The story of the movie part 12
May 31, 2018
Nanuk of the North
Nanook of the North (1922)
Robert Flahardy
Escaping from the perverted world in "Dr. Caligari's Cabin" last week, watching "Nanuk of the North" has an indescribable joy and comfort. The abundant natural light of the Arctic Circle seems to break through the screen, and when it is truly spilled on the body, the eyes feel the effect of "healing".
I say this because I have read some information. In fact, human short-sightedness has nothing to do with long-term use of eyes at close range. It is not that reading books, computers, or mobile phones cause myopia. The real culprit is that the long-term exposure to light is not enough. Sufficient room to accelerate the growth of the front and rear axis of the eyeball (another important reason is of course heredity). In the 1950s, when the Inuit, the Nanuk ethnic group in the movie, was engulfed by rapid modernization and sent their children to school for compulsory education, the rate of Inuit myopia increased by 30 times in just 20 years. They thought it was a cursed plague.
If you write it in this way, it will soon become a popular science article, not a movie review. Inuit people walked into the "civilized" room with the help of modernization, while we saw the white snow in the distance through the film as a product of modern entertainment. It's like feeling the intersection of two destinies, Nanuk is fighting in nature, we are fighting in the city, and we are going to catch the prey in our respective destinies by different routes.
Today we already know that the title of "The Great Hunter Nanuk" was created by Flahadi. His real name is Arakalialak to play the hunter named Nanuk and restore the original hunting scene. And this primitive hunting method has actually disappeared in the era of shooting.
When the Scotsman John Grierson used the term "documentary" for the first time in his evaluation of Vlahadi’s second work "Mora Bay", he said that "the film has documentary value", people agreed. "Nanuk of the North" is the pioneering work of a documentary.
The biggest controversy of this pioneering work today is probably the "blatant" rehearsal and falsification of the documentary. Many people are not able to accept that documentaries carry genes that they believe are against the truth from the time they are born. This is probably related to the big proposition of "reality" or "reality in images". Later, many directors will also use video to answer this serious proposition, but this obviously does not include the first time that many Chinese audiences have heard of Vlahadi’s name. "The Truth" of "Hong Kong 囧".
Bill Nichols provides a kind of "defense" in "Introduction to Documentary Film": documentaries are not copies of reality, and the stories Vlahadi tells are faithful to the Inuit lifestyle, even if these lifestyles belong to the past. ...(And) the basis of this reproduction is the meaning of the value, proposition or tendency of the pleasure provided by it, insights or knowledge, as well as the tone or intuition it instills, these requirements for reproduction, Far higher than the replica.
When I was watching "Nanuk in the North", I had already passed the hurdle of falsification in my heart. In fact, it was no longer in the scope of my attention. On the contrary, I think of the "tree house incident" some time ago, exposing the false traditions of the BBC Planet series documentary (positioning, special effects synthesis, etc.), and the unfolding condemnation made me a little interested to talk about this. Many media have also cited similar behaviors in the pioneering work of this documentary, but the focus of many media criticisms is that the BBC did not take the initiative to disclose these "falsifications", thus depriving the audience of the right to know.
"Nanuk in the North" is almost a hundred years old, perhaps because many movie viewers are more or less still unable to escape the single form of equating the documentary with the Observational Mode in "Introduction to Documentary Film." They have a certain obsession with the "original ecology". Or it is possible that the reality is becoming more and more complex and more difficult to recognize. We need to obtain a certain constant sense of security in the "record" images, and the ever-evolving documentary with the extension of boundaries (which has been there since its birth) has been greatly " Destroy this constancy.
I didn't expect to get a sense of stability from the documentary form. The biggest feeling during the viewing of the film was to confirm that the genes of the documentary naturally flowed in the story, and even contaminated with curiosity. This may be the usual annotations we make for regular feature films. "Nanuk in the North", the birth of the documentary film, unintentionally completed the blurring of the boundaries between the drama and the drama, the first hit in the relay long-distance race.
When you see Nanuk driving his canoe across the ice floes to fish, leading his companions to hunt seals and walruses like a heroic feat; like a skilled craftsman using snow blocks to build houses, using ice blocks as glass. The ingenuity of the windows; the stunning scene of leading a family to migrate in the vast ice and snow with a sleigh, teaching children to use bows and arrows "parent-child activities"; removing the ice roof cover (the audience was not informed) so that the camera can get enough light to depict The "internal" life of the Nuuk family is designed to create the image of the "great hunter Nanuk". Later, those "anthropomorphized" heroes in Hollywood hero series movies generally looked like this
It's just that Nanuk won't go into the sky, and there is no last-minute rescue in the movie. Flahadi did let Nanuk and his compatriots show the wonder of eating raw meat (Eskimo comes from Indian, meaning people who eat raw meat). It is this spectacle, and most importantly, a certain kind of transcendence formed from the beginning of the "record" that made André Bazin praised in "What is a movie": so far I don't feel the old poetic truth. sex. Of course, Bazin is also wary of this kind of spectacle. He is wary that "this kind of'exoticism' has created the formation of a new myth. We clearly see how the Western spirit describes and interprets distant and alien civilizations."
With the great success of "Nanuk in the North", Bazin’s "exoticism" has indeed become popular for a while, and a number of "tropical and subtropical" films have appeared, the most well-known films in the African series, but they will eventually return. Because of the "increasingly brazen pursuit of thrilling scenes and excitement", self-inflicted and inevitable decline.
But Frederick Jameson, who introduced Foucault, Lacan and many other Western postmodern theories into China in the 1980s and had a significant impact on Chinese academic circles, gave the "exoticism" a halo of meaning: he advocated the first The movies of the Three Worlds are all "national fables". A writer once said half-seriously and half-jokingly: (So) whoever dares to shoot incest is the standard bearer of the fifth-generation director. For a long time, Zhang Yimou was misunderstood as an intellectual in this way. This is already a digression.
Going back to the clear narrative intentions in "Nanuk of the North", in fact, Flahadi’s need to shape heroic stories “coincides” with Engels’s theory that the transition from the barbaric age to the civilized age must go through: everything The beginning of a cultural nation must experience its own (in a broad sense) heroic era during this period . So in the early 1920s, when the film was shot, the Inuit were already wearing jeans and using muskets. During the filming process, Vlahadi asked them to regain what has disappeared from their lives and hunt with iron. The original hunting method is very "deliberate." Don't forget, when Engels defined the "hero age", he called it the age of the iron sword, iron plow, and iron axe.
Of course, it is difficult for Vlahadi to realize the source of almost instinctive energy behind this layer of "deliberation" in the creative process, but he does not adjust the focus of the narrative: he has photographed the life of the Eskimo for a year, but because After the accidental film was completely burned, he returned to the North Pole to focus on filming the daily life of the Nanuk family (the wife in the Nanuk film is said to have been lent to him by Frahadi), with an explanatory progression through narration. , The accumulation of suspensefulness made by long-shot scheduling in the process of hunting seals, and the combination of lens editing to strengthen Nanuk's central position, etc., have made it what Nichols said "a film that achieved a wish": It is a feature film that people like Vlahadi hope to discover from the world about this nation and culture .
"Introduction to Documentary Films" also spent a lot of space to distinguish the difference between feature films and documentaries. In fact, these two types of films continue to expand their territory, and the boundaries extend to blend in. Sometimes today, regardless of each other, use a magnifying glass, "Zhu Zhu It is of little significance to investigate and guard their respective territories.
But if we must make a distinction, I would agree with Nicholson’s subjective but precise view: “ Feature films often give people this impression that we look at a secret or unusual from the outside, with our own superior perspective from the real world. The world. The impression of the documentary is that we look out from our corner and observe other parts of the same world ."
When mentioning "Nanuk in the North", "The Story of Film" said: Flahadi openly challenged mainstream film production in different ways of expression. Vlahadi’s father was a prospecting expert. This kind of adventurous spirit was inherited from Vlahadi. He completed a trip in the North Pole as an explorer and director, which is of course also the great adventure of the movie.
And we have repeated many times, after the beginning of Hollywood's rule of the world, this time we really want to go to Hollywood to see a few comedy geniuses with autonomy, and use their wonderful "dancing posture" to set off within Hollywood. "Rebellion".
Section 3 World Expansion in Film Style (1918-1928)
1Dr. Caligari’s cabin Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Robert Winet
2 Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flahadi
3 The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin
4Safety Last! (1923), Fred C. Newmayer/Sam Taylor
5 Holmes II Sherlock Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton
6 The White Rose of the Railway La Roue (1923), Abel Gance
7 Greed (1924), Eric von Strohheim
8 Battleship Potemkin Броненосец Потёмкин (1925), Sergey Eisenstein
9 Metropolis Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang
10 Sunrise (1927), F·W·Munau
11 The Crowd (1928), Kim Widow
12 The Story of Joan of Arc, La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Carl Dreyer
13 Arsenal Арсенал (1929), Alexander Dufrenko
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