1. Female figures and female nudes are a way of presentation in the Western art history tradition. So in this story, the consistent gender war occurs simultaneously in a specific scene of gender-determined power, so it is very "natural" to present the charm of Levitt's film.
2. Rivette presents to us a subtle so-called equality and post-liberation world gender reality in a highly cinematic form. He tries to touch the secrets of art, of life, of the undercurrents under the surface of a decent and gorgeous bourgeois existence, the subtle and nuanced secrets that cannot be revealed to others.
Today, I share the famous French art film director Rivette's masterpiece "The Uninhibited Beauty" produced in 1991. This is probably the most artistic of our entire 52-part series. In other words, it fits the imagination of most of my friends for art films, long and very dull.
The original version of the film was a four-hour version. And most importantly, in this version of the four-hour movie, there is no dramatic setting or conflict that we expect, although it contains the melodrama we are familiar with: family melodrama, emotional melodrama, eroticism All the most typical scenes in the melodrama, the aging, incapacitated world-renowned painter and his equally aging wife, who had been the model for almost all of his famous works. And this time to break into a young, beautiful, rebellious, challenging, young woman like a walking hormone seems to have foreshadowed all the preconditions and conditions for melodrama to happen. So it's a four-cornered story at the same time, and this young woman's boyfriend, a young painter in the beginning, makes the melodramatic possibilities richer, but by the end of the film, nothing happens.
Rivette, as one of a group of talented young artists emerging in the new wave of French cinema, has different characteristics from the directors who stood at the high end of world film history in the new wave we discussed earlier. His films are not as radical as they are, and they do not have such a clear appeal to subvert the morality of bourgeois and the aesthetics of bourgeois cinema. At the same time, of course, he also shared the common philosophy and common logic of that generation, that is, the disdain for the bourgeois society, the alienation from the bourgeois society, and the extreme contempt and ridicule for the bourgeois society.
Of course, in Rivett's case, it is very typical, or very interesting, that the audience that Rivett-style films may have is the main body or backbone of the society he despises. And the social group he despises is precisely by watching films like him to identify and form their own external taste, and use this external taste as a manifestation of their own identity and class. This is presumably a prominent dilemma for European art cinema and global art cinema. That is, they face social problems, often they also show the bottom of the society, but their films are not accepted at all by the bottom society they represent, on the contrary, they are embraced and loved by a certain part of the highly educated and high-class society.
For this film, the mystery of the film was there from the very beginning. The French title of the film is actually a difficult title to translate. The English title finally chose the name "Beautiful Troublemaker", "Beautiful Troublemaker". The Chinese translator is very restrained and has a politically correct position, so he translated it as "unruly beauty". I remember watching this film for the first time when I was still teaching at the film school in the 90s and chose it as the textbook for my film language class at the film school. Because the most important part that we will share later is the extremely rich content of composition, camera movement, and mise-en-scène in this film, many moments and many examples. We just mentioned that this film does not take advantage of all the dramatic moments that melodrama can provide, all the externalities that may occur in specific scenes for characters with different positions, different demands, and different psychological supports. conflict. In the film, this is a battle of psychology, a battle of will. It's a gladiator's moment when youth faces old age, and talent faces mediocrity, and all of this is presented through the language of cinema.
But when I first chose this film as my title, I wasn't even sure how its title should be translated, I asked countless friends from the French literature department who were good at French, and they said it was a very ambiguous and Ambiguous things, such as its literal translation is "walnut beauty", which is a French metaphor that can be translated as "noisy woman", "noisy woman". Also due to the ambiguity of the French title, it has more than one English title, such as "Beautiful Agent", "Beautiful Agent", "Beautiful Supervisor", or "Beautiful Troublemaker" ". All the titles put the heroine, the independent, rebellious, and more or less no-nonsense young writer, at the center of the story's naming.
At the same time, the film is an adaptation of a famous book. Few people realize that this is an adaptation, because Rivett, an advocate of the New Wave and film auteurism, is one of the most famous filmmakers in the world today, and a basic premise and The requirement is called the unity of director and writer, so we ignore that this film is actually an adaptation of a literary masterpiece. It is adapted from a short story by the famous French critical realist writer Balzac, called "Unknown Masterpieces", or "Invisible Masterpieces". But in this film, only an extremely simple skeleton of Balzac's original work has been preserved, which is about the encounter between an aging and creatively troubled famous painter and a young female model, and their painting Psychological battles in the process.
Another element that has been preserved from the original has also become a core and highly cinematic theme of the film, and it also forms one of the most interesting puzzles or charms of the film as an art film. , is that the unknown famous painting is also not seen in Balzac's novels. But we know that novels are originally an imaginary world created by language, and the most basic premise of movies is called "I want you to see first". Four hours to complete a work - it is also said to be accepted as an immortal masterpiece - but we do not see it from beginning to end. And in the narrative of the film, it will never be seen, and like the original novel, the famous painting is built into the wall. The only person who saw this famous painting, besides the painter himself, was the little maid. But before that, the two heroines, the painter's wife and the painter's model, both saw the painting, and their reactions after seeing it allowed us to roughly grasp the film's use of vision, use of seeing, and being seen. The end of the story of that extreme inner psychological battle told. But since we didn't see it at all, we couldn't confirm it.
So I say this is a very interesting story, that is, it is named after the heroine Marianne, the young female writer, the temporary model in the story, as the so-called protagonist or subject, but in the whole movie It is the famous painter who always grasps the direction of the entire narrative and the direction of the plot throughout. Therefore, it is also here that it gives us an interesting incision to intervene in this film. If I share with you my grasp and understanding of this film from my point of view, I will probably rudely describe it as the whole Movies are actually a gender war.
And this gender war takes place on the most traditional social imagination of gender role division and gender role division, that is, the relationship between male painters and female models. We all know that the entire art theory or art history is full of gender wars, or the presentation of gender power. For example, for movies, often the position of women, or the most traditional and appropriate position of women is In front of the camera lens, that is, in a position to be seen. As we will say in a moment, the so-called position of women is always double in film, it not only means that the male camera looks at the female characters in front of the camera, but also exists between the male and female characters seen by the camera. Seen by the male character's desire for the female - the story scene is also seen by the male character as seen by the camera. In other words, a position under the double masculine privileged vision and viewing.
As for art, of course, it is the female body that is drawn and painted by male artists. Female figures and female nudes are a way of showing in the Western art historical tradition. So in this story, the consistent gender war occurs simultaneously in a specific scene of gender-determined power, so it is very "natural" to present the charm of Levitt's film. One of the important reasons why I chose it first, and I still choose it this time, is that it naturally forms a most basic way of reproducing movies and a reproduction path, that is, "seeing and being seen", that is, men watching and women to be seen.
If this is the only case, we would probably say that Rivett is a straight male cancer, Rivett is a male chauvinist, which is a re-confirmation of male power or male superiority. But obviously not so, and if it were, it wouldn't deserve to be included in our list. When we say it's a gender war, we're saying that it has two sides, it has an offensive and defensive process between the two sides, it has this kind of attempt to fight for the winner's position, to try to fight for the ultimate power The possibility of winning in the competition of wills. That's the fascinating cinematic fact that happens over the course of four hours of tedious and indeed dull cinematography.
We can understand the film "The Uninhibited Beauty" as a gender war. The famous painter and the young are far away on the road of struggle, but they are full of youth because of their youth. The proud female writer is also the painter and him A contest of power and will between nude models.
As I understand it, the film is structured in this way as a very unique and highly cinematic story. And this cinematic story has a specific traditional art scene, which is the relationship between the painter's painting and the male painter and the female model at the painting site. In the most traditional sense, they naturally constitute "seeing and being seen", and at the same time naturally constitute a great artistic creation in the form of a soul. It is known by friends who are familiar with Rivett. Rivett likes to say that what he hopes to explore in his film art is the core of art. Sometimes he also uses the rhetoric of "mysterious flower" to describe this. the art of secrets. So naturally, the painter represents the most profound and hidden artistic creation ability of human beings, the talent of artistic creation, while on the other hand, in the usual situation, the female model on the scene is only the object, not only the viewing The object is not only a copied object, but also a physical body, which is what we usually call a materialized body. She has become a certain kind of sketching prop. A male painter's outline of a female model's body is no higher than a painter's outline of a still life. Here, it has absolutely no possibility of equality.
And it is in such a seemingly completely prescribed situation that the director unfolds his story, and the director structures it as a competition and contest of power and will. But what is very interesting is that the possible way that the heroine Marianne can win in all the competitions, competitions, and will competitions in the story is that she stubbornly puts herself in all the characters and all the characters in the story. All identity traits are rejected on traditional roles. In other words, at the beginning of the story, such a prescribed situation was reversed, as if what we saw was that the painter would challenge this rebellious modern woman. The painter will subdue the woman through such a force, through such a high point of power, and make her tame into the position of a woman, a model, an object, an unartistic, material position.
If that's all, we've fallen back into the old melodrama of a horny woman or a lowly woman trying to seduce a man who doesn't have evil desires for her. But this is obviously not the case, because the story of the entire film is built on an important premise, that is, the male painter has lost the ability to create and the impulse to create. And this kind of call and temptation of female writers to male painters makes herself play the identity of a female savior in the oldest melodrama, and at the same time it becomes a kind of provocation of youth in the face of aging, or Youth faces the arrogance of aging.
If at the end of the movie, the old painter finally created his work, although the masterpiece he finally completed was an "invisible masterpiece", he still handed over a work. We noticed that there was an interspersed character, a clown - the agent. For him, any work signed by the old painter is enough to constitute a masterpiece on the art market, so in the end he got a masterpiece. No matter from the masterpiece that was finally built into the wall, or from the painting that was taken away by the art dealer and bought with a lot of money, the old writers have been reborn, and the old writers have been saved. But our heroines, our female writers, did not win, because the old painter made his own salvation successful not to be saved by a woman writer. In other words, by rejecting this temptation, he once again nailed the female writer to her own choice and role position. He made her just a model.
In this sense, what has always happened between two people is a gender war, and this gender war made this masterpiece, and it successfully entered the Cannes Film Festival that year and finally won the jury prize, Precisely what is omnipresent throughout the film is the invocation of melodrama, the allure of our usual imaginative paths. But the director succeeds every time in a highly cinematic way to subtly escape from that temptation. And every time he escapes skillfully, such a war about gender, a competition of wills, and a brutal confrontation between youth and aging, once again presents the subtlety in the psychological sense, a kind of delicate of the movie.
Coming back to this film, which I said could be described as a gender war, we locked the story on the old painter and his model, the young female writer. Its ubiquitous melodramatic seduction actually manifests itself as a love triangle or polyamorous relationship. To put it simply, the four characters in the story constitute a combination of different meanings. When Marianne faced Leeds, the painter's wife and the model of all his masterpieces in the past, it was youth in another sense facing aging, and it was also the theme we are most familiar with: a youth is gone, a youth is no longer even It is the old wife who still has the charm, the despair and helplessness when faced with the provocation of a young, youthful, and so wild young woman. Everyone has also noticed that there is a very core plot in the film, that is, the last unknown and invisible masterpiece was completed on the canvas of the last sketch of Leeds that year. This constitutes a fatal blow and denial for Leeds.
At the same time it is expressed in Nikolai, Marianne's boyfriend, the young male painter and the famous, brother-like, father-like predecessor he must look up to, yearn to follow, perhaps completely unattainable peaks. , on top of his relationship with his young, beautiful girlfriend. Then this is another sense of youth facing aging, and it is also here that Rivette actually constructs another level of gender war, that is, in the relationship between men and men, aging not only means aging, but also means aging. With success, means first, means high. Youth means not only an advantage in life, but also a disadvantage conferred by some natural power. In such a triangular relationship, it forms a competition between two men in an originally asymmetrical power relationship for a woman. And also in such a so-called triangle relationship, the novelty lies in the contested woman, usually in melodrama, a mere object character composed of the desires of two men, and the whole story is interesting, the whole The subtlety of the story lies in the fact that the object character in this classic sense has a strong subject consciousness and strong subject power, which forms the multiple variations in such a set of stories.
But if we look at the triangular relationship between Leeds, Marianne and this well-known painter, we see that in the sense of the multiple thematic variations of youth facing ageing, we see that gender inequality, in the The cultural, social sense is so strong and ingrained. Because in men, aging can evolve into growth, success, patriarchy, and high status at the same time, while aging is an absolute disadvantage in women. And such an unambiguous combination of women and aging itself shows us the basic logic of an unequal power structure, an unequal gender culture. So on such a level, the position that Marianne is in, when it is interrelated with the other three characters and forms a bilateral or multilateral relationship, the variations it produces also begin to become extremely rich. .
So what's so interesting about this very special film? Or where is the call that it formed for me in the first place, and where is the temptation that still forms for me today? It's because what we've just tried to describe in words very incompetently, very tortuously, very self-entangled, is actually quite intuitively presented in the film. In such a relational model between painter and model, it can easily form the power relation of "seeing and being seen", the basic visual structure of active and passive. But at the same time, the film variation it forms is how the heroine changes the position of being watched into a kind of self-expression, a kind of self-calling, and returns in the form of the self-presentation of the individual being watched, trying to control the viewer, trying to Left and right viewers, trying to influence the viewer. To be a little more specific, I can call this film a war in the frame. Throughout the film, we will see that it constantly expresses the painter's placement and placement of Marianne, which will form whether the two people are in the same frame or are divided by different frames. At the same time, it will form the relationship between which character occupies the foreground of the picture, and which character can only recede in the middle and background of the picture. It is constantly formed in the opposite shots, who can occupy the larger scene. Therefore, such a transformation has a more prominent visual image.
And when we say it's a contest of wills, it manifests itself as something between film performance and film scheduling. There also seems to be an evocation contained in the film, as if we can expect some sort of so-called SM-style connection between the two, as the artist constantly positions or contorts Marianne's body into a very uncomfortable , a very unnatural position, almost like an act of direct physical sadism. And the mutual position between the two people, the screen image between the two people, the physical contact between the two people and the transformation of the movements did not finally flow into the kind of relationship between the body and direct exertion that perhaps people once expected. The power relation to the body instead becomes a story about the will, about power, about the master.
It must be said that at the end of the film, Marianne becomes a loser in multiple senses, and the painter wins in such a process and saves himself. It is not that Rivett finally returns to such a position as a male-dominated or patriarchal formulation by the end of the film, but that he presents us in a highly cinematic form of a subtle so-called equality and liberation. Gender real in the world after. And in the process of presenting gender status and gender reality again, he tried to touch the secrets of art, the secrets of life, and the various undercurrents of the decent, gorgeous, and clean appearance of bourgeois existence. Surging, all kinds of knots, all kinds of subtle secrets that can't be put into society and can't be revealed to others.
dictionary:
1. The bourgeoisie (also known as bourgeoisie; French: bourgeoisie) is one of the wealthy classes in the class division made for capitalist society according to some Western schools of economic thought, especially Marxism. Etymologically, bourg refers to a city or town. Correspondingly, bourgeois actually means another well-known concept: citizen. That is, it refers not to a certain class or stratum in a society, but to a group of people who enjoy a unique political-legal status primarily because they are gathered in a certain geographic-spatial area. Bourgeois is synonymous with the French middle class, representing the way of life of the middle class: rational, prudent, advocating capitalism. During the Cultural Revolution, Bourgeois was criticized, and now the little bourgeois are called "BoBo family", but the BoBo family has not even learned the appearance of Bourgeois, let alone the resemblance.
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