Statement: The content of this article comes from Dai Jinhua's 20150317 lecture at Beijing Language and Culture University. The material is from Internet search. It is only for the study and exchange of fans and friends. Any commercial use is prohibited. If there is any infringement, it will be deleted.
Dai Jinhua:
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you Beiyu for giving me this opportunity. It is also fate that I finally have the opportunity to get together with you. Then I chose the title of "The Grand Budapest Hotel". First, it is a relatively new movie, and it has entered another round of distribution, screening, and hot screening with the help of the American Academy Awards. Also, I chose this film because it, I think, is in a sense just sitting on a multiple turning point or intersection:
One is a critical moment in the transformation of world film history, world film culture, and even the global cultural ecology, the so-called digital transformation. As I’ll talk about later, digital transformation has a deep connection with The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the other is the modern civilization in crisis and the modern capitalist financial system in crisis, which is the second turning point in my opinion. The third turning point is that we are entering an era of the end of post-feudal civilization as a whole. So the intense sweetness and sadness shown in this film, and this gesture of looking back with regret in this film, is very meaningful in my opinion. Therefore, based on these considerations, I chose The Grand Budapest Hotel. If possible, I hope to finally sit in the discussion on the position of the subject in the multiple meanings of the modern society as a whole.
For me, every public speaking I still feel a little bit stressed because you don't know your audience, you don't understand their expectations, their desires, their preparations, and you risk underestimating yours at any time. The audience, or overestimated the danger of your audience, so please don't be polite. During the whole speech, you hinted to me in various ways, made it clear to me, and said that we already knew the meaning, or please, To be clear, we do not have this background knowledge. You can use various methods. Even if you don’t make this kind of effort, after 34 years of teaching, I will probably grasp when your pupils start to dilate and your eyes start to blur. What’s especially interesting is that there will be a sudden silence that controls the entire The venue, that's when you know all the audience has fled. So let's give it a try, hoping not to waste everyone's good spring, and not waste the precious two hours of everyone's life, let's discuss the movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel" together.
If we look at this movie intuitively, probably our most direct impression and feeling is: this is a European movie. But in fact, its director is famous far and wide, and it does not need to be particularly famous. People who are slightly interested in film culture or who have watched a relatively large number of films will know the name of Wes Anderson, then everyone also knows that this is a man from From Texas (Texas), a genius from Texas, is an American director. So an American director made a film full of European charm, and this film won the Jury Prize at the European International Film Festival (Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival). And in fact, this film, as a rare film in recent years, once again constitutes a trip to the International Film Festival, which I call the International Film Festival Odyssey. It has toured, entered and been shortlisted at dozens of international film festivals. Finally, it was once again shortlisted for Best Picture at the last, and first, special award of each year, the Academy Awards in the United States. Well, this itself tells us from an angle that this film occupies a special and delicate position in today's global film circle and in today's world cultural pattern.
Well, the off-topic explanation is that I have always been known as an anti-PPT activist. Why do I add the word "ism"? On the one hand, in the so-called normalization process of today's college education, PPT is constantly required and forced to become the basic teaching. It is a necessary link. Fortunately, Peking University continues its tradition, and there is enough openness and relaxation. The most terrifying thing I mentioned is that the principal of a certain university is sitting in the general monitoring room watching each classroom. If the teacher does not use PPT, what is even more terrifying is that if there is no picture on the PPT, he will interrupt you in the general monitoring room. PPT, thereby terminating your teaching. This is one of the most horrific stories of institutional violence I have ever heard.
This is one aspect, but the more important aspect is that I think the PPT is creating a kind of slack in thinking, and at the most basic violation of the spirit of education, because the teacher made the PPT, read it out, and then the students We copied the PPT, and those who copied this PPT are already very good students. Most of the students came down and said: Teacher, can I take it away?
Off-topic, off-topic, I will leave it on this desktop, and students who are willing to take it away can take it away. I don't care if this PPT is copied because I didn't make it into the standard PPT required by the system, usually I am against PPT, I don't use PPT, but if we are talking about movies, I just use PPT as a reminder of the image, Calling everyone's memory of watching the movie, that's all. So don't be surprised if I forget the PPT while I'm talking.
We get back to the point, we said that The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 constitutes a certain kind of cinematic anecdote, a cinematic anecdote, a subtle, beautiful, sweetly sad hot spot of an international cinema. Even if you haven't watched the movie, we were the first to come into contact with the movie's forecast poster and the movie's poster. We have probably captured two elements. One element is such an old European style called by the tone of the entire movie. Atmosphere and marriage, and the other, everyone pays attention to its forecast poster, a pink, flat, cartoon-like shape of the Grand Budapest Hotel, hinting at Wes Anderson.
Then there are many descriptions of Wes Anderson's style, probably I prefer a description called dark fairy tale or dark fairy tale. Some people like to use adult fairy tales, I don't choose this because the word adult as a modifier usually has another meaning, which is why I don't choose it.
What's more interesting is to select a poster made by fans of this film. It uses a variety of small cakes, of course, the pastry shop in the plot, and uses a variety of beautiful small cakes to make a picture. The posters and posters of "The Grand Budapest Hotel", at the same time, the sweet, peculiarly shaped and full of childlike innocence produced by the pastry shop in these plots has become an important prop element in the plot. Very intuitively, we think of a series of interesting, glamorous and useless fads, fashions offered by the so-called creative economy in today's world - macarons, right? Macaron cookies.
So expensive, so beautiful, so common in taste, it seems to be such a popular culture in today's world, or a series of imaginations brought about by dessert, which carries such a symbol of memory, while the fact In the Chinese film review about "The Grand Budapest Hotel", the title of an article is called "Exquisite Macaron Fan Er", so this is not my original, it comes from the identification of it by predecessors.
Well, as we mentioned earlier, the special feature of this film as an American film is that before its debut, during its appearance, that is, during the stage performance, and after its appearance, it is very important that its director, as an important The absent star, with the absent character, is calling the audience of this movie and the expectation of this movie, that is, the American prodigy from Texas, or the American ghost Wes. Anderson, who once hit the cinema with a fox story, then started to show his stylistic quality of using real people to shoot cartoony fairy tales with Moonrise Kingdom.
A small digression, everyone notices that this light, beautiful, sweet fairy tale actually describes a story of extreme poignancy, even extreme cruelty. The subject of the story itself is not so cruel, because the subject itself acts as a metaphorical symbol, we call it the nineteenth century in Europe, right?
When I say that as a metaphorical symbol, it does not necessarily refer to the 100 years of the 19th century, and we may refer to Western culture from the Renaissance to the 19th century. I say its main story is a broad 19th-century literary and dramatic theme—conspiracy and love, inheritance and murder, wrongful imprisonment and escape. Even for example, the Cross Keys Association, which is very absurd and comedy, is a guild, a professional guild formed among hotel managers, and its secrets, its oaths are as firm as ever. Connection.
The main body of the story is such a story, and when blood, murder, competition for inheritance, and conspiracy are linked together, it is no longer a fairy tale in the usual sense, and it no longer has the simplicity and lightness of a fairy tale. But more importantly, the film actually sits at one of the heaviest moments of the 20th century: two world wars—war, destruction, savagery overrunning civilization on a massive scale, in a savage flood Under the impact, the decline and annihilation of human nature. It's about war, not war in general, a huge sore torn open in the twentieth century. It's two world wars. Right?
In this film, it consciously confuses the two world wars. What we perceive should be the Second World War, it should be the German army, it should be the Nazis, it should be the moment when the fascist racism bloodbathed Europe, but it All the military uniforms, the historical associations and historical memories of both sides of the conflict remind us of the First World War. Then the Second World War suggests an unprecedented catastrophe in human civilization. The Second World War almost destroyed all the myths built by modernity. There is a saying that the corpses of the naked Jews burned in the furnaces of Auschwitz (concentration camp) ... it burned people, all our imaginations and beliefs about people. But about the First World War, it is absurd, cruel, it is neither justice or injustice, nor value adherence and value sacrifice. The killing and the killing between the two wars, so when the two wars are fictionalized as a European war in this film, it touches the traumatic memory of the two world wars at the same time, so in that sense it is very heavy . But as I'll say later, the charm of Wes Anderson, and the problem with Wes Anderson, is that he's so good at translating such a heavy theme into a macaron-esque dessert.
A small example, do you remember that in the story, Edward Norton played an incompetent military policeman, and our Chinese subtitles translated it as Niu Mao Guo, thatched grass. The police chief of Niu Mao Nation, a popular movie star like Edward Norton, cameo, now called soy sauce, right? Such a small character in the plot. So have you noticed the police cap badge? Very interesting, a fox. Where did the fox come from? From "Fantastic Daddy Fox".
Here's a self-citation from Wes Anderson. We probably don't have that much time to discuss about this film, every detail, every interesting point contained in the text of this film, and the literature, about art, There are many, many topics about literary theory that we probably don't have time to discuss.
Well, in fact, this movie is quite beautiful, quite delicate, and quite relaxed. It's again, what we said just now, we talked about its heaviness and its cruel side, but at the same time it's actually quite complicated, it's a very complicated movie because there are multiple texts inside this movie, in the A narrative structure like a Russian box doll in a city inside the film makes it form multiple textual relationships and relationships between texts. We say that there are multiple intertextualities within it. At the same time, this film is also a representative work of postmodernism and a representative work of postmodernist film practice. Such a narrative strategy features a tribute to the master, a tribute to the classics.
Then of course, around this film, we can expand a huge text group, and then we can discuss his intertextual relationship in such a text group.
Well this is the characteristic of Wes Anderson. If you are fans of Wes Anderson, if you read about him, you will know that he is a philosophy student, and he can't help but put his philosophical knowledge into his films, so philosophical of intellectual preparation and philosophical thinking, we say that between philosophical thinking and the dark fairy tales of postmodernism, the narrative game of postmodernism, and the refusal of heaviness by postmodernism and the lightness that history refuses to bear, there is another group. A peculiar combination, or a set of tensions that pull the film.
Then let's go back to this film. I said that people who watched this film, especially the friends here, all of them are friends with humanities education and humanities background, probably we will definitely feel this film strongly There is an extremely strong sense of nostalgia, a narrative tone of elegy-like mourning, whether or not we must put the film into rational thinking and rational perception, because usually we are in the cinema, we On the Internet, on our mobile phones, when we watch a movie in any medium, we probably take away only a sliver of unfinished love, probably we don’t really think about the answer, probably not really to savor it. But even so, I think everyone will feel very, very strongly that in this film, it is constructed for us, and what it presents to us is a fallen, fallen, and dead yesterday's event.
So attentive audiences, especially those with foreign literary backgrounds, will definitely notice the line of subtitles at the end. I have noticed that almost all film reviews mention the subtitles at the end of the film, and they all say that when watching a movie, you should Stand up and go as soon as the end credits start to roll up, or wait until the main subtitles at the end of the credits are finished. It is a sign to measure a person's basic film accomplishment and even cultural accomplishment. Well, recently, the film industry has invented something that seems to help improve everyone's film culture. This thing is called an easter egg. The person who stood up and walked away disappeared. After the end credits are over, a wonderful episode is attached to you. . However, I would like to remind everyone here that you must wait until the final list of technologies appears, and then you can leave when they appear, otherwise you will really suffer losses.
Well, the audience I watch this movie is very well-bred, so everyone noticed that there is a line at the end of the credits saying that this film was inspired by Zweig.
Then this subtitle itself seems to be an easter egg, and the easter egg generally reminds us where the atmosphere of the whole film comes from.
So everyone thought of Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", Zweig's description of Europe in the 19th century and Europe in the 20th century, and Zweig's tragic life experience. As a Jew, Zweig experienced the ups and downs of exile in the tragic history of World War II, the exile he experienced, and the tragedy of his life when he finally took poison and committed suicide in a distant foreign country in Brazil, and for Europe. From here, people think of another thinker about Europe, about European cities, about the crisis of modern civilization and the demise of modern civilization, Wolfban here.
Well, I said that even if we leave with only a trace of emotion, we will feel that the film is calling for a world of yesterday, but, but I think this film as a cultural meaning, and the cultural interpretation that the film may provide And criticism is also here. It is that it has been very successful in creating an extremely beautiful, clean, and independent world for us...
Well, in a high-fidelity cartoon-like space imitated by the medium of the film, he is doing this when he walks through what used to be two completely different art styles that are related to each other and completely different. Well, not only that, this is a work photo, you can take a look at it, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is a scene film, just a scene film, then behind it is the so-called most important shooting method of today's movies called green screen synthesis. Today's movie actors are very great, very sad, right? They are forever running around in a house covered with green cloth, making all kinds of horror, panic, and not even a rival actor, because in the end his opponent needs to be drawn by the computer and 3D Stunts synthesize him.
Well, we say that this is a very important basic feature, that is, in Wes Anderson's films, his cartoon paintings, his cartoon style itself constitutes a high degree of media justice at the same time, the media's Qualification, the consciousness of the medium, but at the same time the presentation of this medium not only constitutes Wes Anderson's visual characteristics, his aesthetic style, his personal style, but also constitutes an important part of the film's meaning.
Speaking of which, it's a bit of nonsense. This nonsense is, one of the things I like to say that I like to laugh at is that I sell onions, that is, the Russian formalists say that a work of art is an onion, our intuitive feeling is that there is form and content, we As long as the form is stripped away, we can get the content. But for a work of art, a layer of skin is peeled off, and a layer of skin is encountered, and at the end it is still skin. Does this mean that works of art have only form? No, there is no content that does not attach to the form, and there is no form that does not attach the content. Among works of art it is completely impossible to distinguish.
When we grasp Wes Anderson's childish innocence and deliberately immature ourselves, we have already begun to grasp what he wants to express, what he wants to convey and what he wants to share with us. A thing that is a story or a meaning.
Okay, let's not go into the first one, let's say the first level is the cartoon, right? It is true that many pictures are drawn, and many of his pictures are a combination of drawn pictures and live-action performances. Everyone must remember that one of the very interesting and absurd scenes in this movie is that the protagonist Gustav finally escaped from prison. out, right? In the prison break scene, we can think of many prison break movies, right? His tribute is very clear, well, when Gustav finally escaped from prison, then when he and zero met, the two began to say that he didn't bring his perfume? This is absurd, even if you bring me food or water, it is logical, this is perfume can't stand, you didn't bring me perfume, then under the absurd dialogue, the two run away, right Bar?
After hearing the siren of the police car all the time, the two talents began to escape on their legs, which is impossible in all realistic logic, and everyone noticed that at this time, the director strengthened the characteristics of his live-action cartoon, right? He uses a large panoramic screen, and then dispatches the front camera horizontally, right? The two people fled in the panorama like silhouettes.
Well, I said that everyone will definitely remember such a scene, then in such a scene, we extend the second level of the film's formal characteristics. If you have watched some movies, you must be able to intuitively realize this movie. A very special place is that the film uses a lot of basic taboos as the film's visual language. What taboo? It's the horizontal front. Horizontal frontal position, the first taboo.
The second taboo is that you put the front of the camera on the so-called bandleader stand, right? The conductor of the band in the middle of the stage is in the middle of the orchestra pit in front of the stage, and it is a taboo to place it in this position. What is even more taboo, he used the stage to arrange the characters to enter from the left side of the screen and exit from the right side of the screen. OK, so what's the result of this? The screen is flattened. Why is it taboo? It's because the movie is a two-dimensional art that summons the illusion of the third dimension. The charm of the movie is here. We won't discuss 3D movies now. 3D movies complement the third dimension. When it was one dimension, in fact it did not create a different aesthetics than the two-dimensional film to structure the film screen, so today's 3D film is just a commercial gimmick, just a kind of spectacle, and it can't get rid of it. A visual element of cheapness because it doesn't form a different cinematic aesthetic than when the third dimension didn't exist.
Well, let's put it aside first, because the film is two-dimensional, and the film must call for the third creation and the illusion of the third dimension, so the most basic skill of film directors is to use depth scheduling. Therefore, if you are in the first class of the directing department, you will talk about how to schedule actors. Actors must be drawn from the background, and then come to the foreground. In an interior space, you must set some elements in the middle and long shots so that the audience can feel the depth of the picture. He will definitely tell you that you'd better put a window in the middle shot, hang curtains on the window, and blow the curtains with a fan in a very kitsch way, so that the audience can feel that the space has depth. And Wes Anderson did the opposite, frontal level camera, frontal camera level scheduling, theatrical stage-style left and right in and out, but his genius is that he is not limited to such a scheduling form, in his films he Using the depth, he used the camera to advance and the camera to pull away, but have you noticed? We won't give examples one by one. In this movie, when he used a lot of depth, he clearly used the depth to schedule the camera. When exercising in depth, what does he cooperate with at the same time? He also cooperates with the nesting of picture frames within a picture frame formed by the picture itself. It's me pushing forward and I have a counter in front of me and a door behind the counter, more typical, you remember the porch, the hallway, and then the colonnade of the hallway forms a nest, and there's an elevator door behind the nest.
So as the camera moves forward, I'll talk about an interesting description of the movie later, which is my own viewing experience, and an expression that I've found when trying to describe it, that the movie is always It is creating a slight sense of dizziness for the audience. This slight vertigo has a visual and psychological experience of being swept away by something swirling.
When a camera like this is pushed forward, it is facing a nest in a space that has been horizontalized, so he is very clever not to simplify the movement of the camera in his visual lens language, but The way each different camera moves just reinforces the flatness. We can watch a few groups, and everyone knows that Tilda plays the countess - the heroine in the story is very funny, there are young lovers in it, but the main Romans of this story is the hotel owner and this old woman , "love" between an 84-year-old woman in her eighties. The quotation marks, it's not that old people can't have love, it's that the love in this story is very interesting, and very sincerely full of inclusions, right?
I like two dialogues and two paragraphs in this story. The first paragraph is when the reluctant old lady left Gustave and said you go to the church to light a candle for me, and then Gustave So shrewd to order zero, right? Use 1/5 of the candles, buy me dessert for the rest, and donate the rest to the shoe shine boy. This is different from the exaggerated exaggeration of the affectionate and affectionate man a moment ago. This is an image of such a shrewd philistine, or it can actually be discussed a lot in this film, so I won't expand it. In this film, the best thing that Wes Anderson has grasped is that he is very on the one hand. Successfully organize his visual language, organize his story structure, and very clearly push his visual language story structure to a meaningful expression he expected. But on the other hand, he is highly aware of the problems that his own expression of meaning may carry, so he uses self-deprecating ways to stop our mouths.
For example, in a small scene, everyone remembers zero going to buy a newspaper in the morning, right? Very standardly dragged the newspaper to be read to the guest, then walked halfway and glanced at it and started running, running back, and then ringing, calling Gustave off his guest's bed, and showing him A newspaper, the camera used a small pull, pulled down from the top, pulled from the first title to the second title, the first title is that the war has broken out, the invaders have broken through the borders, this is a major event, this is news, this is It's history, it's the 20th century, pull it down, it's the lady who died, and then the shock response of the two, the master and the servant, is the second piece of news, this is the master and servant of the story, it's such a tragic moment, that The huge history is just to set off a small dark fairy tale, which is a very clever and very clever narrative technique by Wes Anderson.
Okay, so let's see in this story, it's an interesting thing, and then we just said alright, Gustav said we have to go and pack up now because she needs me, and then the next dialogue It became that he should probably leave something for his old friend? On the surface, it is not for the lover's funeral, but in fact it is to the will. Later, the director mocked the family members of the old woman with this kind of face mask. The sons actually had the exact same purpose. interesting place.
Okay, let's come back and let's talk about the frontal level camera, so of course this scene is the most prominent in this group of pictures, not only is the front camera level scheduling the dramatic stage, but everyone noticed that it also uses a feature film that is absolutely not allowed. , although it is often used since postmodernism. What is it, the actor walks directly forward, the actor looks directly at the camera, the most popular and vulgar joke of the film studio is called "Looking Bad", you look at the camera, if there is any actor in the scene, he Whether it is intentional or unintentional looking at the camera, this piece of film is all discarded, and this time the shooting is all discarded. The reason is that as soon as the actor goes up to the camera, he looks at the audience. Once the audience feels an intuitive communication with the actors' vision on the screen, the closed world of illusion of film is broken.
So the basic principle of a feature film is that one actor is going to pretend to be a fish in an aquarium, that is, they swim freely and never care about the onlookers outside the glass and the eyes of the onlookers. But the other big taboo in this movie is that he uses a look-ahead lens, he uses a look-ahead lens, but Wes Anderson is not that pioneering.
Deviating from this point, when the Chinese director was very clever, Feng Xiaogang shot a millet in "Assembly", leading the soldiers of the Nine Company to the last moment of death, he turned back and grew upwards in an instant. So let's not discuss the meaning of the lens, come back Wes Anderson's brilliant is that everyone noticed that one of them is particularly clear that zero is looking at the lens, but then we understand that our camera pretends to be a mirror, so he is not looking at the lens, He is looking at himself. In this scene, he asked the hero and heroine to look at the camera, but then he used a completely symmetrical reverse shot to look at the camera, closing up such a moment that has actually broken the illusion space. Re-compromising the norm is a game Wes Anderson is very good at.
So everyone's attention is like this, I used that work photo, it's the lens position you rarely encounter, we can shoot close-up of the actor in such a close way, but we rarely put it on him On the opposite side of him, we will definitely not put it on the opposite side of him, or such a picture, everyone appears repeatedly in the movie, completely frontal camera position, completely horizontal camera position, the depth of the entire space is not important, or it is compressed .
Well, another thing, if you have read the information of this film, you will already know it, so I will tell it quickly, I don't know if you are aware of it when watching the film, if you are completely unaware when watching the film To, a little regret.
Another Wes Anderson game in this movie, a coup, a very delicate structure, which has never been seen in a movie before, is the use of different screen sizes in one movie. Everyone should know that at one time the movie was the standard screen of the golden section, it was completely the frame, the edge of the viewfinder of the movie camera, the edge of the screen when the movie was shown, right? He directly translated it into a picture frame in Chinese. The earliest film was based on the golden section method, because the pictures of the film were imitating classical painting and imitating classical painting.
Then in the 1960s, television came along. TV screens are the golden section. When TV hit movies, one of the struggles, one resistance, and one unsuccessful attempt of the movie was to use the wide screen. What is the basis for the wide screen? It is the theoretical effective field of view of the human eye. Don't you put the golden ratio frame of the TV's small size there? I give you a picture full of vision.
Therefore, the 1960s was the era of wide-screen historical dramas. Later, people discovered two aspects of wide-screen. On the one hand, people found that theoretically, the limited space of human vision is not the real limited space of vision. We can see such a large space. , but it is impossible for our consciousness to receive the information presented in such a large picture. So people set a wide screen according to the dual parameters of psychology and physiology, but the human eye is limited. It is the so-called 16:9, blackout screen.
Today, many of our digital cameras and our mobile phones are adjusted to a choice of 16:9. So since the 1990s, the most mainstream scale style of movies is this picture. Well, I won't talk about today's movies, there is another type of IMAX, giant-screen movies, once the characteristics of each size, the model of the camera and the size of the film are required. Therefore, each era has a type of film frame, and every time a film is made in each era, we can only have one type of film frame, otherwise it will be too expensive. And as this format is eliminated, it is very difficult for us to get it back.
I shoot widescreen cameras, we're going to look specifically for film that makes widescreen, and I'm going to look specifically for it, and Wes Anderson played a great game in this movie, which is that in this movie there are three kinds of Picture format, so I specially took screenshots for our speech, because otherwise you won’t feel it, and you will notice that the first level, the so-called present tense, uses a 16:9 masked widescreen, a masked widescreen .
Then the story goes back to the writer's recollection in 1985, using a blackout screen, in 1968, a wide screen, and then the story goes back to the 1930s, using the golden ratio standard screen or classic screen, two intentions From this form emerges extremely naturally. The first intention is that in this film, he uses this changing frame to form a kind of call to historical memory. When I see this standard format, I think of the golden age of cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s. When I see the widescreen, I think of the 1960s and early 1970s. At the time, I basically don't feel it, because all the movies are blackout screen. Each medium carries a sense of history or each medium creates a history.
When I was discussing the classic adaptation of classic literary masterpieces, I raised this point of view. In fact, the movie reminds us that we can never truly reproduce history, history cannot be re-arrived, the moment of history, It is we who cannot revisit and re-arrive today, because we have not yet had a time travel period, so far I have not surpassed the speed of light, so time is one-dimensional and time is an absolute river of life that does not flow backwards.
So how can we successfully reproduce history under such a prescriptive limitation today?
A simple way is to use the reproduction of historical media, so there are several levels of reproduction of historical media in this film, one of which is the frame size. The presentation in the 1930s uses the frame of the 1930s, and the presentation in the 1960s uses the 1960s. Format, today's presentation uses a letterbox. Not only that, everyone noticed that the basic tone of the three spaces is different. In fact, the fairy tale feeling of the main body of the 1930s story also comes from the nostalgic old yellow tone on the one hand, which is very warm. But on the other hand, this warm tone is by no means the old tone of realist classical painting, but a kind of warmth with strong artificial color that can be seen at a glance, and brought out by computer. Bright, such a sweetness. So this is something that everyone may feel when watching the film, or it is easy for everyone to find it first when looking for information.
Then we will say that the interesting thing about this movie is that it adopts a nested narrative structure, and I am afraid that friends who watch this movie will notice this. I mean when the movie starts, it evokes a sort of slight vertigo in me because the story starts out as a cemetery, right? A very oddly dressed, what is the association it evokes? It's ex-Eastern Europe, right? An oddly dressed girl walked into a cemetery, and then walked to a tombstone. Later, everyone could see it clearly on the PPT. The head portrait of a deceased person in the cemetery, and then a book was turned over. On the back cover of the book was the author's photo, and then the time was pushed back, and the spaces were nested. We have a writer, because at the beginning of the story, the tombstone is death and people pay homage to him, and then the writer is still alive as time goes by. The writer looks directly at the camera and speaks to the camera as if he is being interviewed. Talking to the camera, the writer When talking to the camera, the time continues to go backwards, and I enter a story about myself told by the writer. In 1968 he entered the abandoned Grand Budapest Hotel, which had fallen into disrepair, met the mysterious and eccentric owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, pushed on, and then the narrator of the story was from the writer telling his own story and the writer telling his own story. The writer, telling the story moves to the writer telling his own story. The characters tell their own story before we get into the main body of the story.
Right? This boss, the zero of the year began to tell his own story, so I think when I watched it for the first time, it was a strong intuitive experience, it is a constantly advancing nested narrative that leads us into the depths of the vortex structure. And there is a small detail that seems to have no material to mention, but it is very obvious, that is, from the sculptural form of the tombstone to the photo form on the back cover, from the photo form on the back cover to the self-narrative of a living writer who seems to be a documentary. Form, when time continues to push back, we enter when the writer tells a story in his life, the writer is replaced.
Everyone pays attention that the first writer is not played by Jude Law, which depends on Wes Anderson's ingenuity, right? Originally we didn't have to worry so much, why should we change it at this time, and play with two different big stars and two obviously different faces, because he wants to highlight when the story is pushed to the second nest, the third nest when it's already a story, right?
The film promises a so-called real space and pushes forward the so-called documentary style, but it is no longer a moment in real time, and then when he pushes forward again, he pushes into the writer's story, he pushes into That book called The Grand Budapest Hotel, a novel, right? The girl was reading a novel called "The Grand Budapest Hotel". It entered the novel, and in this novel, it set up a first-person character, the zero of the year, but zero was not telling his own story. It's a side story. The protagonist of this story is Gustav.
And then you notice that the story goes back, the story goes in, and the story goes out again, forming a big flashback structure that goes head to head, right? He went in from one set, he came out from another set, and finally returned to the girl's destination to read the novel "The Grand Budapest Hotel", which is the most basic and most exquisite narrative structure of this film.
Well, I have actually said just now, I said that the spatial setting of the horizontal scheduling of his horizontal camera itself is a nested spatial relationship, and then its narrative structure constitutes a nested narrator relationship.
In fact, if we look at it from this point of view, this film is a whole with a structure that mirrors each other, accommodates each other, and nests each other. Each level is isomorphic, and each level exists as an independent unit. In such a way, is a very complex and delicate structure. In fact, this still is also an important picture in the film, which can itself become a signifier of the film or an entrance to interpret the film. Because we all noticed that there is a painting and a painting in this picture, and this painting is also the most important plot element in the story, called "The Boy with the Apple". In this interjection, Wes Anderson created a painter, who combined the names of two German painters into a new painter's name, forging a famous painting with the style of the two German painters.
And then the most absurd, the most comical thing in the movie in this story is the character Gustave, who starts reading poetry at any inappropriate time, right? Then his apprentice zero is also very good at reading poetry, and then there is a very sour, very grotesque, not very sentimental feeling. Every poem was forged by Wes Anderson. It was forged based on the poetic style of the romantic era, so you must not look it up. Probably the most proud thing about Wes Anderson in this movie is that after people watched this movie, they said where did your poem come from? I have read. Wes Anderson is especially happy, because he makes a joke of everyone, so please don't make this mistake, let me remind you first.
Well, back to this picture, you all noticed that in this picture it contains a picture frame, and the picture frame in the picture frame contains a complete image, but at the same time in this picture frame he has The watcher, the watcher is the watched, right? Gustav is looking at the painting, but he is also showing the painting and he is being watched by zero, right? This structure is very clear to everyone, but please pay attention to the small make-up mirror next to it, the small make-up mirror on the right side of the screen, do you see it? On the vanity mirror, zero is shown as the audience audience. This is a more complex visual nesting structure than the maid of honor that Foucault has analyzed, and it can be a signifier of what I would say is the narrative and visual structure of the entire film.
Well, I have never been able to grasp the time very well, and probably this time I did not grasp it well. We said about its situation analysis, or about its situation points, we made some hints, and we can enter into the discussion of this film. I said that in this film, it has a lot of very delicate details, very rich details, and the creation of those details, the realism of the details, the texture of the historical life provided by the details are all very strong , but at the same time this film can be called a film that has nothing to do with reality, a fictional country, a fictional era, a fictional war, a priceless heritage story composed of a fictional famous painting. Not only that, have you noticed that one thing that is extremely deliberate for Wes Anderson in this movie is that almost from the beginning to the end, unless the plot happens absolutely impossible to choose, all the characters are in one set of clothes , all the characters have one set of clothes, and this set of clothes is in the midst of ice and snow. I saw some work photos that are very interesting, that is, the entire film crew is wearing down jackets and leather hats, and then the main actors are wearing thin clothes, obviously this is Extremely deliberate.
The whole story is kind of once upon a time, right? A telling is a story, a tell. So when I say it's a dark fairy tale, we say it's a cartoon, and when we say it's a dark fairy tale, we're right, and we're not completely right. In fact, the nested narrator structure brings out the film. Another huge autonomy and a huge reflection and foresight. So what is it? We can also think of the film as a story about storytelling. In this film, he brings narrative, narrative, and narration back to his origins. That's one of the reasons people who talk about the movie often talk about Walter Ban, the reason for the story. storyteller. The story is a form of face-to-face telling, and the story is an interesting, physical presence of the person and the audience. So why does it make sense to say that in this film, it makes sense to return to such a structure. One, it reminds us again how the story came about and what purpose will the story serve? Why does that story exist in our civilization? From another angle, I think this is a comfort that Wes Anderson gave to himself and to filmmakers all over the world.
Saying that no matter how the world changes, people still need stories, people still need to sit and listen to a captivating story, and for them it's one level and another, when we talk about storytellers, when we talk about storytelling and listening When we tell the story, we are actually talking about the confrontation between the physical person and the physical person. So why is this reminder important at this moment? Whether or not film dies because of the death of film, and whether the art of film is only a miraculous influence of the very brief 100 years of the 20th century and will be gone forever, depends on one unit. This unit is accompanied by the death of the movie, will the cinema die?
The day the cinema dies, the movie dies. Because when we all don’t need theaters or watch movies in theaters, or today the technology is fully mature, and the production cost of hardware technology is not extremely high, one thing, a simple helmet , we bring him, we enter the virtual theater, we can watch giant-screen movies anywhere in a bucket, we can choose whether I watch the wide screen or the normal screen. So the problem is not the scale, the problem is not the magnitude, the problem is not the intensity of the spectacle, the problem is that the cinema has actually become a modern assembly space in the 20th century, a microcosm of human society in the 20th century. Lonely crowd.
Each of us is an individual, each of us watches movies alone, we secretly share the joys and sorrows on the screen, but at the same time maybe you are still holding your lover's hand, you are still grabbing popcorn from your friend's pocket, you are still calling friends If you invite friends to the theater, you will still meet in the theater, no matter what, it is a space for physical gatherings, which is the biggest problem of digital transformation.
The digital transformation is being completed, the final cut of modern individualism and modern individualism and modernity and the individual, and we don't have time for this topic. Another movie I mentioned on many occasions last year was called Hull, The Untouchable, Lover in the Clouds. The beauty of this movie is that it's a one-man show, right? The heroine is just a voice, a one-man show, a man-machine love, a certain frustrated middle-aged man fell in love with his computer service system, how absurd, how ridiculous, how sad, but my experience of watching movies is that it As a love story that touched me deeply, deeply moved me. Then the horror of this movie is that when I walked out of the theater, I had two unpleasant associations. The movie was very warm and the movie was very moving, but when I walked out of the theater, there were two unpleasant associations.
The first is, is this day very close to us, this day is necessary for human beings, human beings have finally completed a great miracle, that is, men love women, women love men, we need to love each other Yes, we need company, no one can really endure loneliness, but how hard it is for modern people to endure the other. If we really use digital technology to realize a perfect narcissistic heterosexuality, how wonderful the world would be. right. But how terrible the world is, because human beings are so dense, the earth is so limited, human beings exist, and this species has existed since its existence as a collective animal, a gregarious social animal. If we completely divide ourselves, what kind of future is this?
The second association is a bit funny, but the second association is more deadly. When I was moved by this story, an unpleasant thought came to my mind, and I said that everything is fine, but if the power goes out Now, the next thought is a bit scary. I said that if there is no more calls, then there will be no electricity? If our energy is exhausted. Later, I had a funny and funny idea. I said that from today onwards, I will not only back up my files, but also print my files, and print out my manuscripts, otherwise one day it will be When it becomes a pile of waste, where is my life's labor? As a result, when I was chatting with a friend of mine who is doing nuclear physics, but anti-nuclear and anti-nuclear energy, he told me very indifferently, don't bother. Not to mention that if there is no call, he said that if there is a power outage, if the power outage continues for 8 minutes without any compensation measures, the cores of nuclear power plants around the world will melt. All Fukushima, all Fukushima, in other words, the end is coming. That is another story, about the great breakthrough of our civilization and the great crisis that our civilization is facing. That's why I keep saying that it doesn't matter if I don't like the movie Little Times, the important thing is that Little Times is a wrong order. Friends here, you are born in a great era. I do one good deed every day. I pray that I will die before the great era comes, but all of you will be alive. Then this great era lies in the key breakthrough of modern civilization. The social revolution of digital transformation, the biological revolution is coming. Humans, truly established God at this moment.
It's been a long time since God was declared dead, and this time it doesn't matter whether God is dead or not. All the things that were once described as the authority of God, we have access to today, and this is truly a great time. But at the same time, the price paid by this civilization itself has now reached its critical point. In 2014, everyone must have noticed a data, that is, the carrying capacity of the earth has been broken.
Another topic comes back to our "The Grand Budapest Hotel", I said in a story like this, it doesn't care about authenticity at all, right? The characters wear single shirts, the characters wear eternal clothes, and then they travel through various scenes, and then the characters travel through all kinds of impossible, and every moment is recorded. It's an amazing movie. Did you notice that in the monastery is Mr. Chef from the Grand Budapest Hotel? He said left to right, right? What kind of cable car stops in mid-air to change people, all impossible, what it creates is a system under the premise of virtuality, under the system of fairy tales where storytellers always meditate on themselves, our psychology, our permission, But I say it's here that we're going to talk about a sweet, a story that doesn't seem to have anything to do with reality, and how it caused such a huge stir in the whole movie scene in 2014, because it's not the first time Wes Anderson original behavior. In fact, the most important criticism of this movie comes from saying that you are repeating yourself, you have had enough, we have had enough, your level camera, through the wall, right? It doesn't matter when you pass a room, just walk right through the wall and say we've had enough of you, a computer-modulated bright and sweet color like you, it's not fresh. You've been repeating yourself for far too long. In other words, it is not simply sweet, it is conquering the whole world with its form, with its ingenuity, with its cleverness, obviously with this series of art forms that Wes Anderson is already familiar with, What kind of story, what kind of meaning, what kind of cultural appeal, and what kind of pairing will arouse the vibration and resonance of the hearts of different audiences in the scene. So I said that in this sense, I chose this film, and I felt that it was necessary to regulate this thing.
And from the very beginning, I gave you a topic that was a little too academic, saying "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and the position of subjectivity. So when we're in such a technical discussion, we can go back to nested storytellers again. We say that when we use language to describe such a narrative structure, we can do many, many tongue twisters, and we can take the opportunity to show off our eloquence and say that we have turned our tongues and knotted them when we see them. I can't read it.
It's a story about a reader reading a novel, about a reader reading a novel and starting to pay attention to a novel writer. Then the story of the novelist comes on stage due to the reading of a novelist, and the novelist tells you that the story he tells is a story he personally experienced. He listens to a story, and in the listening story the teller of the story he listens to tells him a story of someone else.
Well, let's say it's an elaborate narrative structure, it's a complex narrative structure, it's about talking about word of mouth, about the characteristics of the story, about the characteristics of the narrative, about the original origin of human culture , these are all true.
But let's go back to the specific identity. In this film, a real subject, the main and important narrator, is the zero in the story. I don't think everyone has any objection. The whole story is told by zero. Not only is he a gimmick-style narrator, because sometimes the narrator in this kind of story is set up like a gimmick in the movie. Let's recall "Red Sorghum", "Red Sorghum" has a desolate voice-over at the beginning. Say I tell you about my grandfather and my grandmother. After a long time, some people believe it and some don't, right? It has a voiceover, there is a characterised narrator there, but the narrator disappears when you actually get into the story. And in this movie, zero isn't just an important character, right?
The protagonist runs through the story, and everyone notices that this form of storytelling runs through the entire work. It was in this movie that I saw a film that used direct quotations for the first time. Everyone noticed that they didn't notice the story The characters talk on the screen, and then I say this movie is really good, and then I say over the line: He said. Do you remember this paragraph? In the film it has been using direct speech, in other words, it maintains a direct speech in the first-person narrative in the inherently objective third-person narrative of the film. Back, I emphasized that in this story the narrator is a narrator, but the most important narrator throughout is zero, the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel today.
So, what is the role of zero in the story? An immigrant, an immigrant, an illegal immigrant in a fictitious country, his homeland is always vague, always vague. In other words, in this movie, we simply wrote three characters on his forehead and called him an outsider. This is a story from an outsider's point of view, what he saw, participated in, described, and recalled. , a story, the protagonist in the story he tells should be, in a sense, the real subject of the story, as well as the subject of the history in the story.
Right? Gustav represents the world of yesterday, and Gustav represents the Grand Budapest Hotel. Gustav represents the beauty of a fallen past that the Grand Budapest Hotel symbolizes. But the story is told by outsiders.
Let's come back and watch this movie again, we will find it interesting, I said at the beginning that we should watch this movie intuitively, saying that this movie is very European, but we were very surprised to find out that this movie was made by an American director Yes, it's not your average American director, it's a Texas American director. It’s very interesting to say this. The two films that have entered the competition in many Oscar film festivals this year are “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Boyhood”. “Boyhood” is a story about Texas, USA, and I’m not here. Expanded, everyone should understand that Texas, as the West, as the last United States, occupied the land from Mexico, as cowboys, cowboy culture, gold diggers, the space of the American West, in a sense, it symbolizes a It's an American culture, but it's also always the edge of America, it's not New York, it's not Boston, it's not even Los Angeles.
So an American director tells a fascinating European story, and a viewpoint like the one we just talked about, the viewpoint inside the text within the sentence, forms a structural reconstruction. This is again a story told by an outsider, a story told by others, so-called the other, by others. The story told by others is a subjective imagination about the cultural value of historical life.
Well, it seems like I'm being too philosophical, and people are starting to respond to me with slackness and silence. I have no choice but to go on, and I can no longer organize completely different ideas. Then everyone will notice that in this movie, we will return to that form, the nested structure at the beginning of the movie, from the beginning to the end, In fact, the place where it is linked end to end is about books, about reading, about reading, so between books and reading, between readers and letters, between readers and authors, a multi-level subject and object, self and other, have formed. interrelationships.
So when I said the title, and gave The Grand Budapest Hotel and the subject location, the subject I wanted to talk about was of course Lacan's subject. What is Lacan's subject? That is, the position of the subject in a political-historical structure of a society, a history, is an I-he structure. No subject's position can be formed by the ego, and no subject's position can be premised on the complete exile of the other. The acquisition of a subject position is formed by the inclusion of the other in the self-life, self-society, self of a culture, the way of summoning by reference, and the way of exile by reference.
So in this movie, there is a very interesting outsider on multiple levels, telling other people's stories, and outsiders telling other people's stories, let's go back to saying that zero tells Gustav's story, is an outsider The Outliers successfully outline and describe the process of a cultural subject diagram.
Then everyone noticed that there is still a role in the plot itself, because this outsider eventually became the real master. He's Gustav's apprentice, he's Gustav's heir, he's the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, and in the end he said that he sold his million-dollar fortune, bought this doomed to bankruptcy, and put all his money into it. To the doomed Grand Budapest Hotel, and waiting for it, in other words, Gustav is the last guardian of this lost ancient kingdom. In this story, he is constantly emphasized that he is an immigrant from an unknown place. He lost all his relatives in the war, burned everything and nothing, and called himself zero.
Not only that, when this character first appeared, when the current manager of the Grand Budapest Hotel introduced him, he said that he was the one we all probably guessed was the United States. He was a new immigrant, right? He is a successful new immigrant, and he also puts on, and constantly strengthens it, such a state that outsiders enter and occupy such a state.
Well, we don't need to say, we don't expand it to other levels, each level we will find different... Subject and object, at the same time, it is such a process. From this level, I think it is very interesting. This is a global opportunity in today's globalization era, which is the fragmentation of our subject and the fluidity of our subject identity and the diversity of our subject identity.
The biggest problem in today's era of globalization is that nothing is more important than this era for us to identify our own subject functions, but there is nothing more complicated or difficult than this era for us to determine our own subject identity. Because in each different circle, we get a data about a different self and other self, we get a different perception of the self, I just give an example, when 911 happened, it was destroyed by the whole world at that time. When they are ridiculed, the president can stand on the stage and say, they are bad people, they are evil, they say we are positive people, so they call it Muslims, Islam, aliens, and people of color. to invade us.
But when a series of explosions occurred on the London Underground, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did not do that. There is no way to speak so loudly about them, you and us. What is the reason? The reason is that the makers of the serial bombings on the London subway, many people are indeed of Arab origin, but they are British citizens, and even they have converted to Anglicanism, Anglican. Are they aliens? Are they still ego?
And for these young Arabs and Europeans who have joined IS (Islamic State) today, how are their subject and self-imaginings formed and completed?
Having said that, going back to this example, one of the most interesting situations today is that everyone noticed that the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture for the third year is a Mexican director, a Mexican director, we joked about the Mexican era of Hollywood movies, you guys From a broad perspective, what do you find director Ang Lee doing in Hollywood in recent years? He was most successful in producing almost the most American genres of the most American type. Do you understand what I'm talking about? It is the traditional type of the so-called regional national culture characteristic, which often loses its vitality in the local tradition of its own culture, but it is on the contrary in the strong desire of some outsiders to become the main body, eager to enter the tradition. In the kinetic energy, the imagination of the subject and the expression of the subject have been regained, which is a very interesting global cultural phenomenon today. So I said that in this film, it also carries such a conscious or unconscious, important aspect of the subject culture, which is a level of meaning that I want to share with you.
Another level of meaning that I want to share with you is that we go back to Zweig, we go back to nostalgia, we go back to the glory of the 19th century.
Let's think about how Zweig once expressed it? Zweig, he said it's hard to imagine an era where he said it was a golden age that seemed to be open forever. He said that in this era, people have become so cohesive, so graceful, so calm. One of the paragraphs is very interesting. He said that in this era no one believes that there is war, revolution, and earth-shaking changes. He said that in such a rational age it seemed completely impossible, absolutely impossible. What is he talking about? He's talking about the 19th century, he's talking about the 19th century Hundred Years of Peace, and the 19th century Hundred Years of Peace was echoed, followed by two wars in the 20th century and an era of revolutions that continued throughout the century.
But what is interesting is that today we are at the beginning of the 21st century, what is the main tone of the whole world culture today? It is a post-revolution, a post-revolution. Maybe we are far from a calm and elegant belief, a rational belief that revolution and violence are gone and are no longer possible. But we are living through our rejection of revolution, our farewell to revolution, our denial of revolution, for which we would rather ignore any social experience. This is our world today, why do we refuse to look at society, to think straight, to dare... The problem, the reason is that we don't know what to do, we refuse, cynical refusal to believe that the world can be changed, we even refuse To imagine that the world should be changed. Because the imagination of changing the world is linked to revolution, war, and violence. So we'd rather linger, we'd rather linger, we'd rather have today's era of peace.
Well, let's recall the century of peace in the 19th century, the world's mechanical changes in the 20th century, and the cynicism and helplessness of saying goodbye to the revolution at the beginning of the 21st century. At this juncture, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes interesting and interesting. It re-constructs a pre-revolutionary world in a way that has nothing to do with reality, let us imagine a pre-revolutionary world, I think it is very interesting that we go back to Gustav, we go back to that absurd moment, It was said that after getting out of prison, the most needed thing is the smell of feathers. How can I not bring perfume? And then that secret guild, right? To give them a way to escape, but at the end, a bottle of perfume was given solemnly, and it was in it that I said that the genius of Wes Anderson is that he is always quite extreme, and he ridiculed himself in an ironic way. Everyone noticed earlier that he said he said Gustave used too much perfume, so we smelled the perfume before he came, and the perfume lingered after he left, but the funny thing is that they were on the road of escape, The two of them sprayed perfume desperately, and then he showed off Norton's character and knew where they were, right? It was like leaving a red thread for the enemy, leading everyone to escape.
But when we leave the plot, we come back to find that in t
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