("Make a Good Movie" poster Online image)
Li Peishan/Wen
The recent "Good Movie" allowed the director Xu Anhua, who was hiding behind the scenes, to appear on the screen to "expose himself", and the yin and yang mistakes fell into the public discussion. "Xu Anhua" is a name that is difficult to feel unfamiliar: over the past 40 years, her masterpieces such as "Woman Forty", "The Day and Night of Tin Shui Wai", "The Golden Age" and so on have a reputation and reputation. In the history of Chinese cinema, "Xu Anhua" is also a name that is doomed to go around: she has won 6 Academy Awards for Best Director, 3 Golden Horse Awards for Best Director, and last year won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice International Film Festival.
In fact, in the years before "Make a Good Movie" came out on the street, the public always had an almost benign "elevation" "misunderstanding" about her, believing that Xu Anhua was a pure literary and art film director who was so high that he made his life difficult. Because there is almost no gossip to speak of in her private life, Xu Anhua's anecdotes that have been praised almost portray a "film practitioner" like an "ascetic": she has always made the movies she wants to make, she can hardly find investment but refuses to bend to capital, her savings have been poured into the movies, and she and her mother live in a low-rent house in North Point, and can only go to school to teach and shoot advertising films to subsidize life. For this set of ready-made "sad marketing" can be "pretended" (Cantonese, meaning close to pretending to be like) words, Xu Anhua has never pushed the boat along the water, on any occasion to talk about the reasons for insisting on this industry for more than forty years, blurting out is "subsistence" or "making money". "No, I have to find a big production to shoot and make a lot of money." In "Make a Good Movie", Xu Anhua did not change his true colors in front of the camera, "I don't believe I can't make money!" The footage flashed back to her work photos on the set more than twenty years ago, and on the T-shirt were four big words: "Not enough money."
In fact, Xu Anhua almost holds a "blowing" (Cantonese, meaning close to you and me) attitude towards all "pretending". In "Make a Good Movie", Xu Anhua's classmates at the University of Hong Kong recalled that when he was studying, Xu Anhua was a very "untimely" person, when everyone was popular for "pretending" not to study well and get good grades, Xu Anhua wanted to tell everyone that she was very "diligent" (Cantonese, diligent), all classes were attended, "anti-contrived" to the end. Now as a director, Xu Anhua has always been reluctant to be labeled as a "female director" who can be a "selling point". For the endless questions asked by the media around "women" for many years, she has always tried to explain that she "does not see things from a single female perspective", for her, "there is no difference between saying that women are and saying that there is no difference", but these questions that do not receive the expected answer will always be repeated. "Make a Good Movie" records her collapse after this endless non-"pretending" cooperation: after the end of the group, Xu Anhua collapsed on the sofa as if "his body was emptied", almost complaining to himself that "the questions they asked were too repetitive, annoying me, always asking what women's movies", and then lit a cigarette and tried his best to smoke.
Embarrassingly, although Xu Anhua herself has been more than the above "true temperament" to reveal herself, the public's misunderstanding of her is too deep: think that she is a literary and art film director who ignores the commercial box office; think that she as a female director is destined to pay more attention to women's fate and gender issues; think that she is too concerned about the edge. How to understand a more authentic Xu Anhua? As an audience, it is our duty to "watch a good movie". Returning to the context of Xu Anhua's films, we may try to find a path that is almost comprehensible.
Business and literature
Treating Xu Anhua as a "pure literary film director" who does not care about business is really the biggest misreading of her.
Looking at the sequence of Xu Anhua's works, she actually bravely tried many genre films, thrillers such as "Crazy Robbery", ethics films such as "Sister Peach", martial arts films such as "Book of Swords and Vengeance" and so on and even documentaries. As a newcomer director who returned from studying in Hong Kong, Hui Anhua's debut film thriller "Crazy Robbery" (1979) achieved great commercial success: the budget was only HK$850,000, but the box office revenue reached HK$2.13 million, ranking 16th in the Hong Kong box office ranking that year. As a genre film, "Crazy Robbery" uses lifting photography and push-track long shots that have been used a lot in Western commercial films, providing the audience with a rather shocking and refreshing audiovisual experience. In addition to its commercial success, the thriller's artistic value was also recognized by the film industry, winning three Golden Horse Awards the following year. 1982's "Run to the Fury Sea" was also acclaimed and acclaimed, not only achieving a box office of 15.47 million Hong Kong dollars, ranking fifth in the total box office of the year, and winning four Hong Kong Film Awards. Film critic Lev believes that Xu Anhua at that time was as good as the sun in terms of business and praise, and was exactly the "darling of the new wave", more popular than today's Wong Kar-wai, "to praise, there is no stingy praise; to the box office, even if it is a re-screening, it will be better than many new works released at the same time by attractive directors." This is also rare in Hong Kong films today. ”
Only after 1984, Xu Anhua's 1987 "Book of Swords and Vengeance" and even 1991's determination to completely pursue commercial success "Extreme Tracking" were not ideal at the box office, although 1995's "Woman Forty" won a miraculous victory at the box office of 14.02 million Hong Kong dollars with a small investment, but then Xu Anhua occasionally failed miserably at the box office, and in 2014, the "Golden Age" with 70 million investment also suffered a "street fight" of 51.57 million yuan at the box office. The failure at the box office makes it more difficult to find investment, but if Xu Anhua does not care about business and pursues "pure literature and art", it is a misreading of cause and effect inversion.
After all, "literary film" is almost a non-existent concept in Hong Kong, and pure personal creation is not recognized, which is considered to harm the development of the film industry (you know, Wong Kar-wai denies that he is a literary film director). In "Make a Good Movie", Xu Anhua himself said with a laugh that if the film is her wife, literature is the mistress. Although he has always tried to implement the literary motifs and discussions that he prefers because of his literary background, Xu Anhua has always been making commercial films in a down-to-earth manner. In the eyes of film critics, Xu Anhua often regrets the quality of his films out of considerations of commercial balance, most obviously using the wrong stars in order to win investment, such as Dawn in "Half Life" and Nicholas Tse in "Jade Guanyin". Under the temptation of the box office, Xu Anhua once directly put "love, fighting, thriller" these popular factors into a pot out of the "Extreme Tracking". According to Xu Anhua herself in "Make a Good Movie", she is not a "self or all-round" filmmaker, and many times it is "out of the situation" or others let her shoot, which makes her film "could have been made better but not good enough", "but it also allowed her to survive".
Xu Anhua's inseparability to "literary motifs and discussions" made it inevitable that she would lose the east fence of the box office, but it also achieved the artistic mulberry of her films. Jia Zhangke's expression in "Make a Good Movie" is implicit and in place, "I think that especially Director Xu is not not thinking about the market, but the question is, is it not necessary to let every director succumb to the market. Yes, everyone has his own destiny. Xu Dao's talent and talent, she should not do those things that succumb to the market, she should do things that insist on herself. ”
Women and beyond gender
In fact, not only the media, Chinese the film academic community's interest in Xu Anhua is still narrowly focused on the "female perspective", and there are countless papers analyzing the "female image" and "female consciousness" in his films. All these discussions about "women" about Xu Anhua actually presuppose a basic premise: as a female director, Xu Anhua is destined to be discussed as a "woman" rather than a "director". This "presupposition and spontaneity" of political correctness has kidnapped Xu Anhua and her films. Some people even criticized Xu Anhua's lack of "gender self-awareness" based on the fact that the heroine "Aunt" in "Auntie's Postmodern Life" could not resist fate and her life eventually fell to the bottom.
Looking at Xu Anhua's film works over the past forty years, only looking for "female consciousness" from them is really "dimensionally reduced". In fact, what is more different from many directors who are male or female is that Xu Anhua has a clear sense of care that transcends gender. "Sister Peach" (2012) focuses on the old age of the "self-combing woman" domestic helper who cuts herself off from all the rights and obligations brought about by gender through the "self-combing" ceremony, "Idle Fried Rice" (2010) tells the alternative "reunion" of men and women who jointly raise babies after splitting the combination, and the short film "My Way" (2012), which has little attention, cares about the struggle and dilemma of the middle-aged "boy" who has a career and a family but is determined to turn into a "female petite" with surgery. "Make a Good Movie" also shows Xu Anhua's "diligence" that is beyond gender in the film: when he was young, he used "crying" as a weapon ("When you were young, others will pay attention to you"), "a shot can't work, just cry and lose your temper"; when you are older, you scold on the set, smoke violently, always apologize when you leave your work state, and start shooting but always return to the old way. She was very comfortable working when "no one treated her like a woman".
In contrast, it is undeniable that Xu Anhua pours a considerable amount of "female experience" into her films. As she says, "My films have never deliberately depicted the themes of 'women's equality' or 'feminism', probably because I am a woman, so it is easier to touch women's life experiences, and what I most want to shoot is a different female experience from the perspective of male directors." 」 ”
The culmination of this "female experience" is her autobiographical film The Stranger's Tale (1990). Xu Anhua's relationship with her mother in her early years was quite tense, until she was 19 years old, she did not know that her mother was Japanese, learned to understand her mother's plight at that time, and slowly reconciled with her mother. The intense emotional confrontation and ultimate understanding between women in "Kertu Autumn Hate" is condensed into a journey to Japan. During this trip, the daughter experienced the fear and helplessness of people in a foreign land, understood the forced aphasia of her mother who was rejected and opposed by her ancestors in the old house in Guangzhou, and the pain of being robbed by her grandparents so that it was difficult for her mother and daughter to connect. The grand narrative that grandchildren rely on to inherit the memory of civilization has finally wavered and conceded to the common emotional resonance among women.
This "female experience" is also reflected in the narrative language of "Ketu Autumn Hate". The French philosopher Julia Christieva believes that there is a distinction between "women's time" and men's "linear time", which is reflected in the narrative, and the linear time structure that has been constructed is clear and stable, and the woman's time is full of fragmentation, dispersion and intersection, containing different forces. The narrative of "Ketu Autumn Hate" adopts a non-linear narrative structure that interlaces time and space, the past and the present are constantly intertwined and flashed, and the emotional balance with grandparents and mothers is constantly changing in this pull, which reflects the "experience" of how women's emotions flow in their daily lives.
Edge and history
Wu Nianzhen commented that the characters in Xu Anhua's films are almost all lonely, or struggling in the cracks of history. In "Make a Good Movie", a critic pointed out to her face that "your world view is relatively dark" and always tends to shoot marginal people who are "abandoned by society and living in misery and melancholy". Xu Anhua replied with a smile in shock, "I thought I was full of sunshine."
It is also a big misunderstanding to think that Xu Anhua is a director who specializes in shooting marginal people, and compared with Chen Guo, a director who has made films such as "Durian Fluttering" in Hong Kong, Xu Anhua is really not "concerned about the edge". Rather than focusing on the edges, she loves to rewrite personally understood history from individuals who have been ignored and exiled by mainstream history, and "Ketu Qiu Hate" is the best example, including "The Story of Hu Yue", "Running to the Fury Sea" and even "The Golden Age".
Why did Xu Anhua form such an image writing? Self-life and local experience are naturally one of the reasons, Xu Anhua in "Ketu Autumn Hate" infused with the personal experience of the two generations of the family under the great history of the wandering and alienation of the suffering. This is just as the film scholar Rocca said, "people's wandering is uneasy, more precisely, people are forced by the environment and suffer from rootlessness", it is difficult not to become an important "motif" for Xu Anhua's films to implement throughout.
The second reason is that Xu Anhua, mentioned above, has been studying literature for many years and is difficult to give up on "literary motifs and discussions". Li Qiang, a screenwriter who has a deep cooperation with Xu Anhua, described her as a "very rare intellectual director" in "Make a Good Movie" - directing is only her profession, and she has more care and enthusiasm for social, historical, literary and human conditions. How the fate of the individual rises and falls in the history of great changes is obviously a very important "literary motif", which we can find in the writings of Shakespeare, Hardy to E.M Foster. What Xu Anhua cared about were the refugees who migrated after the Vietnam War, the female writers who migrated in the War of Resistance Against Japan, and even the elderly women who returned to the city after going up the mountains and going to the countryside. Xu Anhua pursues a meticulous view of marginalized individual situations, and also pursues accurate portrayal and rewriting of the big history, which is the inseparable "two sides of one body" for interpreting Xu Anhua's films. The individual becomes the "gap" into history, and history is also the "container" for loading and interpreting the individual, and practical understanding and transcendence arise spontaneously.
In "Make a Good Movie", Xu Anhua calls it "redemption". "Because I myself feel that all movies actually point to redemption." That is, how can you be detached from such an environment instead of indulging in this place. Immediately after the quiver that "I thought I was full of sunshine," "Make a Good Movie" turned the camera to a more serious self-expression by Xu Anhua sitting on the couch. Such "redemption" moments are not uncommon in Xu Anhua's films, in which the middle school history teachers in "Forty Men" who are in a hurry to marry recite "Chibi Fu" together, agreeing to go to the Three Gorges tour before the submerged, and an emergency midlife crisis is declared over; in "Auntie's Postmodern Life", the surreal and perfect moon that appears between the ancients and the present; in the more recent "When is the Bright Moon", the members of the Jiangdong guerrillas bid farewell, and after the rising of the moon is a scene of seventy years of change in the long river of history.
For Xu Anhua, the most important part of the so-called "making a good movie" lies in this. In order to correctly find the position between the individual and history, she attaches great importance to the field search and collection of historical materials to prepare the film solidly rather than on the spot, which is her lifelong interest. As Xu Anhua said in "Make a Good Movie", "I myself feel that when making a movie, sometimes the most important thing is these things, not that you make a good movie, but your own education process and life experience, but a lot of it is obtained through data collection, but these experiences are very valuable." ”