Truffaut won the Best Director at Cannes for "The Four Hundred Blows" (1959), and Zhang Dalei won the Best Feature Film at TGHFF for "August". The black-and-white memoirs of childhood events are so attractive and frequently won at film festivals. Win a grand prize?
British "Sight & Sound" (Sight & Sound) magazine has just announced this year's best film - "Roma" (ROMA). Previously, this black and white film made with Alexa 65 has won a series of awards such as the "Golden Lion Award" at the Venice Film Festival, as well as the "Best of the Year" affirmation by the world's top 8 film critics associations (Note 1) . "Roma" has been hailed as "the most anticipated movie of 2018" by many fans.
Alfonso Cuarón (Alfonso Cuarón, also translated as "Alfonso Cuarón") is the first Latin American director to win the Oscar for best director, one of Hollywood's "Mexico Three Greatest Men", who has directed "The Center of the Earth" Commercial blockbusters such as Gravity (2013) and Children of Men (2006).
Shocking audio-visual feast
After four years of absence, director Cuarón said: "Although I live abroad, my head always thinks of Mexico. As a Mexican, I always want to know what is going on in my country. I want to make movies in my native Mexico." "Roma" is the film Cuaron has always dreamed of.
After many film and television people become famous, they want to use their own resources to shoot the stories of childhood, but few people can do it as well as Cuaron. —Nick Pinkerton
On the credits, Cuaron also serves as producer, director, photographer, screenwriter, and editor. The entire film was mainly shot in the Colonia Roma area of Mexico City, Mexico, and took 108 days. The final imaging uses a black and white picture, a 2.39:1 widescreen ratio, and the sound uses Dolby Atmos (Dolby Atmos) technology with 64 independent channels.
The last time Cuaron was director of photography was 28 years ago on the Mexican TV series La Hora Marcada and the film El motel de la muerte (1990).
When the colors are removed and only black and white are left, the flow of light and shadow is more obvious. The delicate images captured by Alexa65, combined with the shocking effect of Dolby Atmos, make the audience seem to return to Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. Following Cuaron's long and steady Tracking Shots, within 135 minutes, witness the ups and downs of a family, the impermanence of life and death, and the social changes in the context of the big times.
Extending from the director's personal family to the atmosphere of the entire era in Mexico, the film also reproduces the Corpus Christi Massacre incident in Mexico's modern history. "Roma" has been hailed as a "historical epic" by some film critics.
There are a large number of deep focus shots, long push shots, and pan shots in the film, and some foreign film critics praised "Roma" for its "Neorealismo" style. Comparable to "Citizen Kane" (Citizen Kane, 1941).
An experienced film festival judge said that to know whether a film is good or bad, it is enough to watch the beginning. The three opening shots show the director's skill and the overall level of the film.
The opening of "Roma", the first shot, is amazing. A long shot with a fixed camera, focusing on the ground, water is constantly rushing in, mixed with soap bubbles, and it looks a bit like an ocean wave (there is a hint of the later climax of "Saving People in the Sea"). The sky reflected on the floor, and suddenly a plane flew by. The plane here, and the last shot at the end of the film - an airplane flying over the open sky, echoes each other.
With the blessing of Dolby Atmos, from the beginning of the film, it brings a very immersive audio-visual experience.
After the camera stayed for a while, the camera was Tilt Up, and the audience followed the movement of the camera, and successively saw the drain hole, the water pipe, the heroine Cleo, and a long narrow lane.
The next shot shows the living environment of a middle-class family, with Cleo helping to tidy up the room on the second floor. Camera movement followed Cleo's footsteps using Pan and Tracking.
life and death, life and death
Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Childhood Memories" (1985), the English title is A Time to Live A Time to Die (also translated as "Life and Death"), in the first half of the film, the father has a lung disease and left; in the middle, the mother has a throat Cancer, left; at the end, grandma was old and left. The protagonist of the story, He Xiaoyan, was an ignorant wild child from elementary school. Along with his family's tragedies, he experienced parting ways, and he gradually grew up. The narration at the beginning of "Once Upon a Time in Childhood" said: "This movie is some memories of my childhood..."
In childhood, some people died, taking away their memories and love, we survived and began to become those who left us, began to understand them, so those forgotten and vague memories began to become indelible memories .
Similar to "Once Upon a Time in Childhood", "Roma" is also about director Cuaron's childhood story. In the film, Cuaron recalled the female nanny who grew up with him, and reproduced how his family and himself faced the sudden changes in daily life.
The English title of the film, ROMA, turns into "AMOR", which means "love" in Spanish. "Roma" is a movie about "love". Cuaron specially marked "To Libo" at the end of the film. Libo was the female nanny in the director's childhood home and the prototype of the heroine Cleo in the story.
Actor Yalitza Aparicio, who plays the heroine Cleo in the film, is an amateur and has never been exposed to acting before.
"Roma" chooses to use the perspective of the nanny Cleo as a narrative point of view, and the story revolves around a middle-class family living in Mexico's "Roma" community. Mother Sofia lives with her mother-in-law in a small villa with four children. The father of the family - in 1/3 of the film, cheated and left his wife and children. The absence of the male master made this family with only women and children shrouded in a strong sense of insecurity. At the same time, Cleo also experienced the test of survival in pregnancy, childbirth, and stillbirth.
Image files and memory replication
Cuaron revealed that more than 90% of the content of "Roma" comes from his memory, "some direct, some roundabout, but it is all about the era that shaped me, or the era that shaped Mexico, 1960-1970 is the beginning of the long transition in Mexico. starting point".
"Roma" was filmed nearly fifty years ago in 2017. In order to restore the atmosphere of the times and childhood memories, a lot of attention was paid to the scenes, costumes, props, etc. Even the dogs in the film also looked for photos of Caron's childhood. are almost identical.
Roland Barthes, a master of semiotics, asked "what attracts me in the photo", and the family image "Winter Garden" reminded him of his deceased mother, and proposed "this was once" and "adventure". ”, “thorn point”, “knowing face” and other concepts.
Barth believes that the images left by photography, similar to "footprints on the beach" and fingerprints on glass objects, are a kind of "that-has-been". In the era of film photography, no computer simulacrum was born, and it must be a real objective entity that can leave an image on the film. With the passage of time, regardless of whether the entity that once existed still exists today, when a person views a photo, a certain part of perception or memory will be evoked. At the level of human sensory cognition, the person/thing/thing in the photo is The moment of watching, seems to be "present".
"Adventures" means "details in the images that interest me", but this attraction is generated by viewers looking at photos, adding their own associations, and having conversations with their own life experiences. Bart believes that there is no photo without adventure. "Adventure" is directly related to "punctum", which in turn reflects "studium". Barth pointed out that the "thorn point", which is enough to "sting" people, is the reason why the works really attract viewers to stop; There is some emotion invested, but not particularly profound. "Prick points" exist in two senses. One is that "details" affect personal feelings; the other is the emotional impact brought about by the passage of time (that is, "this was once").
Barthes has stated that he cannot show the picture of "Winter Garden" because "it is my 'thorn point' and exists only for me. It is just an irrelevant picture to you and cannot constitute a clear object. , at best, it can only arouse the interest of "knowledge", such as about the times and clothing. But for you, there is no trauma" (Writing the image after Roland Barthes, 1997, pp.37).
In "Roma", the images "rewritten" based on the director's personal life experience memory are undoubtedly "private". The well-designed composition and the immersive and shocking panoramic sound in the film evoke the audience's "knowledge". With the progress of the story, life-like plots and natural performances, the audience gradually began to empathize with the characters' situations, and gradually began to talk about the content of the story with their own life experience. The film transcends national barriers and depicts sincere humanity. , aroused the audience's different "prick points" and awakened a general emotional resonance.
Any real situation in the audio-visual field that is condensed in front of the camera, whether it is unconfigured or rehearsed, is archived as a unique part of history. These dynamic images, which record time and space, not only directly construct a diversified and differentiated overall image for the history of film style, but also reflect various cultural and historical pulses that are layered and superimposed. —— Film scholar Sun Songrong
Modern people take pictures wherever they go, relatives and friends, food, scenery, stray cats on the roadside... Why is it so important to preserve "memory"? Why do human beings want to turn what happens around them into "visual files" as much as possible? Influenced by Bergson, Marcel Proust mentioned in his stream-of-consciousness novel "Reminiscence of the Time Is Like Water" that "the world is true only in memory".
The so-called life is extension and memory. Bergson believes that the essence of time is not the movement of objects, but human consciousness. Time and life are closely integrated and inseparable. If there is no "memory", human beings will not have the concept of "the past"; without the past, there will be no "present"; without the contrasting combination of the past and the present, there will be no "Laduree" (Laduree), and no There is life.
"Roma" also seems to echo the concept of "continuity" in terms of camera movement, with its amazing Long Tracking Shots and a lot of Pan shots.
"Roma" is a grand memory rewriting that Cuaron wrote, directed, and photographed, and is his personal video archive. The director integrates what he saw, heard, and felt as a child, combined with family photo albums and historical data, into a feature-length film with skillful and calm skills and surging emotional undercurrents.
A simulacrum is an intellect added to an object, and this intellect has anthropological value because it is the resistance of man himself and his history, situation, freedom, and even the spontaneous rejection of human thought and spirit. --Roland Barthes
Note 1 The 8 Film Critics Associations are: New York Film Critics Association Awards, Washington Film Critics Association Awards, Philadelphia Film Critics Association Awards, San Francisco Film Critics Association Awards, Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, New York Online Film Critics Association Awards, Toronto Film Critics Association Awards Film Critics Association Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award.
(This article was first published on the public account of "Dafeng Media" " Rome: The Intimate Image of the Best Director Oscar | Alexa65 Shocking Screen | Movie Notes ")
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