The similarity with Lynch may be just an accident. When Bi Gan traced his surrealist influence, he mentioned the French painter Marc Chagall (Marc Chagall) and the French Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (Patrick Modiano). "Night" captures the feeling of their work.
This article was published in the 22nd issue of Sanlian Life Weekly in 2018, total issue number 989. Reprinting in any form on any platform is strictly prohibited. The source of the pictures is indicated, all rights belong to the original copyright owner, and the consequences of unauthorized reprinting and misappropriation are at your own risk.
A close reading of "Roadside Picnic" written two years ago : Poems and Buddhas inside and outside the long lens , I hope that Bi Gan can write two years later. Whether it is good or bad, persistence in creating is the most important thing.
The most anticipated Chinese-language film of the year, the second feature film "Last Night on Earth" by young director Bi Gan, finally held its world premiere in the Debussy Hall of the Palais des Cannes on the morning of May 15. The East Asian film series in Cannes this year is very interesting. The first half of Jia Zhangke's "Jianghu Children" took the lead, and a series of East Asian films set off a small climax in the second half. On the day before Bi Gan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi in the main competition and Hirokazu Kee who finally won the Palme d'Or, the next day was the premiere of a new film by the Korean celebrity Lee Cangdong. For Bi Gan's "a concern" unit, the ranking at this time can be said to be a "golden time": media viewing is booming, and the film market will not end until two days later. As a result, the Debussy Hall was full at first, and no one with a lower level of the Film Festival Pass was able to enter. Before the start of the screening, everyone laughed and said that Bi Gan has since become the "direct line" of Cannes.
For this young man who was still making a living by shooting wedding videos a few years ago, this journey was not easy. Bi Gan’s debut work "Roadside Picnic" (2015) has a surprisingly low cost. Most of the actors have to pay for their cars and horses at their own expense. However, after the film won the award in the "Filmmaker Today" section of the Locarno Film Festival, it quickly attracted the attention of critics and filmmakers at home and abroad, and was successively released in theaters in France and other European countries. In the case of extremely limited living space for domestic art films, the slightly obscure "Roadside Picnic" won the opportunity to be released for ten days in the summer of 2016, creating a miracle in the art film market. The "Last Night on Earth" that had already been announced at the time, the completion time was delayed again and again, and it was not completed until February of this year. Later, I only worked overtime for about three months. Therefore, he himself said in the interview that further adjustments will be made after the festival ends and before the release.
This new film still tells the story of what happened in Kaili, Guizhou and the fictional town of Dangmai. Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) returned to Kaili to deal with his father's funeral after he left his hometown for many years. An old photo found in the wall clock prompted him to start looking for the woman Wan Qiwen (played by Tang Wei) he once loved. Of course, like "Roadside Picnic", the plot has never been Bi Gan's strong point. He himself said that the story of the film is not very meaningful, it is just that a man is looking for a woman, but the important thing is to grasp an emotion and create an appropriate atmosphere. Therefore, during the shooting process, the script will change at any time, sometimes to grasp the atmosphere and feeling of the shooting place, sometimes it may just have a new idea.
The technical flaws of "Roadside Picnic" are obvious, and Bi Gan also thinks this is a pity. In a sense, "The Last Night on Earth" is a second attempt after he has obtained sufficient funds. The two films have many similarities in form and content. "Roadside Picnic" is a forty-minute long shot that took the protagonist to Dangmai, where he saw the nephew and dead wife he was looking for again. "The Last Night on Earth" simply took the entire second half into a nearly one-hour long shot, thus forming a two-stage structure with real front and virtual back. It was also in this long shot that Luo Hongwu met the woman who might be Wan Qiwen and other deceased people. Its position and function in the narrative structure are almost exactly the same as the long shots in "Roadside Picnic", allowing the protagonist to relive the past in a dream-like atmosphere.
From Chagall, Modiano to Celan
For an artist who is more obscure and wins with his personal style, a simpler way is to analyze his influence and understand his work in the context of these influences. Film critics including Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes Film Festival, often associate Bi Gan with Hou Xiaoxian, Wong Kar Wai and David Lynch.
The comparison with the two Chinese masters should be obvious. Hou Xiaoxian's reconstruction of the concept of film time and space and Wong Kar Wai's non-linear narrative can be found in Bi Gan. East Asian audiences may not be deeply impressed because they are traditionally influenced by the Buddhism cycle theory. However, where the Western Christian concept of linear time is deeply ingrained, the time and space concepts and narrative methods of the two Chinese directors can be said to be revolutionary at the end of the last century. The same is true for Bi Gan. The recurring wall clocks and hints of turning back in time in "Roadside Picnic" clearly tell us that the concept of time and space is an important aspect of the film. The image of the wall clock is weakened in "The Last Night on Earth", but it is still the starting point of the entire narrative. When Luo Hongwu found photos inside the wall clock, the audience should be alert: the narrative sequence of this film will be very complicated.
David Lynch represents the other side of Bi Gan's work, that is, breaking with the daily perceivable "reality" and looking for another reality in an imperceptible level. However, the similarity with Lynch may only be accidental. When Bi Gan traced his surrealist influence, he mentioned the French painter Marc Chagall (Marc Chagall) and French writer Patrick Modiano (Patrick Modiano). ), and made it clear that he wanted to shoot "The Last Night on Earth" as their work.
Chagall is one of the pioneers of surrealism in fine art and the origin of the term "surreal". According to legend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire believed that Chagall's paintings were "surnaturel" (surnaturel), and later developed the term "surrealism" (surréalisme) based on this. If you insist on labeling Bi Gan, "surrealism" may be the most appropriate. He is good at expressing invisible consciousness. The super long shots in the two feature films are just like what Breton (André Breton) said in the "Manifeste du surréalisme" (Manifeste du surréalisme), " the seemingly contradictory dreams Harmonize with reality into a kind of'absolute reality' or'super reality' ".
Modiano's influence is first on the content. The winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature is a master of "memory", using the genre of detective novels to present memories and forgetting, existence and annihilation in personal and collective history. "The Last Night on Earth" was originally described as a science fiction film, and later there were traces of genre films such as road movies. Formally, Bi Gan's long shots are obviously irrelevant to Modiano, but the fragmented and non-linear processing of reality and memories in the first half is obviously very similar to the incoherent language deliberately set in Mo's writing. Huang Jue said that in the film where his voice was used as the voice-over, most of the scenes were actually shot, so Bi Gan abandoned the video in the post-production. It is not difficult to imagine Modiano writing in the same way. The first draft is inevitably a logical and clear narrative, and then carefully changed to the true appearance of human beings when recalling the past: chattering, contradictory, and hesitant.
In an interview with French film critic Wang Muyan, Bi Gan also mentioned another name-Paul Celan (Paul Celan), and said that the title of the new film originally wanted to use Celan's 1952 poem "Poppy and Memory" (Mohn und Memory). Gedächtnis), the first part is "memory", and the second part of the long shot is "poppy". This statement surprised me a bit, because compared to Modiano, Celan's "memory" is not fragmented, nor does it reject the grand narrative of modernity. If you think about it, Celan's influence on him may have two aspects: formal repetition and "noir film" attempts.
Celan’s most famous poem should be "Death Fugue" (Todesfuge), and its final version happens to be included in "Poppy and Memory". A major feature of this poem in terms of form is that there will be a lot of repetitions in each part, with only a few minor adjustments, just like the "fugue" form in classical music, imitating the same theme in different parts. There are many strategic repetitions in "Roadside Picnic", but they all disappear in "The Last Night on Earth". However, when the same character is expressed in different periods and different identities, it is separated rather than continuous. This may be the real "fugue" of the two films.
More important is the obsession with death of the Jewish Celan as a Holocaust survivor. Most of his works were written in the shadow of death until he drowned the Seine at the age of 49. "Poppy and Memory" is his second collection of poems, and every word is filled with the breath of death. Even the seemingly love poem "Night..." is actually describing the power of time to destroy everything, the kiss of time is the kiss of death. This kind of heaviness is naturally unattainable in Bi Gan's films. What he draws is the melancholy that time makes everything annihilate, and of course the oppressive feeling of death that can happen at any time in film noir. The things in "Last Night on Earth" often have a history, such as a once luxurious and magical mansion, but when it appears in a long shot, it has become a ruin of time.
The introduction of this long shot is very interesting: halfway through the film, the protagonist walks into a movie theater and puts on his glasses. At this time, the audience also needs to wear 3D glasses, because after this one-hour long lens is 3D! Bi Gan believes that 3D can better embody dreams, and it also coincides with Breton’s surrealist description of "reality above reality": if 2D is a perceptible reality, then the atmosphere and emotions created by the 3D long lens are more Gao's existence is a reality that transcends reality. It is also a hypertext, which is Bi Gan's view of film art itself: it is a vehicle to record time and space, and people turn back time through film. This is consistent with the clock drawn on the car body of the ending train of "Roadside Picnic", which rewinds frame by frame like a movie to simulate the timelapse.
From the author's will to the film tyrant
This choice of format means extremely difficult shooting. The long shots were taken twice, the first three times were all scrapped, and the second time five times, only the last two were available. In the words of the protagonist Huang Jue, it is already a "miracle" that this shot can be taken. "The Last Night on Earth" changed three camera directors one after another, and the long lens came from the last one. He is the French photographer David Chizallet (David Chizallet). His representative works include the Oscar-nominated Mustang (2015) for Best Foreign Language Film and this year’s Caesars’ hottest “Le Sens de Marriage”. la fête, 2017). But for anyone, Bi Gan's long shots may be a once-in-a-lifetime special experience.
But the filming is not over yet, and the screening is still a problem. The film does not have a full 2D version, because 3D is not a gimmick to entertain the audience in Bi Gan's hands, but a solid artistic language and expression technique. In addition, the entire long shot is a night scene (echoing the title), and the cinema needs to increase the brightness, and coupled with the complex sound mixing and mixing, it is difficult for domestic theaters to make mistakes from the hardware to the software. Bi Gan said that he would work hard to communicate with the theater, but such communication is often not very effective. When Stéphane Brizé's "Life" was released in France in 2016, his team did a lot of communication work. He himself also published an open letter to major French cinemas, urging them to turn up the volume. Finally, according to French media reports, some theaters did not follow suit, and a work with extremely rich sound details destroyed the laziness of commercial theaters.
Whether it is the obsession with technical details or the expression of surrealism, Bi Gan's "author" posture is very clear. Most of the author's films are "big directors and small actors." Even international superstars such as Tang Wei have to return to the "duty" of actors and use their bodies and skills to realize the will of the director. Bi Gan is still adjusting the script during the filming process. For relatively amateur actors, such as Chen Yongzhong who plays the underworld boss Zuo Hongyuan (Bi Gan’s aunt is also the male lead actor of "Roadside Picnic"), the filming The impact of the changes in the order of the day and the evening is not significant. But for professional actors, it is not a small challenge, especially in terms of language. Dialects are of great significance to Bi Gan's poems and movies. Except for Tang Wei's character because he is a foreigner, which is mixed with Mandarin, all other characters speak Guizhou dialect (Kaili dialect). In order to adapt to the script that may change at any time, Huang Jue spent a lot of energy learning Kaili, which may be one of the reasons why he stayed on the crew for ten months.
The details about dialects may seem trivial, but they are very important for the development of Chinese writers' films. Previously, the practice of Chinese film and television works was to allow the plot to accommodate the actors. No matter where the story is, the actors speak Mandarin, and occasionally some northern dialects. This is related to the status of dialects and policy orientation for a long time. Two years ago, "Romantic Demise" still has an unreasonable mixture of Mandarin and Shanghainese. There is no explanation in the plot. It can only be regarded as the slack of the actors or the low requirements of the director. In fact, in the past ten years or so, southern dialects have begun to "resurrect" on the big screen. Both the demand for realism and the creation of the atmosphere of the work are a positive change. The most famous one is "Thirteen Hairpins in Jinling" by Zhang Yimou. . However, Bi Gan's Kaili dialect is much less spoken than Nanjing dialect and Shanghai dialect, and there is not much room for casting roles, so the actors can only learn it by themselves.
Imitating accents and learning language are the actor’s internal affairs. For example, Meryl Streep’s two Oscar actresses have worked hard on language: She was in "Sophie's Choice" (Sophie's Choice, In 1982), she played a Polish woman from a family of intellectuals. She had a lot of German and some Polish dialogues, and she had to wear a Polish accent when she spoke English; in "The Iron Lady" (The Iron Lady, 2011), she had to have a full English accent. Chinese film actors have done much less work in this area, or even worse than some TV dramas and entertainment shows. I hope that the Kaili dialects of Tang Wei, Huang Jue, Zhang Aijia and Li Hongqi are a good start. Although Taiwanese actor Li Hongqi did not have any dialogue in the finished version, he also said that everyone in the crew is learning the Guizhou dialect, and he is no exception.
Those actors who can support Bi Gan's crazy artistic demands are already worthy of film art, and their experience in the film is even more interesting. Huang Jue was very excited after watching "Roadside Picnic" and wanted to visit Dangmai. Later, after discovering it was a fictitious place, I sought to cooperate with Bi Gan, because the director is the only key to Dangmai's door, and only by shooting his film can he reach his Dangmai. Li Hongqi and Bi Gan are Golden Horse Award "same-level students". When Bi Gan won the Best New Director Award for "Roadside Picnic", he won the Best New Actor Award for the literary film "Drunk, Life and Death". Li said frankly that many people advised him not to take Bi Gan's films, but in the end he was moved by the director's talent. "Bi Gan is a poet, and even his speech is poetic," he said.
If it is said that the actors, photographers and other crew members fully support Bi Gan, there are rumors that he has a lot of friction with the management in the filming and production. This is first of all the lack of industry experience. He himself also said that "The Last Night on Earth" was his first filming under the film industry system, and it was a learning process. At the same time, his "author" consciousness is also incompatible with the current Chinese film industry. The reason why the author's film is valuable is that it is not a mass product on the assembly line, and is not responsible for pleasing and pleasing the audience. Therefore, Bi Gan must go to the European Film Festival, where the fragile and valuable author spirit can be protected. The mission of the Cannes Film Festival is to showcase and promote "authored films for the general public". In addition to being a creator-centric economic system, the author system's artistic purpose is to provide a more personal exchange, preserve the "humanity" of works, and prevent films from falling into the anonymous void of pure commercial production. When we watch an author's film, every audience seems to be having a private conversation with the author, so the interpretation of the work will vary greatly.
When the audience complained about "not understanding" Bi Gan, we were looking forward to a regular film industry narrative product. It was like visiting IKEA and seeing hand-made, only one piece of furniture, and we were a little panicked. When a person is in a panic, the first reaction is to blame the other party for protecting themselves. Therefore, to appreciate the author’s movies requires a sincere or even naive heart, without any presuppositions and expectations, and treat each work and author as a completely different individual, as a brand new adventure. Others will make comparisons. They cite examples of other authors' films to deny Bi Gan's value. This still fails to look at each author one-to-one. Film is an expensive art. All art directors will make more or less concessions to the industry, but A's compromise does not mean that B's uncompromising is problematic. Conversely, Bi Gan's persistence cannot prove that a director who has made more concessions to the industry is worthless.
If Bi Gan must be criticized, it may be that he entered a "tyrant" style of creation in the second feature film. This term is used by critics to describe many masters of art, and its connotations are not the same. What I want to talk about here is a desire to communicate with the audience, whether it is artificially set up barriers to understanding, or is it out of artistic needs. The key to "Roadside Picnic" is not difficult to understand is that there is very little dialogue, small amount of surface language information, and it is all helping to understand the plot. In this way, the audience can spend more energy on understanding the audiovisual language. The relationship between the characters in the film is often explained by images and language, and there will be Modiano-like repetitions. These artistic methods inadvertently reduce the difficulty of understanding. "Last Night on Earth" is the exact opposite. There is too much dialogue and too dense information, and some information flashes past and will not be repeated. In addition to Bi Gan's audiovisual language that always requires your full attention, this is not a film that can be watched carefully and sincerely. It demands too much from the audience. When I was in the Cannes media field, I saw many foreign reporters exiting in the first half. Although those who stayed to the end stood up and applauded, it is undeniable that Bi Gan's barriers to understanding are indeed a problem.
Since it is communication, it is two-way. The audience needs to overcome their own inertia to appreciate the author's film, and the director also needs to think about whether the emotion he wants to convey and the atmosphere he creates will be stranded before reaching the other shore. How to "tether" the audience is not only a commercial operation, but also an art game. This is obviously not Bi Gan's strengths. Whether or not to be a tyrant is the author's own choice, and no one else has the right to interfere. But any art exists as a social phenomenon, and the creation of an artist is not higher than the existence of society. It is said that "The Last Night on Earth" is the most expensive one in the "A Concern" unit of this Cannes Film Festival. It is no longer a low-cost production of a poor boy with a group of young people chasing their dreams. Everyone has high demands on it. very natural.
The film was only finished in February, and many people before Cannes said it was too late, and finally caught up. According to the information I got, the film-picker saw a relatively complete version of "The Last Night on Earth" the day before the release of the film list, and made a selection decision. Coincidentally, the Egyptian film "Judgment Day" in the main competition was upgraded from "a kind of attention" to the main competition at the same time. Director AB Shawky told me that it was already night when I received the call. At that time, he and the producer couldn't believe this "last-minute upgrade". "Judgment Day" is his feature film debut. No investment was found when preparing for the filming. Although the shooting conditions were not as difficult as "Roadside Picnic", it was also extremely difficult.
From these inside stories, we can guess that Cannes officials have been waiting for Bi Gan and even reserved a place for him in the main competition. But after watching the film, I decided to give this "newcomer quota" to Shawky. The theme of "Judgment Day" for the disabled and the inheritance of Italian neorealism makes many film critics uncomfortable, but you can experience the innocence and adventurous spirit of the debut. I was moved by it in Lumiere Hall, just like I was moved by "Roadside Picnic" back then. Bi Gan said that his next work is likely to be an adaptation of a novel, which is a path that many mature directors have traveled, and it is also a model that the film industry likes. But from the point of view of emotion rather than skill, "Roadside Picnic" is still the best Bi Gan.
(This article was published in the 22nd issue of Sanlian Life Weekly in 2018, total issue number 988. Reprinting in any form on any platform is strictly prohibited. The source of the pictures is indicated, and all rights belong to the original copyright holder. Unauthorized reprinting and misappropriation are at your own risk .)
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