Most people don't know that there are turbulent parallel worlds around us.
More than a hundred years ago, Dickens frowned and wrote in "A Tale of Two Cities", " This is the best time and the worst time. "
It is the second half of the 19th century, the British Victorian era.
There are teahouses open to the public on the street, salons and dances are held every afternoon in the manor, women smoke and drink like men and shoot, countless gears and bearings rumbling in this industrial empire.
[The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms] borrowed from this era.
It ranges from street scenes and architectural styles, to hairstyles, corsets and tutu skirts with square collars. The most terrible thing is the complicated and delicate gear when the heroine Clara opens the secret door.
They rotate, stand still, and bounce, as if to cherish the beauty of the machinery that everyone awed in the Victorian era, and the lost gear complex.
In the 1st century, engineer Shiro from Alexandria wrote in the book "The Making of Automatic Devices": Through the interaction of axles, levers, pulleys and wheels, a tragedy can be staged completely.
It looks like the puppets and shadow puppets later. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for this production technique to be lost, and it was not recovered until the 13th century.
It was the dignitaries in the French court who sent craftsmen to make some mechanical monsters that could interact with guests. Two scholars, Roger Bacon and Great Albert, made a copper robot head that must answer all questions.
Da Vinci must be mentioned here .
In 1495, based on the study of human anatomy, he drew a mechanical knight with weights and gears inside, which can make the knight move his chin and arms, and even sit up.
But if he is a fanatic of gears and crankshafts, then Dr. Fontana before him is an "addict" in this regard.
The thick sketchbook is full of gear-related designs. Four-wheeled bicycles, fire-breathing mechanical monsters, and wind-powered systems are all geared together.
It's really like a drug addiction.
In 1657, another man named Huygens came and made the world's first pendulum clock based on Galileo's pendulum painting. Every king of the palace is proud to own such a luxurious mechanical pendulum clock.
It is also really beautiful, as if you can see the evening market, young people playing cards in the corner, rich old men passing by with beards, poor children at the end of the alley with disheveled hair, shouting who wants to buy roses, two for a penny.
Of course it is the art of gears.
This art reached its peak in the Victorian era.
In the 19th century, the invention of the telegraph and electric light changed the lives of the general public, and the construction of the railway set off a major travel revolution.
Steam locomotives, ships and production workshops are full of mechanical beauty brought by gear combinations. So in "Jude the Obscure" , the talented and handsome Shu rejected Jude's proposal to go to the church.
It's better to sit on the train.
In this way, precision machinery full of romantic aesthetics composed of gears grew up in the turmoil of industry. It is no longer a cold component that transmits power through the bite movement, but gradually rises to a kind of complex.
To cherish the memory of that passing era.
After walking at four o'clock, the air wheel has stopped and gradually fell. Pushing the window and looking around, the city of New York is like drawing a picture, and the vertical and horizontal railroads are like the threads in the palm of your hand.
Westerners are afraid that hundreds of thousands of lives have never thought that the first work in the world with a gear complex and mechanical worship was actually made by a Chinese.
It was "Moon Colony Novels" serialized in the magazine "Embroidery Novels" in 1904. The author was called "The Old Man in the Wild River".
It's really a sad name. In the vernacular, it is an old man fishing in a deserted river, and he has stopped writing twice, knowing that his body is not good.
He wrote about the story of Long Menghua, a Hunan native, who fled to Guangdong with his wife and children in the starry night, and then boarded the Japanese Yutaro's air warship. He traveled all the way across the five continents in Vietnam, and traveled to the moon.
It's really wild and unbelievable, and it's amazing. But compared with Wu Jianren's novel the following year, it is nothing.
This Wu Jianren is equivalent to "Xu Zhiyuan of the Qing Dynasty", and he wrote some stuffy things, called "condemnation literature". Later, influenced by the old man fishing in Huangjiang, about Mo turned his head to write a "gear novel".
It is called "The New Stone Story" , which is the same humanity of "A Dream of Red Mansions". It is said that Jia Baoyu no longer indulges in children's personal relationships, and began to study some high-tech.
For example, the automated mechanical submarine, the invincible warship that can traverse the belly of a fish, also fought against the Boxer Regiment, and reprimanded others for their ignorance.
Who could have imagined that this nation that dare not even touch a camera would one day be able to say nothing about machinery, gears, and propellers.
But after all, it was passed from the Western Empire that the sun never sets, and then it crossed the Atlantic Ocean to show its talents in the United States of America. No matter how the Chinese write it, the donkey dung egg is just plain looking.
For example, in 1926, "The Flying Man of Bonaparte" written by French writer Frederick Coase was more professional than "The New Stone".
The background is the peak of the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century. It is said that the protagonist installed propeller power on the glider and built a steamship, named "Vélivole", which was given to Napoleon.
The 1933 Spanish novel "Mark Wan, Invincible" also showed the beauty of machinery. Steam airships can be seen everywhere, and on the cover there is also a picture of a certain precision machine combined with gears in operation.
In 1991, science fiction masters William Gibson and Bruce Sterling co-wrote a novel called "Difference Engine" , which shocked the world.
She stared at the sky, stared at the outline of the huge and elegant steel aircraft. In front of the machine, a group of small drones flew up and down, and screamed towards the red sky like bagpipes.
In this way, a new concept that can cover all the previous works in one word was born from this novel: steampunk.
The gear complex is just one of its many elements.
So how many elements does steampunk have?
Airplanes, cars, submarines, steam, coal, oil, corsets, top hats, goggles, laser guns. But no matter which one is taken out alone, it will lose the taste of steaming friends, and it will become more common.
Except for gears.
In [Metropolis] in 1927 , gears, bearings, coils and huge steam-bearing machinery can be seen everywhere in that dark underground city. And it's spectacular, as if you can smell the smell of engine oil.
At [Twenty Thousand Miles Under the Sea ] in 1954 , Kirk Douglas was wearing a sea soul shirt, operating a heavy mechanical structure. Valves, dials, and thick steel pipes present a simple and violent beauty.
This undisguised obsession with gear machinery, this kind of lens about knobs, pipes, pressure valves, and mechanical transmissions that appear in large numbers in movies is the gear complex.
Only it can be known at a glance. It is the texture of steampunk, shining with the afterglow of the old Victorian era.
It is a pity that Hollywood in the 1970s was obsessed with realistic themes. As far as gear movies are concerned, there is no room to shine.
Fortunately, in 1979, [The Strange Man of Two Worlds] was released. There was a time machine inside, with handles, riveting and rotating shaft, like a big gear, revealing a strong mechanical texture and the energy of "letting imagination take power".
1999 [Wild Wild West] , gears, bearings, large noisy mechanical devices consisting of a bolt screw top, but the expansion of the mystery steam friends will "nostalgia" and "Treason" perfect fusion of two isolated words.
Crossing the millennium, this kind of lens has not been depressed by the rapid development of the world, but relied on realistic visual effects to become more and more new.
For example, in [Steam Boy] , the gears in the piano are shiny and rough, and you can feel its heavy breathing.
In 2012, [Steel Sky] , the cockpit setting of the ultimate spaceship, is more like having the power to calibrate the world.
Every part there carries its bone-chilling coolness and terrifying resistance to death, and it rises up in the "chest cavity" with roar and roar, which is indescribable and breathtaking.
Not to forget [Hugo] , in the hands of the boy with mechanical controls, all the cold gear parts are shining with gentle light.
It was also through his repairs and assembling that those delicate structures with romantic aesthetics turned out to be as brilliant as bronze in an instant.
Of course, of course, there are [The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms] . It is like the comic book "Journey to the West" from the 1940s, with a spiral staircase with hints of constructivism and mechanics——
Just like [Young Sherlock Holmes] in 1985, [Back to the Future 3] in 1990, and [Hugo] in 2011, there have been watches from the Middle Ages that brought the art of gears to the extreme——
With a "click", the heroine Clara opened the secret door, and under the guidance of the plum sugar fairy, she saw a large, complex and simple and mysterious mechanical device——
There is clearly a shocking momentum, but it adds a layer of romantic light nickel. It is as if the sky is covered with thin gray clouds, but when you look closely, one or two stars can always be seen in the break of the cloud.
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There is also a line in the film, "Most people don't know that there are turbulent parallel worlds around us."
If that is the case, I hope it is full of gear machinery, because it opposes unanimity, supports diversity, opposes restraint, and supports fanaticism. If not, it would be good to be able to watch a gear movie.
In order not to die because of reality.
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Author/six aunts
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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