Cai Mingliang once said in an interview after winning the "Outing", "We are now filming the 'Walking' series, and your mainland netizens scolded me for being crazy, let them continue to scold me, we will go slowly. "He smiled from time to time in his words, as if this scolding was another form of caring.
He is a very unique director. The "standing and earning money" that happened to Jiang Wen may not happen to him again. The style of his personal images can be roughly classified into the following points: no plot, no clear character relationship, scarce dialogue, single movement (mostly fixed shots and long shots), slow rhythm, and few soundtracks. And Jiang Wen, at least there are stories and camera language. Cai Mingliang himself said, "My works should go to art museums instead of theaters."
From "Youth Nezha" in 1993 to "What Time Is There with You" in 2001, the leading actor Li Kangsheng is the leading actor. A total of 5 films were filmed in the "Well-off Series". In the 8 years when other actors came and went, and the "plot" changed, "Xiaokang" remained like a rock. As a broken thread, it was directly inserted in the middle of several movies.
Li Kangsheng was only in his early 20s when he was first discovered by Cai Mingliang. In the past 8 years, he also grew up with the "well-off" in the film, transitioning from youth to middle age. The restless youth without exit was urged by time to settle down. But after all, it was still the sadness scattered all over the corner. The rash and unanswerable questions of youth are still unanswered in adulthood. In "What Time Are You Over There", Xiaokang seems to have grown into an adult, but his confusion, inability to reconcile with society, silence, and unprovoked rebellion are still clearly discernible. These are not the accumulation or continuation of the previous four films, nor are they revealed by this new drama, nor are they spoken by the characters in the fake films, but these well-off "God Children", just like the father in the film. Just like the "soul" of Tsai Mingliang, in Cai Mingliang's video writing, under his choice of video text as the "author", it is pervasive.
city and people
The image composition of the city is presented in the film as a complex and complicated visual form, "Through the means of cultural geography, culture can be understood as a matter of different spaces, places and landscapes, in addition to being interpreted as other things. An important sign of this is that the language of cultural studies is full of metaphors of space.”[1] In turn, the film, with its unique visual language and editing operations, as well as the division and reconstruction of space, has greatly expanded people’s understanding of space. The perceptual depth of this limited "landscape" of urban space.
The story of "What Time Are You Over There" develops in parallel in the two cities of Paris and Taipei. Interestingly, both cities "only" exist in language: Xiaokang sells watches on the go in Taipei. Except for the scene at home, Xiaokang goes to overpasses, tunnels, cinemas and viaducts in the film, but wherever he goes There is nothing special, they are just the most basic urban buildings, without any landmarks or city symbols. In the end, the audience still follows the clues of the "Forbidden City Museum" mentioned in the radio that is randomly placed in the car when Xiaokang is driving. When I came out, this was Taipei; on the other hand, Paris originated from Xiang Qi's oral expression, "I'm going to Paris." When I saw her again, she was already in a hotel in Paris, and the sound of footsteps upstairs drove her away. Her drowsiness, under the fixed camera, she is like a frozen sculpture on the bed, her body is dormant rigidly under a cheap blanket, only her eyes move from time to time, which is the only outlet for her thoughts and feelings. As a tourist, we did not follow her to appreciate the beautiful scenery of Paris and the famous Eiffel Tower. On the contrary, she frequently appeared in cafes, restaurants, subways, convenience stores and hotels. And these places that were supposed to carry some of the travel memories brought her, or conveyed to the audience through the lens of the film, an inescapable chat: she always spent a lot of time alone in thoughtful soaking. Cafes, she even vomited because she drank too much coffee; restaurants and convenience stores were just places where she had to go to meet her basic physical needs. At first, her little vision for Parisian cuisine was slowly lost under the barrier of words. , The cold violence of the communication barrier gave birth to her cowardice, and in the end she had to turn to the fast food in the convenience store for relief, and the good memories of the food came to nothing with her. In all the outside shots, the sky in Paris was cold and dark; the only time she was seen sightseeing was in the cemetery, where she frowned at the sculpture on someone's tombstone for a long time, and the audience looked through a low, medium shot Watching her watch, in the stillness on and off the screen (in the equivalence of time), the absurdity, boredom, and lowness of this tour exudes instantaneously, while the tone of the trip stays decisively on the channels of loneliness and coolness.
Alain Badiou believes that a good film can synthesize "vast space" (the city-state in ancient Greek plays) and "closed space" (the cellar in Sartre's play), but in Cai Mingliang's case, The city has clearly become a pretense. Xiaokang and Xiangqi seem to be in two modern cities, and they are standard urban residents, but these two urban spaces blurred by Cai Mingliang are actually like a huge labyrinth device, a modern Miniature version of Babel. Xiaokang and Xiangqi are not enjoying the convenience brought by high urbanization, but are coerced and isolated by this bizarre "metropolis": Xiaokang's active silence in the mother tongue environment, Xiangqi's language in another country Continuing to talk under the obstacles eventually led them to an embarrassing situation where they had nothing to say. In Hou Hsiao-hsien's "City of Sadness", Tony Leung's role was set as a deaf-mute, which was originally a compromise made against his poor Mandarin, but inadvertently, Leung Chao-wei's "deaf-mute" made the image in the film All of a sudden, this kind of aphasia seems to be a sullen resistance to Taiwan's years of reform and social changes. "Have no choice but not to say" coping strategy.
Given the greatness and differences in different cities, Cai Mingliang chose to present the small but the same. His selection of the blurred basic space, the capture and emphasis on the trivial life of the two leading actors, all tell us that the world is also born from the heart, and escaping from a place seems to have new possibilities, but the result is always Same. At the same time, the sense of distance between Xiaokang and Xiangqi is nominally manifested by the geographic distance between cities. However, under the indistinguishable space, the audience has other possibilities for the establishment of space imagination. For example, the multi-line parallel narrative technique of the movie gives the audience an "all-knowing and omnipotent" understanding of the life of the two, but at the same time this cutting cuts their connection to pieces. When we see Xiaokang in Taipei trying to adjust the clock he encounters, and Xiangqi in Paris drinking coffee unconsciously; when we see Xiaokang throwing his watch in boredom in the city, and Xiangqi helplessly squeezing When we were on the Paris subway; when we saw Xiaokang having sex with a prostitute in the car, and when Xiangqi tried to get comfort from the woman in the same bed... We already knew that these two people, not will have any connection. What is even more psychedelic is that the actor Antoine, the protagonist in the movie watched by Xiaokang in Taipei, miraculously appeared beside Xiang Qi, who he was thinking about day and night, but he was old and no longer. The confused youthful face fixed at the end of the film. This seems to imply that Xiaokang and Xiangqi are in different thinking time and space, and Xiaokang's behavior of turning back the clock by 7 hours is in vain. Some kind of relationship effort. In addition to what has been described as a melancholy atmosphere, the city is still a blindfold provided by the director. The audience encodes the language symbols of the two cities into an image of a modern city, and is looking forward to a romantic urban story. In the experience of projecting oneself on the screen, in contrast to the situation of Xiaokang and Xiangqi, the moviegoers saw the embarrassment they carefully concealed in reality: we cannot conquer the city, we cannot integrate into the city. Even more difficult than integrating into the city is building genuine relationships with others. If the city provides a reason for us to justify our own alienation, then Cai Mingliang is deconstructing the concept of city and region. He exposes the truth that cities cannot give shelter, minimizes their functions, and hides The wandering individual is magnified so that there is nowhere to hide.
Regarding the lack of urban protection, there is a good example in the film: in the film, Xiangqi is reduced to going to a convenience store to buy dinner to feed her stomach, but after paying the bill, she stands at the door of the convenience store and does not leave until she passes a woman outside. She followed him out of the ground - it turned out that she was afraid, afraid that this noisy city would return to silence and empty streets. She just followed him all the way, so nervous that she walked past her hotel and still didn't realize it. She didn't realize it until she walked a few hundred meters away and ran back out of breath. When the city at night removes the make-up of overcrowded and busy during the day, the oppressive and terrifying charm of the city is highlighted. This kind of fear is also revealed in the excellent psychoanalysis model "Vanilla Sky": in the opening sequence, the protagonist David wakes up from his luxury apartment, saying goodbye to his sweet sleep, he washes and dresses as usual, and is in high spirits. He drove down the street, but he slowly realized where the anomaly was: Times Square in New York, which was always busy and crowded with people, was deserted. Billboards are still radiant, electronic advertising screens are bustling as usual, skyscrapers towering into the sky, traffic lights still indicate empty streets, and the world is still in order without human participation. This is the most terrifying scene, and I believe it is also the "spectacle" that has the greatest impact on the audience of the film. The city has evolved into a leisurely "ecosystem", and their creators - human beings - disappear on the screen (human and The innate archetype of the wasteland will urge us to make a pessimistic judgment that "human beings are extinct"). Seeing that the city built by oneself is no longer enjoyed and controlled by human beings, seeing that the city that is separated from human beings is still as bright as yesterday, and urban planning and architecture will remain in the world for a long time, surviving longer than human beings. The door of man's fear has been completely opened. Under the cover of night, the city is endowed with a "privilege" to escape from the jurisdiction of human beings, and the sense of control that human beings subsequently lack has returned to deepen people's helplessness, and the relationship between the city and people has fallen into a loop : During the day, people are crowded and lonely in the city, and at night they are afraid in the silent streets, and they feel inferior at the same time. The next day, everything started over and over again.
The nostalgic symbol from the perspective of time
"My films are very symbolic, whether it is the moon or the wall, it is an open text for everyone to interpret." There is such a scene in "Outing", the two protagonists are staring at the wall respectively. Look at the painting on the wall, while the painting on the wall is a coast. Some people think that he is alluding to the relationship between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. To this, Cai Mingliang replied, but he did not give a definite answer.
In "What Time Are You Over There", the most important symbol is the clock. In addition, the clock, as the main symbol of the film, runs through the three narrative clues of the whole film. In the first narrative, Xiaokang, who sells watches for a living, meets a woman (Xiang Qi) who is going to Paris, who wants to buy the watch that Xiaokang has that shows two time zones. Xiaokang refused to take action on the grounds that "I'm at a funeral, you will wear my watch," but Xiangqi begged and finally bought the watch. She also gave Xiaokang a piece of cake. Staring at the back of the other party's departure. After that, Xiaokang was fascinated and tried to adjust all the watches around him to Paris time in order to form some kind of connection with Xiangqi, who was far away in Paris. In this clue, the clock has become the master of time. By adjusting the clock, Xiaokang "eliminates physical obstacles", as if he came to Paris in an instant. Jet lag here is a metonymy of spatial distance, and the jet lag is "eliminated", and for Xiaokang, the vision of the end of the world at this time is "established" (imaginative satisfaction). However, as mentioned above, the relationship between Xiaokang and Xiangqi is essentially impossible to intersect. For ordinary audiences, Xiaokang's behavior is incomprehensible, naive and meaningless, but at the same time it has Strongly surreal, this is also a rare "spectacle" in this dull anti-narrative film. At the end of the film, there is a scene where Xiao Kang uses a fishing rod and hook to form a long stick on the roof terrace, trying to reset the hands of a giant decorative clock in Taipei. The camera is at a high angle and is erected in the building opposite the building. The frame of the big vision contains a lot of image information, and the thin figure of Xiaokang is difficult to distinguish. The long shot is extremely useful. In the long shot at the end of The Postman (1994), Neruda stands hunched on the beach, with a huge overturned rock behind him reflecting his grief; and the comedy Hulot The long shot used in Mr. Vacation (1953), however, is intended to complement Mr. Hulow's antics through the expanse of space. The long-range shot of this film adopts the overhead shooting method, which shows Xiaokang's humble and marginal background from the bottom and his sense of loneliness that he can't find a place in society. Through the glass of the building, we can see the constant flow of pedestrians on the street. In the next fixed shot, Xiaokang obviously got his wish. He sat on the roof terrace, opened a bottle of French red wine he just bought to celebrate, and made it comfortably. With the dream of "instant Paris". And the city behind him is bustling, and the leisurely leisure of Xiaokang once again highlights his identity as an urban alien. From the extension level of the symbol of the clock, Xiaokang is using a clumsy and useless stereotype (Xiangqi will not know Xiaokang's contribution) to express his love that he has no reason to say in reality ( The desire to relate to others to be consistent with others). But clocks don't just stop at the first level.
In psychoanalytic schools, images of clocks are always associated with words such as time, past, memory, sorrow, repentance, etc. Another narrative thread of this film is that Xiaokang lost his father and his mother was in a quagmire of pain that he could not get out of. Xiaokang’s response was flat, as if he had accepted this fact and returned to normal. Moreover, the film used more space to express his love for Xiangqi. The "persistence" of his father, which makes his father's death and Xiaokang seem to be at the two ends of the separation. In fact, Cai Mingliang once again used a blinding method, using "love" to cover up "family affection". To a certain extent, I think this is a kind of alienation. He jumped out of the previous "death-great sorrow" emotional processing mode, and relied on creating a sad atmosphere in the city and exaggerating the isolated situation of the characters to avoid the Xiaokang lost his father. Painful direct writing. There has been such a case in clinical psychotherapy: a man with a happy emotional life divorced his girlfriend for no reason after the divorce of his parents, but he insisted that he was "not influenced by his parents at all". In this case, the man's unconscious level has been affected by his parents, and he even suggested to himself that "love is false and unreliable", and the active breakup with his girlfriend is his defense mechanism to avoid the truth. In the film, Xiaokang's obsession with adjusting the watch is also partly out of nostalgia for his father. Lost courage to meet my father (fear of ghosts, afraid to go to the toilet).
Xiaokang faced the pain of losing his father at the end of the film: after a night of romance, Xiaokang's watch case was stolen by a prostitute, and his Paris time was all "zeroed". When he got home, he stared at his father's portrait, successfully performed his recognition of his father, and withdrew his eyes, he put on a coat for his mother who was snuggling on his father's bed, and then lay gently beside her.
At the end, Cai Mingliang inspires/sublimates the watch metaphor of the whole film by paradoxically arranging the father figure into the main narrative of Xiaokang and Xiangqi: Xiangqi, who has nowhere to live, sleeps in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris, and the naughty child in the background Together, they pushed her suitcase into the pool in the park. Xiangqi, who was in a drowsy state, was unaware. The suitcase floated to the other side and was picked up by an old man who looked like Xiaokang's father with an umbrella handle. The beginning of the home is very different, the gray coat, wool scarf and leather gloves make him look solemn and neat. In the opening chapter, how could the long-dead father realize the dream of a well-off and travel to Paris to meet Xiang Qi? There is no answer in the movie, but no matter what the interpretation is, Cai Mingliang's return of the "father image" is by no means unintentional, but more like a closed-loop ceremony intentionally completed. In the last shot of the whole film, my father turned around and walked towards the Ferris wheel in the distance. He is not only the first character to appear in the whole film, but also the last character to leave the scene at the end of the film. The film also presents a closed loop in structure. In addition, the Ferris wheel has the same shape as the clock, and the two together bear the reincarnation metaphor of the clock: the birth of man, the existence of man, the death of man, the disappearance and retention of man, the cycle of life and the cycle... This is still A negative existentialist proposition. But fortunately, the redemptive help of the father at the end of the film adds a warm and warm chasing light to this cold film.
References
Li Jishe, The Global Space Politics of Taipei Films: Yang Dechang's "Yi Yi" and Tsai Ming-liang's "What Time Are You Over There?" . "Modernity under the Image - Film and Visual Culture". Zhou
Yingying, editor-in-chief. Zhejiang University Press, 2002. Pages 195~216. ", March 9, 2012. http://cinephilia.net/archives/13007
Qin Chuanxi, Interview with Cai Mingliang: My film is near an art museum, not a cinema. September 7, 2013. http://yule .sohu.com/20130907/n386091482.shtml
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