene of the film: the dying protagonist lay motionless on the hospital bed, then grabbed a sparrow lying next to him and held it firmly. Suddenly the man lifted his arm, released his palm, and threw the bird to the sky. ; Next shot: The picture goes from the distant sky to the man’s childhood country house in the middle of the forest, and then it features a young mother and father lying on the grass not far away discussing the unborn child, and the mother looks back into the distance; The next shot: an elderly mother walks out of the forest with her young protagonist and sister. Through the flight of the bird, we experience the moment when the dying patient goes from waking up to dreaming; guided by the sight, the young mother in the dream meets the unborn child and the elderly mother. In the solemn and solemn background music of Bach's Passion of Matthew, the whole film reaches the climax of emotions. After repeated alternations of different times, it finally merges and reaches eternity.
1.2 Du Fu Renke and Poetry Films
Compared with Tarkovsky's big opposition to Eisenstein, he highly admires Du Fu Renke. Du Fuzhenko, who was as famous as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, was quite different from the mainstream of Soviet film production at that time. Montage is not as important to him as the first two. He emphasizes the relationship between the scene and the scene in a set of continuous shots, rather than the relationship between the shot and the shot in the scene; the numerous and varied scenes are often short Yes, but the lens that composes them is uninterrupted. In addition, Du Fu Renke’s visual style is characterized by a wide-angle perspective, “the complexity of movement and composition is formed in one frame, just like a painting that slowly takes shape”.
This has some similarities with Tarkovsky's film shots. Tarkovsky is good at recording images and expressing emotions with long shots and motion shots. There are about two hundred shots in "Mirror", much less than ordinary movies, but his long shots rarely stand still, always expressing rich image language in slow motion, showing the changing scenes. And the advancement of the plot.
For example, at the beginning of the film at 11:50, there is a long shot lasting more than a minute: the camera is first fixed on the table, the kitten is licking the milk on the table, and then the little protagonist’s arm appears and sprinkles on the kitten. Sugar; the camera moves slowly to the right, taking a close-up of the protagonist's side; a little pause, the camera is lifted to the rear right, the young mother appears surrounded by the shadows, forming a middle shot; stays for a while, the mother walks out of the camera to the right , After a short empty shot, the camera slowly moved to the right, sweeping the furnishings of the room, and the mother re-entered the painting, sitting by the window looking at it; after the camera gradually advanced to the close-up, it slowly changed from the objective lens to the subjective lens, turning to Mother's line of sight: First, the stool in the yard near the window, and then slowly raised, aimed at the forest in the distance. This slow shot, in conjunction with the recitation of Tarkovsky’s father’s poems, naturally reveals the young mother’s loneliness. There is no tension or fierce sensation, but only allows the audience to experience this long elapsed time with the young mother. , Feel the loneliness and helplessness of waiting.
But apart from Du Fu Renke, Tarkovsky was critical of other "poetry films", that is, Du Fu Renke's follow-up imitators. He tried his best to deny this genre direction in the book, because such movies are full of abstract metaphors and empty symbols. The rich particularity and emotional connotation of the subject are eliminated and become monotonous symbolic symbols; after the birth of the symbol, it is extremely easy to be abused and eventually reduced to a cliché. He pointed out that “the purity of film and its inherent power are not manifested in the richness of symbols in its images, but in the ability of these images to express concrete, unique, and real events.” Therefore, to Tarkovsky In other words, being far away from actual concreteness is the biggest problem of "Poetry Movies".
2. Different realism
In the former Soviet Union, the basis of ideology came from the theoretical theories of Marx and Lenin, and film workers should pay attention to social, political, and economic issues. Therefore, their goal is to use the reality of the picture to depict the real external world. Most directors of the former Soviet Union followed the "socialist realism" line proposed by Zhdanov. Tarkovsky, who is an alien in the Soviet film industry, may be the person least connected to this "realism". His extreme romanticism and mysticism tend to make his films focus on scenes and ignore plots, focus on emotions and ignore the causal connection of events, full of dreams and memories, and even often appear in surrealist scenes. All this seems to stand on the opposite of realism.
But he has emphasized the authenticity of the film more than once in his book, which seems to be a big paradox.
In Tarkovsky's view, the greatest potential of film as an art lies in the recording of facts. Movies exist in the form of images. The perceptual and concrete characteristics of images make authenticity the greatest feature of movies. Therefore, film is the most suitable art for expressing this kind of authenticity. But for him there are two types of facts, one is the facts of the objective world, and the other is the facts of the psychological world, which are manifested by emotions, dreams, memories, etc. What he wants is to experience human emotions in natural scenes. What he opposes are ideas, concepts, and concepts imposed from the outside, because these things are not inherent in the image itself, but are non-factual. On this level, he also criticized the Soviet Union's "poem film" for breaking away from "realism and time realism". He said, "The first thing a movie should describe is the event, not the director's attitude."
Tarkovsky himself made use of the real-time and documentary nature of the film both in the direct and indirect sense. One of the most direct and prominent is the documentary interspersed in the movie. Tarkovsky believes that documentary is an ideal film. It is not just a method of filming, but a method of reproducing and copying life. The documentary in "Mirror" includes Spanish bullfighting; street scenes during the Spanish Civil War; the ascension to the sky by a Soviet manned hot air balloon; the Soviet Red Army crossing the Sivas Sea; the Soviet Red Army winning the war; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in Japan; the Sino-Soviet border conflict; Chairman Mao’s Tiananmen Square Meet the scene of ****. For example, when the film deals with scenes where the Spanish live in the protagonist’s house, the director interspersed documentaries about Spanish bullfighting and the civil war. These clips made the Spanish exiled in the Soviet Union a vivid sense of history in the living of the Spanish exiled in the Soviet Union. In a larger social context.
The Soviet Red Army's crossing of the Sivas Sea is what Tarkovsky considered the "main axis, essence, core and center" of the film. Through this segment, the entire film has risen from a personal and private lyrical memory to a memory of the entire society. Without this news film, this film would have only a strong personal subjective color, showing only a family tragedy. In Tarkovsky's eyes, this documentary bears the suffering of mankind in the course of history. They are recorded on film and become eternal moments. Personal memory and social memory are thus perfectly integrated, interpenetrating and intertwined. Whether it is the memory of the mother working in the printing factory, or the return of the protagonist’s father who left because of the war in the dream of the protagonist, it has a realistic and historical Power; the relationship between people, the destiny of each person is related to the same generation.
So in this sense, we can say that "Mirror" is a realistic movie in a sense.
2. Europe-the borrowing of various techniques
1. Expressionism in expressionist
films first emerged in Germany in the 1920s. Its main feature is the breaking of the laws of spatial perspective, and the exaggerated expression of line colors and light-dark relationships. Emphasizing the intuitive feeling and subjective creation of the work is subjective, with strong emotions and expressiveness, in order to create an extreme spiritual world.
For "Mirror", the use of expressionism is mainly reflected in the use of color, light and shadow.
"Mirror" has very rich tones in the use of image colors. It does not mechanically distinguish between the present and the past, reality and imagination in black and white and color. It is separated or diluted, showing a layer of blue-black, dark green and dark brown tones, creating a dull and gloomy psychological atmosphere.
The use of lights and shadows can be taken as an example of the scene where the mother takes the protagonist to visit the doctor. When the mother and son walked for two hours to the doctor's house, they found that only his wife was at home, but the woman was not friendly to them. The light and shadow use and scene scheduling of a shot at 83:30 in the film are very exciting: first is the all-black shot, the woman walks out of the dark, the light enters from the left; the woman walks to the right into the shadows, the camera is on the right Move, the mother enters the painting, and the woman only has a black silhouette behind; the camera continues to move to the right, the mother draws out, the woman’s face reappears, and then walks out of the camera to the left and front; the camera is still, zooming, the face of the little protagonist from deeper Slowly emerged in the shadows. In this long shot lasting 25 seconds, the entire background is dim and unclear, and the light hits the foreground, focusing the audience's eyes on the facial expressions of the characters. The woman's arrogance and indifference, and the mother's feeling of being under the fence are quickly strengthened; Guangcong Entering from the left, half of the character's face is in the dark, suggesting the complex emotions of the character's unclear heart; the mother and the woman's faces interlaced in the shadows, and they do not appear completely in a shot, they are vividly shown The tension between the two of them; and finally the profile of the protagonist emerges from the dark background, we know that in fact, the protagonist sees all this silently in his eyes. At this moment, the helplessness of the mother abandoned by her husband, The young protagonist's inability to protect his mother's self-blame and tolerance, as well as his compassion and love for his mother, are all condensed in this lens. Later, the woman forced the mother and her son to kill the chickens for her. In order to protect the little hero, the mother had to do it. After killing the chickens, the director gave the mother a close-up shot, also with a dim background, with light coming up from the bottom right. , Forming large eyeshadows and cheekbone shadows. At this time, mother's smile made every audience feel her despair and helplessness.
2. Surrealism
Surrealism movies also emerged in the 1920s and are a branch of the French avant-garde. They tried to use Freud's theory to establish a solid ideological foundation for themselves, to find their own weapons of ideological and artistic resistance in the newly opened field of unconsciousness, and to emphasize spiritual automatism. In terms of subject matter, surrealism strives to use movies to show dreams and fantasy worlds. In terms of form, surrealism strives to pursue unconscious structures, get rid of the shackles of reason, and break the narrative of cause and effect. The most famous one is "An Andaru Dog" co-authored by Buñuel and Dali. The two of them took the point of view starting from a dream image, freed from the shackles of conventional morality and reason, and it was a complete anti-narrative film.
And dreams can be said to be an indispensable part of Tarkovsky's movies. Not only in "Mirror", there are all kinds of strange dreams interspersed in his other films. Similar to the proposition of surrealist movies, Tarkovsky believes that the performance of dreams should not be poor slow motion shooting and soft light curtains. The obscurity and ambiguity of dreams is not due to the unclear images, but the unique impression produced by the logic of the dream, which is composed of completely real elements combined in an irrational and unpredictable way. And his film is to clearly expose this irrational logic, rather than cover it up.
However, unlike French surrealism, Tarkovsky's dreams are lyrical, not dramatic or absurd. For example, the first dream in "Mirror": the mother who had just washed her hair walked through the room alone, the ceiling and walls began to seep water, like rain, and began to drop a lot of lime. In this scene, the mother stared at the mirror. , I saw my old self in the future. Loneliness and loneliness are more intense in this incomprehensible background. Another example is the last scene of "Mirror": an elderly mother and her two children walk across the field; while the young mother stands at the other end of the field in the depth of field; then, the little protagonist makes a clear and powerful shout, and the elderly Mother walked into the distance, and the camera slowly retreated back into the woods. In this segment, three different times appear at the same time in the same spatial picture: the young mother who has not given birth, the young child and the elderly mother. Time and space are intertwined, which is a metaphor for the eternity of maternal love.
3. Asia (Japan)-Discovering "Time" in Space
Tarkovsky has repeatedly unabashedly expressed his admiration and love for Japanese culture. He likes Japanese haiku, such as Basho's verse:
Gutang Quiet Wave
Frog bounces into the water with
a plop.
He believes that these verses contain only accurate observations and records of life, and they never use metaphors for anything other than themselves. Instead, it only expresses itself; but these real observations and records will bring rich meanings and make people feel ample emotions and imaginations. This is because life and the world itself are full of meaning. As long as the reality is accurately recorded, Can discover the entire universe from it. This is the source of Tarkovsky's emphasis on the authenticity of the film mentioned above.
In terms of movies, Japanese directors such as Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, etc. also reflect this characteristic more. Their films are more interested in shaping the overall mood and atmosphere than the performance or psychology of the characters. The rhythm of the films is usually slower, and they pay more attention to the design of the picture. They are good at reflecting the sense of space and time in a long shot. , Emphasize the relationship between the environment and the characters.
A shot at 13:55 at the beginning of "Mirror" can well reflect the record of the real world in Tarkovsky's film and the sense of time in the space shown in this record. The thatched house outside the house caught fire, and the mother asked the two children to go out with her to watch. The camera started with the two children getting up from the dinner table and leaving the camera. The almost imperceptible movement slowly retreated for a full 10 seconds. Just when the audience felt that nothing would happen, a metal vase on the table was suddenly blown to the ground by the wind, making a crisp impact! After this crisp blow, the camera slowly moved away and started looking for the protagonist. This is really a very moving scene. The time flowing in the movie and the life of the protagonist make the audience feel empathized with the impact behind the 10-second empty camera.
Fourth, the end
Tarkovsky believes that the essence of director’s work is “sculpting time”—“from the “big chunk of time” composed of huge and solid life practices, cut off and discard the unnecessary parts, leaving only the finished product. The composition element is the element that ensures the integrity of the image. "Time is always the theme of Tarkovsky's movies. And he also spent his entire life exploring the secrets of carving time, and every one of his movies flows with time that belongs to him alone.
We can also deeply feel his sincerity and enthusiasm in any of his films. The greatest wealth he brings to us is not in his rich and unique film techniques, but in his motto: For any artist and art form, conscience and conscience must precede technique. For me, he will always be the greatest director in my mind. The kind of piety and faith he revealed in the movie has always made me yearn for myself to become a better person.
Reference
1. Ulrich Gregor. World Film History (since 1960) [M]. Beijing: China Film Publishing House.
2. Andrei Tarkovsky. Sculpture Time [M]. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House.
3. Virginia Wright Waxman. History of Film[M]. Beijing: People’s Posts and Telecommunications Publishing House.
4. Antoine de Beck. Andrei Tarkovsky [M]. Beijing: Peking University Press.
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