This is an era of consumerism advancing at the speed of light, and immortality is the fate of most films, but I still arbitrarily believe that "Human" is a masterpiece that is close to "immortality": as long as human beings have not perished, it will not Obsolete; if human beings will eventually die out, it will be an excellent video material for other civilizations to study human civilization.
The film chooses a grand and daunting theme: human beings. What do we talk about when we talk about "human beings"? This topic is so grand that we seem to have a kind of daze in the "array of nothing"; and as a part of human beings, when we try to talk about this topic, we can easily have a kind of "don't know the true face of Mount Lu." , only because of the powerlessness of being in this mountain". But this is another subject so important that we cannot avoid it. What is a human being? Why it came out like this? Where will the fate of mankind go? As the most important human art form of the twentieth century, it would be cowardly and shameful not to attempt to present these themes.
Faced with such a theme, the director abandoned the linear narrative in the structure of the film, and he adopted the most direct, time-consuming but also the most effective way to structure the film, that is, with those ultimate questions about human beings alone Go for an interview alone. To this end, the director spent 3 years visiting 60 countries around the world and interviewing 2,020 people of different skin colors, genders, races and backgrounds. When all the stories come together, they constitute the human story.
The main line of the film's structure is interviews with various people, with aerial shots constantly interspersed in the middle. When the camera is facing the interviewer, it uses a close-up of the front, the background is a uniform black set, there are no other redundant elements except the narrator in front of the camera, and we seem to be facing the narrator, blowing air. With all kinds of strong emotions, they talk about love, happiness, family, death, conflict, hatred, violence, forgiveness, poverty, immigration, discrimination, homosexuality and other topics - here, this kind of substitution is very subjective The shots can be seen as human beings' various reflections and reflections on their own destiny, and the cramped scene frame under the close-up shots also seems to indicate the anxiety of human beings. When the camera is cut to the aerial photography, the open panorama makes people suddenly clear. Under the slow-moving lens of the high-speed camera, from the human caravan in the desert, to the frenetic Westfalenstadion, to the row upon row of terraces, And then to the city where the lights are flickering, all kinds of human civilizations can be seen in full view-here, the human beings under this god-like bird's-eye view are as small as ants, just as Lao Tzu said in "The Tao Te Ching": "The world is not benevolent. All things are cud dogs. Humans think, create, and destroy in confusion, while God just watches from the sidelines.
The photography of this film is extremely elegant, especially those carefully designed aerial shots, with the symphony-like music, it is even more magnificent, beautiful, and has a strong formalism style. A similar style can be vaguely seen in Chinese director Zhao Liang's documentary film "Sorrowful Warcraft."
PS "Humanity" was screened during the Shanghai International Film Festival last year. Unfortunately, I was not able to go to watch the film at that time.
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