Foreword: Aristor's new film "A Midsummer Night's Fright" arrived as scheduled. The clear sky, green grass and singing and dancing in the preview announced the arrival of "Sin under the Sun". Judging from the current comments, It seems that "cult" and "bad taste" will also be two important labels for the director's new work. At this time, it became necessary to revisit the director's debut work. After all, "viewing experience" has always been the key for "qualified" audiences to constantly borrow and understand the movie in front of them. While "Hereditary" and "A Midsummer Nightmare" may be two very different horror films (as the trailers and reviews suggest), it's still important to look back at the former - it at least makes one understand that Ali How Esther was a blockbuster, quickly joining the ranks of Robert Eggers ("The Witch") and Jordan Peele ("Get Out") among contemporary horror film writers.
Note: The short review of a brush can basically be ignored, this long review will be a relatively detailed attempt at style analysis - but it will basically not involve (which many people have discussed in detail) "Paimon King"" "Cult" these (in my opinion) irrelevant "details", this article is only concerned with "why" - "why" Aristor succeeded, and this success is obviously not piled up by a pile of image details about "cult" from.
1. Start from scratch
After an obituary (and the bass that accompanies the obituary), the film's first real shot: a small wooden house (embedded in an out-of-focus window frame), pulled back and out of focus (The hut is out of focus, then the bass comes back up and the loudness is pushed up), the camera pans steadily and smoothly across the room (the bass disappears), and falls on a model cabin, with a spooky mix, the camera slowly advances to the Room section - then son in bed and father coming in to wake him up (the sound goes off).
A most honest and fundamental question is: whose point of view is this peculiar shot? Who is "seeing" the wooden house through the window frame? And who will "see" the heroine's son and husband through the model?
First, a basic theory is introduced, that is, the "stitching theory" ("Film and Method: Anthology of Semiotics") elaborated by Oudal and Dayan.
Odal and Dayan concluded that the "front and back shot" of classic Hollywood is essentially a "stitching system" (forget Mr. The role of ideological ventriloquism is that a positive shot acts as the signifier, and the successive negative shots act as the signified, and the alternate action forms a stitching effect, which cancels the "off-screen stage" caused by a single shot, and bridges the gap in the film space. In short, through the stitching effect of the front and back, the audience will no longer question "who is watching", because "the person who is watching" has all been marked as a "subject of statement (content)", and "the subject of statement behavior" (that is, the narrator who guides the audience) has disappeared and is no longer visible.
While you may (and don't actually) hate the brainstorming of the movie "The Big Theory", there's no denying that (very vulgarly) there are plenty of times when it does work.
Back at the beginning of the film, a basic question is thrown: whose viewpoint shot is this? Answer: I don't know.
And just like that, the traditional suture system disintegrates, the viewpoint shot that fails, and the suture that opens the "crack".
… So what we are facing is no longer the simple reversal of the subjective lens into the objective lens, but the construction of a space of impossible subjectivity that taints objectivity with an indescribably monstrous smell of evil. A thoroughly pagan theology can be clearly identified here, which secretly equates the creator himself with the devil...
- Žižek (this quote isn't specific to the film, but it's miraculously so - so apt)
It can't be easier to understand than this - this is the point of view of the evil "primitiveness" of pre-ontology, and it is also the great Other of the Real (the most simple and clear explanation of the "Great Other of the Real" Think of the stares of those who are behind the world's most popular "conspiracy theories"). This evil god, who is both high and omnipresent, casts his traumatic gaze on the "Doll's House" - isn't it the best portrayal of the so-called "King Paimon"?
While the analysis of the opening is interesting, but not necessarily convincing ("over-reading" so to speak), let's take a few more examples to demonstrate the fact that this visual motif is an unmistakable conscious style.
After the daughter cut off the pigeon head, she turned around and saw the mother outside the school (phantom). Here is a series of switching between the daughter's viewpoint shot and the daughter's face close-up. A similar passage occurs when the daughter is lured out of the room and onto the grass to see the vision and snap her tongue.
At the end of the movie, the son who was possessed (but the evil god has not yet fully awakened and was waiting for the final ceremony) walked to the wooden house, and the audience was first presented with his viewpoint shot (looking down the wooden ladder to the bottom of the wooden house with a strange red light. opening), and then suddenly cuts into a big vision (the son climbs up the wooden ladder)
Doesn't the above-mentioned classic Hitchcock-style lens (subjective point of view-cut-objective lens (essentially "impossible subjective lens")) constitute "the gaze of the great Other in reality"?
Second, the unique "miniature landscape" image modeling.
In several panoramas (the father wakes his son up at the beginning, the son goes to his sister to go to the party, the heroine talks to her son and daughter in front of the door when they leave to go to the party...) All of them form a strong and distinct The "miniature landscape" style: figures and furniture are doll-like, and the panorama forms a peculiar spatial section. I don't know how the film was shot, but it's safe to assume that so-called "tilt-shift photography", a camera lens that can be used to create a "miniature" style, may be used here. What the "doll" model necessarily involves is the inhuman dimension below it - just like Žižek's refutation of Kleist, the "unconscious beauty" of the so-called "puppet show" is nothing but the willful manipulation of the Big Other. An absolute mechanicalness of the film; or to quote a plot in this film: the teacher asks the students: is it worse not to have a choice, or is it worse to have a choice? The latter is clearly recognized in the film: "to have a choice" means despair, it means that "all choices have been realized, there is no other possibility", it means a complete loss of agency - choice becomes a An "empty gesture" - and this is exactly what happens to the heroine: she does everything she can, and she can't escape the abyss.
3. Between the frames
Intuitively, frames are used a lot in the film. This is another unique dimension, and its existence has actually been pointed out in the previous article-"the wooden house embedded in the window frame", why is it in the window frame?
Direct stylistic interpretations would point out that the frame within the frame constitutes some kind of emphasis, "direction of attention" (according to Bordwell's theory), or "closed composition" so on and so forth.
The key content of the painting is not in its visible part, but in the disconnect between the two frames, in the gap that separates them.
- Žižek (still not directly related to this film, but will find it miraculously applicable again)
The "wooden house in the window frame" in the screen creates some kind of over/over, and this over/over is dependent on the cracks between the picture frames - imagine if the picture frames overlap and everything is reduced to ontology When presented as an "objective point of view", will the audience still perceive the evil breath from hell?
Another example: The final shot of the movie is a section of a cabin where a terrifying summoning ceremony of the evil god is being held. Strangely, this section is completely different from the spatial section in the panoramas mentioned above: this section occupies only a small area in the center of the screen, and is tightly surrounded by a large block of thick darkness.
Why?
It is still "between the picture frames", but with a slight change, the "picture frame" is no longer a rectangle, but the outline of the hut. In other words, the "key content" is not the ceremony in the hut, but the depth outside the hut. Measured darkness.
And this boundless darkness, what else can one think of except Hegel's "Night of the World" (the absolute contingency, impossibility, traumatic reality)?
Fourth, the ghost dimension
Looking at the relationship between the heroine and Aunt Joan, there will be unexpected joy: their relationship starts with a set of (standard, over-the-shoulder) front and back shots, and ends with a weird mirror composition: the heroine is standing at the door , Aunt Joan, who was not directly in the painting, was reflected in the mirror in front of the door. She said to the heroine, "You didn't kill her, she was always by your side."
If the interaction between the heroine and Aunt Joan is a narrative that witnesses a journey of delusional disintegration (from "intention to be relieved" to "self-defeating and being captured by a cult"), then Aristé stylistically completes the The distant echoes of this: the positive and negative hits at the beginning signify "successful stitching", and the illusion fills the void of order; the mirror composition at the end is "stitching disintegration" and "ghost dimension" emerges. In Zizek's words, when stitching When it fails (the signifier cannot be anchored), there is only a "ghost dimension" ("small object" - isn't it mirror image?) to fill the unfinished loss. But on the other hand, paradoxically, it is precisely this "ghost dimension" that completes the self-referential ("interface effect") of the suture system of positive and negative fights - when the "ghost dimension" emerges, it is also witnessed by the audience with their own eyes A moment of "phantom" (rather than being captured by the "phantom" that is usually structured in head-to-head play).
A small footnote comes from the heroine's use of the camera (a 180-degree flip in an aisle and an eerie pull in the room) trying to find (already left) Aunt Joan: the invasion of the real and the complete disintegration of the illusion.
5. Spots of the Real
This is one of the easiest to explain: think of the sudden, unintelligible snap of the tongue, and it might be as unbearable as the electronic chirping in Hitchcock's "The Birds" sound effect.
The content discussed in this article is simple and superficial, but it is enough to illustrate the cleverness of "Hereditary Doom": weaving the cult content through a special audio-visual style based on the "Great Other of Reality", behind which, of course, is the movie The author Ali Est has a high sensitivity and accurate grasp of the medium and the subject.
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