Apart from the joking reappearance of individual nuances, the difference between tribute and plagiarism is roughly reflected in the fact that the former is tacitly made by the audience and the creator, while the latter is based on serious information asymmetry. Therefore, for the same text, it does not have a definite quality label, but slides between ambiguous definitions according to the audience's level. The embarrassment of "Earth" is that the audience who recognizes that it is a tribute cannot tolerate those degraded mechanical methods, and for those who regard it as a brand new image, the creator will inevitably face moral controversy.
From the "Diamond Sutra", Bi Gan was very proud of quoting scriptures. However, the parody advertised in the post-modern context is a carnival of deconstructing authority, but in "Earth" I do not see the slightest sense of rebellion. On the contrary, not only did he not have the anxiety of not being able to get out of the shadows of his predecessors, but instead he quoted them with great interest, and even directly used them as his core image.
This is probably another kind of anxiety called "youngness": the poor life experience is unable to fill the excess desire for expression, so it has to resort to the established framework or the bones of the dead. At the same time, deliberately complicating oneself in order to seek depth, it is as if the messed up bricks seem to have expanded due to the increase of gaps. Relying on these same steps, one can naturally enter the sequence of film history and literary history, and even directly continue the context of the predecessors. For young creators, this indiscriminate attachment to artistic criticism is disappointing.
In fact, "Roadside Picnic" was originally not so "used", we would only say that its style is "Takovsky" or "Hou Xiaoxian" style, but regardless of the author's talent or the land under his feet, All can be called a self-contained one. Carey in "Earth" has become a more "sloppy" fiction, and has been roughly inserted as a template for genre films. Guizhou dialect can be translated into any language, which makes people wonder whether there are only tonal differences in the hometown for Bi Gan.
However, in addition to talent overdrafts, the distortions brought about by capital intervention cannot be ignored. The sixty-minute long mirror is full of gimmicks from the inside out. Compared with the imaginary difficulty, abundant manpower and money can solve the problem of difficulty in execution. Another paradox of "Earth" is quite universal opportunism: the blood and tears of the producer are completely a portrayal of capitalism with the highest efficiency, but the final product is a kind of art film that rivals Hollywood.
Unlike most domestic films that use small towns as the stage, Bi Gan has no interest in realism, even if his "birthday" is so political. Obviously, in the context of the vertical penetration of educational technology and speech management, the young generation of contemporary China, "depoliticization" may be a mixture of strangeness and avoidance at the same time. Bi Gan's particularity is also that he is de-urbanized geographically, and his educational background is de-academicized. This constitutes another footnote of his hurriedly moving closer to the mainstream: the centripetal force comes from the extreme speed of the edge. He was still the child who longed for his father's recognition, and didn't want to replace him in the past.
And marketing events may be reduced to talks for a long time. If I have to say that many people who do not understand art films will use this as an opportunity to try to get in touch with Tarkovsky or David Lynch, I have no opinion. After all, this is also the work done by "Love Apartment" in promoting American TV series.
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