Hollywood movies have compact plots and obvious narrative lines. There are no idle pens or digressions. All plots revolve around a central event, corresponding to the Newtonian mechanical system of classic physics, and develop according to realistic physical time. It is exactly the perfect reproduction of Aristotle's definition of plot integrity in Poetics more than two thousand years ago.
Take a step forward to the new reality of Italy. Take De Sica's "The Bike Thief" as an example. There are digressions and meaningless pens that have nothing to do with the central event, such as the rain that is often mentioned by people. In the movie, the protagonist’s car was lost and went to look for it. It was raining, and the incident was suspended and interrupted. We had to wait for the rain to stop with the protagonist.
How to shoot in Hollywood? There is no rain scene in Hollywood at all. It is meaningless and has nothing to do with the central event. Why do you want him to do it? In Hollywood movies, there must be a causal logical relationship between the upper and lower shots. The previous shot has obvious directivity and obvious purpose. It adopts "continuous editing" and "smooth editing", and the connection between the shots is close.
Going a step further, to the modernist movie, Antonioni's "Eclipse", the main line is that the heroine loses love and meets a boy, and once again fell in love. But there are too many temporal and spatial flows that have nothing to do with the "central event". For example, the hostess called in front of the scene and said that I broke up with him. The last shot is going out on a private jet. Then he came back, went to the stock market to find his mother, and met the boy again.
It’s okay to delete the plot of flying out in the middle, Hollywood says it’s totally okay, and it doesn’t affect the relationship between the heroine and Alan Delon.
And the unrelated top and bottom shots like this, similar to the "raining" of the new Italian reality, modernist movies, all of them are. Almost the whole film is such a meaningless "idle pen".
In the first act of "Red Desert", the heroine wears a green coat and takes the child to his father's company to find him. At the end, she is still wearing a green coat, but she comes back. But the many things that happened in the middle are not in the middle of the two in terms of time.
The flow of time and space in modernist films is arbitrary, jumping, and chaotic. Moreover, there is no necessary logical connection between the upper and lower shots, which also reflects the change of modern people's view of time and space from the side, from a diachronic linear development to a synchronic spatial juxtaposition. From the physical time of Newtonian classical physics to the psychological world under Einstein's theory of relativity.
In addition, compared with the new reality, although the editing of the new Italian reality has no inevitable cause and effect between the upper and lower shots, the overall narrative line is consistent. And modernist movies have almost no central events, so there is no such thing as idle writing or digression, because there is no central event at all.
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This can also lead to the contrast between Jia Zhangke and Cai Mingliang.
Jia Zhangke’s films have so-called idle pens. For example, the boy who walked by with a spear in "The Old Man in Mountains and Rivers". Jia talked with Yang Yuanying and talked about this as a poetic moment in my film. It does not assume a narrative function. Promote the development of movie plots.
This is similar to the new reality in Italy, with occasional idle pens and digressions outside the central event.
And Cai Mingliang’s films are mainly late-stage films, with "Outing" as the boundary, there is no so-called central event at all. The characters are eating and chewing, peeing and masturbating, or silently gazing at the mural, holding a sign in the wind and rain to sing " Man Jianghong. Even in the early days, but a large area was completely flooded in the movie, and the central event was eliminated until "Outing" was completed.
This is similar to Antonioni's modernist movies. The central event is eliminated. There is no necessary logical relationship between the shots. The movie is completely occupied by meaningless little things. Psychological time replaces physical time, and time and space flow arbitrarily.
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