Teacher Dai Jinhua often compares film to a "parallelogram", with images, sound, time and space on the four corners. Since the development of film, "audio-visual language", as the most important and only way for film to present itself, has always been a lame-image as a visual medium has been highly developed, and a set of dazzling mise-en-scene theories have been developed. The sound as an auditory medium is uniformly named "sound effect", occupying an embarrassing position as an auxiliary effect for watching movies.
For a long time we have overlooked the point that the image, as a visual actor, its reception is intermittent and controllable. When we close our eyes, we can easily reject the image and this form of representation, but we But it is impossible to close the ears and refuse the constant stream of sound. Besides, because vision is much more complex than hearing (which is probably why the visual aspects of movies are more developed than the auditory aspects), humans process visual signals more slowly than auditory ones. (If the distance is too far, it will cause a serious lag for the sound to reach the ear, but it does not mean that the vision is sensitive, just that the vision gets the information first). The simplest example is if someone gives a start command with a sound and a color, or presses the command of the responder, obviously the one who listens to the sound will start or press the button (of course you can't do this command at a distance of 100 meters, because the sound spreads) slower). In the case of obtaining information at the same time, hearing is far more sensitive than vision.
So what role does sound play in the movie? Or what should it do? What kind of role does the element of sound play in the "fantasy" that the film creates? Abbas conducted an experiment (or provided us with the material for an experiment) by combining three different sounds and images.
In the in-car scene at the beginning of the film, the soundtrack is a continuous dialogue, while the footage is a finely edited clip, consisting of close-up shots of reporters, close-up shots of drivers, and shots of pedestrians or scenery outside the car window, but these are obviously broken. The footage is strongly glued together by the continuous soundtrack, and many times the footage is even cut several times in a sentence, but our viewing experience is still smooth and natural, without any blunt fracture.
The driver accidentally dropped an empty tin can from the rubbish heap in the process of picking up flowers. After a deliberate kick, the can rolled down the slope unimpeded and made a clear sound. This The shot Abbas did not use editing, but a long shot from close-up to long shot. When it comes to long shots, our first reaction is the unity of time and space, but this time Abbas is emphasizing vision and hearing. Unification, our eyes follow the tin can in the lens from the right to the left, and our ears are also processing a sound change from strong to weak at the same time, at this time, the film lens obtains the most "real" completeness, and obtained the verification of reality.
And the ending is the most discussed staccato track. In this passage, the visual is a long shot of the unity of time and space, but the continuity of the sound is broken, and we instantly get a fractured and jerky viewing experience, which is always regarded as the innate long shot. One of the characteristics of "fluency" is easily destroyed, followed by the collapse of the illusion that the film is proud to create the illusion of reality, the experience of empathy is terminated - we are excluded from the "movie" door. What's even more interesting is that Abbas simply did not do both, and added the only soundtrack in the film to this paragraph. In this way, the virtual attributes of the film are even more exposed.
It is said that Abbas explored the boundary between the virtual and the real in this film, which is true, but he is not only interested in the virtual in the sense of narratology - the separation of drama and documentary, but also on the film itself. A discussion of virtuality and authenticity. The two are like intertextuality, which contrasts each other at the level of audio-visual language and drama. This is not only a close-up of Abbas on Iranian society, but also a close-up of Abbas on the film itself.
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