Text: Hounge
Editor: YY
As director Cai Chengjie's film debut, "A Vast Expanse in the North" (formerly known as "The Little Widow Chengxian") does not stop at the director's personal life experience, but from the perspective of "he", it tells a series of what a widow in the northern countryside who has died for three years is on the way to find a place to live.
The fifth generation of directors focuses on history and groups, and their works are unique aesthetic experiments with national characteristics, while the sixth generation of directors focuses on the underlying care of individuals and small people in a realistic way. Cai Chengjie differs from the above in that he tries to provide another possibility for Chinese rural narratives with a new system of film aesthetics.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" >- the meaning of the dissolution-</h1>
Through the perspective of the heroine Nijo, the film presents us with a long scroll of ukiyo-e in the contemporary northern countryside: widowers without childcare, women who conceive a sixth child in order to give birth to a son, hypocritical and calculating village chiefs, and left-behind children who are bullied but have nowhere to complain, and appear one by one in the heroine's road trip.
It looks like the shell of a road movie, but the film is constantly smeared with a layer of magic.
Poor and closed villages, unlearned villagers, and religious superstitions are the perfect soil for the birth of magic realism. The little girl transformed by the white fox in the film, the deaf fourth master who died and came back to life, seems to be using the ambiguity of the image to cross-examine the so-called "truth" that we are accustomed to in real life.
When the heroine Erhao wears loose hair and puts on a shamanic dress, for a while, the audience can hardly tell whether she is a human or a fairy.
Complemented by the sense of magic is the film's ubiquitous sense of absurdity, which often appears in some kind of comical, black humor and dissolves the otherwise serious and even heavy topic in a relaxed way.
At the beginning of the film, in a subjective shot, the voiceover of the second best has been asking about the whereabouts of her husband, Dayongko, but no one answers, until the small bench reads homework, we do not know that her husband was killed.
Explaining the plot through the form of homework rather than dialogue creates a sense of spatial absurdity in itself, and also causes the audience's psychological dissociation effect.
In another passage, Erhao sits on the snow with a look of despair after catching up with the trafficker, while the big aunt of the twisted song on the bridge above the camera is walking through with joy and laughter, and sorrow and joy are placed in the same space.
In addition, the deaf fourth master was picked up by The Second Good in the iron barrel after the whole night, but the legs and feet became sharp, and the girl identified by the B Super was magically replaced by the Boy by the Second Good, these absurd and bizarre plots that could hardly occur in real life repeatedly appeared in a curious way, pointing to the absurdity of life itself, while also canceling out and rejecting the possibility of profound criticism.
The director said in the interview, "The so-called human nature, there is no need to exalt or pity", in this sense, the sense of absurdity here dissolves the meaning of life itself, and meaninglessness itself becomes the meaning of life.
The second good helped the deaf fourth master to take a bath
The second good to visit the sister-in-law's unfavored daughter
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="16" >-reconstruction of space-time</h1>
The film begins with a large color vista, then turns to black and white images, and reappears in several scenes with colorful images such as colored windows, colored lights, and red charcoal fires. The continuity of time is broken when color turns to black and white, and if the former is a rare happy time for Nichiyoshi and Daiyoko, the latter corresponds to the difficult years when Niyoshi barely survives.
Inside the space, the recurring images of kettles and charcoal fires in the film delay time to some extent, and time seems to stagnate at the moment when the camera closes up these props, as if the memory is blocked.
In the choice of time period, the film has also made a deliberate treatment.
The dialogue with the deaf fourth master at the end of the film prompts Erhao to leave the village of Yiba for a whole year, but the time presented in the film is almost always winter, which is obviously a means for the director to reconstruct time, showing that for the closed and almost diplomatic villages, winter and cold are the main tone of life here, and the cycle of four seasons and the resulting cycle of life is always absent in this land.
In terms of spatial composition, the film adopts the traditional 4:3 format, mostly using door frames, car windows, cement holes and other picture structures, combined with fixed lenses, so that the overall picture has a classical sense of stability.
When shooting the location, the director made full use of the topographic characteristics of the northern hilly area, and chose the scenery as a medium and long-range view, which well showed the characteristics of the vast geographical edge and the layering when the snow covered the land.
The natural poetry expressed in the picture also coincides with the spirit of the film's "nature worship". In the film, Erhao not only carries the truth, goodness and beauty of human beings themselves, but also represents the embodiment of nature to some extent.
Her help to the little fox incarnation of the girl, her obstruction of the villagers to blow up the mountain, all show that she is a god-like character representing nature, and finally the village chief takes the lead in pouring "Hundred Urine" on her, which corresponds to the act of bombing the mountain that they will carry out.
The villagers who are eager to get rich use the "hundred urine" to wash away the immortals on Erhao's body
The villagers lack respect and faith in nature, they would rather sacrifice nature for money and profit, and like the dozen villagers who are trapped in the mountains at the end, nature will eventually punish them.
There are several spatial elements that appear repeatedly in the film, and interpreting them constitutes an important way for us to understand the film.
The whole film Ofo has been looking for a place to live, from the old tofu family to the village committee, the deaf fourth grandfather's family to the previous two husbands' homes, and finally back to the village committee, Niyoshi and Shishi are not only looking for a place to live at night, they are also looking for the coordinates of personal real life, that is, a place to settle down.
After the death of her husband, Erhao and his brother-in-law Shi began a life of wind and food and sleep
Unfortunately, their flesh seemed so alien to the world around them that nature became their last habitat.
At the end, Niyoshi lies on the snow, looking at the world upside down from her subjective world, and when the women fight for a so-called "peace charm" (actually a "fixation charm"), Niyoshi gets up and walks on the vast earth, and at that moment it seems that the earth is her real destination.
In addition, the well, as an ambiguous symbol of death and destruction, also appears many times in the film. There is also a confessional room in the middle of the film, which is the place where Catholics repent, but in the film, it is reduced to a den for traffickers to sell children, and this absurd setting undoubtedly has a strong realistic irony.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" >-unsystematic aesthetic construction.</h1>)
It can be seen that the information that the director wants to express through the film has a large capacity, and the aesthetic construction of the film itself also has a certain degree of self-consistency, but only from the 113-minute version of the release, the film still has many flaws and deficiencies.
First of all, in terms of characters, the portrayal of villagers is still too facial and curious, and these shortcomings are further amplified by the lack of naturalness of ordinary actors and excessive performance traces.
Taking the village chief as an example, it can be understood that the director designed the intention of some lines such as "the shackles of carrying fate" and "fatalism", and he may want to create a sense of absurdity and at the same time show the characteristics of the character's moral appearance.
The village chief wanted to do something to the two good
However, in the film, the effect presented is a flat, non-living, detached village chief, which in itself is contrary to the reality of the film. In contrast, the role of the deaf fourth master is obviously more three-dimensional and successful, but unfortunately there are not many such brilliant supporting roles.
Secondly, in the film technique, many details are still slightly green and stiff.
For example, the transition shot shot shot by aerial shooting in the film looks a little too deliberate, and it is not too connected with the overall style of the film. I don't know if it is the reason for the deletion, but many shots in the film also have the problem of unsmooth connection and unclear intentions in the editing. In addition, the aesthetic experiment of fixing long shots is only conceptual and lacks impressive passages.
Aerial footage appears several times in the film
Finally, in the text, many of the plots at the end lack the necessary foreshadowing in the front, so they appear more abrupt and lack logical self-consistency.
For example, what is the meaning of Xu Wei driving away the two good vans in the end? Why did Nihao give a box of feathers to the little girl who hadn't appeared in the film before? At the same time, many paragraphs of the text also have a clear sense of design, such as the sudden death of the stone, and the deliberate choice of time period mentioned above.
At the end of the film, the little girl opens the box given by the second good
All in all, as a domestic rural theme film with aesthetic pursuits, film language construction, and social issues, it is lucky to be able to see it in southern cities. However, when this unique rural narrative is "watched" by urban people, it produces a certain curiosity and imagination, which has to be said to be an irony.
We should focus on the other end of China's binary social structure, but from what perspective? What is the position? It is worth thinking about for creators and audiences.
THE END
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