We human beings have liked to listen to stories since ancient times, whether it is the myths and stories of ancient Greece or the ancient legends of China, they are all composed of stories. They have survived through generations of oral accounts of storytellers.
With the advancement of science and technology, the way stories are circulated is constantly changing, from the earliest bards, to later writers, to movies and TV series. Compared with traditional texts, the video medium of film presents the story in a completely different way. Therefore, many film and television works adapted from novels are difficult to achieve the same results as novels.
This week's "Moments" is one of the very few works where both the original and the adaptation have been a great success. The original novel, All the Time, creatively rewrote Virginia Woolf's famous novel Mrs. Dalloway. "Mrs. Dalloway" tells the story of a day in Mrs. Dalloway's life, when she is planning a banquet. The entire novel is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, allowing the reader to observe the story following Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts and feelings.
In All time, Cunningham changed the day in the lives of one woman in Mrs. Dalloway to one day in the lives of three women. And these three women happen to run through three important periods of the 20th century.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > 1923: A talented female writer trapped in her time</h1>
The year 1923 was a time when women politicians took to the streets to fight for their rights. This may be the first time in history that women have spoken out en masse to fight for the same rights as men.
Outside London, Virginia Woolf is working on Mrs. Dalloway in a villa where she lives with her husband. Her mental state is unstable, and everyone around her is looking at her with a certain kind of "monster" view. And she can only struggle alone in her own spiritual world.
In filming this era, scattered light is used to create warm yellow tones, and there is a lot of black in the picture, which visually looks like the style of classical painting in the 19th century. The whole picture looks like a beautiful oil painting, especially the section where Woolf walks into the water with stones stuffed in his pockets.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="22" > II, 1951: Housewives trapped in mainstream values</h1>
In 1951, at the end of World War II, American servicemen returned from the battlefield and expelled women who had gone out to work during the war to supplement the social workforce.
The housewife Lola in a detached house on the outskirts of the United States seemed to have had the perfect life that a woman could have as considered by mainstream social values at that time. A husband who loves her, is considerate, and takes care of her family, a sensible, intelligent, and lovely son, and a new life is still being nurtured in his belly.
But Lola still had her own pain and struggle, and the social environment at that time could not make her feel at ease with her sexuality, nor could she live freely. If you don't follow the mainstream values, you will be regarded as an outlier, and even the mainstream values will deprive women of their unsatisfied rights.
Now that you already have everything that society thinks you deserve or can have the best you can have, what qualifications do you have to ask for anything else?
The film in this segment completely replicates the TV soap operas of the 50s. Soap operas are TV series between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and its potential audience is full-time housewives. The content is also mostly used to promote the mainstream values of the identification and brainwashing of the perfect family.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" >3, 2001: Modern free women trapped in the "aura of genius."</h1>
In 2001, in New York City, the female editor of the Literary Press held a banquet on this day to win the grand prize for the poet she loved.
Without the pressure and siege of external forces, the admiration for genius still trapped her in her own life. The genius she admired was Lola's eldest son, whom lola had abandoned, and now the poet who won the poetry prize. Just as she was busy preparing everything for the dinner party from the morning, the poet suddenly gained some kind of epiphany and chose to end his life.
The moment he jumped out of the window, her day's running and so many years of following were gone. Her later life could also lose its direction.
As women, our experiences, the discipline of society, make us have a completely different life experience and survival experience than men's. Our sense of distress has not diminished because of the progress of the times.
I especially like teacher Dai to share the last question left behind, especially to record it:
Free women are in fact an important issue in modern society and one of the mysteries of modern society. In what sense are free women free? When women begin to have equal, relatively equal, or absolutely equal political, economic, and legal rights with men, is women's liberation already complete? If it is not completed, then where is the possibility of completion? What is our direction? Is feminism feminism? Does feminism mean a gender war? Does feminism, or women's emancipation, mean that women reverse power relations and then occupy the dominant and dominant position occupied by men in the history of thousands of years of civilization? Is this really our purpose? Or is it to oppose the essentialism of gender, to pursue the arrival of true equality, to respect individual differences, to accept the infinite richness and differences of each of our individual lives, and to use this as a premise to ultimately pursue the arrival of a common liberation?