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Lead:
Abandoning the traditional biographical film formula, "Shirley" draws more creative focus from the plot to the image style and sound effect design. This is not a biographical film solely belonging to Jackson Shirley, but a film about Shirley and her novels-from the film's fictional description of Jackson's heroine and the partial abstraction of the film- —'Paula' seems to refer to a part of the female group, and what connects the emotions of this female group are the various anxiety that belong to women. It can be said that this layer of motif not only removes the film from the framework of the biography at the content level It was liberated, and it also blended with the film's quite experimental director style, and reached a match.
text:
-An experimental biographical film
The first thing that needs to be admitted is that the title "Shirley" and the biographical attributes of the genre will more or less preconceively set up a frame in the audience's subconscious mind, which will interfere with the audience's choice of perspective, including me. Inside. But soon, as the couple, Rose and Fred, came to Bennington, director Decker took the audience back to a plausible scene on the train with a short flashback.
At first glance, it looks like a shot of Rose and Fred after a moment of passion, but from Fred’s absence and the mirror image of Rose on both sides, a hint of the director can be captured-this is more like a stranger facing Rose. The town environment and Jackson Shirley’s overwhelming and somewhat horrified mood depiction-Director Decker began to work hard to establish such a mysterious and weird style tone at the beginning of the film, and then the film has repeatedly focused on the reality dimension and the character psychology The jump and connection between the worlds also well confirms the director's creative intention to try to break away from the conventional framework.
In addition to these editing between the real environment and the character's imagined world for the expression of the character's psychology, the design of the image and sound effects is also a part of the overall style that has been given absolute importance and is very intuitive-the whole film is deliberately It avoids the panoramic explanation of each scene, and frequently uses shallow focus lenses to give close-ups of people or focus on certain local environments in the scene.
Visually, the audience cannot clearly grasp the distribution of this house and the space where Shirley often moves. Every time Shirley accidentally appears or collapses in a corner of the room, her perverse and weird personality is aggravated. The audience has no way of knowing the overall atmosphere of the school and the details of the work of Professor Hyman and Fred. They can only see the sultry female students in a corner of the campus and hear the noisy telephone ringing. Every conversation between the two couples is It seems to describe and exacerbate the instability of these two relations.
Aurally, the director exaggerated the specific sound details such as the creaking of the wooden planks in the house to a certain extent and made special treatments for individual sound effects. While assisting the overall atmosphere creation, it actually reflected the inner world of Shirley, Rose and others. Externalizing to the audience, specifically conveying various emotions about the role's anxiety, anxiety, or pain.
The director’s bold and experimental creative style in this film intuitively created a special atmosphere for the film, which is worth mentioning-this atmosphere has been repeatedly inserted into the film by Shirley’s novel fragments. After the narration, it coincides with the background of Shirley’s thriller novel in style, which makes the audience feel as if they are experiencing the situation of Shirley’s novels, which can be said to be intertextuality at the formal level——
Paula eagerly wanted to tell her friends every thought she had.
And after she did this, she herself would no longer exist, because she would not have new ideas and new words.
After that, she is free to do whatever she wants.""
However, due to the fact that the film is different from the traditional genre framework, the establishment of the style and the creation of the atmosphere did not end up in the plot, but fell on the portrayal of the two main female characters of Shirley and Rose, so if you look at it from a conventional and genre perspective In the film, it is inevitable that many interspersed fragments depicting the psychology are jumping and abstract, and the plot is too blank and lacks completeness.
This is equivalent to setting a premise for the audience to enter the film-we must grasp the details of all the movements and emotions of Rose and Shirley, and once we can successfully enter the inner world of these two women through audiovisual elements, We will find that what they are experiencing is the anxiety and predicament that some female groups will face, and this motif is not only the source of inspiration for Shirley’s novel about the “missing girl Paula”; it is Shirley’s ability to gradually The reason for accepting and understanding Rose, and having mutual emotions with her.
In a sense, it is women's unique anxiety and predicament that make'Shirley, Rose, Paula in the novel, and a group of women she refers to' produce emotional links. In Jackson Shirley's own words:
What I describe is neuroticism and fear. If you connect all the books I have written, it will be a documentary record of'anxiety'"
——About the film’s female anxiety, Shirley and Rose each went through a'birth cycle'
For Rose, her anxiety comes from unequal speech rights and fertility. She tries to narrow the gap between her and Fred through reading and learning, and tries to prove the choice Fred made for herself. It is wise. Rose coveted Shirley's equal status with Hyman because of her talent in the writing field, but the reality is that after Hyman made a request to her and Fred, she became the need. For those who make sacrifices to protect her husband's work, housework, maintaining sexual attractiveness, and expecting labor have become her daily tasks.
Although this level of anxiety should be common to women in the 1960s and easy to perceive to the audience, the film cleverly uses Rose to conceal the news of the pregnancy from Fred and helps Shirley through Rose. Investigating and smashing an egg to alleviate these few details of inner anxiety, restraint but accurately convey the suppression to the audience, without dramatizing Rose on the surface to be emotional or hysterical.
If the problem of the different education levels of Ross and Fred is due to the background of the times, the director has used Shirley’s intellectual identity to avoid this inducement while straightforwardly explaining to the audience: even if you are a female intellectual When a member has the right to speak with her husband in the family, you will still be subject to scrutiny from the external social environment-and the criteria for scrutiny may be the stereotype of everyone in this environment of'normal women'; or it may be the majority of people in the environment The kidnapping of the individual's concept/morality formed by the evaluation of public opinion.
So if you look roughly at the weirdness and perversion that Shirley is exposed to on the surface, it is easy to attribute all these to creative anxiety or the emotional conflict with Professor Hyman. However, if you look closely, it is basically the surrounding environment for'normalizing' women. Examine and treat Shirley’s “rejection” attitude-when you are a decent and normal woman, you seem to be part of the urban community; you seem to know that to remove wine stains you need to pat rather than wipe; you seem to be Stay in shape and maintain your sexual attractiveness as a woman...
In this sense, the novel about the missing girl Paula does not seem to be limited to Shirley’s personal creation. It is more like a child born to Shirley. Shirley seems to be experiencing a period of their own life just like Rose. The'birth cycle', and they have common anxiety and trauma during this cycle. They not only have to accept the lack of responsibility of the male role (respective husband) in this process, but also bear the emotional betrayal of the male role. .
Step by step, Shirley and Rose developed an understanding of each other. With the coexistence of the two, each as the other half of the other's'reproductive cycle', this understanding gradually evolved into a symbiotic affection, so it appeared on the screen. The ambiguous contact between Shirley and Rose and the scene on the edge of the cliff--
The two people who were originally standing on the edge of the cliff, after a close-up of an imaginary'Ros', cut to Shirley standing alone with her baby on the cliff. The pain and the sharing of experience and understanding between the two make this moment. They seem to be the same female individuals, questioning their gender identity and experience.
——Every girl can be'Paula'
The novelty of the film is not only the visual and audio-visual interaction with Jackson Shirley’s novel style mentioned in the previous article. Another catch is that the introduction mentioned in the introduction of Shirley’s novel heroine "Paula" Fictitious writing, this fictitious writing is not only a blank space on the text, but the audience can also see the blurring of her image in the lens.
This not only provided an opportunity for Shirley to project Rose’s image and emotions onto Paula during the film’s creation, but it also reached a meaning level, that is, Shirley was facing Hyman to the “missing girl”. 'When the subject matter of this novel was questioned, Shirley resolutely responded:
There are thousands of such girls outside, and schools all over the country are everywhere. They are alone and cannot be noticed by the world. Don’t tell me I don’t understand”
Shirley understands the "Paula" she wrote, because the anxiety, pain, and situation of her and Rose can be completely projected on "Paula". "Paula" can be any girl. They face such a Common issues for women.
Although the film has a chronological background, the writing of women’s anxiety and the expression of women’s conditions are not limited to the background of the times. There are no problems with regard to fertility, stereotypes about treating women, public opinion evaluations of women in the social environment, and moral constraints. One does not continue to breed in modern society, but the stereotyped impression labels and standards of moral public opinion may become another kind, but what remains the same is that these problems still seem to be "topics" unique to women.
Just like Li Cangdong’s line in "Burning"
There is no country in this world that belongs to women"
At least, not yet
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