The article deals with the history of video development, in order to prove Yasujiro Ozu's concept of "return to original film" or "anti-film".
It's a well-planned "step back." In the last chapter of "Republic", Plato borrowed Socrates' mouth to put forward the concept of "imitation theory". The "metaphor of the three beds" was added, and it was believed that the first bed in the world was created by God, and the craftsman only made the bed, while poets and painters only imitated the creation of God and the making of craftsmen. Plato came up with the three concepts of creator, maker and imitator. Generally denying the value of art, arguing that the "philosophical country" dominated by rational dialectics does not need negative art. With the rise of film art, we will find that, like painting, film has actually embarked on a process of getting rid of "Plato's prejudice". For now, it is better to understand that the dream-making system caused by "transcendence" entering the image has actually gotten rid of "Plato's prejudice" visually, such as "science fiction movies". The first film in the world was The Arrival of the Train by the Lumiere Brothers (1895), in purely documentary form, the film started from a complete imitation of reality, and the camera was fixed even until 1909.
Including Mériere, the first real film master in film history, although it was the first time to introduce the concept of "scene scheduling" in the film, his camera was still fixed, still in the "dramatic category", maintaining an unchanging perspective— -The perspective of the stage space, what changes is the stage background. Merieux The method of "camera scene = stage space" does not lead the audience into the image space, which is not a way of expression in the film. Generally speaking, it is the "destroy of confined spaces" that represent the established hallmark of cinematic expression—the camera moving closer or farther away from the subject. "Theatrical mise-en-scene" and "cinematic mise-en-scene" are opposites. Mérieux's scene changes rely on "cuts" instead of "fade in and out". Fade in and fade out actually imitates the opening and closing of theatrical stage curtain. The opening and closing of the stage curtain is a kind of plot and scene transition, giving the space and time a sense of continuity. Mérieux's use of "cuts" in this "dramatic space" resulted in a sense of jumping with too large a gap between unit shots. It was not until Edwin Potter's "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903 that the real "movie scene dispatch" was opened. Watching "Tokyo Story", we found that the tatami space that Ozu shot is actually like a square stage. Interestingly, Ozu's low-position fixed lens also represents a kind of "audience perspective of theatrical space", and he also retains the central axis perspective. , take a front or side angle, and even after the lens enters the space, it still retains the parallel axis perspective, just like the theater audience uses a telescope to look at the stage characters, which is very similar to the stage space perspective. There's also less and less camera movement: moving shots are slow and low-angle "units of motion". Fade is replaced by a simple "cut". But unlike Mérieux, the jumps between shots in Ozu's films, combined with the lack of "movement-image", create an image rhythm that is almost like a gurgling water. At the same time, "Tokyo Story" shows us a steady rhythm that is close to real life. It looks like a realistic imitation of reality, it doesn't try to create gorgeous scenes higher than life. But he is not an imitation of the original. By omitting the plot and applying montage, Ozu creates a larger time and space. Even a single "movement unit" is given time and space extension. With his "silence", Ozu allows the shot or dialogue to extend in a longer silence and blank. He breaks up the space from around the frame through relatively fixed camera positions that resemble theatrical perspective. From these perspectives, Ozu is obviously a return to the "original film", which is equivalent to an "anti-film" countercurrent. But it seems to be retroactive, but in fact, they have created their own image systems on the original basis. The development of film in the 1910s and 1920s resulted in regional differences. In Europe, represented by Germany and France, the image style is dominated by paintings, and the ideographic nature of the genre expressionism is more symbolic than reasoning. Here, "subjectivity" is introduced into the picture through the painting works, which is the same as painting. , the movie screen also has its own "subjective personality", which derealizes the appearance of the real world and creates a dreamlike world. To borrow the words of "the Hegel of film" Jean Mitri, "art consists in transforming the objective world, not in describing it." It perfectly responds to Plato's doubts about art at the beginning of the article. Then music followed painting and became a new legal reference for film, which led to the concept of "visual music", which is not shown here. However, in Europe, audiences before the popularization of movies have the habit of watching dramas, and the demands of audiences restrict the thinking of image creators in reverse, allowing the development of movies to revolve in the "dramatic space", and even retain the theatrical curtain style of fading in and out. Scene switching. In comparison, the United States, which is relatively lacking in drama, has developed image aesthetics. The United States is represented by David Griffith (The Birth of a Nation, 1914). He discovers the montage relationship between shots in an aesthetic sense. Griffith takes shots and combinations of shots beyond what they can achieve alone. Due to his creation, montage has made the film unprecedented: 1. Spatial form: put the "audience" into the story space; compared with "Tokyo Story", it can be seen that Ozu's spatial form still follows this concept, and will The camera moves horizontally into the space, leading the audience into the "unit space". 2. Rhythm form: make it possible to omit and reduce; "Action-image" is omitted in "Tokyo Story", and the possibility of this omission also begins with Griffith. 3. Form of reasoning: The relationship between shots is established, implying a certain meaning. "Connotation" and "Extended meaning"; Compared with "Tokyo Story", Ozu did not adopt the third "inference form" created by Griffith. In fact, the final ontology constructed by the film is a time logic line, and there is no reasoning Form, in this sense, Ozu returns to "Merieux-style logical montage". At the same time, the Soviets also discovered montage from Griffith's films, experimenting with "relevance" based on dialectics and Marxist philosophy, such as the famous "Kurishov effect". Eisenstein redefines "montage", thinking that montage is a kind of conflict, and the conflict creates new ideas. Montage is considered "arbitrary relationships between shots that degrade reality". Just like Bella Baraz's point of view, the "productivity" of montage lies in understanding what the image itself cannot show through montage. To sum up the historical understanding of montage, combined with "Tokyo Story", we found that in Ozu's films, the method of meaning levitating is used as much as possible, and he does not have a clear directionality. This clear directionality is blurred with auditory notation to avoid reducing arguments to the same meaning. Yasujiro Ozu believes that life is simple, but people continue to "mix the water" to complicate it. He deliberately presents a "weak connection" in the film, order is often disrupted by sudden situations, and life is in a state of disorder. In his films, everything is ordinary and mundane. This "disordered state" of "everyday" and "critical moments", extended to the image system, essentially means that he parted ways with the montage theory created by the United States and the Soviet Union. In a sense, he is against "generalized montage". At the same time, it also shows his attitude towards the westernization of Japanese society after the war. Even the language of images has parted ways with America. In the constituency of the shooting material, Ozu strengthens and eventually transcends the theme of the two generations of opposites through visual and auditory symbols: the ordinary in the United States meets the ordinary in Japan. Deleuze quoted Bergson's three thesis on motion in his monograph on the philosophy of image "Action-Image": 1. Motion is a kind of "duration" 2. Moment reconstructs motion "specific moment": classical/pose/first Experience; "Any Moment": Modern/Motion Slices (Animation) 3. Movement is the dynamic aspect of "whole", which derives the concept of perception-moving image, and divides it into three sub-categories: perception-image/action-image/emotion-image In the attitude of film montage, he actually basically removed the process of "action-image". After the "action-image" was discarded, the uncertainty of montage orientation was created. For example, the death of the mother character in the film, the reason for the death is suspended by the film, because the process of death has been completely abandoned, and in this way, the "ambiguity" pointed by the imaging system is achieved. Beginning in 1945, Italian neorealist directors developed the "wandering form" pioneered by the French New Wave movement
A form of "wandering" that is closer to life itself is thus born. For example, "The Bicycle Thief" by the famous neorealist director De Sica, the film camera follows the eyes of the disadvantaged father and son, wandering the streets, looking for the whereabouts of the stolen bicycles. In this way, the audience who was first brought into the situation by the language of the film gradually became one with the characters, and the motion-image seemed to have no independent meaning in a certain sense. Secondly, because the characters are in a weak position, when the characters lead the audience to wander, the "behavior" of other superstructures or rich people in the space is much faster than the two poor subjects, so the audience feels powerless along with the characters. Since the development of video history, the video space has been regarded as a window that has nothing to do with itself. Neorealism obviously brings the audience into the video space at a deeper level, so a higher-level video language was invented! It also heralded the crisis of "movement-image". And "Tokyo Story" also continues the wandering form of neo-realism. We can deeply feel that when parents go to Tokyo to play, the audience follows their parents' eyes. At the same time, due to their old age, their parents are already a symbol of weakness, and the audience also follows them to feel the powerlessness of life in the unfamiliar environment of Tokyo. But Ozu seems to have gone further than Neorealism, Ozu has directly erased the "action-image" that created the crisis in Neorealism. He invented a "pure audition image", through the creation of "visual signs" and "auditory signs", which replaced the role of "action-image" in the film. It is usually necessary to construct the character's character through "key moments" and "action-image". Instead, the "pure visual images" of who the characters are and the "pure auditory images" that the characters say, gradually pile up the main content of the script in the extremely ordinary dialogue. For example, at the beginning of "Tokyo Story", although the opening scene is full of dialogue, the behavior does not seem to be developed around a clear theme, and the characters are created/shaped through dialogue and visual images of the characters, almost entirely from dialogue. As the founder of film theory, Bazin acknowledges the linguistic nature of film, but refuses to identify with the linguistic symbols of images, and believes that images are not a communication medium separated from reality, let alone an arbitrary symbol. Although Bazin had a lot of fans in the early days of the New Wave movement, gradually everyone began to move away from his arguments. So taking advantage of the trend, Ann Metz of Chris initiated the monograph "Cinematic Semiotics" on the basis of the linguistics of Saussure and Roland Barthes. Metz believes that film semiotics can be divided into "natural signs" and "artificial signs", the former is represented by the reproduction of the natural attributes of things, and the latter can be divided into "reproducible signs" and "conventional notation". Contrary to Bazin's point of view, Ozu invented the audition symbol. His cinematic space is either disjointed or empty, and many plots are sublimated to a "random space state". In his works, many visual symbols have "autonomy" that they do not directly possess. For example, after the acceptance of the spirit in "Jingdong Story", the father and Noriko went to stare at the sunrise, which was actually an attempt to reconstruct the disturbed life. Sequence, because nature is regular, and the law of replacement will never change. Then, the "sunrise" here obviously has the autonomy that the image itself does not have, and he reconstructs the sequence of life. Life returns to calm after sunrise. At the same time, there are many visual symbols representing American style and westernization in the film, such as trains, chimneys, ships, messy wires, wine bottles, modern buildings, etc. There are also similar auditory symbols, the roar of trains, the whistle of ships, and even children. The English recitation in the mouth represents the daily life of the American style, which is in sharp contrast with the daily life of Japan such as ancient Japanese buildings, ancient lighthouses, temples, and tombstones. But what is interesting is that these same symbols at the end of the film all dissolve the conflict after experiencing the "sunrise". That is to say, in Ozu's films, the "empty mirror space" is actually autonomous. Their "character" changes over time. Here, these objects seem to have become autonomous time-carrying objects after experiencing the spread of time and various lives. For example, still lifes in movies, still lifes are defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content. After the fate/change/process, the form of the changed thing does not change or move. This is the carrier of "time", and he endows the image with the meaning of time. The still life is time here, because it records everything that changes. At the same time, Ozu's still life has a kind of continuity, and the still life shows what remains after all the series of changes. This is the purity of time, or direct images of time, each image is time, an immutable form full of change. Time has become the precise visual storage of events. Therefore, Deleuze believes that in the image system created by Ozu, "time-image" has come. "Time-image" makes time and thinking feel, making them tangible and sound. I am trying to reconstruct the disrupted sequence of life, because nature is regular, and the law of replacement is never changing. Then, the "sunrise" here obviously has the autonomy that the image itself does not have, and he reconstructs the sequence of life. Life returns to calm after sunrise. At the same time, there are many visual symbols representing American style and westernization in the film, such as trains, chimneys, ships, messy wires, wine bottles, modern buildings, etc. There are also similar auditory symbols, the roar of trains, the whistle of ships, and even children. The English recitation in the mouth represents the daily life of the American style, which is in sharp contrast with the daily life of Japan such as ancient Japanese buildings, ancient lighthouses, temples, and tombstones. But what is interesting is that these same symbols at the end of the film all dissolve the conflict after experiencing the "sunrise". That is to say, in Ozu's films, the "empty mirror space" is actually autonomous. Their "character" changes over time. Here, these objects seem to have become autonomous time-carrying objects after experiencing the spread of time and various lives. For example, still lifes in movies, still lifes are defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content. After the fate/change/process, the form of the changed thing does not change or move. This is the carrier of "time", and he endows the image with the meaning of time. The still life is time here, because it records everything that changes. At the same time, Ozu's still life has a kind of continuity, and the still life shows what remains after all the series of changes. This is the purity of time, or direct images of time, each image is time, an immutable form full of change. Time has become the precise visual storage of events. Therefore, Deleuze believes that in the image system created by Ozu, "time-image" has come. "Time-image" makes time and thinking feel, making them tangible and sound. I am trying to reconstruct the disrupted sequence of life, because nature is regular, and the law of replacement is never changing. Then, the "sunrise" here obviously has the autonomy that the image itself does not have, and he reconstructs the sequence of life. Life returns to calm after sunrise. At the same time, there are many visual symbols representing American style and westernization in the film, such as trains, chimneys, ships, messy wires, wine bottles, modern buildings, etc. There are also similar auditory symbols, the roar of trains, the whistle of ships, and even children. The English recitation in the mouth represents the daily life of the American style, which is in sharp contrast with the daily life of Japan such as ancient Japanese buildings, ancient lighthouses, temples, and tombstones. But what is interesting is that these same symbols at the end of the film all dissolve the conflict after experiencing the "sunrise". That is to say, in Ozu's films, the "empty mirror space" is actually autonomous. Their "character" changes over time. Here, these objects seem to have become autonomous time-carrying objects after experiencing the spread of time and various lives. For example, still lifes in movies, still lifes are defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content. After the fate/change/process, the form of the changed thing does not change or move. This is the carrier of "time", and he endows the image with the meaning of time. The still life is time here, because it records everything that changes. At the same time, Ozu's still life has a kind of continuity, and the still life shows what remains after all the series of changes. This is the purity of time, or direct images of time, each image is time, an immutable form full of change. Time has become the precise visual storage of events. Therefore, Deleuze believes that in the image system created by Ozu, "time-image" has come. "Time-image" makes time and thinking feel, making them tangible and sound. The "empty mirror space" is actually autonomous. Their "character" changes over time. Here, these objects seem to have become autonomous time-carrying objects after experiencing the spread of time and various lives. For example, still lifes in movies, still lifes are defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content. After the fate/change/process, the form of the changed thing does not change or move. This is the carrier of "time", and he endows the image with the meaning of time. The still life is time here, because it records everything that changes. At the same time, Ozu's still life has a kind of continuity, and the still life shows what remains after all the series of changes. This is the purity of time, or direct images of time, each image is time, an immutable form full of change. Time has become the precise visual storage of events. Therefore, Deleuze believes that in the image system created by Ozu, "time-image" has come. "Time-image" makes time and thinking feel, making them tangible and sound. The "empty mirror space" is actually autonomous. Their "character" changes over time. Here, these objects seem to have become autonomous time-carrying objects after experiencing the spread of time and various lives. For example, still lifes in movies, still lifes are defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content. After the fate/change/process, the form of the changed thing does not change or move. This is the carrier of "time", and he endows the image with the meaning of time. The still life is time here, because it records everything that changes. At the same time, Ozu's still life has a kind of continuity, and the still life shows what remains after all the series of changes. This is the purity of time, or direct images of time, each image is time, an immutable form full of change. Time has become the precise visual storage of events. Therefore, Deleuze believes that in the image system created by Ozu, "time-image" has come. "Time-image" makes time and thinking feel, making them tangible and sound.
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