Three Nights of the Noble

Modernity and Director's Will

The story has a relatively strong tone from the very beginning. The streets of Venice at night, the bus pulls into the block stop, and a group of people get off the bus with our handsome old horse. Under the night sky, there is no warmth or warmth, but people's thick coats show that In the cold weather, after saying goodbye to the strangers for a while, Lao Ma wanted to enter the bar but it was closed. In stark contrast to the people on the street who were in a hurry or who had gone home, he chased and wandered for a while. After the stray dogs in the city, the emotions in the whole space become both unfamiliar and familiar. Unfamiliarity lies in the nature of emotion transmission. The audience does not understand where our old horse came from, what purpose it is, and why it walks, so it will naturally feel unfamiliar; while familiarity is because it wanders aimlessly, It is one of the biggest features of Neorealist aesthetics. At the beginning of the chapter, the camera is constantly wandering, and during the wandering, it pays attention to capturing the external performance of the characters’ inner activities, as well as the close relationship between the characters’ actions and the environment. From a narrative point of view, the space here is deeply bound to the characters. It provides a strong narrative development condition for our old horse to discover the heroine who is waiting alone, and injects abundant naturalness into the story. The next series of reactions of the heroine Cher (crying and fleeing, telling, making an appointment, deceiving, etc.) are very interesting, or to be precise, the attitude of "refuse to leave" and "deeply hidden", has become a dramatic development of Visconti's manipulation The technical elements of the plot can be briefly summarized as the heroine Cher's attitude will inevitably develop from refusal to concealment to the end under the premise that the movie will progress and will eventually be closed. Structurally, "White Night" generally reflects the structure of three nights similar to the novel chapters, and it can also follow the attitude shown by the heroine Xue Er, which can predict a clear trend. In terms of recognition, the male protagonist Lao Ma's aimless wandering is obviously a step closer to the audience than the female protagonist Cher's more unknowable and unfeeling behavior, and the other male protagonist is highlighted through the deeper estrangement of the female protagonist's role. The less deep estrangement of the characters allows the audience to establish an emotional connection with the characters in order to quickly identify with the core characters.

The urban wandering of the plot in the prologue reveals the skills of the story unfolding, and successfully endows the idle male protagonist Lao Ma with the most powerful narrative motivation: revealing the secret. The plot is then injected with a strong narrative impetus: One can now arrange reasonable and strong drama, and complete the expression at the story level without greatly damaging the naturalness of the story; second, the audience's emotions do not have to be bound in The male protagonist Lao Ma and the female protagonist Cher must be presented in a positive way, so as to be closer to reality; the third is that the combination of narrative drama and elusive emotions to promote progress will achieve a strong psychological expression of the characters, that is, drama serves Emotions, the new actions of the characters reflect new psychology, which strengthens the action and mystery of the story. Focusing on the male protagonist and the old horse means the suspension of the female protagonist Cher’s behavior and the obstruction of the audience’s sight in the narrative, which must effectively strengthen the mystery. The suspenseful tension with the ending.

Looking back a little, Visconti can no longer be simply summed up as the so-called standard bearer director of neorealism. In fact, crying from the street of "Little Beauty" must add a paragraph at the end that is slightly redundant and oversaturated. The tragic ending of the "Warring States Enchantress" is an attempt to realize the opera. The change of style and aesthetics has been quite obvious, with profound cultural connotation and strong artistic appeal. The tone of reality, the "Visconti-style novelist film" in the critics has been shown for a long time, in this film adapted from Dostoevsky's novel, this expression is even more ubiquitous. The externalization of psychological actions in the film has a strong taste of psychological realism, which makes it more expressive.

On the second night after the plot continued to unfold, Visconti revealed the mystery for us, the heroine Cher's previous puzzling actions and behaviors were explained, and the two people had a corner of the city of Venice, and the exterior unfolded in reverse order. It should be noted that , In the scheduling, Visconti used the time-traveling that directly retraces the past. First, because the female protagonist is directly present in this section, there is sufficient retrospective power. It is both the subject of retrospect and the object of retrospect, so there is no problem of subjective and objective dislocation in any form between objective shots and subjective shots, and the synchronic long shot that directly breaks the closed limited space is also due to the finely designed distance method. , to achieve the effect of empathy. The temporary shift in the focus of the plot is also due to the retrospective experience of the male protagonist and the female protagonist, which follows the identification of the emotional connection in the prologue and is further strengthened. At the same time when the female protagonist gradually stepped out of the external flashback and was about to finish the story, the male and female protagonists of the main time and space came to the place where the female protagonist’s sympathizers agreed respectively. Visconti connected the time and space to end the flashback, and once again directly sewed the diachronism of different time and space. Editing to bring the emotional shock to a whole new level.

This external flashback to supplement the main narrative of the "same story", along with the emotional climax of the reveal, should be closed, but in fact, because the heroine sympathizes with the reason that the person agreed to meet in a year, but the person did not appear as promised, focusing on the male protagonist With the deviation of the heroine's focus, the subjective narrative unfolds another piece of subjective narrative, showing some tendency to objectify without being closed. For the two characters in the film, being objective means knowing each other, while the heroine is not closed. The experience experienced by the subjective stream of consciousness is directly expanded by the space that the heroine Xueer can cover in the venue, eliminating the possibility of unreliable narration, and it is directly known by the male hero and the old horse, and the plot reflects the narrative subjectivity of the heroine Xueer. , which means that the irony of it, the principle of presence is the primary, but it is reflected as the secondary focus of the narrator, the male protagonist, the old horse. On the premise that the mystery, that is, the suspense, is revealed, the resolution of the conflict is completely based on the existing Knowing the objective conditions and pressures that the lover that the heroine Xueer is waiting for may appear, the choice made after the fierce inner struggle of the heroine, and the final answer given by the heroine Xueer to complete the final closure to complete the film expression. The plot of the second night further broadens the overall expression dimension and the decisive factor that determines the final direction of psychological externalization.

The story logically came to the last night, that is, the last night when the conflicts and conflicts had been constructed and the conflicts and conflicts needed to be resolved. The relationship between the characters also formed a clear turn from the first night. The relationship between the two people in the story was finally anchored. The possible external pressure of the main lover has become the last structural barrier, and the old lover has become a bomb that has not been released for the time being. The male protagonist, Lao Ma, had already given up on his own initiative to withdraw because of the ardent news of the female protagonist, Cher, and hoped for a turning point. The thought of letting go of the last fight to win the hearts of the beautiful still increased sharply. It is precisely because of the dual internal and external uncertainties of the male protagonist. The crisis has caused the audience's strong identification and empathy, expressing the possibility of the two people's sincere union and perfection is really possible. In the next dance hall scene, Visconti used lighting to create internal montages and the clumsy but sincere dance of the male protagonist to further strengthen the emotions. In contrast to the hopeless revival of the heroine Cher's old love, she moves towards the positivity of a lover who is finally married. When the two embrace each other and happily imagine the future in the snow on Christmas Eve, the film ushered in the end of the heavy heart attack. , the lover appeared! The external pressure completely overwhelmed and deconstructed the internal tension with the trend of destroying the dead The meaning is rewritten, on the one hand, it is the instant heart death of the three-night tempting trip, and on the other hand, it is the love harvest that has been waiting for a year, which further sublimates the fairy tale world of the so-called "lovers end in marriage" to "sorrow is greater than heart death." "The real reality.

Compared with Visconti's films, Tuo's novels show that the male protagonist Lao Ma and the imaginary in the book are undoubtedly the protagonists in the absolute sense. They are devoted and magnanimous, ideal and noble. The love between the two sexes described by Tuo Shi is not quite the same as the exclusive sex in Western literature and movies. It neither excludes the opposite, nor seeks the self in the other, but is eager to help with love. The other party gets rid of pain and fulfills himself, and it is this kind of non-conventional love that transcends class hierarchy and other qualitative determinations that determine the final outcome: although there may be different sides from now on, a certain eternal emotion that transcends time and space and cannot be separated is produced. The transmission of the true aristocratic spirit that cannot be ignored by Sconti. In terms of style and technique, the whole chapter has a large depth of field, a neo-realistic walk, a combination of psychological realism, a deep and gentle long shot/montage combination, a psychologically externalized soundtrack, and a deserted night, snowy and sad real scene Venice, etc., enables the protagonists and the environment to achieve a profound image situation (time-image), which further supports the transmission of authorship.

The emotional process of the male protagonist's three nights in Visconti's lens is just like the narrative possibility that the female protagonist's old love has no positive results, and the final appearance of the female protagonist's harvest of love is like the revelation of the story of the male protagonist's final love. Both are false. The correspondence between the real and the real is also just when the two endings that do not exist outside the film are stitched together to obtain a real symbolism. The modernity of emotion in realism is thus revealed. At the same time, it is not difficult to find that for Visconti, by Poetic realism is a teacher, pioneering neorealism to deviating from the dramatic power of psychological realism to show society, the symbolic attribute of the "hypertextuality" link between Visconti's film and film is also related to emotion to some extent. The modernity of the film coincides with that of the film, and it is perhaps the purest manifestation of his true aristocratic blood in his films.