"Our Years": A tribute to the hot-blooded youth

Author: Zhong Chengxiang (Famous literary critic, librarian of the Central Research Museum of Literature and History)

The film "Our Years" is a positive realist work, which touches people's hearts with beautiful and poetic expressions. This is the greatest value of this movie.

The film depicts a campus life 40 years ago, and conveys the spiritual journey of several college students after the resumption of the college entrance examination in the new era. How to innovate the film under market conditions is inseparable from "Bacon casting the soul": cultivating the roots of the Chinese nation and casting the soul of the Chinese nation's great rejuvenation of the Chinese dream, can not leave the cultural people, with art to nourish the heart, can not leave the emphasis on leading, valuable in self-consciousness, better than in self-confidence. The film should paint a portrait of the times, a biography of the times, and a mingde for the times, and this film has painted a portrait for the restoration of the college entrance examination in the new era and a portrait for the first generation of college students. There are several characters here: the class leader, Cao Zhengchang, is a hot-blooded young man who pursues school with enthusiasm for serving the country, strives for self-improvement, and adheres to his moral bottom line. He was a young man with ideals, ambitions, feelings, and morals, very representative. The other is a gifted teenager who is only 12 years old in school, and this image also has the typical aesthetic value of a specific era. Another is a beautiful female college student, her passion is clothing design, but she was admitted to the industrial machinery major. A small and medium-cost film, through the unique film language to truly and fully portray the image of these college students with different personalities, and then reflect the ever-changing era of change, it is easy to talk about. But the preciousness of this film lies in adhering to the purpose of Bacon casting the soul, insisting that the film is written about people, and the film is to rely on people's emotions, people's minds, and people's interests to impress people, and to cast bacon's soul. Film needs the stimulation of the audiovisual senses, but it must not stop at the pleasure of the audiovisual senses. Mere sensory stimulation is by no means spiritual beauty. Only through the physiological senses reach the heart and sublimate into spiritual beauty can the purpose of bacon casting the soul be realized.

"Our Years" adheres to the correct creative concept and aesthetic value, its story is popular and not vulgar, writing about the ideal aspirations of a generation of young people, pursuing spiritual beauty and consciously abandoning simple sensory stimulation. The film has two plot lines: one is the career line, in the early 1980s, a special group of students studied hard for the rise of China; the other is the love line, the youthful charm of a young and beautiful female college student set off an emotional wave among this group of students. The film writes about the complex relationship between the academic pursuit path of young people with dreams and their love path, but does not simply give either-or value judgments. The squad leader is completely an elderly young man cultivated by China's excellent traditional culture and contemporary culture, and he has not forgotten the country wife who has been sharing happiness and hardship with him in the difficult years. The film writes about his feelings for Quexi, who was about ten years old. It is the hazy feelings of youth, true, clean and pure. If it is written as a sister-brother love, it is not interesting. And Quexi's love for him is the sister's love for her brother. Even if he writes about the creamy young man who is influenced by popular literature and art, the director has a little ridicule for his naivety and innocence, but the overall grasp is reasonable, and he shows his sincerity in the plot of "rehabilitating" Quexi on the school radio station. Films with similar themes often like to show "love triangles", and this "Our Years", which also writes about the love entanglement of young students, is obviously better. What it ultimately brings us is not to inspire desire, but to inspire hope and beauty. After the four main characters in the film graduated, the class leader became a private entrepreneur, and the electrical appliances he produced were known all over the world; Zhao Yishui became the backbone of scientific research in colleges and universities, engaged in high-tech research; Youyou became a translator and writer; Quexi successfully changed careers and established his own clothing territory. The campus, imbued with the spirit of the 80s, nurtured their growth.

This is a small and medium-budget film, the film chooses to build a story narrative from the perspective of young college student Zhao Yishui, and is committed to the creation of the era and environmental atmosphere, and perspective on the unique social mentality and character mentality of that era. The film uses a relatively rich film language, the use of multiple lenses and the multi-change color processing, which sets off the romance and poetry of campus life in the 1980s, and the upward tone has a faint melancholy unique to nostalgic films, showing the unique artistic style of the film. There is no doubt that if Chinese films, especially art films, want to develop, they should advocate such a creative path.

Guangming Daily ( 2022-01-05 15 edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily