Had Bazin been alive, he might have helped us better understand what Ang Lee is doing right now, offering insights into his talent, skill, and gloomy attitude toward audiences.
Anyone debating 120 frames can go back and re-read Bazin's 1946 essay in Review/Critique magazine—the myth of the "complete film". In this only a few pages, Bazin does point out the causal relationship between the inversion of ideas and technology, and clarifies the direction of a cinematic myth—that is, the mechanical reproduction of reality in the 19th century, from photography to the phonograph. myth.
Looking at today's 120-frame film reality from this standpoint, what we need to witness is obviously no longer a flat illusion of light and shadow, but a window opening to reality. Neither scientific discovery nor industrial technology plays a key role. What really matters is that, long before the appearance of 120-frame films, or even before the appearance of 24-frame films, the transcendental film concepts that existed in human imagination, and the hidden The desire to fully replicate reality in the human mind.
Many people are surprised by the roughness and shallowness of the script of "Gemini Man". However, for the window-opening experiment that is not intended to be here, action movies that can attract the attention of the audience have become a very natural selection. People who always feel that Ang Lee is good at delicate psychological dramas, but ignores the meaning of action movies that emphasize action and light stories. Just as perspective is the original sin of painting, storytelling seems to be the original sin of cinema. Audiences, accustomed to being raised by melodrama, are at a loss once they lose the assertion of the plot, ignoring that the plot plays a merely symbolic role here. And accusing Ang Lee of not making good use of his strengths is as absurd as accusing Picasso after 1907 of not "using his strengths" to return to the blue period. It's easy to criticize a character, but we're not so much reading a story as a screen image, and those who don't understand it might as well pay attention to the bacon triptych hanging behind Owen's pale, shady father.
Ang Lee has the freedom to choose the medium, and also has the self-consciousness to complete the film myth. In this sense, no one has to worry about his box office failure, let alone consider the 65-year-old director's end. After all, when Woody Allen, 84, was still writing, Clint Eastwood, 89, was behind the camera. There is no reason to judge the success or failure of a creative director by the quality of a work.
To be sure, we can clearly see the film's boredom with "storytelling", a perfunctory approach to tight-lipped screenwriting strategies. And what the creator wants to explore and what the propagandist wants to pack can also be something irrelevant. For now, it's more like a stopover on the path to a fully replicated reality.
So there seem to be only two remaining questions: 1. To whom is the power of viewing transferred from mechanical choice? In fact, from the very beginning, cinema has technically removed our natural viewing and replaced it with the camera's choice of depth of field, viewpoint, scene, and motion. But now, when we can see everything clearly with high definition and a democratic attitude of infinity, the black spreading window frame has become the only existence that hints at its supreme power. In this case, the pros and cons, which symbolize the traditional grammar, and the bland and boring lens assembly appear extremely trite and unnecessary. The era is limited by its own imagination, and the type of story that really suits technology is far from appearing. 2. What if the created reality is more realistic than the reality? How is this possible? However, this is possible after all, and perhaps we are not too far away from being immersed in another world not far from the real world.
that's all.
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