Literature x Movies: When Hometown Collides "Comfort Zone"_Le Yi Tanuki_Sina Blog
Recently, I heard an interesting point about literature and film:
Drama films can be likened to novels, art films can be likened to prose, or poetry collections, and documentaries can be analogous to non-fiction writing.
This view comes from Jia Zhangke.
In the industry for 20 years, he has always adhered to the creation of "author films", and this year released a new work "Swim until the sea turns blue".
Watching Jia Zhangke's films, I never read the commentary spoilers in advance, and walked into the theater with a feeling of opening gifts, like reading a literary work, and maintained a respect for the author's film.
The film begins with a close-up of faces, many ordinary Chinese faces, one by one projected on the big screen, everyone is silent, but successively into the expression of an era.
The camera pushes onto an ordinary old man, beginning to tell the history of Jia Zhangke's hometown , Jiajiazhuang, Shanxi, and then leads to the first generation of writers after the founding of the People's Republic of China: Ma Feng.
Ma Feng, who became famous for writing "The Biography of the Hero of Lü Liang", when he was most proud of his life, suddenly decided to return from Beijing to settle in the countryside of Shanxi, just to complete the task of creating rural life in New China.
The seeds of idealism have since sown green seeds on the barren saline land for generations, Jiajiazhuang has given birth to more writers, and the whole village has been rejuvenated and vitality from the poverty of the twilight.
Since then, people here have regarded literature as a harvest and have continuously held literary celebrations, which has also attracted the attention of Jia Zhangke, who has returned to his hometown to recuperate, and the idea of shooting a literary documentary "Literature of a Village" was born.
The countryside and the city, along with the rumbling footsteps of modernization, continue to fill the world's population flow represented by young people.
The city has become the dream enclave for most rural teenagers.
The film focuses on the three writers of "post-50s" Jia Pingwa, "post-60s" Yu Hua and "post-70s" Liang Hong, who actively or passively choose to become observers of the times, leaving a literary chapter with extremely high understanding and delicate brushstrokes, winning personal fame and living in the metropolis for a long time.
Like thousands of drifters, the reason the three writers left their homeland in the first place was the desire to survive in their predicament.
Influenced by his father's "family composition", Jia Pingwa was repeatedly hindered from applying for various types of work, and with his eyeshot eyes and good writing when he read "Dream of the Red Chamber" as a child, he won the opportunity to go to college by writing slogans, and has since stayed in Xi'an to engage in literary and artistic creation.
In the huge gap between urban and rural life experience, Jia Pingwo vaguely felt the stagnation of creation, so he returned to his homeland, while traveling through the northwest countryside, while standing at the starting point of his life and looking at the world and China, in the cultural upsurge of Chinese and Western fusion, relying on the joy and pain brought to him by rural life, looking for the style and creative ideas of "Impetuous" and "Waste Capital".
Hometown and literature helped Jia Pingwa to clear the fog of life.
Yu Hua's writing began in Haiyan, Zhejiang Province, as a child.
10 years of cultural poverty, incomplete fragments of the novel, giving him unlimited imagination of the story. The experience of taking a nap in the morgue and diving in the sand waves of The Mile provides him with a unique cut to see the world.
The gap in love and career forced dentist Yu Hua to look out the window of the clinic for romance, in order to enter the cultural center of his heart, he began to write novels, after countless creations and rejections, and finally received a telephone invitation from Beijing at the age of 23, straight through the door of literature.
The utilitarianism of youth fame met the great era of literary wealth, which gave birth to the victory of "amateur writing".
Hometown and literature gave Yu Hua the ecstasy of success.
Born in 1973 in rural Dengzhou, Henan Province, Liang Hong went to Renmin University for a doctorate in 2000 and later settled in Beijing to work.
After a long period of research on vernacular literature, there was always a voice in her heart urging her to return to her hometown and write something.
Visiting his homeland evokes the pain of growing up in Liang Hong's heart, which is about family poverty, about his mother's serious illness, about the humiliation and sacrifice of his eldest sister, about his father's temperament and foresight, and about the gossip and materialism of the village.
Revisiting Liangzhuang and searching for the sights and stories of Liangzhuang people across the country have healed the hearts of Liang Hong and his father for many years. She finally recognized the spotless nobility in suffering in the retrospective of writing "China in Liangzhuang" and "The Record of Liangzhuang".
Hometown and literature illuminate Liang Hong's obscure youth.
The fields of wheat are stacked, witnessing the silent growth of the wheat cutters for generations, and the villages are the soil of serious literature, sending the idealists of each era to the city.
In the 1990s, when Yu Hua became popular, the trend of the times changed from literary and artistic grandeur to national business, and many fellow travelers gave up writing, and the light in their eyes began to chase the stock market and hot money.
The literary and artistic youth in the city are gradually consumed by life into middle-aged people who are inseparable from tobacco, alcohol and cards, and are uniformly rounded. Most people, just like this, live a comfortable and tedious life.
The loneliness of writing and the warm boiling of the city once again stimulated him to think about human life, and the famous article "Alive" was born.
Yu Hua, who has achieved fame, has remembered countless times when he was a child, swimming along the tide to the distant and unknown shores, breaking through the yellow sand near the sea again and again, until he broke into the pure blue sea.
Every time he moves forward, he tempers the youthful mentality, allows him to dare to get rid of the family tradition of practicing medicine, bear the blow of being rejected thousands of times, and migrate all the way to the inflection point of fate.
The son of Liang Hong, who grew up and went to school in Beijing, returned to his hometown with his mother to worship his ancestors, listening to the elders talk about famine, plague, and river diversion, as if watching a magic drama in an alien land.
A teenager who loves physics and video games has been silent about his father's past for a long time, just like he said "Henan" in the place of origin column, he will never speak Henan dialect again.
A generation has left, a generation has returned, and only the river of the village is flowing quietly.
"Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" is Jia Zhangke's lowest-rated film in recent years, and it is difficult to give people a specific impression, in my case, it is to add a private account of the restlessness and hometown that must exist in each era.
The city will ignite a person's boiling point and eventually give birth to a legend; and the hometown determines a person's starting point and destination, nourishing the spirituality of literature.