After three months of solicitation, the Concave Mirror DOC Documentary Film Criticism Competition aimed at discovering documentary critics ended its call for collection, and the film criticism competition received a total of 281 documentary long and short film reviews, of which 212 were documentary long reviews and 69 were documentary short reviews, of which 30 were shortlisted for re-evaluation.
After the selection of the three final judges, the final selection results of the main competition and the cooperative track have been announced. Thanks to our partners: CathayPlay, Houlang Film, Heguan Image, IM Cross-Strait Youth Film Festival, FIGURE, set up different awards for this film critic competition, and provided participants with a wealth of prizes.
Next, the Bump Mirror DOC will select the winning works of this film criticism competition, and today's release is the work that won the first prize of the Bump Mirror DOC Film Criticism Competition: The Ritual of Words, which also won the IM Chinese Documentary Film Critics Award.
Awards:
Film criticism combines literature and film theory, discusses how the film "Water Moon in Hand" expresses the traditional aesthetics of classical Chinese poetry with modern film language and techniques, and deeply and creatively interprets the two art forms of classical poetry and film complement each other in Chen Chuanxing's films: the film space embodies the artistic conception of poetry, and the lyricist and his words give the film soul and sound.
Li Xiaoyang's acceptance speech was:
Brodsky said: "Aesthetics is the mother of ethics. This phrase applies to literature, but not to documentaries. The documentary is not a light pole palm tree, the documentary is a dense thorn - the documentary is not a black and white vertical judgment, it will always open the densest and richest branches to the audience, which is closely intertwined with the roots, ideas, ideas, etc. rooted in the ground. Documentaries are video intermediaries that connect literature and sociology, and the audience can find the most unexpected but reasonable things from the documentary, which is the charm of the documentary. Documentaries are thin slices of social history that can see not only the subtle texture of society, but also the traces of the knife when it is cut. Thanks for the documentary, thanks for the bump mirror. I hope that the spark of documentaries can be passed on from generation to generation, and I hope that the activities will become better and better.
1
The rituals of space, memory and poetry
"Memories are not only the pattern of words, but also the subject of word preference." This is the judgment made by Yuwen Suoan when he studied the words of the Southern Song Dynasty poet Wu Wenying. This is not only true of the lyrics, but also of the documentary on the character history directed by Chen Chuanxing. "Water Moon in Hand" and "They Write on the Island: When the Fog Rises" and "They Write on the Island: Huacheng Again" together constitute Chen Chuanxing's "Poetry Trilogy" - "When the Fog Rises" is filmed by the Taiwanese poet Zheng Shuoyu, telling about "modern poetry and history"; "The Coming of the City Again" takes the Taiwanese poet Zhou Mengdi as the object, presenting "Poetry and Faith"; "The Water Moon in Hand" photographs the poet and classical literature research scholar Ye Jiaying, thinking about "poetry and existence". Chen Chuanxing photographs three poets in a similar path: reminiscing about the past with the present as a starting point and making a chronicle narrative.
"Pattern" is used to describe space. The poet documentary filming space of the big pattern, the small pattern of the poet documentary shoots the event. For space can give poetics, while events can only give explanation. The narrative of "The Moon in hand" unfolds from space. Chen Chuanxing took Ye Jiaying's former residence in Beijing as the starting point of his memories, and divided the documentary into six chapters: "Gate", "Pulse Room", "Inner Courtyard", "Courtyard", "West Wing Room", and "Emptiness", in order to echo Ye Jiaying's life stage: "The Gate" tells about the Japanese army's invasion of China and the great destruction of China's national gate, and Ye Jiaying was born in a chaotic world; "Pulse Room" talks about her grandfather's poetic enlightenment and character influence on Ye Jiaying; "Inner Courtyard" tells Ye Jiaying about learning poetry from Gu Sui and entering the initial stage of the literary palace; "Courtyard" and "West Wing" Then it talks about Ye Jiaying's experience in the mainland and Taiwan and her teaching in the West (the "West" in the "West Wing" corresponds to the West). The last chapter, "Emptiness", corresponds to Ye Jiaying's old age in the empty realm of emptiness —the six-fold space of the family home overlaps the history of poetry and life from the inside out, in the words of Chen Chuanxing, "the history of ancient poetry" and "the history of a woman".
The documentary "Water Moon in Hand" uses the space of the home to divide the chapters, which has a deep meaning. The home offers a decentralized image while at the same time condensing the whole of the spirit. For Chinese, home is both a concrete real space and a metaphysical metaphor of destination. Heidegger said that man inhabits the earth poetically. "Residence" is a function that only a family home has. Gaston Bashra believed that homes were motherly. The home is the geometry of the echo, and the home enters the heart vertically, making a hazy reorganization of the world. Settle down and establish a business, the word of a family, the country and the world... Chinese home is accessible to career, life, and the universe, and home is the prototype of the world. "Water Moon in Hand" is unfolded at the level of the collective consciousness of "home", and the space is raised to the level of theme. Chen Chuanxing explained that the home space is a memory "palace", and there are causes and conditions in the space to "meet". The audience not only met with Mr. Ye, but also met with poetry through Mr. Ye, and met with more distant memories of time. Poetry and space are used to connect the whole film, so that space becomes a structure with imaginative images. Through the poetic space, the audience listens to a film narrative of words and feels the ritual of words.
François Joost argues that any narrative is based on two temporalities: "the temporality of the events to be told and the temporality of telling itself." Through the spatial layout, "The Water Moon in Hand" takes the audience to meet with two times. In the first time, the audience meets with the history of the development of classical poetry. Words in the Five Dynasties were "words of song words" and "words of poetry" in the Song Dynasty, and later evolved in the direction of "to be repaired". The trajectory of the development of words is very different from the traditional and moral tendencies of poetry, and the literati can use long and short lyrics to express deep and tortuous private emotions, which is a function that poetry does not have. Song ci can be written very small (such as Wen Tingjun), or it can be written very large (such as Su Shi) and retracted freely. Words are born out of poetry, and beyond poetry has its own characteristics, which is the duality of words.
At the second time, the audience met with Ye Jiaying's private spiritual history. Ye Jiaying proposed "beauty of passive virture", "weak morality" is not weakness, but means that the weak should also have a strong faith ethic, which provides spiritual strength for people in difficulty. "Water Moon in Hand" tries to answer how Ye Jiaying has repeatedly overcome difficulties. The answer is poetry—not poetry at the level of words and words, but the spirit of poetry, the poetic personality. Wang Guowei said that "heaven has made a man of the word with a hundred evils", and Nietzsche said that "all literature, the rest of the love of the blood book". Why? Because exile, death, suffering, loneliness and other misfortunes feed the poet. The word "blood" rarely appears in the Song Dynasty, and more imagery is "tears", such as "wine into the intestines of sorrow, turned into tears of lovesickness" (Fan Zhongyan's "Su Musha"),"caring for each other without words, only tears in a thousand lines" (Su Shi's "Jiang Chengzi")," "Just do spring rivers are tears, endless flow, many sorrows" (Qin Guan", "Jiang Chengzi"). Poetry purifies suffering and "lightens it." "Tears" turn suffering into sad emotions, which is the character and power of poetry. Some of the boat ferry images used in the film are also used. According to Rancière, poetry relies on the chaotic power of language, refusing to be crossed by meaning itself. To compensate for the power of its lost form, the poem leaps to the other side of the line and takes the power of thought into its own hands. Chen Chuanxing not only presents poetry in the film, but also aligns the poem with Ye Jiaying's life experience and writes the poet in poetry.
The world is concrete in poetry. Heidegger believed that the essence of language is sagen, and Heidegger interpreted Taoism as showing, showing, and poetry "presenting" the world "at the time of both clarity and obscuration.". Poetry is a language outside of religion that approaches history, through which the collective memory of national culture is evoked. Harald Welzer argues that cultural memory has two characteristics: one is the concreteness of identity, and the other is reconstruction. Cultural memory is an organized and ritualized communication and interaction in the past, and through the analysis and transformation of some images, the content of memory is fixed for a long time. Cultural memory depends on collective consciousness and on collective knowledge. "Water Moon in Hand" uses a lot of cultural traces, such as temples, grottoes, etc., which are spatial places that trigger cultural memories, and these buildings are plucked from the past time and space, appropriated into the movie, and obtained the flicker of meaning.
Life without rhyme is poetry. The last chapter of the film is "Emptiness", which corresponds to the stage of old age in Ye Jiaying's life. Whether it is the Buddhist debate of emptiness or the realm of emptiness in poetry, "nothingness" and "emptiness" are the most difficult to give meaning, because they need to start from "being" and "concrete." The fifty-fifth of the Words and Sayings of Man mentions an important proposition: "Words are untitled. Wang Guowei explained: "Not untitled, the meaning in the poem, can not be exhausted by the title." "Untitled emptiness" is not only the ultimate reference to words, but also the ultimate reference to life. In the second half of the film, Ye Jiaying returns to the original mongolian homeland, back to the ancient city of Yehe, where the Yehenara tribe once lived. At the end of the film, there are shots of Buddha statues falling snow, and there are also shots of snow claw marks, which are traces left by things, which is a standard image code, which corresponds to Su Shi's famous sentence "Life is everywhere like what it is, it should be like Feihong stepping on the snow mud." Relying on the rules of montage, relying on the usage code, relying on spatial rhetoric and the principle of two-degree embellishment, the film presents the audience with an image ritual of poetry.
2
The Time of Things and the "Depth of Field" of Literature
Residual lotus, bronze mirrors, murals, inscriptions, epitaphs, reliefs, tiles, Buddha statues, snow scenes, water waves, photos, letters, dyeing cloth... "The Water Moon in Hand" draws the elements of things from the Song Ci, and the scenes in the words and Ye Jiaying's personal life history generate contrasts and ripples. These object lenses can be roughly divided into three categories: scenery, cultural relics (artifacts), and old objects. The film uses an empty lens of the object to express it. What is the narrative meaning of the object lens? Chen Chuanxing explains: "[These things] show the very important aspects of poetry: chanting, praise. According to Chen Chuanxing's explanation, the beautified objects in the film are the poems themselves, and they are the origin of culture.
Objects are the apparitions of poetry, and poetry renames objects in language. The psalmist summons things, and makes things come. The poet uses words to summon people into words. When materialization occurs, things are open to literature; when materialization, things realize the world and unfold the world. Monogatari is a Song word and a movie context. In "The Moon of Water in the Hand", the object is not only the thing itself, but also carries the background of the use of canon and the history of Yong. For example, the bronze mirror that appears in the movie is a cultural projection of Wen Tingjun's "Bodhisattva Man", the originator of the word "Bodhisattva Man": "Look at the mirror before and after the flower, and the flower faces are intertwined." For another example, the "dry lotus" on the water that appears in the movie is intended to summon the "菡萏" in ancient Chinese. "菡萏" is another name for the lotus flower in the poem, and "XiaoHe" is Ye Jiaying's milk name. "Dry lotus in the water" corresponds to the lyrics of Li Jing, the lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty: "The incense of the han is sold to the green leaves, and the west wind is worried about the green waves." This poem is mentioned repeatedly in The Book of Ye Jiaying. The lens of the dry lotus is used here, and there is an emotion related to mourning and loss, and there is a mournful atmosphere.
The water moon is in hand, and the flowers are full of clothes" is a verse in the Tang Dynasty poet Yu Liangshi's "Spring Mountain Night Moon", which is a beautiful experience. Gao Yougong proposed "lyric aesthetics", the so-called "beauty classics" is an aesthetic experience, which enters the cultural tradition and collective consciousness, and is internalized and inherited. The beautified scenery is not only the veil of Song Ci, but also the transparent figure of the image. Falling flowers, flowing water, cold grass, Xie Yue, winter snow, light smoke, the scenery departs from the meaning of nature and enters the beautiful structure of Song Ci. In "Human Words", Wang Guowei spent a lot of energy to explain the significance of the scenery to the Song Ci. For example, "Those who can photograph real scenes and true feelings are said to have a realm." (The Sixth Rule of "Human Words") So, what kind of attitude should we take to write about scenes? Wang Guowei replied, "The poet must have the intention of despising foreign objects, so he can use his slave to kill the wind and the moon." And there must be the meaning of attaching importance to external objects, so that they can share happiness with flowers and birds. ("Human Words", Article 61) However, how to grasp the lightness and importance of attitude? Wang Guowei also said that he should have an attitude of "half out and half in" towards natural scenes: "If you are inside, you can write about them; if you are outside, you can view them." (The 60th Rule of the Human Word) The "realm" is based on the writer's treatment of the scenery.
Song Ci's treatment of the scenery is very subtle, and Wang Guowei said that we should look at things with the eyes of nature and intercede with the words of nature. If the scenery is not incorporated into the artistic structure, it is no different from the wandering style of tourism: "The loyalty of the writer is not only to the matter of the person." That is, to a grass and a tree, there must also be a faithful meaning, otherwise the so-called travel word. How to "faithfully" deal with the scenery in the Song Ci is a reasonable way? Wang Guowei explained: "In accordance with nature"—the scenery in the writing and creation of the environment, it is necessary to be subjective and natural, just as the things in nature are related to each other and restrict each other. Wang Guowei's comment on the scenery triggered the speculation on the relationship between virtual and real in song poetry, and also triggered Zhang Yan's thinking in "Etymology" that "words should be emptied, not qualitative".
The film uses objects and scenes not on the laws of the empirical world, but on the principles of montage. Things move away from the scenes of life, reorganized by the film, and glow with a new look. Seemingly disordered objects, in fact, have carefully conceived, have a profound allegorical form. According to Rancière, poetic language "lies in the concreteness of the image and in the temporal thickness of the material material." "Things precipitate history, and when the old objects meet the eyes of poetry, history is revived." When artifacts, poems and images meet, the theme of "memory" and the essence of the poem are revealed, and the objects awaken allusions and images, allowing the sparks of poetry to burst everywhere.
In the documentary "The Moon in the Hand", the scenery and utensils are no longer simply props or imprints, but wrap up the power of time. Roland Barthes proposed the "temporality of things", which "means that there is a time later" that makes things "move like fate". In Roland Barthes's narrative, things have the depth of time. Objects washed away in the long river of time, they are traces and evidence of the disappearance of the complete past, hidden in allusions, fragments and aesthetic memories. The main plot of "Water Moon in Hand" is Ye Jiaying's life deeds (birth, marriage, family, career), and the scenery is secondary and off-topic content. The scenery lens is a planet moving around the celestial body, which belongs to the celestial body "Song Ci". It can be said that poetry is the starting force of "Water Moon in Hand", and the main plot and secondary shots that unfold around it are all natural things. The compositional thinking of "The Water Moon in Hand" uses poetic wisdom, and the scenery has a high degree of metaphor. The meaning path of the film structure is "to live with oneself and to ferry people with things", and the "ferry boat" and "bodhisattva" that appear in the film are examples: Liu Bingsong said that Ye Jiaying's life was full of twists and turns, and it was poetry that saved her. "Don't complain to the world, and the phoenix is born in the fire." The poems dilute Mr. Ye's suffering, and the poems are the ferrymen of her destiny.
What is Cinema? Based on the technical concept of long shots and depth of field lenses, Bazin proposes the "mummy myth" of time. As a medium of the past, things make time "a cracked lens". Objects are summoned with fragments, surrounded by the attraction of time, which has the same meaning as the beginning of the Bible. In the image, objects such as murals, steles, and statues are associated with Song Ci, and they have a complete aesthetic time. The empty lens itself is an aesthetic gaze, which leads the audience to retrace the river of time and become the rhyme foot and broken sentence in the nostalgic words. One of the functions of montage is assembly, when the object is assembled with the Song word and the sound, the object has a different meaning: the object is the silent sound of the poem, the sacrifice of the word, and the "depth of field" of literature.
3
Chanting and sound poetics
"If you want to meet each other, you only need to be quietly in nowhere and call your name." In the documentary "The Return of the City", Zhou Mengdi recited this poem from "Ten Lines of Zenza". Born in Henan, Zhou Mengdi withdrew to Taiwan with his army during the civil war, and set up a book stall in the downtown area of Taipei for a living, and his life was miserable. Sound is a special medium, through the voice of Zhou Mengdi's poetry and his floating life experience, Chen Chuanxing shows that he is a person of faith. In the documentary "The Moon in the Hand", chanting and gagaku are an important feature of film creation, chen Chuanxing explains: "Sound makes language a possibility of symbolism, rather than a carrier of symbolism. ”
What does it mean to recite poetry on screen? What is the relationship between sound and poetry? What is the relationship between sound and aesthetics? When Benjamin talks about the medium reproduction and spatial transfer of the European visual arts (oil painting, photography, etc.), he thinks about an important issue: the disappearance of the "halo". So, does the recitation of poetry in the film also make the poetic text lose its authenticity? The answer is no. This is because poetry originates from sound, not from vision or text. Lu Xun mentioned in "Talking Outside the Door" that the trumpet sound of collective labor, "Hangyu Hangyu", is an early literary creation. At the beginning of the birth of poetry, the seeds of sound were already buried. "Hangyu Hangyu" is a singing presentation of sound, which makes labor match the rhythm of the body.
The perception of poetry is first and foremost opened by sound. The same is true of Han Le Fu, and the same is true of Song Ci. Song Ci was born between wine banquets, and is a reward lyric given by the literati to the singers, and the content is mostly acacia separation, which is far from the ethical indoctrination in the Book of Poetry. Wen Tingjun's collection of words, "The Collection of Flowers", describes beautiful women, such as "Bodhisattva Man": "The hills overlap the golden ming extinction, and the sideburns want to spend the snow on the cheeks". After the Song Ci experienced the process of poetry, it gradually stepped out of the female theme, expanded the writing to a wider realm of life, and gradually had the temperament of poetry, such as the words of Su Shi and Xin Zhiyi. Song Ci was originally an evil and obscene "fragrant song", but after Yazheng, it gradually became a new literary genre, starting from writing show words with deep feelings and beginning to writing emotional realms. Ye Jiaying believes that when the word reaches Liu Yong, the era of "slow word long tone" is opened, and the willow word is spread through the medium of sound. The Song dynasty Ye Mengde commented on his words in the "Summer Record": "Wherever there is well water, you can sing willow words." "The new poem severs the sound tradition of poetry, removes the shackles of rhyming, removes the regulation of form, and allows the genes of sound to hibernate. After removing the dimension of sound, the new poem becomes a pure visual text, which can only be obtained by the eye, not by the sound; it can only be viewed, not chanted.
Poetry is the language of metaphysics, metaphysics often pursues the original thing, and sound is the source of ancient Chinese poetry. Sound is the closest to the essence of human existence. Aristotle begins his Explanatory Notes: "Sound is the symbol of spiritual experience, and words are symbols of sound." Printing the heart with sound is the characteristic of ancient Chinese poetry. Chen Chuanxing made the soundtrack of the film with the tone of "poets worrying about life". According to Du Fu's poem "Eight Pieces of Autumn Xing", Japanese composer Akira Sato composed Gagaku for this film. In the form of lamentations, Gagaku nostalgic for the ancient times of loneliness and sorrow. The music and chanting in The Moon in hand, such as the shaman summoning a deity—the voice promises itself to the poet as a way to awaken memories. Ye Jiaying said: "The life of a poet is resurrected in your voice." "Chanting is the most direct form of lyricism, and chanting gives poetry a sense of solemnity and ritual to sound. Western poetry can be read and read, but not recited. Chanting is a unique Chinese way, which preserves the unique sound of Chinese speech. The French Symbolist poet Paul Valéry believed that poetry was "a sense of immediacy between meaning and sound." Valery called French poetry a "high symphony", which mixes the dual language of prose and poetry, which is not centered on sound, but gradually ambushes meaning through the symphony of language. Valery uses the metaphor of symphony to illustrate that sound is a cover for Western poetic texts.
Zhang Yan, a lyricist of the Southern Song Dynasty, said: "To make a slow word is a very topic, first choose the name of the song, and then the fate." "In the process of writing words, the sound comes first and the text comes later. Ancient Chinese poetry pays attention to the law of sound, and the poetic works around sound include "Cut Rhyme", "Guang Rhyme", "Pingshui Rhyme", "Pei Wen Yun Fu", etc., which are independent of the Chinese character dictionary . These phonological rhymes standardize the rhymes and are the sound basis for making poetic words. Rhyming sounds stipulate flatness and rhyme, and also fix the formal specifications of the language to form a regulation: word count (four words, five words, six words, seven words, nine words, jagged miscellaneous words), sentence count (four sentences, eight sentences of poetry, more than eight sentences of long law, etc.). Song ci was originally called "poetry" and "long and short sentences", excluded from the category of poetry, and later justified its literary legitimacy. Song Ci invented long and short tones, the form is jagged, and compared with the rigid poetic form, song ci is more flexible to sing. Such as Mengling, Su Musha, Yi Jiangnan, Partridge Heaven, Water Dragon Yin, etc. are not word titles, but word names, that is, what song tune is used to sing. Lyrics must first choose a sound program, followed by text creation. In the Preface to Mao's Poems, it is written: "Emotion is in the middle and walks in words, words are insufficient, so sigh; sighs are insufficient, so chants are insufficient; song is insufficient, do not know the dance of hands, and foot is also done", the author goes on to write that "emotions are born in sound, and sound is written into a sound." It can be seen that in the order of words, sounds, and dances, the level of expression of sound is richer than that of words.
With the help of the film medium, the chanting rediscovered the sound, and the poetry was revived. In the documentary "The Moon in hand", Chen Chuanxing created a new listening relationship, so that listening is based on the sound of silence. Through gagaku and chanting, the song ci returns to the concept of time in addition to the meaning of the literal level. It is precisely because of the premise of sound that there is the Qing Dynasty lexicographer Zhang Huiyan's evaluation of Song Ci: <词选>"The Preface" "Its fate is made, it is happy to speak in small words, to be touched by each other, to be extremely fateful in the wind and ballads, to mourn the joys of men and women, and to complain about the feelings of the Taoist sages and gentlemen who cannot express themselves." Low wandering should be taken as a metaphor. "Low wandering to squint" is the sound breath of long and short sentences, twisting and turning, singing three sighs. The chanting brings the poem back to the source of the authentic sound, back to "Xing". Chanting makes the poems alive, sound, and breath. Only when there is sound and breath can there be a word brand name "slow sound", and only then can there be a breathing rhythm of "slow word long tone".
Adorno said the nature of the artwork is negative. What are poets, and why should there be poets in times of suffering? Heidegger gave a vague answer: loneliness. Loneliness is man's position in the world and the spirit of the poet. The poet is worried, and the writer is worried about the world. It is the duty of the poet to use the art of language to tell the world about the loneliness of the world. According to Lancier, poetry is a thought, an independent spiritual force capable of infinite reflection on itself. What Rancière is talking about is the endogenous power of poetry—the reclusiveness of poetry. Poets and lyricists used their works to build temples one after another, leading the world to the path of seclusion, to practice in the temple of writing, and to take refuge in the soul.
Plato wants to expel the poet from the Republic on the grounds that poetry cannot know the truth, but only adds to the illusion of truth. Poetry is imitation, the shadow of ideas, but the words are long and the words are wide. The Huayan Jing compares interpersonal relationships to the mirror of sentient beings, and in the process of mirroring, "the shadows are seen again and again in one shadow, and the shadows are reproduced, becoming endless and endless." "Poetry is a mirror that looks at all sentient beings, poetry is the mass culture of China's past era, and China once used poetry to replace religion, aesthetics, and philosophy." Brodsky believed that aesthetics was the mother of ethics. The public may be ignorant of the laws of society, but it is impossible to avoid the infiltration of everyday culture. Poetry crosses borders and serves both literary and philosophical functions. Poetry is the purest flame of language, and what poetry says is both the beginning of the world and the pure completion of the world. Through the poet, the meaning of the world is no longer enclosed in the present, the present, and the present, but is purified by words brought into the aesthetic system, witnessing the spiritual power of "immortality".