Written by 丨 Joyful Split
The famous American film critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Ebert wrote a huge book in his lifetime, especially the "Great Movies" series. His writing is concise and highly generalized, his penmanship is condensed, and he is actually a model of in-depth and simple criticism, and in today's "academic" film criticism, Ebert's pro-people attitude is really touching and moving. How to avoid dropping the book bag? How to combine technical analysis with subjective emotion? How to quietly embed gossip anecdotes into film history legends? How to bind an individual's sensory experience to time memory for life? These are the best things that movies teach us, and movies will eventually end up, but the life engraved with film traces will last forever.
The first series of "The Great Movie" selects a hundred classic films left in the history of film, with the promotion of popular science to the public as the main purpose, detailing the ups and downs of the plot, artistic cultivation, director's brief history, filming process, behind-the-scenes tidbits, etc. contained in these films, reading like a spring breeze, and not losing its elegant aesthetic ability because of "lowering" the reading threshold, the huge amount of reading and the amount of rumination output are implemented between the lines, refining the spark of thought, so that fans deeply feel "In all art, Movies are the most reassuring of our empathy for another experience, and good movies make us better people. ”
The Great Movie, by Roger Ebert, translated by Yin Yan / Zhou Boqun, Guangxi Normal University Press, May 2012.
This year, the second series of "The Great Movie" was published, continuing the advantages of the previous work, covering still a wide range of genres - silent films, Westerns, song and dance films, film noir, animation, science fiction, comedy... Commercial films and art streams are properly balanced, popular and unpopular are compatible, and it is a great pleasure to follow the film's single patch. After watching the movie mentioned and then reading this book, the effect is better, and the emotional resonance is more empathetic, and together with Ebert enjoy "giving life to the things you love".
Although the mainstream of the selected films in this book is still biased towards Europe and the United States, the Asian part is also involved - in addition to Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, satyajit Rey's "Music Room", Tian Zhuangzhuang's "Blue Kite" and Zhang Yimou's "The Red Lantern Hangs High", which are more advanced in terms of geographical richness than the first series; there is also overlap with the first series in terms of director selection, and it can also be seen that the author's consistent preferences, such as Orson Wells's "Citizen Kane" is indeed Ebert's favorite, often as an analogy.
The Great Movie 2, by Roger Ebert, translated by Li Yu / Song Jiawei, Republic of | Guangxi Normal University Press, May 2020.
When some readers first come into contact with Roger Ebert's film reviews, they may have a certain "mediocre" misunderstanding - there is no blessing of esoteric professional terms, no historical and cultural background analysis of the past and the present, and no deep theoretical concept package. His comments are not forced to preach, there is no reason to be mysterious, so it often leads the reader to think, "I can write like this." However, the simplicity of the style is not equal to shallow and straightforward, the simplicity of the text is not equal to the simplicity and roughness, a closer look at this small volume, but to accommodate such a full of information and abundant emotions of the film review, we will find that it is actually the author's superb writing skills.
Roger Ebert's film criticism obviously has a more fixed pattern, and most fans write about the same aftermath, the plot summary is inevitable, but if it is too mediocre if it is in the plot statement; however, how to skillfully integrate the story synopsis into the whole can test the writing skills, carefully observe this series, and find that the plot summary is not only of different lengths, but also as much as possible in form.
Taking the silent film "The Collapse of the Ancient Mansion of Escher", which I like very much, as an example, we can get a glimpse of Ebert's writing direction.
The Collapse of the Escher Mansion is based on Edgar Allan Poe's novel of the same name.
The opening chapter is not in a hurry to state the plot, but rather depicts the surreality of the environment and points out the Xenadu for Citizen Kane
（Xanadu）
The inspiration of the hall design, in the history of film, to find out or explicit or implicit "tribute" clues, although not without suspicion of concealment, but also a pleasure to watch the film. There are plenty of cases in the book, such as "Eavesdropping on the Great Conspiracy" when Harry presses the toilet flush button, blood gushing out, inspired by "Horror"; "The Countess Earrings" "found a valuable item in the wrong place, at the wrong time", which appears repeatedly in Othello, the Golden Bowl and Ecstasy; the impact of 007 on future generations - the private detective Matt Heim series, the Ace Spy series, etc.; the sad grinning face in "The Smiley Man", which inspired the little clown in the original Batman comic book
（Joker）
Characters; the repeated use of Rashomon's narrative strategy to become a fixed vocabulary...
Ebert then points out that The Collapse of the Escher Ancient Building is, in a way, F. Ebert's point of being f. Ebert. The echo of W. Mauna's 1922 Northferatu, in which German expressionist elements are heavily represented, analyzes the atmosphere of the film by a spatial arrangement similar to Dr. Carrigalry's Cabin– a view that is later reiterated in The Sunrise, also Maunau's work: "The best silent film is not first of all telling a story, but summoning an experience." "Suggesting that this ancient house" is not a room for human habitation, but a stage for a surrealist drama stage. It also points out its purpose: "Its dreamy details and landscapes are more about reflecting the effect than about realism." This is the formation and development of the genre to which Ebert's commonly used style traces and examines, which is quite useful for popularizing the knowledge of film history, and also highlights the knowledge reserve of the writer.
F· The horror fantasy film Northferatu directed by W. Mauna.
For example, milos Foremann, the director of "Firefighter's Ball", is the backbone of the Czech New Wave, listing the masterpieces of this wave of movement and its flow; de Sica's "Tears of the Wind candle" is the culmination of the neorealist genre, with real cruelty and silent sadness due to the belief of "approaching the original appearance of daily life". The book briefly promotes the various video trends that have left a name in the history of Danfan, such as the French "quality film" and the New Wave, the American New Independence Movement, and the German New Wave.
The quality of The Collapse of the Escher Isle is inseparable from its creative team, and Jean Epstein parted ways with assistant director Louis Buñuel after collaborating on the film, who had just teamed up with Dalí to complete the famous "An Andalus Dog", a surreal film with heavy tastes. "An Andalus Dog" also appeared in the first series of The Great Movie. In 2018, the Shanghai Film Festival had two consecutive screenings, which can fully feel the connection between visual effects and text appeals.
A Dog of Andalus is a cross-border collaboration between Luis Buñuel, the father of Surrealist cinema, and Salvador Dali, a surrealist painter. It is the manifestation of people's dreams and subconscious.
References to the composition of the cast are often accompanied by a few anecdotes, such as being called the first "Camp Film"
(Camp movie, by the way, the next comment is also very detailed)
In "Victory over the Devil", even Bogart himself said: "Only hypocrites will like it." Director Houston tore up the script on the first day of filming; Truman Capote had to "talk on the phone" with his pet crow every day, and one day the crow refused to speak, and the screenwriter had to fly to Rome to comfort him, resulting in the film production being postponed – and it was a disaster movie! Buster Keaton claims that Buster comes from the magician Harry Houdini because he was good at wrestling since he was a child and was exceptionally strong.
The heroine archetype of "Jules and Jim" attended the premiere of the film and admitted: "Yes, I shot Jim. When Godard was shooting "Weekend", he couldn't afford to buy a track, so the photographer sat in a wheelchair and asked people to push the "push track" shot. To make Red Dead Redemption look more like an American movie, Leone, Morricone, and even Eastwood were given American names. The gossip outside of these movies is interspersed with them, and it's also very interesting.
Red Dead Redemption
Ebert did not mention the director's creative characteristics and tendencies until the middle of The Collapse of the Escher's Ancient Building (and before that, the plot introduction had been largely and quietly completed): "Silent films are inherently conducive to the expression of fantasy and imagery, and dialogue will make the story tend to realism." After a brief comparison of the film with other versions, the conclusion of "focusing on grotesqueness" is concluded, and points out the contribution of the actors, subtitles, and soundtrack to the overall tone of the film, the whole film seems to be buried alive in a strange state, and the terrible atmosphere it conveys requires a sense of stage drama in the eyes of a third party.
Throughout the book, there are many combinations of plot and genre characteristics, lens analysis, and external commentary, such as the large amount of red in "Shouts and Whispers" because "color, together with blood, death and spirit, symbolizes its innermost emotional connection"; as in "The Earrings of the Countess", "Offils likes to cross the foreground object to photograph the subject, or through the window, or surrounded by gorgeous sets." "Like Tavigne's" painting style is soft and drowsy. It seems to be longing for Impressionism. Country Sunday soothes us with a quiet summer day. ”
Stills from "Shouts and Whispers".
In summary, Roger Ebert's film criticism paradigm is easy to be imitated is misunderstood, if there is no strong knowledge and complete knowledge system support, if there is no keen sensitivity and capture, how can it easily evoke emotional experience? In fact, the most touching thing is to recall the feelings brought to us by the movie in the text together, and rekindle the heart of love. "Movies are not platforms, it's a train." Reading the chapter "My Uncle" ends with Godard almost in tears, just as the author realizes after watching "Tokyo Story" that "a movie can help us be better if we are imperfect", ride the "movie" train and rub shoulders with your soul, and once again lament how good the world of movies is. The movie helps us imprint life markers and time nodes.
Edited by Dong Muzi and Li Yongbo
Proofreading 丨 Wang Xin