This article is an undergraduate graduation thesis, published in the first issue of "Han Hai Chao" in 2009, with a total of 78 issues. When it was published, it was titled "The Poetry of Leaping, The Philosophy of Poeticization".
Abstract: Macedonian director Mitch Manchevsky's "Heavy Rain is Coming" is a film with a profound "anti-war" theme. Under the aesthetic pursuit of postmodernism, the film uses a large number of metaphors as a means of audio-visual expression, and uses a poetic time-space structure to present a life tragedy in sections. The film presents the war story in a restrained and subtle way, which can arouse the audience's deep emotional resonance.
Key words: "Heavy Rain is Coming" Postmodernist time-space structure
For audiences who are accustomed to telling stories with linear thinking, watching Macedonian director Mitch Manchevsky's "Heavy Rain is Coming" is indeed a challenge to accept , but for audiences who are accustomed to European films' artistic pursuit of personal expression, "Heavy Rain" is a film that is not unfamiliar to them. European films have always focused on film narrative and made breakthroughs in traditional fields. the spirit of the film. As the most important international film festival in Europe, the Venice Film Festival, it attaches great importance to this aspect. "Heavy Rain" presents a simple story in a three-part structural framework. This seemingly disordered and chaotic, obscure and even boring narrative mode is precisely the unique form of speech the author conveys his thoughts, and it is also in line with the artistic tradition of European cinema. The Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the International Film Festival is an honor within reason.
Aesthetic Exploration in the Context of Postmodernism
Luo Yue once borrowed the "dialogue theory" of the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin to illustrate the aesthetic significance of this segmented narrative, which is a particularly constructive article. However, the Bakhtin theory introduced by the author and the arguments he cites in his case analysis seem to be somewhat incompatible. "Both the external structure and the internal structure need the active repair of the audience, so the dialogue becomes an important principle of the film's narrative structure here."[1] It seems to be true. Nevertheless, the author's implantation of "dialogue theory" into the discourse of film criticism is indeed a seminal insight. When we study the mode of segmented narrative, we have to incorporate it into the theoretical construction of postmodernist aesthetics. This is just like "An Andalusian Dog" and "Dr. Caligari" that appeared when the avant-garde was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. They were not created out of thin air, but had a corresponding aesthetic trend. Therefore, the "dialogue theory" with "polyphonic structure" as its main feature is not so appropriate in interpreting the segmental narrative structure. On the contrary, it should be interpreted with the relevant theories of postmodernism.
Peng Jixiang's "Aesthetics of Film and Television" discusses the differences between the two cultural symptoms of postmodernism and modernism, and sums up many characteristics of postmodernism: "Postmodernism embodies the death of the subject in alienation and the indifference to this death. ...making it permeated with a spirit of doubting everything, including doubts about the external world and self-doubt...Postmodernism strives to break the concept of wholeness, using structuralism as the theoretical basis, with fragmentation and marginalization It believes that the world is actually fragmented, and this fragmentation is mostly the edge, but less is the essence; more is accidental, less is inevitable; more is fragmentation, less is The whole. Under the influence of this structuralism, postmodernism strives to dissolve all distinctions and boundaries... The pursuit of confusion and splicing, the pursuit of constructing the world of works based on the principle of 'uncertainty', is manifested as unprincipled and chaotic, A text that advocates collage." [2] And "Heavy Rain is Coming" just reflects the following three aspects of Russian characteristics of postmodernist aesthetics.
1. The time-space structure of collage
The film adopts a three-stage narrative structure in the plot arrangement, and the time and space are broken here, showing a state of collage. We arrange the films in normal chronological order: Alexander Kokov, a news photographer who hated the war, returned to his hometown of Macedonia and hoped to live a peaceful life, but the ethnic hatred that pervaded him was not what he wanted (the second paragraph of the film); Kirkoff was shot by his own people in order to help Samira, the daughter of his former lover Hannah's daughter, escape (in fact, Samira was raped) (the third paragraph of the film); Samira hid in the young priest Kirill In the room, the two fell in love. On their way to escape the pursuit, Samira's brother shoots the young Samira (the first paragraph of the film). In this way, the theme of racial conflict is placed in front of the audience without thinking, and the audience once again plays the role of pure "spectator". The creators don't want to tell an easy-to-understand story "naturally", leaving the audience only as passive "spectators". The good news is that the storyline of the film does not follow the logical linearity of time sequence, and in the first paragraph at the beginning of the film, at the end of the whole story, the second paragraph is the beginning of the story. The space-time structure is dislocated, and the most direct impression to the audience is the sense of collage of the storyline. However, this collage is not random stacking. On the contrary, in the mutual maintenance of the relationship between the characters, the three paragraphs form a unified whole.
2. Relatively independent storylines The
director used three words in the layout of the film: "language", "faces" and "photographs", each of which forms a separate paragraph. The film takes the coming torrential rain at the end of each segment as an opportunity to organically combine the three segments to form a formal circle. However, the three paragraphs are not joined end to end in the traditional sense. In fact, each paragraph is independent of each other. The first paragraph tells about a tragedy of love caused by racial conflict. Samira died under the gun of her younger brother, the rainstorm came, and the inexplicable woman who appeared at Kirkoff's funeral became the protagonist of the second paragraph. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Kirkoff returned to his hometown of Macedonia because of his anti-war stance. The husband of his lover, Anne, was tragically killed by a mob. In the third fall, Kirkoff became the protagonist. He longed to live a peaceful life, but the whole village was filled with the smoke of ethnic conflict. In the end, he fell under the guns of his tribe in order to save Samira, the daughter of his former lover, Hannah. When the rain came, Samira escaped from the chase.
The independence of the three stories lies in their own logical sequence of beginning, development, climax and end. Different from the story paragraphs of classic films based on linear thinking, the three paragraphs after the split are developed relatively independently, and do not follow the temporal and spatial unity of the entire story and the logical linearity of the plot development.
3. The fragmented narrative
is particularly puzzling. There are some almost "inexplicable" bridges in the film. For example, in the first paragraph, Kirill wondered whether the photographer's uncle who took refuge in London was Alexander Kirkoff, because Kirkoff When he left London, he said that he would come back to honor his nephew, but he did not go to Kirill when he came back; who took the picture of Samira's death in the second paragraph, because there was no camera present when she died, and according to Normal logic presumes that Samira is still alive, and that Samira was photographed at the moment of her death; in the third paragraph Alexander Kirkoff tells the soldier that Anne is dead, when in fact in the first paragraph his Anne is one of those present at the funeral; what is the connection between the rock 'n' roll on the ignorant radio in the first paragraph and the strange woman walking through the cemetery in the second paragraph; Kirill in the first paragraph The section where the hallucination occurs is exactly the same as the section where Kirkoff has the hallucination in the third paragraph. The shooting technique is exactly the same. The method of panning is used, and the fixed scene and scene are used twice in the same section. , the audience does not know what the director wants to express. This series of vague "fragmented" narratives, which seem to be chaotic in the time chain, can better convey the complexity of contemporary people's living experience, and more importantly, it is a subjective "fabrication", which means that the film The temporal chaos of "fabrication" has not only come from the director's formal exploration, it has also allowed the structure to enter the ideographic level.
Jameson believes that postmodern time is characterized by a sense of space and time like "schizophrenia", or what Lacan calls "the breaking of the symbolic chain". That is to say, in modern and pre-modern concepts, history is a continuous and solid linear chain from front to back, while in post-modern concepts, history is jumping, intermittent, and non-linear, and the historical chain often appears "cracks" ” and the phenomenon of fracture. History is primarily a subjective construct, a fragmented fragment that can be spliced at will. “The disappearance of historical consciousness creates a sense of rupture, which makes postmodern people say goodbye to tradition, history, and continuity, and rise to the surface to feel the sense of rupture in the non-historical experience of the present time. … The disappearance of the sense of history means the future Modernism has a discontinuous view of time." [3]. The film uses the ethnic conflict between Macedonia and Albania as the story content, and then involves the turmoil of the world at that time, thus reflecting the creator's anti-war ideology. Although it is so obscure, the film does not directly use the protagonist's language to accuse, so that the audience can feel the irrationality of war and the distortion and deformation of human nature in the context of this kind of tragedy of relatives killing each other, this invisible violence. is uniquely powerful.
Poetic time-space structure and anxiety of belief
The leap of poetic language creates an imaginary space for poetic presentation. This kind of jumping is often associated with a sense of rupture, which can create a painful poetry. For example, Haizi's poem "Asian Bronze" begins with: "Asian Bronze, Asia Bronze / Grandfather died here, father died here, I will also die here / You are the only place to bury people". [4] Asia and copper are combined into one phrase, and they are chanted again and again, but grandfather, father, and I died in the only place where people are buried. This cruel combination of allegorical images reveals a strong "fatalism" The color of compassion is painful. The opening line of "The Rainstorm is Coming" also has the same allegory: "With screeching / Birds flying across the dark sky / People are silent / My blood has been aching from waiting", the jumping thinking and the sense of rupture here it goes without saying. Poetry and film have the same jumping properties. Relying on artificial "editing" and "montage" characteristics, the pictures of the film are connected in rhythm and order, like a set of rich poetic images, which constitute the whole film. In a unique way, the different elements are perfectly combined to produce a good poem, but also an unexpected image. Imitation and constant repetition can only lead to the drying up of poetry and imagination. Director Mitch Manchevsky is a poet who ironically and bluntly brings together three stories in a fractured, unconventional narrative, then reconstructs them with the imagery of a "heavy rain" at the end of each paragraph. , so that the original "defamiliarization" effect produced a painful psychological resonance. "Heavy Rain is Coming" is one such poem, in the same style as the painful opening poem. Therefore, the abrupt combination of "language", "photos" and "faces" in the three paragraphs of the film seems logical. The verse at the beginning of the film echoes the space-time structure of the film, forming a poetic space-time structure. If arranged in the normal order: photo-language-face, then the opening verse can only be a "poetic" decoration.
This "sense of rupture" is an important feature of postmodernist aesthetics. Through this "sense of rupture", the director not only allows the story to achieve a reincarnation in form, but more importantly, he also conveys a "broken" hope. After Samira's death in the first paragraph, it should be the normal and logical end of the whole story, but in fact this is just the beginning of the film. When Samira died, Kirill should have two choices: one, to deal with the revenge of his own loved ones. When this kind of revenge will bring another round of vendetta, its cruelty is self-evident; second, Kirill quietly watched the kind girl die at his feet, and the film ended. The director put this sense of desolation at the end of the first part, giving the audience the last hope in the psychological expectation, because the film has just begun. On the contrary, at the end of the whole film, the photographer Kirkoff is shot by his own people, while Samira escapes from the enemy's pursuit when the rain comes. This kind of complex arrangement leaves enough room for the audience to imagine. A man with a sense of justice in his heart died, but a weak woman who was powerless to resist escaped and ran to the church. This again implies that the end of the film gives the audience a hope in their hearts. The image of the church is also quite decent, not only can protect the body, but also purify the soul.
In the second paragraph of the film, when Anne passed through the streets of London, the chorus of children's voices came from the church, which caught Anne's attention. She stopped to watch, and her heart was full of contradictions and anxiety again. These children sang to praise the beautiful life, but the war caused other children to lose their homes, and even cry in horror and fall in a pool of blood. When Anne saw pictures of war-victimized children in the picture room, her mind was filled with the cries of children. The cries of these children still haunt her mind as she walks the streets of London. The film has done the following treatment here: the cluttered streets of London presented in close-up shots, and the cries of children form a set of sound and picture oppositions. This huge gap presents the audience with a sense of distance between war and peaceful life: on one side is the crazy war of cruelty and tyranny, on the other side is the charming and lazy face of the modern city, intellectuals with conscience in the modern city, such as Annie and photographer Kirkoff, but because of those tragic fates, voluntarily bear a heavy and unpleasant, adding a bit of warmth and warmth to the film.
In the first paragraph of the film, there is a strong religious atmosphere. Such a sacred and peaceful church was broken by the sound of explosions generated by children playing turtle fighting (a metaphor for conflict), and then a group of men with guns broke in, fierce and vicious, and searched at will. , behave violently. One of them shot and killed the cat on the roof. This crazy act of total dehumanization subverted the "divine" here and also heralded the stage of tragedy.
Contemporary people's inner emptiness and depression in their living conditions, religious belief has become an important way of sustenance. Years of war have dismembered the original respect of life in a complicated and confusing way. People rely on the only and weak belief to maintain their lives and seek a kind of spiritual liberation. However, people's beliefs here are insignificant, showing a state of anxiety. Religion is only a tool for sustenance of good wishes and has no practical significance. The film conveys a color of compassion.
Metaphor as a means of expression
Metaphor exists not only as a way of description, but also as a ubiquitous habit of thinking. As Lakoff argues: "Metaphors are pervasive in our daily lives, not only in our language but in our thoughts and actions. The conceptual systems on which we think and act are fundamentally It is metaphorical.” [5] That is to say, metaphor is not a purely linguistic phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon, it has risen from a linguistic phenomenon to a spiritual behavior, or even a cultural behavior, which is based on human experience and subjective cognition. active.
As an important figure of speech in film, metaphor has the function of sublimating the theme on the one hand, such as the last picture of the Korean director Kim Ki-deok's "Time": in a large panorama, all the heads are surging, the protagonist is buried in it, and people's perception of time is lost. On the other hand, the incomprehension of the film, from individual pictures to the whole film, is often caused by metaphors. However, metaphors at this time, as a means of expression, are precisely the characteristics of postmodern aesthetics. an embodiment. The film "The Sun Also Rises" directed by Jiang Wen in 2007 revealed through a large number of metaphorical images that in the era that has become history, the collective unconsciousness of human beings as individuals, after abstracting the originally clear and sensitive history, became confusing. It is precisely this "ambiguous" picture and the "putting the cart before the horse" structure that reveals that in the years of the Cultural Revolution, individuals were as insignificant as a grain of sand in the huge power of historical discourse.
In the first paragraph, "Language," religious complexes are given a strong and special color. The director used a large number of still images to repeatedly present churches, murals (such as the Virgin, Jesus, pagans who had their eyes gouged out during the "fifth century" massacre in religious history, etc.), crosses, guns in the hands of thugs, and priests. facial expressions, and the deep, heavy scriptures used by priests in their prayers. The director arranged such a scene as the first paragraph of the film for no purpose. We know that wars and ethnic conflicts have occurred frequently in Albania, and even caused turmoil in all European forces. However, as people who live in this land of right and wrong, they regard war as life, and at the same time worry about their own fate, maybe the one who falls in a pool of blood one day is themselves. They have a strong religious complex, and they pin their personal safety on religion, praying to the "Almighty Lord" to grant them a peaceful and peaceful life, but the reality is not what they imagined.
When the old priest and the young priest Kirill passed by a group of children who were doing "fighting turtles", the old priest said: "Time does not pass, and the circle is not a circle." When he was secretly hurt, he caught a glimpse of the wall not far away and wrote such a sentence. This is actually a "prophecy" about cherishing: cherish beautiful language, cherish beautiful love, and cherish the life bestowed by God. However, the reality is not so perfect, the continuous wars, the impending ethnic conflict, the perfection of reality is almost a paradox in the film.
When the old priest and the young priest Kirill walked to the church, the old priest said: "I would like to be like you and swear to be silent." "But this sacred beauty needs words to praise." The film does not explain why Kirill promised to be silent. I vowed to be silent and gave up this language of praise. This passage is titled "Language," and the protagonist swears silence. But his silence was broken when she fell in love with the Albanian girl, even though they didn't understand each other. As the Albanian girl lay quietly on the floor of her living room, the following lines appeared in his dream: "Though I drive through the valley of the shadow of death / I am not afraid of evil / Because you are with me." He woke up When he came, his hallucination found that the girl was standing by the window, just staring at him, the rustling of rain outside the window. The moment the girl died, Kirill said, "Please forgive me, I love you." The girl made a "please keep silent" movement with her index finger, and Kirill watched her die quietly. The creator gave "language" two forms before and after the "generation of love", one is silence, and the other is to let silence speak. In the process of these two comparisons, the religious complex expressed in a large number of pictures in this paragraph is more intense, and the Macedonian brothers with guns will not let go of a cat and the violence of Samira's death under the gun of his own brother , expresses it vividly, but religion and violence are a paradox of binary opposition. Interestingly, the three paragraphs were named "language", "faces" and "photos", but Kirill swore silence. The "faces" in the second paragraph are the faces of children who were terrified and killed in the war, and later The bloody face of Nick's death under the guns of the thugs, the "photos" in the third paragraph are several pictures of the murders that Kirkoff took in a row. This kind of complex arrangement breaks the audience's beautiful imagination of "language", "face" and "photograph", while the reality is the naked presentation of violence. As the fate of the characters draws to a close, a torrential rain comes. "Rainstorm" has become the direct executor of the sin of baptism of human nature, and at the same time, it has also become a symbol of violence to a certain extent.
The composition and lighting of the film also take into account the existence of this metaphor. The quiet blue tone of the night in Kirill's room in the first part, the figures are shrunk to what appear to be two moving points as Kirill and the old priest pass a height, the same quiet cross under the quiet night sky, presented in the third paragraph The hillside in front of the sheepfold often shows the insignificance of the characters and the desolation of the perspective in the form of silhouettes. The scene where Kirkoff witnesses a doctor delivering a lamb in a dimly lit room is a brutal act of violence. Under the arrangement of the director, the bloody scene was presented in a long shot, and it was so naked that it was unbearable to watch. When the audience experienced the birth of a little lamb, they could not help but have such an emotional displacement: the little lamb came to the world through a bloody scene, Several children and refugees died on the bloody battlefield!
The film goes to great lengths to present these aphasiatic, suggestive and allegorical events, and through the powerful function of metaphor, inspires the audience to reflect on the war. The director's use of metaphor as an audio-visual means is not to divert the audience's sense of identity and make the film obscure and incomprehensible, but to generate a more intuitive or allegorical resonance in our minds through a metaphorical lens.
Audience present
Another important feature of the segmented narrative structure is that the creator pays enough attention to the audience to allow the audience to participate in the narrative of the film, which I call "audience present".
In recent years, films with segmented narratives similar to "Heavy Rain" have emerged in the international film circle, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (United States, 1994), Zhang Yang's "Spicy Love". (China, 1997), "Lola Run" by Tom Tykwer (Germany, 1998), "Love is a Bitch" by Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu (Mexico, 2001) , "21 Grams" (Mexico, 2003), "Tower of Babel" (USA, 2006), Jiang Wen's "The Sun Also Rises" (China, 2007), etc. Although these films vary widely in content, they have a common feature in terms of structure, that is, they are all composed of three or more relatively independent stories, and they use a lot of metaphors, hints, interruptions, and supplements in the narrative process. Narrative techniques such as narration, intersection, and alienation make the film present a strong sense of collage.
The traditional film narrative mode only pays attention to a complete story of the protagonist in the play, that is, the beginning, development, climax, and ending. It doesn’t matter if there is an audience, because this process—the process of telling the story of the “protagonist”, must be completed. That is, the story is the story of the "characters" in the story, not the story of the audience. The creators take into account how to make each "character" smooth when creating, and the audience has only the right to appreciate it. "What the film presents to the audience is the image of the characters, the plot events, and the flesh and blood of the text."[ 8] This also contributes to the inertia of the audience to a certain extent. When it comes to the segmented narrative, the creators fully consider the existence of the audience. While telling stories with "characters", they also need the audience's life experience to be integrated into the story. That is, audience engagement forms part of the story. From simply writing a complete story for the protagonist to writing a story for both the protagonist and the audience, this cannot but say that contemporary cinema is a breakthrough in narratology.
Let's compare it to the classic narrative mode of classic Hollywood movies.
"Titanic" has become a classic in the history of world film with its ups and downs story and perfect dramatic rhythm, among which the old Ruth's reminiscence statements play a role in controlling the film's rhythm throughout the film. This kind of voiceover, which tells the audience a romantic and crazy love, seems to be caring for the audience, but it is actually a puzzle set up for the perfection of the story itself. Another example is "Forrest Gump". Forrest Gump's fighting spirit and legendary life is also presented through the middle-aged Gump's voice-over, aiming to complete the presentation of Forrest Gump's half-life deeds. As for "The Sun Also Rises", one must have the audience's life experience or education accumulation in order to fully understand the absurd behavior of mad mothers and children born on train tracks under the discourse system of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, the sense of absurdity conveyed by the film is what the director really wants to say. Samira escaped at the end of "Heavy Rain", which not only gave hope to the protagonist of the film, but also gave the audience a sense of anticipation for the viewing experience - a kind of hope. In other words, the audience has won a hope in the advancement of the story.
If the traditional narrative mode treats the audience only as a "watchman", and the story is always complete in presence or absence, then this segmented narrative mode, which challenges the audience's thinking tradition, treats the audience as the narrative subject, and the audience is only present, can show the integrity of the story; if the traditional narrative is "acting" the storyline, then the segmented narrative is "presenting" the fragments of the story, and how to connect these fragments is the result of audience participation; if the traditional narrative is "presenting" the fragments of the story Narrative keeps the story intact by abandoning the audience, while segmented narrative abandons the audience in order to keep the story intact. In fact, this is the case. The traditional narrative has cultivated a large number of teapots waiting for water-the audience, but this segmental narrative method that seeks breakthroughs in art has been ignored. The influence of "Titanic" is more than that of "Titanic" anyway. The Rainstorm is Coming", but this is a paradox caused by the cancellation of all sublime under post-modern consumerism.
More and more films go against the conventions of the classic model, and make great efforts in the form when telling the story, and the audience is an indispensable part of the narrative, which has become a major feature of contemporary films that deliberately break the tradition. The stylization of storytelling techniques that have long been the subject of imitation in Hollywood films seems less gratifying. Just like "Forrest Gump" and "Titanic", telling an inspirational or poignant story with flashbacks, interludes, poetic and infectious voice-overs has become a common mode for films in various countries. The essence of art is innovation. The first time you hold a film director, you can find a new way to present an "anti-war" theme that has been spoken in different ways for a long time in a painful way. This is director Mitch Manchewski's work. Old-fashioned place.
Notes:
[1] Luo Yue. The Dialogue of Film Narrative Structure [J]. Contemporary Films. 2005(2)
[2] Peng Jixiang. Film and Television Aesthetics [M]. Beijing. Peking University Press. 2002.152-154
[3] Wang Yue Chuan, Shang Shui. Postmodern Aesthetics [M]. Beijing. Peking University Press. 1992.27-28
[4] Haizi. Haizi's Poems [M]. Beijing. People's Literature Publishing House.
[5] Quoted from Gu Wenping. Culture in the Metaphorical Perspective [J]. Huaiyin Engineering Journal. 2002(5)
[6] Li Xianjie. Film Narratology: Theory and Examples [M]. Beijing. China Film Press. 2000.326
Spring 2009
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