one. Video overview
1. Babel (aka: Babel) This film was produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures, 143 minutes long, filmed May 2, 2005 - December 1, 2005, on October 10, 2006 Limited release in the United States on March 29 with a budget of $25 million, but the actual box office in the United States reached $34,302,937, and the global cumulative gross is as high as $135,330,182. At the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, the film was nominated for Best Picture and Alessandro Gonzalez Inarritu was nominated for Best Director, Rinko Kikuchi / Adriana Barraza was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Guillermo Arriga was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Stephen Miglione was nominated for Best Editing, and Gustavo Sandorara was nominated for Best Music Production. Best original soundtrack; at the 64th Golden Globe Awards in the same year, "Babel" also won six nominations in one fell swoop, namely: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score; at the 59th Cannes Film Festival in 2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the Best Director and Catholic Humane Awards; at the 31st Cannes Film Festival Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Japan Film Academy Awards; Best Film of the Year at the 7th American Film Institute Awards.
2. Produced by Ann Ruark , Alejandro González Iñárritu and Steve Golin , written by Guillermo Arriga and Alejandro Lo Gonzalez Inarritu , director Alessandro Gonzalez Inarritu , cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto , art by Rika Nakanishi and Yoshihito Akatsuka ( Yoshihito Akatsuka ) is in charge. The main cast includes Brad Pitt (Richard), Cate Blanchett (Susan), Adriana Barraza ( Amelia) and Rinko Kikuchi ( Chieko).
3. Richard and his wife Susan traveled to Morocco because of their marriage crisis. Susan was shot in the station wagon. In order to treat Susan, a carload of American tourists had to stay in a small village in Morocco, and the police also raised the incident An investigation was launched for a terrorist attack, but the truth was surprisingly simple. Richard and his wife were stranded in Morocco, which affected the children at home. In order to attend the son's wedding, the Mexican nanny had to let her nephew drive her and the children with her. However, when they came back from Mexico, they met. In trouble, the police suspect she is kidnapping American children, and things start to get out of hand. In Japan, Chieko, a deaf-mute girl, lives alone in a silent world. Her mother's suicide makes it more difficult for her to communicate with her father. Due to her disability, she cannot get the attention of the opposite sex, and her character becomes more and more rebellious. So, she uses her own way to communicate with the world.
2. Video Analysis
1. Play
Since the early twentieth century the film industry has established itself as one of the core features of Western society, depicting the commonly held societal conceptions, and acting as a means of both reflecting on and creating ethnic labels. Its status as one of the core features of Western society, it depicts commonly held social ideas and serves as a means of reflecting on and creating national labels. In American movies, a series of so-called Western Asian images have been created, such as mysterious, debauched, brutal, degenerate, authoritarian, corrupt, antiquated, stagnant, chaotic, evil and other negative characteristics. For example, Fu Manchu and the old man in the opium den with braids in Once Upon a Time in America. For a long time even white people were cast in Asian roles, and these Asian images were alienated through gluing eyes, braids, weight loss and funny accents. But fortunately, since the director of this film is Mexican, his depiction of the "other" in mainstream culture is very moving. Under his lens, Asia is no longer an ignorant and backward regional concept. The debauchery and loneliness in Japan's bustling cities.
The background and meaning of the film's title, the Tower of Babel, also known as the "Tower of Babel", is recorded in Chapter 11 of the Bible. After Noah's Ark, the survivors began to multiply, and they had many descendants. Since their ancestors were the three sons of Noah, the people spoke the same language and made the same sound. They decided to build a tower that could lead to heaven, which aroused the dissatisfaction of God, who messed up the language of these arrogant people, made emotional communication between them obstacles, cultural differences, and unification of ideas , Disagreement, suspicion and quarrel arise. Without a common language, people cannot work together, and the idea of seeing God is naturally put on hold, hence the name "Babel Tower". "Babel" means "chaos" in Hebrew. Director Alessandro Gonzalez Inaritu named the film after "Babel", which expresses the existence of human beings through this allusion. With the theme of various communication gaps and obstacles. Although its story unfolds in four countries and five languages, language is not the primary barrier to human communication. The main theme of the three stories connected by a shotgun in the film is: Cultural stubbornness and prejudice are enough to block the obvious reality, and people's inner differences are the source of estrangement.
The story of "Babel" spans four countries (Morocco, the United States, Mexico, Japan) on three continents, showing the five languages (Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese and Dumb) that the title implies, as human beings Symbols of territory, race and language. The sample selected for this film is representative, not only because the skin color covers white, black and yellow, and the age includes the old, middle and young, but also because the selected countries also include four major grades: the United States, the world's superpower, and the developed countries represented by Japan. , developing countries represented by Mexico, and poor and backward countries represented by Morocco. Linking the above four samples together is a wonderful irony of the world: on the one hand, because of the unequal distribution of wealth and the disparity between the rich and the poor, a spiritual gap is drawn between developed and underdeveloped countries. On the other hand, the satisfaction of material needs makes people’s hearts more empty, and the crowded cities are transformed into castles of material and spirit, imprisoning the soul in it alone, separating the heart from each other, making it more sensitive, More vulnerable, lonelier, more egoistic, more vulnerable. The reason for this gap and estrangement is not the language barrier in the ancient legend, but material wealth: the effect of material wealth, the unevenness of material wealth, and the process of pursuing material wealth. Especially the Japanese branch line metaphor. Japan is like a girl who has no words, no words, no words to explain. She is suppressed to the extreme, her desires cannot be released, and she can only vent her nakedness. Their guns can only be used to hit wild beasts in Morocco, or to put them in their own mouths. The mouth, the failure of this organ, has become the most embarrassing embarrassment in Japan. I'm afraid no one understands this.
We cannot avoid that, in this film, Chieko is an image of the other, an oriental woman, with a special cultural identity. The screenwriter chooses an oriental image as an aphasia from the perspective of many heterogeneous cultural dialogues, which undoubtedly has a bit of symbolic color. On the one hand, it indicates that the East in the eyes of Westerners has an eagerness to be respected and paid attention; On the one hand, and more importantly, it also implies that the East is facing a dilemma of aphasia under the communication situation immersed in Western discourse. Therefore, "Babel Tower" itself may be said to be determined to break through barriers, but this breaking process itself gives people a potential worry about the futility of communication. The oriental image of Qianeko, which is very symbolic, is a metaphor for the living environment of the whole East in the context of Western culture. Chieko's efforts to integrate into the world of normal people have no results, which is very similar to the embarrassing situation of Japan's identity after leaving Asia and entering Europe.
Japan can almost be regarded as the most powerful country in Asia. Its system and national strength are similar to those of Western powers, and it seems that it cannot make up for the difference in certain regional identities. It has always been regarded as an "outsider". Groups are divided into ingroups and outgroups. People form different groups in society, and these groups have different group cultures. The so-called group culture refers to a social group with common cultural elements. Due to her physical defects, the Japanese girl Chieko lost the key to interpersonal communication, the language in the group culture, and thus became a member of the relatively disadvantaged deaf-mute group. There is an insurmountable gap between this subgroup culture and the dominant social culture, and the latter has a great influence on the values, behaviors, and thinking styles of most members of the society. The differences in communication methods and group culture make Chieko lose the living space in the family and society, and the nameless sadness erodes this young life, so she took up the weapon of gender and vented it with behavior that deviates from the main culture of society. : If you don't wear underwear to attract boys, take drugs and dance to pursue your own "happiness". In the final analysis, it is language that separates the deaf-mute group culture from the dominant social culture, and is the dominant factor in the formation of the conflict between the strong and the weak.
2. Characters
Despite the difference, Hollywood utilizes the prop of dressing to portray to the audience that women in the East are different or “Other” from the West, which contributes partially to perpetuate the audience's stereotypes towards the Eastern women. Despite the difference, Hollywood utilizes The props of dressing convey to the audience the message that Eastern women are different from Western women or "other", which to a certain extent contributed to the perpetuation of the audience's stereotype of Eastern women. Just like the appearance of Shanghai women, cheongsams with tight buttocks are bound to appear. When Japanese girls appear in the film, the iconic school uniforms and black diagonal leather backpacks are always indispensable.
Chieko is the protagonist of the Japanese branch, and her styling design is very interesting. In most of the scenes, she wears a black crew-neck sweater with the school badge and a white shirt, but always has two or three buttons unbuttoned and the neckline is open, revealing her white and tight neck. A means of her showing sexual attraction. The short hair looks simple and simple, but there are a few strands of pink highlights. Although Chieko is deaf and mute, and although she has experienced the heavy blow of losing her mother, she still cannot erase her feelings as a young girl. From the two strands of pink hair highlighted on her hair, the pink mobile phone, the pink key decoration, the pink decoration on the bag, the pink short sleeves, etc., we can see her love for pink and her dream for girls. yearning for love. However, due to various reasons, she lacked a life in full bloom. Therefore, she only highlighted a few strands of hair, and her pink short sleeves were also concealed by a black and dark purple coat. The inner desire is deeply suppressed by reality, and these all pave the way for Chieko's excessive behavior in the play.
In her prehistoric setting, she is a girl whose mother committed suicide and cannot communicate with her father. The lack of family affection can't be made up with love. Even with a good face, many boys are scared away because they can't speak. She can only go in and out of noisy social places with friends who are also deaf and mute all day long, and she pretends to be dissolute. In fact, she is a lonely girl who lacks love in her heart.
In the film, Chieko's most important drama movement should be wanton dancing. She danced to her heart's content and released her incomprehensible depression and pain. She gets the pleasure of being recognized by the outside group, but the way she gets is closely related to the dark side of society. People are at a loss in the face of cross-cultural communication problems, and they often encounter obstacles, but the dark side of society has succeeded in a strange way. This is undoubtedly a wonderful metaphor for the director.
Chieko's character is very complicated. On the one hand, she shows her rebelliousness with indifference and boldness towards sex, and on the other hand, she will cry in the arms of the police. She is stubborn, so even though she is constantly getting taunting looks from the boys she likes, she bravely pursues love, from doctors to police officers. At the same time, she is also childish, rebellious and vengeful. As a deaf-mute, Chieko has become a blind spot for discourse in the world of sound, and at the same time, she is an aphasia who cannot have the right to speak. The status of this aphasia makes her adopt a kind of rebellion against the words themselves, and the speculation about the mother's suicide process shows her mockery of the credibility of her own words. Her own words have not been noticed by others for a long time, and Chieko takes an extreme attitude to obliterate the truth of her own words, so the lies she keeps repeating are just her revenge for the sound world that does not really pay attention to her words. The nudity from the beginning to the complete nudity at the end is a symbol of her urgent need to communicate with the outside world. When the shell of communication—language has become illusory, Chieko takes this extreme approach to present her essential self in front of others , these are undoubtedly very tragic.
This poor, symbolic Asian girl kept her lips pursed and her eyes wide open to catch other people's actions and guess their minds. She had to find other channels besides voice to communicate with the world, namely body language. So sign language is her non-verbal means of communication. The misunderstanding of Chieko's non-language in the film stems from the misunderstanding of the meaning of symbols by outsiders. The most basic element of communication is symbols. People use symbols to encode information. Symbols are the carrier of meaning. Without symbols, meaning cannot be transmitted. Symbols are very important to the transmission of meaning. Symbols are further divided into linguistic symbols and non-verbal symbols. Since Chieko in the film is deaf and mute, she can only use non-verbal symbols to encode and transmit information. Rather than the natural multi-meaningness of non-linguistic symbols, it has built a high wall for cross-cultural communication. What Chieko wants to express with her body language is friendliness and closeness, but for people in the outgroup, her actions may have the opposite meaning, so Chieko is often rejected by normal people. The sharing of meaning is very important in cross-cultural communication. If both sides of the communication cannot correctly understand the meanings expressed by each other, this kind of communication is doomed to fail. The experience of Chieko reveals that the misreading of non-language is an important factor that hinders cross-cultural communication.
3. Audiovisual
The film breaks through the traditional linear time structure, and presents a ring structure, that is, a time structure connected end to end. The beginning and end of the film are actually in the same scene. There are no pretentious movie special effects, and there is little background music to set off the atmosphere. The whole film appears in front of the audience in a natural and true image, giving people a shocking original ecology.
(1) Empty lens
After Chieko and her companions indulged in the fountain square, they got on the subway bound for the dance hall. At this time, another empty shot of the subway appeared. The subway is at the front and top of the picture, and there are buildings in the depths of the picture, and they are almost all located below the location of the subway. The light and shadow of the whole picture is composed of the dark night and the light from the window. Just one picture will deeply penetrate the viewer's heart with a sense of oppression. At the same time, it is implied that there is greater depression behind Chieko's indulgence.
In the dance hall, she found that the boy she had a crush on was kissing her friend, Chieko was extremely disappointed and decided to leave early. When it came to the outside of the ballroom, the director inserted such an empty shot: it was an illusory background composed of lights. Before seeing that scene, Chieko thought that she had found someone who liked her, and she was immersed in the happiness of being loved along the way, but all this was immediately broken with the appearance of that scene, and everything was as ethereal as an illusion.
(2) Depth of Field
When the police spoke to Chieko for the first time, the background was all false. When Chieko was rejected by the dentist, she walked alone on the street, and the crowd behind her was blurred. Chieko and her friends were walking on the street, and their backgrounds were all empty.
The depth of field of the picture is very small and the background completely disappears out of focus. This is the best way to express Chieko's hearing loss. In addition to the unique meaning, the shallow depth of field background also depicts a Chieko living in a self-subjective world. Joy, anger, sadness, and joy, no matter what state, Qianhuizi has no exaggerated body performances, and what people will always see is the detached face. The world around him, no matter how noisy, the scenery outside the window, no matter how it changes, the crowd around him, no matter how they look at him, Chieko can completely ignore it. This is the rebellion of youth and the self-expression.
(3) Light
In the scene at the nightclub, Chieko and a few friends came to the crowded ballroom to dance. She was excited to see the boy she liked kissing her friend by accident. In order to emphasize Chieko's emotional change from excitement to loss, the lighting design has an obvious dramatic treatment. As soon as the group started going upstairs, the color of the lights changed from magenta to green. As Chieko starts dancing and enters her little personal world, the colors of the lights start to change to red and yellow, and when she sees her best friend kissing the boy, she switches to a monochromatic flash effect. Creates a somewhat abstract effect. The soft light on the actor's face was just right, setting off the glistening effect of Chieko's face.
(4) Audio
In expressing Chieko's sound, the director boldly used silent sound. Although Chieko is deaf, she was very excited when she followed her friends into the dance hall. However, this is not the case. The appearance of three silent clips makes the audience go out of the illusion and walk into the real world of Chieko. The quiet and even deadly environment forms a sharp contrast with the deafening space of reality, and her sense of alienation and loneliness is reflected.
The first silent clip appeared when Chieko first walked into the dance hall, and the silence was in line with her deaf and dumb physical state. Chieko found out that the boy she liked actually fell in love with her friend, and at this time the second silent clip appeared. Here, there is a crossover of the silent and the vocal, with a quick switch between close-ups and short shots. Here, Silent no longer expresses Chieko's real world, but conveys a shocked state of mind. Like a bolt from the blue, my mind went blank. Reality and the blank brain crossed and flashed quickly, and Chieko took a long time to finally find or accept reality. Then, she chose to leave the ballroom alone and came to the bustling street. A third silent segment appears. No matter how bustling the crowd is, or how loud the electronic band playing on the street is, there is silence in Chieko's world. The use of silent sounds for ten minutes here revealed that Qianezi was in a heavy heart after being hit, and she no longer had the mood to take care of everything around her. Three silent clips, three different moods, vividly express the progressive heart of Qianhuizi, allowing the audience to truly feel a real Qianhuizi.
(5) Pull the lens
Chieko and her father hugged tightly on the balcony of their high-rise building. The scene gradually zoomed out from a close-up view, and the space changed from small to large until it completely disappeared in the urban night sky with flickering lights. At this time, the subtitles read: "Dedicated to children: the darkest night, the brightest light." This pinned the director's high hopes on the children's generation to break the shackles of the world, breaking nationality, skin color, physical condition, and culture. Yes, this and so on the diaphragm. He expressed his belief that the power of love can overcome most difficulties, many obstacles that cannot be overcome, and unacceptable concepts that are too small to be discussed in this world.
(6) Reflection of windows
When Chieko walked to the living room naked, the police did not see her directly, but used a moving lens to the left to imitate the police's subjective perspective of watching the night scene, and then dimly saw Chieko without clothes through the reflection of the glass. Immediately afterwards, a quick flick of the shot was used to depict the police officer looking back in complete surprise and panic. In the dialogue between the two, there has always been a yin and yang face. The two were in a tangled mood at this time, the police were struggling with lust and reason, and Chieko was struggling with loneliness and self-esteem. Complemented by the close-up of the trembling hands and the close-up of the expression after hugging, the police rescued and comforted the lonely and painful Chieko to a certain extent.
(7) Music
After the police and her father had finished discussing Chieko's testimony about her mother's death, the moment she turned to leave, there was a crunch of a monotonous bow moving back and forth on the strings, accompanied by a few crisp percussions, a depressing sound. The feeling of being unable to breathe came up. Although the camera is gradually zoomed out and the characters gradually disappear in the dim light, the melody that haunts my heart is unwilling to fade away for a long time, and it is boring, bitter and long.
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