[Just now, the Oscars ceremony broke out the biggest oolong in history. Hollywood legend Warren Beatty and his screen partner Fei Donaway announced that "City of Philharmonic" won the best picture. The producer of the film had already given a speech on stage and found that the card in the envelope was written It’s not his own film. The current official statement is that the staff made a mistake on the envelope. Beatty got the envelope for the best actress. Because the word "Best Actress" at the bottom of the card is very small, it is estimated that the grandpa and grandma cannot see clearly, although there are doubts. But it had to be announced in big letters. In this way, "Moonlight Boy" staged a shocking reversal, and directly took away the "City of Philharmonic" from the stage. Another joke in the shop is that Isabel Huppert should carefully check whether the award envelope for the best actress is also wrong. The director of "Tony Erdman" Marlen Ade estimated that there is no need to review the best foreign language film envelope. The Iranian film "Salesman" was upset and it was basically Trump who did the free promoter-he will Iran is listed as a country where entry is prohibited, and director Fahati announced that he would not attend the Oscars in protest, so the members of the academy who have not watched the film directly voted for their protest votes to "Salesman". 】
The grievances between African Americans and Hollywood is a topic of sociocultural history worthy of a special book, ranging from the white painting "Black Face" (now considered highly discriminatory) that originated from the theater tradition to Heidi McDaniels' "Pretty Woman" (1939) won the first Oscar for a black actor. Although there is a successful all-black music song and dance film "Carmen Jones" (1954) by the legendary director Preminger, the African-American screen image has been limited for a long time. Slaves, servants, criminals and other social marginal roles. Since the 1990s, African-American filmmakers have begun to make breakthroughs on a large scale. The positive images on the screen have soared. There are more black artists, black actors and actresses, and films that tell their own experiences and stories from the perspective of the African-American community. It is convenient to call it " black film ".
However, the number of such films is still very small. Last year, Oscars guilty of public outrage because no African-American actor was nominated for years. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (Oscar Taibai) was overwhelmed on Twitter. As an African-American woman, the president of the Academy, Cheryl Bunny Isaacs, was forced to announce In 2016, the new members of the college attracted more ethnic minorities. Just a year later, "Black Films" shined at the Academy Awards: "Hidden Characters", which has a great entertaining spirit and educational significance, and "Fences", which was born out of drama and exclusively for actors and actresses. Feelings "Love", which is profound and highly accomplished in art, tells the end of the American anti-interracial marriage law. The feature documentary section includes three works on topics of African descent.
However, in addition to the real eye of documentaries, the "black films" in feature films still stylized the image of the black community in content, lacking diversity. The 2014 Oscar-winning "Twelve Years of Being a Slave" is a grand narrative of the "official history" of African Americans. The popular 2011 "Help" and this year's "Hidden People" are also based on the equal rights movement. Many "black films" are actually a counter-effect to white works and society. Although there is a lot of necessary work, such creations should have been done almost in the 1980s and 1990s. "Twelve Years of Being a Slave" was released in 2014 instead of 1994, which in itself shows that the American film industry has had serious racial problems for a long time. The rest, such as "Chillac" and "Quadi" two years ago, packaged stereotypes in ancient Greek dramas or Hollywood classics and continued to sell them, which can only be regarded as some of the contributions of African-American filmmakers to mass entertainment. .
Last year, Sundance became a big hit but was forgotten due to director Nate Parker’s alleged sexual assault. "The Birth of a Nation" refers to the work of the same name by the legendary director Griffith from the title. The 1915 "The Birth of a Nation" has a prominent position in film history, but the unbearable image of black people in the film and the positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan have caused great controversy. This year’s best documentary nominee, "I am not your nigga" mentioned that Griffith’s film directly caused the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States in the 1920s. Nate Parker’s "The Birth of a Nation" is a reversal of Griffith’s work. It tells the story of a black slave priest who gradually grows into an uprising leader, translating Griffith’s white heroism directly into Black heroism. This superficial prosperity of "black films" actually converged the creativity of many African-American artists into a sub-genre with a routine to follow, requiring the work to hit every sensitive point in identity politics and shape another. This stereotyped black image has almost become a cultural segregation.
Fortunately, there is "Moonlight Boy".
The film is adapted from the intensely autobiographical play " In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue " by the Yale drama professor and black homosexual Tarryl Alvin McLani , plus director Barry. Jenkins' own experience as a child (the mother image in the film is almost his own mother). The film is divided into three sections, which tell the story of the protagonist's childhood, adolescence and adulthood respectively. Chiron, a black boy, lacks love and care for a long time because of his mother's drug abuse. He is introverted and small in size. He is often bullied by his classmates and is called a "faggot" (faggot). Chiron met the drug dealer Juan and his girlfriend Teresa, and found the long-lost family warmth in them. As a teenager, Chiron had sex with his only friend Kevin, but after Kevin was forced to fist him under pressure from his peers, Chiron was completely violent and attacked the campus bully who had bullied him for a long time. As a result, he had a relationship with many black Americans. Like men, they dealt with the police and prisons (for black men’s imprisonment, please refer to the "Thirteenth Amendment" nominated for the best documentary feature film). In the last paragraph, Chiron arrived in the new city and became the leader of drug dealers like the deceased Juan, but the hesitation of his identity and love for Kevin still occupy all of his heart.
Jenkins and Chazelle understand that as a young director making a second feature film, he must deter critics and audiences from the beginning. Just like the singing and dancing at the beginning of "City of Philharmonic", Jenkins mobilized his most exquisite film language from the beginning to set the tone for the whole film. He chose to start with the image of drug dealer Hu Ang, who is cold, arrogant, and unbelievable. The opening is high-profile. The camera whirlpools around the already majestic and extraordinary actor Mahsala Ali, wrapping the dangerous environment on the confident and confident Hu Ang. It shows that he is highly alert to the surrounding environment. Then there is the hand-cranked lens of Chiron when he was chased by his classmates. It can be regarded as one of the most appropriate hand-cranked uses of the year. Entering the subjective world infinitely magnifies the emotions of the characters. Such precise lens language carries through the whole film, coupled with the use of symphony in the soundtrack, softens the strong and makes the weak sublime, and the transition between the two is not abrupt at all.
If you insist on categorizing by identity, "Moonlight Boy" is a true "black movie" of the 21st century. It puts a question mark on the stereotype of black men, and uses the growth process of a black gay boy to torture American culture and The male image in black culture. It no longer talks about the official history of African Americans' bitter and deep hatred, but also transcends the black and white worldview, enters a delicate and personal narrative, and truly shows us ethnic minorities as flesh and blood individuals. "The New Yorker" drama critic Hilton Als, who is also a black homosexual, said: " Jenkins avoided what I call Negro hyperbole throughout the film, that is, those often used to represent black Americans. The clichés of life. "
Jenkins does not show you the violent side of Juan’s life, but shows his family life, his gentleness towards Chiron. The "talking between men" between him and the little boy is not any cruel growth ritual, but teaching him to swim on the sea. The beauty of the body, the sea and the sky makes people forget his underworld background. The scene where he holds the child to learn to float, the fixed lens and soothing music are in extreme opposition to the 360-degree vigilance of the drug dealer and the little boy’s hurried flight-this is to teach him love and trust, and to teach him about life. There are moments when you don't have to guard against behind or panic, and keep your eyes on the one you love, even if you have to pay a heavy price for it.
Such a film is extremely difficult to deal with sex. First of all, in the tradition of the screen image, black men were initially stigmatized as primitives with excessive sexual desires and rapists, and later in the mass media. "Humanized" black men. These two extremes are also the history of gay images on the screen, from the “desexualization” at the beginning to the obsession with sex scenes in queer movies. Jenkins used the climate background of Miami in the film to show a large number of male and female bodies. The whole film maintains a high sexual tension, but the only time it is true is the clumsy tasting between two teenagers on the beach. Everyone has the first taste of the forbidden fruit. The two bottom black boys and the middle-class white boys and girls are no different. They have real desires, but they are not sex machines.
The film makes these "unreasonable" details appear so natural, and then we discovered that the problem is actually this "common sense" itself, which is only the inherent impression of a group of society. As a child, Chiron asked Juan and Teresa what a "faggot" (faggot) was and whether he was a "faggot". What we get is not about anger, playful abuse, or preaching on how to "be a man". The drug lord full of tendons behaves like an enlightened and wise university professor, giving one of the best sex education dramas in film and television works. Is this real? Is it normal? Maybe it's the typed and facial "black movies" that make people feel that such delicate and natural details shouldn't appear. The fictional work itself has no "truth", only "credibility", and the audience's judgment of credibility is closely related to social discourse, which in turn requires the work to participate in the production.
"Moonlight Boy" presents an all-African world, and all characters with lines are black, and there is no intention to speak to whites or to react against white society in the film. This is a self-contained black society. It has drugs and crimes at the bottom, but it also has everything that all other groups have. It does not exist relative to any other, it is self-consistent. But this purely black world mobilizes the common sense of the audience, always pointing to the problems that still exist in reality, showing the lower class without anger and sadness, implying the role of race in social stratification, and the relationship between black boys and the national violence machine. . Huppel said that "She" is a "post-feminist" film. For the protagonist Michel, all struggles have been won, and she only needs to be herself. In the same way, "Moonlight Boy" is a movie that wants to be a "post-race" but can't, but it is at least a great attempt. So when I say that it is "the last "black film"", I mean that it is trying to abandon the meaningless statement of "black film" and completely free from the shackles of stereotypes. (I have tried the same before, maybe only the 2014 satirical comedy "Dear White People".) Although limited by the times, no matter from the interpretation of creation, dissemination or public opinion, Jenkins's works are still burdened by African-American artists. The destiny is heavy, but it points a clear way to the practice of all ethnic minorities in American cinema in the future. Of course, there can be many roads, this is just one of them.
The real relationship between this film and the "black film" tradition is not on the screen or in the script, but behind the scenes. One of the three producers of "Moonlight Boy" was Jeremy Kleiner, the master behind "Twelve Years of a Slave". After winning the best film with the latter, he immediately concocted an equally black one. The theme of "Selma" (2014), the response was not as good as before. Last year, he abandoned the black theme and switched to the political film "Big Short". The other two producers of "Moonlight Boy", Di Gardner and Adele Romansky, are both women. This is the first time in Oscar's 89-year history that I saw the Golden Man holding the best film on stage. There are more women than men. They bring an individual narrative that is not impatient or impatient, which embodies the collective dilemma into specific characters at a time and place, instead of treating people as symbols. If Kleiner has given the "black film" to the highest throne of the American film industry, then "Moonlight Boy" opens a new creative era in the artistic and social sense for this "genre"- "Twelve Years of Being a Slave" "Need Oscar, but Oscar needs "Moonlight Boy" .
(This article was published in "Sanlian Life Weekly" WeChat public account on February 27, 2017. Unauthorized reprinting and quoting are strictly prohibited.)
The films mentioned in this article are arranged in order of appearance:
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