The ultimate purpose of the circular narrative structure is not to reveal the cycle and fall into the cycle, but to find the gaps in the seemingly inevitable cycle, so as to realize the dissolution of the cycle and break free from the fate of the cycle.
In 1994, Macedonian director Mirzi Manchevsky's debut film "Heavy Rain is Coming" came out, which caused a sensation in the international film circle and won the top prize of the Venice Film Festival, the Lion Award. Admittedly, this is a masterpiece worthy of serious exploration, so for more than two decades, the multi-angle reading of the film has been ongoing. The tones of the story are complicated. Factors such as war, violence, time, love, religion, and ethnicity intertwined and penetrated each other to construct this attractive media text . The highlights of the film are everywhere, music, photography, and tone are all worthy of study.
one. Dissolving time - time never dies
In 1994 "Pulp Fiction" won the Palme d'Or, subverting the traditional film narrative mode, and the circular narrative structure broke away from the long-standing linear narrative structure in one fell swoop, creating a novel narrative method for film art. The traditional classic narrative mode is the mode of storytelling that we are familiar with, that is, a story always has a beginning, a development, a climax and an end. But in a circular narrative structure, cause and effect are inherited, events occur end to end, and the past and the future can be extended indefinitely, creating a cyclic effect. And "Torrential Rain" is undoubtedly a practitioner of the circular narrative structure. The film depicts three seemingly independent, but in fact, closely linked stories: Words-Faces-Pictures . The first meaningful picture of the film is the monastic monk Kiel who promised "the dumb oath picking tomatoes, and the rainstorm is coming in the distance, and the film ends with the dying Alexander lying in the rainstorm, the rescued girl. Samina runs to the monastery where Kirill is located, and the movie returns to the scene where Kirill is picking tomatoes. The end of the third story is connected to the beginning of the first story, and the film narrative forms a loop.” "Circle". In such a circular narrative structure, the flow of time is not orderly, but chopped and spliced, which appears complex and meaningful. Simply put, such a circular narrative structure is basically for deconstruction time, digestion time.
Xi Murong once said that time is the king who is always invincible , and we humans are just the hostages of the king of time. Everyone's life is inextricably linked with time. In real life, no one can turn a blind eye to the sound of the passing of time. Whether we like it or not, we can only accept the mercy of time. This is not the case for artists. Although they cannot be separated from time in the flesh, in their works of art, time has become a "hostage" that they can manipulate at will . For any artist, thinking about time is a problem that can never be escaped. Through "Heavy Rain", we can get a glimpse of Manchevsky's attitude towards time. Obviously in his mind, time and space can be transcended .
The plot and character clues in the story of "The Rain Will Come" are simple: the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Alexander left his married wife Anne , left "safe" London, and returned to restless Macedonia. She died under the gun of her cousin because of saving an alien girl, so the rescued girl Samina fled to the monastery where the young monk Kiel was, and a pure love developed between the two. , Samina died at the gun of her relatives. Therefore, in a linear order, the arrangement of the three stories should be Faces-Pictures-Words , but Manchevsky deliberately chopped up such a simple story in such a natural order into three parallel development stories that affect each other, and play Out of order, in Faces (Alexander and Anne's love story) a photo detail of Samina's death was inserted through Anne's point of view, when in fact Samina was not dead at that point; it was already held in Words Funeral Alexander reappears in the next story. The living are dead, and the dead live on. The time that has been cut is full of suspense, and life and death seem to transcend the bondage of time. Such fragmented time processing makes the story change from a single perspective of Alexander to three perspectives of Kiel, Alexander and Anne, and also makes complex and diverse themes such as love tragedy, racial conflict, and religious conflict to be tolerated and digested by the film.
The dissolution of time makes the time in "The Heavy Rain" appear complicated intuitively, and the fundamental purpose of the dissolution of time is to transcend time , a desire to make something that can transcend the limitations of time and space and remain forever, such as the opposite of violence and war. love and peace . The doubts and thinking about time in "Heavy Rain" have successfully surpassed the existing "movie time and space norms". Those bizarre, deliberately chaotic and unsewable time narratives make people think about the relationship between individuals and time, groups The relationship between man and time, and naturally produce the desire to transcend time, to find the eternal.
two. Escape the loop - the circle is not round
In the circular narrative structure, time is closely linked to each other, which seems to have no beginning and no end, and thus represents the cycle of fate. The picture of Kiel picking tomatoes on the eve of the torrential rain is the beginning and the end of "Heavy Rain", which symbolizes the entanglement of love, the contradiction between religion and nationality, and the conflict of violence in this endless story circle. The continuous cycle also symbolizes the repetition of the fate of everyone in the story. There is no doubt that behind the endless cycle is the repetition of tragedy. Of course, tragedy can bring the audience's thinking, but I think the "ambition" of every director who uses a circular narrative structure is more than this, and neither does Manchevsky. exception .
The ultimate purpose of the circular narrative structure is not to reveal the cycle and fall into the cycle, but to find the gaps in the seemingly inevitable cycle, so as to realize the dissolution of the cycle and break free from the fate of the cycle. The prophecy "Time does not pass, the circle is not round" appears in every story: In " Words ", the old priest urged Keele to go down the mountain before the rainstorm, and on the way said "Time does not pass, The circle is not round"; in " Faces ", on a wall in London street is written "time does not pass, the circle is not round"; the last time in " Pictures ", the picture cuts back to the beginning, and the old priest is still urging "Time waits for no one, because time is round" as Kiel came down the mountain. This phrase that appears many times is actually the goal that Manchevsky hopes this work can achieve - breaking out of cycles and reincarnations .
The cycle in the passage of time is just a repeat of tragedy and injury. If time does not pass, the circle is not round, that is, the cycle stops, then the fate of each character can be reversed, and the injury may stop, even in despair. There can be some hope.
Gaps and loopholes make the circular narrative structure less complete, break away from the strict time and space constraints, and generate new content for narrative expression. The storyline of "Heavy Rain is Coming" would normally end with Samina's death, but Manchevsky set it to end with Alexander's death. The two images of Alexander, who was dying in the rainstorm, and Samina, who was running to escape, were constantly switched, symbolizing the death of perdition and the change of hope of new life . If the end of the film is only the death of Samina, it can only bring absolute tragedy. Because such deaths are all too common in a land of violence and racial hatred. But when the ending is reset to what was achieved in the film, it also ends with death. The death of Alexander, who resolutely blocked the bullet for the innocent girl, is of great significance to prevent the killing of the nation and to bridge the gap in human nature. At the same time, far away The figure of Samina running towards the monastery symbolizes the hope of a new life in a kingdom full of death and violence. Thus, the gap of the ring appears, and we can see new hope and new possibility in the gap. In fact, it's not just Alexander trying to escape the loop, it's Manchevsky behind the character. Manchevsky came up with the idea to direct the film after seeing such a tragic and bewildering reality in his native Macedonia. So he himself and the characters under his lens are trying to find the gap, hoping to escape the historical fate of the cycle, praying for the coming of peace, even if it requires sacrificing his own life.
The escape from the cycle is the unwillingness to allow the endless arrangements of fate and to sink into the cycle of violence and war. And the hard blow of escaping the cycle can wake up a faint cycle world, and also wake up all the audiences who are also sinking in it. Therefore, "Heavy Rain" adopts a circular narrative structure, and the attempt to escape the loop fundamentally is undoubtedly successful and valuable.
(December 2016, age 20, "Western Media Criticism")
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