"The Prodigal Son" in "The Director's Talk"

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Alan Sillito, a well-known British writer of "Angry Youth". Sillito was born in a family of tanners in Nottinghamshire, central England, and grew up in a slum. He is too familiar with the poverty and customs of his hometown, and knows too much about the lives, thoughts and emotions of the workers. His novel about workers' life won the Writers Club's Best Debut Award in 1958. Director Karel Reitz is one of the advocates of the British "free film" movement.

"Angry youth" was a literary phenomenon that emerged from a particular setting in Britain in the 1950s. Most of the "Angry Factions" came from humble backgrounds, but many were well educated. They are completely despairing of reality, feel that the class divide is insurmountable, that the church, the old educational system and cultural life are hypocritical and absurd. They created a series of "anti-hero" characters in their works. Cynical, cynical, and swearing, these characters reflect the pain caused by modern capitalist "civilized" production. The "Angry School" expressed the anger of the British middle- and lower-class youth, broke the suffocation of the British literary world in the 1950s, and brought vitality to the British bourgeois literature after the war.

The "Free Film" movement arose in response to the stagnation of British cinema in the 1950s. Advocates of the movement claim that their creations aim to challenge conservative ideas within British society and the film industry. They emphasize the social responsibility of film artists, demand attention to everyday themes and individual expression in their creations, and strive to get rid of the film industry. The shackles of commercialization realize the freedom of creation. In terms of style, authenticity is required. The films made under the name of "Freedom Films" mainly include documentaries with real events as their content, such as "Mom Does Not Promise" and other six sets of films. Due to economic constraints, it was unsustainable, and the "Free Film" movement came to an end in 1959; but in the following years, there were still a number of films that permeated the "free film" rebellious spirit in content, and followed the "free film" artistically. Therefore, it should still belong to the "Freedom Cinema" genre. "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" is not only one of them, but also becomes the representative work of "Freedom Film" and even the representative work of British film. "Freedom Cinema" inherited the simple and smooth realistic tradition of the British documentary movement in the 1930s, fresh and natural, and injected fresh vitality into British cinema. Some people have compared it with Italian neorealism, and some people think that it promoted the French "New Wave" ", although the two were very different; but later "freelance" directors all turned to commercial films.

Due to the same social and cultural background and the same artistic ideas, the "Free Film" movement has a natural connection with the "Angry School". The works of the "Angers" are often adapted as "liberty films": in addition to this film, based on the novel of the same name by Sillito, there is also "The Lonely Runner" (1962, director Tony Richardson), based on Osborne's same name The stage adaptations include Retrospective of Anger (1959), The Actor (1960) (both directed by Tony Richardson), and So Sports Career (1962) based on David Storey's novel of the same name. , director Lindsey Anderson), based on John Blaine's novel "Climb Up", the film adaptation of "High Society" (1958, director Jack Clayton) and so on.

Through the description of how Arthur works, especially how to spend his spare time, the film expresses the reality of the life of the British proletariat in the 1950s, and reveals the problems of alienation, rebellion and adaptability. The biggest feature of the film is that the characters and the environment are extremely realistic and believable. Seelito himself once worked in the Nottingham bicycle parts factory, and his Arthur is a character he is very familiar with, and the writing is vivid and ready to come out. In order to truly reproduce the spirit of the original work, Reiz went to Nottingham to live and conduct interviews, so as to feel the environment in which Arthur lived. When he was adapting the film, he deleted the redundant plot, so that the novel with a loose original structure would naturally push to a climax through each necessary event, and finally brought an inevitable ending, so that the film has a complete traditional drama. Structural form and distinctly accentuate the theme. In the film, Arthur's lines are distinct and lively, completely extracted from life, coupled with the actor's appropriate performance, and the director's true description of the environment and details of Arthur's life, the character and social environment are very naturally integrated. Together, reveal a world of pathetic, cynical characters with no way out in their lives.

Arthur wakes up after being beaten and looks in the mirror with a monologue: "I lost a fight, and it wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. If any cunning bastard tells anyone that the fool is me, then I Tell them, I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow up the factory." The film shows his complicated psychology of not admitting defeat even if he loses, but the ending is that Arthur is about to marry Doreen, which Doreen considers It is a proper marriage and a stable and harmonious life, which is in great contradiction with Arthur's always cynical attitude and rebellious character. Is Arthur willing to "give in" to life? It seems that for not so adaptable - getting married, Arthur will pay a greater price to struggle for life. At the end of the film, Arthur throws stones at the newly built buildings, which is a metaphorical action and a symbol of Arthur's weakness. Explaining the ending, Reitz said: "The film tells the audience what I think of him in a sarcastic way. I'm going to continue to contrast his side as an aggressor to the world with his side as a victim of the world. Require this feeling of frustration at the end." In fact, this ending can be seen as a metaphor for the angry young generation "lost" - there is no way out!

In this film, Reiz strives to adapt his documentary style to the subject matter and to the content. He has a persistent pursuit of the authenticity of the background, taking every detail into consideration. For example, when Arthur went to Aunt Ida's house to perform an abortion for Brenda, there was ironically a movie poster "Life is a Juggling Field" on the outer wall of her house. Narrow alleys, windows blocked with bricks, wilderness, trash cans all over the street, etc. are barren and sad backgrounds to set off the plight of different characters and express the environment in which the characters live. While Arthur and Bert were fishing by the river, while talking, telephone poles, dead bushes, sloping small trees, etc. appeared on the screen, which especially brought out the powerlessness of the young couple to reality. The use of the camera, which does not seem to stand out, is usually placed at an intermediate distance to make an objective and intimate observation of what is going on, but as soon as it changes this distance, it has an amazing effect: in close-up shots , forcing the audience to become one with the character; the camera is pulled back, and the audience has a full view of the environment that has a decisive influence on the character. The rhythmic variation of the shooting distance becomes Reiz's expressive means of illustrating the environment to the audience. Most of the camera angles are flat, and occasionally there are overhead or overhead shots, which also have obvious effects. For example, when the camera overhead shot the workers pouring out of the factory like a tide after get off work, the audience immediately felt that their lives were like ants. Humble and impoverished; when the camera looks down on the roofs of the homogeneous buildings, it naturally causes the audience to feel depressed and frustrated with the monotonous and dead atmosphere that pervades this industrial city; when the camera is upside down, Arthur is drunk on the tavern staircase landing. When he looked up and down stupidly, there was a mocking effect that he thought he was invincible, and then he fell to the ground with a sly smile on his face, which made people feel that he was very sad. Reiz also uses deep focal length lenses to capture a variety of life phenomena in the crowd around the main characters. Reiz's documentary style is also reflected in the sound processing. The singer sings the absurd love song repeatedly while Arthur is drinking at the tavern, making a mockery of Arthur and Brenda's relationship. Reiz uses symphonic dissonance in the sound, and the film begins with the loud noise of the machines to the point where it seems like your head will burst. In the scene that decides Arthur's doom, Reidz chooses a variety of different sounds from the fair to form a symphonic sound, and when Arthur and Brenda jump into the carousel with the cockpit and spin non-stop, the symphonic sound His voice is more complex and expressive, as if comparing life to a mad bazaar. There are two silences in the film: one is that when Arthur was beaten by two soldiers, he was in the distance and could not hear the wave. The sound of punching fists reduces the expression of brutality and contrasts sharply with the noise of the crazy market; the second is that after Arthur was beaten and recovered, he visited Doreen's house. There is a love scene. It was short, but their kiss seemed to be endless, heralding Arthur's peace, and an end to it. The editing of the film is smooth, and Reiz uses a combination of different techniques, sometimes using overlapping sounds to transition scenes, sometimes using fades to show the transition of time and place, or the end of one life and the beginning of another. , when the contrast between the two scenes is emphasized, the crossover is used, and the conversion of the general scene is cut. Since the story is basically paragraphic, with causal and chronological order, traditional editing techniques are used to perfection. In this way, with hard work, Reitz dedicates a boutique that is both realistic and analytical, digging deeper than others into the level of people's life in a special time and place, and his documentary style gives the audience. Leave an impression: "It really happened, just let the camera record it as it is."