Personal score: 8 points (out of 10 points)
On the axis of Woody Allen's works, people often set up labels for him including existential philosophy, urban satirical comedy, semi-autobiography, alienation effect, nostalgic age, love pessimism and intellectual complex, indicating that he has Formed a very strong personal style and clearly recognizable labelled characters in the works. It can be said that in the late 1980s, Woody Allen's urban comedy has become a symbol of contemporary American cinema, that is, the new Hollywood era.
Different from the creation of Hollywood genealogy, Woody Allen's films are filled with an existentialist's endless questions about the world, life, and love. As the "only" intellectual in the American film industry, Woody's films are self-contained and linked up and down. The application of some typical techniques makes all his works find a reasonable position and self-consistency in his creative sequence. The "Woody's time and space" and Woody-style thinking constructed in the long-term operation spanning half a century enable those who love his works to obtain similar emotional experience in his different and similar movies, so Woody won the A large crowd. His identity as a Jewish middle-class intellectual is also talked about by the majority of European movie fans, and he also cherishes the love of European audiences who have supported him for so many years so that the producers will not lose money.
The reason is all because of Woody's stable creative mentality. The creative mentality determines the style of the director's work, and the presentation of the work is like the creator's psychological mirror, reflecting what he has experienced and what he thinks. In Professor Qin Junxiang's book "The Psychology of Film and Television Creation", it is mentioned that "the relatively definite and stable artistic psychological situation formed by the main body of artistic creation in the past long-term social life, study and artistic practice" is the creative mentality. It is the product of the organic combination of habitual consciousness and habitual unconsciousness, the sum of the knowledge, experience, thoughts, opinions and beliefs that the subject of artistic creation has been accustomed to, the cohesion of the trend of the times, the accumulation of historical consciousness and the habitual personality The organic unity of mental and other centralization".
In the process of Woody's creation, his strong creative mentality is fully reflected. Therefore, this article takes "Radio Age" as an example to discuss some of the creative mentality reflected in Woody Allen's works. .
"The clouds are easy to disperse, the sky here must be connected to your sky", in the sky above the city where we live, the radio waves are shuttled and intersected, and finally all kinds of sounds are sent to thousands of households. When we look up, we can't see anything, but there is a power that connects the people who live in it. In the United States in the 1940s, this power was called radio.
There was a Jewish boy who grew up remembering the golden years of radio, so he created this film called "Radio Days" to document how his family was deeply attracted to radio. , influence change, and anecdotes about the stars of that era that were created by the emergence, popularity, and prosperity of this mass medium.
A typical Woody Allen-esque memoir, the sense of age and nostalgia created by "Radio Age" is not at all diminished by the protagonist "I" babbling off the screen. It guides the camera to shuttle between houses, streets and crowds, connecting the fragments of life scattered in the gaps of time one by one, making the originally scattered structures close together, and there is the possibility of pairing and echoing each other.
From a structural point of view, some of Woody's early films did not have a very strict plot structure. To explain the cause, process, and result of the event, it was more like inadvertently selecting several life or fictional fragments to assemble them together. , such as "Annie Hall", "Sex Book", "Manhattan", "Structural Love Maniac", etc., so how to assemble these scattered fragments is a knowledge, I think this logical answer appeared in Woody's early years as a comic actor Shan You experience. Woody's naturally sensitive humorous cells and his accumulated experience on the stage of Shanyou cross talk made him use a lot of analogies, associations, setting suspense, and similar substitution techniques when linking clips, so voice-over explanations and movie pictures are often formed. An intertextual relationship, sometimes exposition, sometimes dismantling, and sometimes direct overthrow, creates a sense of humor and a connection between the fragments. "Radio Times" opens with a very dramatic story. The thief sneaks into "my" neighbor's house, just in time to receive a call from the radio station to participate in listening to songs and recognizing songs and winning a prize. When the owner returns home, he finds that the house is in a mess, but there Got a whole bunch of furniture the next day. Using a slightly absurd coincidence to bring the audience into the radio age, after raising the audience's interest, taking advantage of the class differences at both ends of the radio, it transitioned from the upper class who recorded the program to the life of the ordinary working class who listened to the program. Growing up, "I" began to fondly recall the small town where he lived as a child, hooked up the life of the protagonist's family, and reminded the audience of the romanticized descriptions that may exist because of the age. Later, "I" used a radio program to represent a family member to establish the relationship between the radio program and the life of the general public, and also found the sound source for the background music that filled the whole film. Everyone in the family has their own favorite programs, which reflects not only the personalities and preferences of family members, but also shows that in the age of radio, the prosperity and development of broadcasting enables men, women, and children to find fun and enjoy it. Place. Mothers yearn for a life in the upper class when they are doing housework, fathers who hope to become dragons like little prodigies, but they all listen to emotion regulation programs, boys like adventure stories, and girls and women who yearn for love like music and radio. Sexy male voice, uncle likes to listen to sports legends, this situation is no different from us in the age of television and the Internet. This refined life tool It has universality and generality, so it can get our emotional recognition. In addition to the clues of ordinary family life, there is also a clue about the scandal about the life of radio stars. Through the playful narration of the protagonist, you can switch freely between the two clues.
He can temporarily press the story of the smoking girl played by Mia Farrow and jump back to real life, and he can also use different music programs to wear Aunt Bee's repeated love twists and turns. Such a voice-over control method is like a DJ on a mixing console, freely and unrestrainedly controlling the development of the story and the progress of the film.
Woody Allen once said that he was successful as a humorous columnist and comedian, and he did not shy away from boasting about his talents in this area. It was his early writing and acting experience that made him enter the film industry. After creation, you can so keenly distill the jokes in your life, and calmly place them into your own story.
Woody has always been regarded as an existentialist believer. In his films, intellectuals often ramble about the meaning of life, the origin of the world, the authority of religion, the contradiction between the sexes, these issues may never be solved, but Woody just couldn't stop thinking. All of this may have originated from the fact that the nanny tried to cover him with a blanket when he was 5 years old, so that he felt death, and since then, he began to keep on searching for the answer to the ultimate question. In Woody's films, life always has a hint of postmodern absurdity. The characters in the film are ambiguity due to their own personality flaws and language habits. It is accidental and inevitable that these coincidences occur. In Woody's rare and warm reminiscence sketch, "Radio Age" still reveals his jokes and ridicule after looking back on life, but this time it is very kind. Aunt Bi's handsome male companion abandoned the car and fled after hearing the news on the radio about an alien attack on Earth, leaving Aunt Bi alone on the foggy road at night; Jewish fasting day, Ai Uncle Bi went to the next house and asked the neighbor to turn off the radio so that the family could pray quietly, but he ate clams and chocolate pudding at the neighbor's house. When he returned home, he suddenly felt a pain in his heart when he made a speech that questioned God; Shirley, a smoker girl, witnessed the black hand The party assassination was supposed to be silenced by the killer, but escaped because the killer's mother was Shirley's childhood neighbor; "I" never knew about my father's occupation, but was caught in the process of carrying a repaired radio home. I got into the taxi that my father drove, and my father got the highest tip of his life... These things, which could be told calmly as jokes in the years that passed, are in fact impregnated with a suitable bitterness in the present moment. Why is it appropriate, because it is neither thick nor light, and will not destroy the current loose narrative rhythm, but when I recall it after laughing, it adds a touch of sentimentalism about the impermanence and helplessness of life. Although Woody is often compared to Chaplin, compared to the deep laughter and tears in Chaplin's films, the people Woody mocks and fools are lovely and ordinary. It is the irreconcilable differences between people that make life so clinking and turbulent. We never know what life really looks like, but what Woody tries to tell us in "Radio Age" is that the chaos of life caused by the impermanence of fate will eventually be wiped out by the torrent of the times. When the Pacific War broke out, people were watching the real-time war on the radio, and the after-dinner chatter was short of the Nazis and the Communist Party. It was probably the most concerted period of time in the United States. When the news of a little girl falling into the well came from the radio, the noisy home suddenly fell silent. The father put down the belt that was beating his son and stroked his head. The woman stopped dancing and stopped. All on the little black girl who fell into the well. People will appreciate the years and cast an affectionate glance at it. Whether or not "I" actually saw the German submarine with binoculars on the beach, that magical moment in the process of growing up as a teenager should be remembered in his life. This may prove the irrationality of life, but what Woody is more willing to say may be about a teenager's heroic dream.
Liu Yun Yi San, "The Sound of Time Flowing", this is a better translation of "The Radio Age", when the light passed by, and broadcasting was no longer the most reliant entertainment method and way of life, but the flashy years of the past, They have become the nourishment for Woody's future creation. Childhood experiences have all become treasures worthy of repeated exploration on Woody's creative path.
2017.08.13
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