Text: Savage Five Edit: Mr. Friday Image: Network
Friday's words: Whether it is a film perspective, a narrative method, a way of passing through the level, first of all, they belong to the literary level rather than a pure film language, but most of them are hidden in the camera in front of the frame, and literature is shown through you, me, him and the omniscient perspective. Therefore, most of the things we are going to talk about today are similar to what literary theory is going to study.
So are they different - from the perspective of the film, the perspective directly determines the audience's perception and psychology (such as the subjective perspective that horror movies usually use); the narrative method determines the mood and mentality of the viewer, for example, "The Third Degree Of Suspect" tells you who the murderer is, and turns around to let you see the process. And "The Invisible Guest" is to carry the answer of the murderer in the pocket and show you the truth in the end; as for the path to pass the customs, it is purely an entertainment consideration - in order to advocate freedom, promote the victory of justice over evil, the "Lord of the Rings" has to go over the mountains, 007 has to fly to Paris to London to fly to Japan, Avatar even has to take a spaceship to go to an alien planet... You know, if these things are replaced by literature, the effect is completely different!
With this similar coordinate, let's discuss it with several sets of special sets of films as examples. The reason why they are special is because in addition to telling stories, they are also using theory to explain the problems of perspective, narrative method and clearance path. Comparing them with other commercial films will help us learn film more effectively.
I. Perspective: "Rashomon" vs. "Hunger Platform"
If you've seen Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red, you won't be unfamiliar with the story structure of the Japanese film Rashomon — a murder case in which N witnesses recollect the narration, producing N versions of events that combine into a 90-minute movie.
Obviously, the story and suspense are no longer the only things that the film has to show the audience here, and the director and screenwriter are still showing us the perspective, or more precisely, the subjective perspective of different people looking at the same thing and the same problem. It makes us aware of the problem that the original audience (or reader) will passively follow the subjective narrative of the narrator, and things will change with the narrator. We call this perspective the "narrative perspective."
▲ Stills from the Rashomon film, 1950
From this realization, we can further deduce a conclusion: any story with a single theme or a single ending is subjective.
With this conclusion, let's further extend the concept of "perspective" to see the Spanish film "Hunger Station" released 70 years after "Rashomon".
This time there are no N narrators, and there is also a protagonist in the story, a story line - it is about a man who wakes up and finds himself imprisoned in an enclosed space with countless layers, and every day there will be food passed from top to bottom at regular intervals. In this way, people on each floor survive on the meals that the people on the upper floor eat, and the lower the lower the food, the less food...
▲ Hunger Station Movie Poster, 2019
However, we can still say that the film is multi-perspective, because we follow the protagonist to different "layers" and see the living conditions of different people in different environments. It's like letting us move bricks and nibble on steamed buns all day long, sit in the office and drink Starbucks one day... And in this process, we (as viewers) experience the vicissitudes of life and experience different social classes.
Have you noticed that in the process, the audience spontaneously develops multiple perspectives with the plot. Of course, this perspective is a class identity that is framed under social classes. Let's call it a "class perspective" for the time being.
In addition to the "narrative perspective" and "class perspective" we said above, there are many directions for the film to show the perspective, such as "Eating Men and Women", director Ang Lee shows the lives of three generations of people of different ages and different family identities through a family, and then explains the concept of "family" with different angles, we will call it "identity perspective";
▲ Stills from the movie "Eating Men and Women", 1994
In the "Blue, White and Red Trilogy", Kieslowski interprets three films through the stories of several groups of people from different social classes in France, showing the living conditions of people of different ethnic classes in France, which we call "social perspective".
▲ Stills from the film "The Red of the Blue, White and Red Trilogy", 1994
Multiple perspectives are relative to "subjective", so we can say that if a film produces a pluralistic perspective, then the film is more or less anti-subjective sensibility, and then "theoretical interpretation".
2. Narrative method: "Horror Planet" V.S. "Shaun of the Zombies"
Let's take the contrast between the two zombie films to explain the difference in the perception and effect of different narrative methods on a movie.
First of all, all Western zombie films have one pattern: zombies eat people, people fight zombies. Come and see Rodriguez's Planet of Terror —
▲ Horror Planet movie poster, 2007
The coolness of the hero and heroine, the coolness of the zombie headshot, the excitement of the same enemy everywhere shows the American heroism style, which makes people's adrenalines soar. Of course, the ugly shape of the zombie and the scale of the bloody scene are also indispensable to its effect.
▲ Stills from the Horror Planet movie, 2007
What did the same zombie genre become in the hands of the British? Let's see Shaun of the Zombies —
The zombies here are like drunkards who have pink eye and have not woken up, the protagonist has become two delicious and lazy sloppy dicks, even zombie headshots, and have to tear down their vinyl records as weapons... All of this, people will not be scared to pee, only laugh and cry.
▲ Stills from the movie "Shaun of the Zombies", 2004
The question is, why is the same model, the same persona, the same contradiction against the two sides, some people can shoot the horror and excitement effect, and some people shoot the humorous and funny effect? Obviously, the narrative approach plays a leading role here!
What is the narrative way, it is very simple, I can let a zombie suddenly jump out of behind a normal person in the middle of nowhere, or I can let this normal person meet a zombie on the way to buy breakfast during the day;
I can have a handsome guy riding a Harley hit a zombie in the head from tens of meters away, or I can have a coward pull out a doorknob and count down the zombies.
This is the way the narrative is told – the motivation and the result are the same, but the process and the impact on the audience are very different.
Of course, the narrative methods are ever-changing, which also determines that the same theme story can tell N kinds of effects in the hands of different directors. Love, war, family ethics, crime suspense... This is the case, they are not limited by the story framework and the theme of the story, and focus on the technique of narrative style.
Third, the way through the level: "Lola Run", "Source Code", "Groundhog Day"...
We said at the beginning that The Lord of the Rings climbed mountains and waded through the water, 007 crossed the Eurasian continent, in fact, these things are plainly a problem of the clearance path.
The basic purpose of the commercial film clearance path is to please the audience. In other words, the more peculiar the path, the larger the audience's eyes widen. The more obstacles in the path, the more dangerous it is, and the more exciting the audience looks at it (as for the result, everyone knows that the protagonist can eventually win). The author has contacted many domestic screenwriting teams, and they gather together every day to study this "clearance path". In order to catch the public's attention, they are eager to let the characters go to heaven and earth, move bricks and dung, and make various abnormal moves, regardless of what rationality and motivation.
Off-topic, back to the theme, the three films we want to cite here have different passes paths from the usual commercial films: the main body of their stories is no longer the fantasy scenes and strange moves under the clearance path, and the "clearance path" itself has become the main body of the story to be told, and the entire story is composed of N clearance paths.
Watch "Groundhog Day", it is about a weather forecaster who finds himself doing the same thing repeatedly every day, as long as he falls asleep at night, the morning alarm rings, and then repeats the same plot, repeating each of the same plots, just like this, the audience also follows the protagonist over and over again, and never gets out of this strange circle.
▲ Stills from the movie "Groundhog Day", 1993
Source Code reinforces the concept of suspense on the basis of Groundhog Day—a man who wakes up to find himself in a train, which in turn goes out of the way until it finally explodes. So, the man woke up again, and despite all his efforts, it was still the same scene, the same process, the same result, and the cycle began again and again, until the truth gradually paid the surface...
▲ Stills from the source code movie, 2011
Compared with the first two, "Lola Run" is more direct - in order to rush to the scene within 20 minutes and rescue her boyfriend, Lola has tried tirelessly again and again, failed once, and done again, and the director simply made each tackle soundtrack into a video game style.
▲ Movie poster for "Lola Run", 1998
Do you feel it, not so much watching the director tell a story, but rather watching the character tackle the game. What the director did was just try out the different paths under the framework of the story and show it. Note: This juxtaposition of the display has a completely different effect on the audience than the heroic tackle in commercial films – the latter is to hide the concept of "tackling the key" and make you unconsciously caught up in the game plot, while the former is to make you aware of the concept of "tackling and repeating".
And when the audience realizes the concept of tackling and repeating, it has already raised the movie to the level of a theoretical analysis, which is like looking at the myth of Sisyphus, watching Sisyphus push a large stone up and down the mountain. The sense of absurdity generated by this is a kind of criticism and analysis of "storytelling".
4. Summary
At the beginning, we said that the perspective, narrative method and clearance path of the film are still based on the literary level, and they are basically formed in the process of writing literary scripts. Therefore, commenting on the quality and realm of a movie cannot be completely based on the elements of perspective, narrative method, and clearance path. After all, the film also has its pure cinematic language, such as performance, such as special effects, such as space and so on.
But on the other hand, film is a comprehensive art, it is inseparable from those literature, fine arts, stage drama and other side categories, integration is its way of development.
Pay attention to "Friday Literature and Art" and interpret classic movies