What has happened and continues to happen in the film is the constant change in the social status of the protagonist's family, in which Apu's family experiences a fall - a continuous decline in social status. All kinds of hardships and bitterness in daily life have become the main line of the story in the film. The film has a dual theme, one is man and nature, and the other is man and society. To be more specific, it is an ancient realist melodrama unfolding in the vast nature, or it can be said that a picture of human social life unfolds in nature through a family. The film quietly shows the beautiful nature, the morning smoke, the calf on the trail, and so on, all of which constitute the rhythm of nature itself. The poor and hard life of people unfolds in it, one is the beauty of nature and the resilience of human life, and the other is a social landscape painting, which makes us aware of the changes that India is going through after the independence and establishment of the country after the war. The "Apu Trilogy" has a consistent ballad-like, long, soothing, and calm narrative rhythm, unfolding a huge social picture in nature, with a seemingly casual scene of India captured in everyday life. The pulse of society and the extremely profound changes that Indian society has undergone. It is not only to understand the historical changes of colonialism, but also to understand the changes and reorganization of the social structure of India, which is tottering under the impact of modernization.
In the dilapidated houses after the war, there are huge holes in the walls, and this hole, which is not a door, constitutes another door for children to enter and exit, and at the same time constitutes a lot of family affection, drama, and childishness. It is such a dilapidated courtyard that constitutes the space structure for the director to schedule a screen tragicomedy scene.
Most of the day scenes in the film were shot in the courtyard. The director uses scene distinctions precisely and accurately, and the events in the foreground, middle ground and even background very accurately constitute the depth of field shots in the so-called documentary aesthetics - that is, in the depth of the same space, different There are different events happening in the space, these different events may not constitute the so-called montage effect inside the lens, they are separated from each other, they exist independently, and they actually happen in the same space at the same time. The different levels in such real space also constitute different levels of social discourse, which is precisely what makes Rey's film very meticulous, accurate and subtle.
When watching this film, we can once again appreciate the almost gorgeous gray color tone in the black and white film era, which is extremely rich in black and white, and can feel a color unfolding in our imagination in the sense of black and white. A colorful world, in which we can learn and appreciate the film's grasp of the narrative rhythm and the unique poetry and charm that a world displayed with film art may have.
The director accurately grasped the rhythm during this continuous falling process. At each turn, the father's work_wage constitutes a temporary pause, and a childhood world that seems to be able to blend in with nature, happy and innocent, unfolds again. But when the next fall happened, people fell a level closer to hell, until they had to say goodbye to heaven forever and be banished from their homeland forever.
In this work, one of Rey's structural uses is the alternating use of music and live sound. In other words, when the music pours in, the live ambient sound disappears, the real sound disappears, and the environment is filled with music. Full. And in the next moment, the voice in the real space emerged again, as if it was intruded by the real world.
Rey's use of sound constitutes a particular aspect of psychological representation in his films. This is the psychological aspect of people who suffer virtually endlessly, but endless suffering in no way means that they are numb, that they are more difficult to perceive emotions than others. Their emotions are a luxury in their lives, but this luxury also emerges uncontrollably at certain moments in their lives.
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