Director Li Cangdong mentioned in an interview, "When I was filming "Miryang", one of the questions I considered most was how can the film express the invisible things. In reality, many things are visible, such as Material things, but there are also many things that are invisible, such as faith, God, etc. It is invisible in life, but it does exist. How should we express these invisible but real things? This is exactly what I was most concerned about when I filmed "Miryang". At that time, my choice was to show what can be seen in a real and simple way, and let the audience feel and judge for themselves. I don't want to see me What is missing is described in film. I would like to let the audience feel it.
When it comes to religion and belief, I don't want to pretend what I don't see and don't believe in as what I know and believe. I want the audience to follow the heroine Shin Ae and the rest of the characters in Miryang with their own lives and get a feel for what's going on with them. "
He mentioned two concepts in the above interview, one is "invisible" things, and the other is "I can't see" things.
The first is the meaning of "what can be seen and what can't be seen" mentioned by Director Li Changdong in the interview, which refers to how to express the figurative and abstract issues in the film.
This method of focusing the lens on the figurative and causing the audience to think about abstract things is actually not the first of Li Cangdong's creation. When our primary school Chinese teacher taught us how to summarize the central idea, this kind of thinking mode that sublimated from the concrete to the abstract already existed. What makes Li Changdong's films special is not the simple application of this model, but how to express the figurative more realistically.
A question that arises from this is: Can figuration be truly expressed?
When a director decides to use a camera to record a certain figurative, he is bound to be limited by the viewfinder, and the actual content that the viewfinder can accommodate is much narrower than the real field of view. Coupled with the limited depth of field of the lens, the figurative range that can be captured is further reduced. So the essence of the film is not about what to express, but about what is worth expressing, which itself is already a subjective issue. A square frame, why does it fall on this object at this moment and not on other things? The figuration recorded by the lens has actually been separated from the figuration, to be precise, it is the figuration that has been selected and filtered. This is just one aspect of the camera’s filtering. If editing, color grading, special effects and other filtering links are added, the recorded representation will deviate even more from the original representation. And the film itself is based on the play, then the play itself is the playwright’s cognition and understanding of a certain figurative, and it is completely subjective, then discussing the existence of a real figurative in the technical dimension will be hopeless. Medicine falls into the category of epistemology, and the only definite conclusion is: whether the real world can be recognized or not, we have no way of knowing.
Then the concept of "reality" we discuss in art must mean something else.
Personally, I think the essence of art is the "prejudice" artists have about the world and the specific way they express their personal "prejudice". So whether the art is "real" or not is actually a measure. It refers to the extent to which the selected expression method can accurately convey the creator's understanding and feeling of the creative content.
If a certain thing the creator wants to express is terrifying, such as a certain ghost, his camera, lighting, music, and scenery must all play a role in creating an atmosphere of "horror". So whether it is true or not in this context can be translated into whether the effect is scary enough. If the lighting chooses to use shadowless lamps for 360-degree lighting without dead ends, then ghosts will not know where to hide. This choice is obviously not real enough.
The "truth" discussed in terms of expression is actually a question of whether the expression is valid. So the figurative itself cannot be truly expressed, but the prejudice against the figurative can be effectively expressed.
When we understand that film is the creator's expression of his own prejudice. Li Cangdong's second paragraph really revealed his extraordinary qualities.
“When it comes to religion and belief, I don’t want to pretend what I don’t see and don’t believe in as what I know and believe. I want the audience to follow the heroine Shin Ae and the other characters in Miryang. Live, to feel how they are."
The "invisible" thing he mentioned here is actually his reflection on his "prejudice" as a creator. If he does not have a clear and precise "prejudice" about what he wants to express, the film becomes the creator's way of exploring a certain thing or problem.
The method chosen by Li Cangdong is to reduce the rendering of all technical representations, make the tone of the film as close to daily life as possible, and then narrow the sense of distance between the audience and the characters, so that the audience can personally experience the situation of the protagonist, so that the choice of the protagonist produces their own "prejudice".
The heroine in "Miryang" has experienced the pain of losing her father and son one after another, trying to obtain inner redemption by converting to religion in despair, and trying to make the audience understand the heroine and God by recording the heroine's daily religious activities to understand the relationship between man and religion at a larger level. However, Li Cangdong did not give an answer about the essence of this relationship, which is where he is brilliant. Instead of giving answers, he asked questions. The audience becomes the one who answers the questions. When Li Cangdong's film ends and the audience's film has just begun, the audience's answers to the questions he raises are an extension of his creation, and the best way to do that "he can't see". Interpretation.
It's interesting that the heroine also has something she can't see in the play.
The redemption she has been looking for is actually by her side, but because her superiority prevents her from seeing the essence of human beings through appearances, she has never been able to get the redemption she wanted.
Movies can be divided into three categories based on expression or exploration. One is that the creator wants the audience to see what the creator sees, such as "Trainspotting"; the other is that the creator wants the audience to see what the audience wants to see. , such as "The Fast and the Furious"; there is also a category where the creator wants the audience to see what they can't see, such as "Miryang" and "Memories of Murder".
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