Aristotle said in Poetics that metaphor is to give a thing a name that belongs to other things. For Aristotle, metaphor is a figure of speech with multiple properties. With the establishment of metaphor-related theoretical systems, the concept and category of metaphor gradually become clear. Today, when we talk about metaphors, we are talking about meanings or connotations that come about by suggesting things to each other.
In film, metaphor is a common technique, because film is a kind of visual art, and visual imagery is an important element that constitutes the language of film. From this, the relationship between visual imagery and metaphor is obvious. In the works of Spanish director Victor Ailes, metaphors are brought to the extreme. The work "The Hive Ghost" filmed in 1973 can be said to be the culmination of metaphorical art.
In Ghost of the Beehive, metaphor is no longer a matter of linguistics or rhetoric, but also involves philosophy and other fields. Through the metaphorical symbols deliberately set by director Victor Ellis, we can analyze the film's sociology, The meaning and value of ethics, aesthetics, etc. We have to admit that movies can be loaded with powerful metaphorical meanings. Regarding this point, Italian film director Pasolini said: Movies survive by metaphors.
It is not easy to construct a film with metaphors. The director must first be familiar with the meanings that each symbol can express, and then arrange and combine them in an appropriate way. In order to make it easier for the audience to enter the metaphorical time constructed by the director, Victor Ailes abandoned the complicated narrative method, focused the story on a Spanish family, and completed his artistic expression through the growth of children.
[What we recognize as nature, intelligence, human motivation or thought is not what they are, but how they are expressed in language. Our language is our medium, our medium is our metaphor, and our metaphor creates the content of our culture. 】
When talking about "The Hive Ghost", we must talk about the dark history of Spain since modern times. From 1939, Spain entered the period of Franco's dictatorship, and for more than 40 years after that, Franco The regime brought great disaster to Spain. The implementation of the fascist state system has cast a gray mask on this country, which is known for its enthusiasm and splendor. Persecution, death, imprisonment, all the while looking down on those who live carefully.
Coincidentally, Ghost of the Beehive was filmed in 1973, when the Franco regime had entered twilight, while the time in the film was the 1940s, when the Franco regime had just begun. In Victor Ellis, time itself is a part of the metaphor, because his life began in the summer of 1940, so this film with an autobiographical nature is also the director Victor Ellis's own childhood. backtracking.
Unlike the autobiographical films that follow traditional narrative rules, Ghost of the Beehive cannot capture any complete story, and there are only metaphors as far as the eye can see. The growth of two girls, a cold mother, a father with an extraordinary love for bees, the movie Frankenstein, an abandoned hut, a wounded soldier with pollution... these seem unrelated Things make up the film, and all the metaphors in the film.
The film starts off with a bleak vibe that fits right in with life in Franco's time, and the village where the story takes place is shrouded in solitude. Barren and dilapidated houses, empty and desolate fields, and lifeless life. All of these constitute the atmosphere and tone of the film, and are also the background color of the life of director Victor Ellis.
The protagonists in the film are two girls, Anna and Isabel, two girls who grew up in Franco's regime. In a high-pressure environment, the two girls are very different. Sister Isabel is a victim of the dictatorship. She likes to kill and stimulate , numb and lack of vitality, sister Anna, on the contrary, has always maintained innocence and kindness, and has a strong curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the outside world. The two characters represent exactly two types of people under a dictatorship.
In a turbulent social environment, the family is naturally uneasy. The father of the film is obsessed with the study of bees and hives all day long, in fact, this is alluding to the closure, chaos and disorder of the whole family environment. The whole house is like a hive, and the people living in it are bees. Through the mumbling of the father in the film, we can understand the state of the whole family.
"The Mystery and Madness of Drones", "The Aggressiveness of the Queen Bee", "The Variety and Never-ending Activity of the Hive". Peaceful on the outside but frenzied on the inside is the family's unease. The mother misses the distant lover in the dull married life, and the father dedicates himself to the study of bees to comfort his loneliness. The director expresses the relationship between parents very implicitly, and the indifference and alienation of this small family is exactly the same as that of the larger environment.
Ghost of the Beehive is an understated and unpredictable film, but the waves in this still water are extremely turbulent. Fortunately, the director did not run through despair and depression to the end, but used metaphors. This ambiguous and magical way provides us with more angles to interpret the film. How to understand metaphors depends on how to understand this film. In Ghost of the Beehive, we seem to have entered a labyrinth of metaphors, and we are deeply immersed in it, entering the director's past life in the light and shadow of light and shadow.
[I. Pillot said: "Art does not necessarily require bizarre and twisted plots, nor does it necessarily have to create extraordinary 'heroes'. In fact, the real and unique realm of film is ordinary things, and film teaches us to savor the everyday The charm of ordinary things.]
Movies are an asymptote to reality, but movies are not the same as movies. Poetry is hidden in life, and the generation of poetry requires precise coding by the director. In 1925, the French avant-garde theorist A. Berkeley put forward the concept of "movie should become poetry". At the same time, Soviet film artists began to make poetic investigations and attempts in film art, such as Eisenstein and Du Frenko, who used a lot of metaphors, symbols and other techniques in their works, trying to make the film appear in a dream. screen.
From the establishment of the original theory to the current mature system, poetry film has long become a wonderful work of film art, it breaks the boundaries of film narrative and broadens the audience's aesthetic experience. In Ghost of the Hive, we have a very intuitive feeling, the beauty that flows slowly. Although the film is full of uneasy and depressing atmosphere, when the empty scene flashes, the stillness from nature can still be shocking.
I admit, the viewing process of Ghost of the Beehive was not smooth, even a little dull. There are no conflicting plots or eye-catching lines, and the movie is silent and fluid most of the time. For this film, "watching" is not an appropriate description, and listening seems more appropriate. We are listening, and the director is listening.
Since poetry movies are so dull, why can "Hive Ghost" become a classic? Knowing this question, we seem to be able to understand the slightly ambiguous and awkward situation of poetry films.
Different from genre films that focus on rhythm and narrative, poetry films have their own style in both narrative techniques and audiovisual language. Poetry film is a type of film that selects the audience very much. It needs the audience to be immersed in it. If the pursuit of brevity and visual stimulation, poetry film is by no means the best choice.
Poetry films can achieve unity in form and content.
Ghost of the Beehive is a typical poetic film, and the director chose the method of "metaphor" when constructing his own poetic art world. Metaphors are different from stories. Metaphors are in the dark, and stories are in the light. Victor Ellis seems to want to express the surging of the dark through the stories in the light. After many years, when I opened "Hive Ghost" again, Victor Ellis was undoubtedly a success.
The point of storytelling is sometimes not the story itself, but how to "tell" it. Audiences who are familiar with Victor Ellis must know his artistic style, mysterious light and shadow, silent character close-up, poetic composition, carefully placed alienation... These are his commonly used magic . With the use of a lot of metaphorical montage, Victor Ellis makes poetic film form and content to some extent merge into one.
The reason why poetry movies are difficult to make is because of the changeable emotions. Poetry movies themselves are a kind of movies that contain a lot of emotions. If the emotions themselves are dazed, poetry movies will also be in a dilemma in terms of narrative. In Ghost of the Beehive, this kind of worry seems superfluous, because in the director's shot, we can capture the normal trajectory of the two girls, the divergent parts of their characters, their views on death, and The image of "Frankenstein" that often appears gives the film a touch of ups and downs.
Poetry movies can bring a different kind of emotional experience to the audience.
Jauss, the representative of German acceptance aesthetics, once put forward the concept of "aesthetic expectation". He believes that in specific art appreciation activities, people will have three different levels of expectation: stylistic expectation, image expectation and implication expectation. Therefore, when we enjoy a movie, we often want to obtain visual stimulation or aesthetic experience from it.
Ghost of the Beehive is not a commercial film, it has no dazzling special effects, and no storyline that is ups and downs, so why is this film a classic? Obviously, it brings a special aesthetic experience to the audience. In a sense, Ghost of the Beehive does not belong to Victor Ailes' personal work, it belongs to the entire history of Spain. Through this work, we can understand the seriousness and absurdity of history, and understand the repression of human nature. Distortion and deformation afterwards. At the same time, the film does not follow the traditional narrative method, but completes the artistic expression of the film with a large number of metaphors.
Perhaps the "ghost" that has never appeared in the movie is the reason for the existence of this special emotion. It has never appeared, but it has always existed. This feeling is something we don't have when we appreciate other commercial movies. In other words, director Victor Ellis knows the particularity of this expression and the effects it can produce. Therefore, he is obsessed with his own choice to make his work unique.
Poetry films can reveal the unique cultural temperament of a nation.
Every poem film has countless angles that can be interpreted, and this interpretation stems from the particularity of the poem film itself. This particularity endows the poetic film with its spiritual qualities and makes the film full of affection. Poetry films often contain the creator's aesthetic and artistic concepts, and the creators will be affected by the environment and growth trajectory. Therefore, when a poem film comes out, it is difficult to break away from the national cultural temperament.
A typical feature of "The Hive Ghost" is that the overall atmosphere is exactly the same as that of the Franco regime. Victor Iris, who has experienced those dark years, must have been deeply touched, so he can grasp the film atmosphere just right. When dealing with the serious proposition of death, the director cuts in from the perspective of a child, weakening the heaviness and complexity of death itself. This notion of death is not random, but stems from the open-mindedness of the European continent itself.
The birth of each film has a big soil - national culture. In the history of Spanish cinema, there are not many movies constructed by metaphors. Many of them are handed down. When it comes to Victor Ellis, history has become a hidden past, but his films cannot be separated from history and times after all, because he came from that history and can only go back to that history. , his films are meaningful.
After watching the film, many left-wing critics said that the film's political metaphors were too obscure and lacked criticality directly related to reality. Regardless of whether this evaluation is pertinent or not, it is certain that Victor Ellis does not focus on "political metaphors", but "metaphors". The director's focus is on family tragedies rather than high-rise historical conflicts. He chose to use a more moving way to interpret the historical trauma suffered by the entire Spain in the twentieth century.
And Spain, which has experienced that period of history, just needs such a show, because it takes time to recover from the trauma.
Poetry films often begin with metaphors, but metaphors are not the end, but the beginning. The film ends with the disappearance and return of the girl Anna, who brings hope to the stagnant family. When she disappeared, the family broke down the barriers built between each other in search of her. The mother took off the glasses for the father who was sleeping on the desk, and burned the letter to his lover. The father was sweet in the gradually restored family warmth. Sweet sleep. This warm return allows us to get to the emotions hidden in the obscurity. Filmed in 1973, director Victor Ellis seems to see a hint of hope for democracy in the aging dictator, which is not a metaphor.
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