Looking forward to "Roadside Picnic" bringing "Renaissance"

【Culture Tan】

Tarkovsky probably did not expect that many years later, because of such a film, he would be remembered by the large-scale literary and artistic youth in China, and make a distant echo on the other side. It should be the first time that a domestic film has become a popular topic of communication on social media because of the form of a long shot itself.

"Roadside Picnic" is scheduled to be scheduled for 10 days in mainland theaters only from July 15th. From the Baidu index, the search index of "Roadside Picnic", which has a scheduling rate of 1%, a cost of 200,000 yuan, and a box office of 4 million, reached a peak of more than 28,000 in the three days after its release. For comparison, Hollywood Popcorn's crowning work "Batman v Superman" has only more than 170,000 search peaks.

Bi Gan attracted so many sideways glances, in addition to the determination and bravery rendered in his works as an idealist, it can also be regarded as sprinkling the dew of literature and art into an unprecedented era of hunger and thirst. Bi Gan said, "The French quality is very good, because in France, they grew up watching movies and watching works like 'Last Year in Marienbad', and their children watch that." That's for sure, but in the years when Truffaut made Naughty Ghost and Four Hundred Blows, the great Leap Forward had only just begun.

Today, for the first time, the country has more than 600 million people spending an average of 58 minutes a day on a mobile app, and content can be easily triggered by sensational headlines. In Beijing, thousands of miles away from Bi Gan's hometown in Guizhou, consumption upgrading is a hot concept in the mouths of many entrepreneurs and investors in full swing. The strong drive for self-growth and the desire to flaunt at the cultural level have made new media public accounts emerge like cafes on the left bank of the Seine. Tens of thousands of people rushed to the capital airport together in one afternoon to escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in order to fulfill "a trip that can be walked away". Online classical music magazines that teach appreciation to Haydn and Ravel have sprung up in two months.

Just as the hereditary aristocracy always looked down on the nouveau riche, if niche art was popular among the popular population, art practitioners or enthusiasts often not only did not rejoice, but felt indignant and angry that their works that were regarded as standards were misread and exaggerated. In fact, this should be the best of times for art and the people associated with it. No matter what kind of human factors drive the bottom, more and more people will read Borges or listen to Rachmaninoff with curiosity.

For artists, such an emerging audience means better conditions of existence and creation and social status, no matter how much they really love in the end. At the same time, I believe that there must be even one in a thousand teenagers in those crowds, just like Bi Gan of Kaili County town saw "Stalker" for the first time, and when he was wrapped up in front of the great work of art, the five thunderbolts slammed into Mao Setun and threw themselves into it.

Someone on the Internet insisted that if the long shot was removed from "Roadside Picnic", the movie would not have so many opinions. This is obviously a pseudo-proposition that doesn't make much sense, like asking Mitchell if he didn't write Gone with the Wind or not Mitchell. Bi Gan said that the long shot of the long drive straight into the confluence of land and water was "very necessary", just like Kundera's reference to Beethoven's "es muss sein". Chen Danqing once said that all the paintings he painted in his life may not be as important as his introduction of his teacher Mu Xin to a wide range of Chinese readers.

I don't know if Bi Gan will secretly feel in his heart, no matter how those subtropical incantations, those colorful colors, those swaying mirrors, those circles of time and space end up, so many people now know Tarkovsky, this movie is worth it.

After sitting in the huge movie screening hall and watching this strange work, I silently wished the young director, whether by form or content, to bring a renaissance to China's mainstream commercial works.

□ Liu Yuan (Vice President of Investment Management, Zhen Fund)