The French director Houmai died ten years ago, but his influence persists, and the film lines he influenced and shaped are very clear. It is said that he is an unpopular director, and his film expression is too restrained, basically focusing on portraying people's inner world. The drama of the film lies in the action and action of the characters, and the action of the characters in Hou Mai's film is very weak, as the critics say, his film is "thinking rather than acting". So focus on the subtle expression of the film, the general accustomed to watching commercial films is difficult for people to have the patience to fully understand, but people who like it will be very obsessed with Hou Mai's film art.
▍ French film director Hou Mai (1920-2010)
The 10th Beijing International Film Festival screened 6 of Hou Mai's films, and many film enthusiasts cheered for it. Recently, Guan Hu's movie "Eight Hundred" was released, and many viewers said that this is the real movie! I know what these people are talking about. They refer to films with outstanding visual effects that are "good movies" and "real movies". If so, Houmai's movie is simply too unmade. Its narrative mainly relies on the dialogue and lines of the characters, and many Houmai films can be understood by the audience if the picture is removed and appears in the form of radio dramas. If Hou Mai's film is enough to watch on the small screen, what is there to cheer for watching Hou Mai on the big screen?
This is actually a discussion of a particular ontological problem, that is, the "cinematicity" of Hou Mai's films. Hou Mai's film is, of course, also a movie, and it has its own unique cinematography. When a film changed from silent to sound, the definition of cinema was modified. Film is the art of comprehensive promotion of picture and sound, and discourse also plays a huge role in it, although films that rely too much on lines seem to make the power of the picture appear negative, but the role of the picture is still not dissolved. This point to discuss, indeed to waste too much ink, and the speculation of related aspects, historically completed, here is not the table. What I want to say is that due to the re-screening of Hou Mai's film at this North Film Festival, the author was required to do a pre-screening tour part of Hou Mai's film, so I re-watched four or five Hou Mai films in a row, including "Summer Story", "Green Light", "Claire's Knee" and so on. This re-watching has given me a lot of new experiences.
▍ Stills of "Claire's Knee"
How do we introduce HouMai in a concise and concise manner? How to understand the meaning of HouMai? Houmai is one of the more unusual French New Wave film directors. In terms of age, he was the oldest director of the French New Wave – born in 1920, 10 years older than Godard, 12 years older than Truffaut and 8 years older than Varda. We know that Varda is known as the old grandmother of the French New Wave, and Why is Houmai much older than Varda and has not received such a prestigious honor?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > recognized master of emotion</h1>
Hou Mai's film style and expression tendencies are also very different from these people, and his spiritual understanding of the New Wave is not the same as others. Although he, like many New Wave directors, has been a film critic and is a model of film critics' success in turning to directing, his life experience is also very different from others. Before making films, he was a teacher who taught literature, but also wrote novels, and was a writer. Almost all of his later films are first completed novels, and then the novels are made into movies, so from here, his films are writer's films, but also author films, and the authorship is very strong.
▍ Stills from "One Night at mud's House"
Where is his authorship manifested? In fact, I have seen Hou Mai's previous works, and what is particularly different from the works of other directors of the French film new wave is that the plot of his works I often can't remember, and every time I re-watch it, I will slowly remember that I have seen this movie before. I think there's a reason this happens. Because the storyline he designed is all a storm in a teacup for us, compared to the various big problems we are keen to discuss and present in our own living environment, Hou Mai's perspective is too microscopic, the waves described are too internalized, and it is also too windy and snowy.
In fact, his creations are also very inconsistent with the French social atmosphere of the era when he created films, the 1950s and 1960s. We know that there was a May storm in France in the 1960s, but Hou mai's work does not seem to present that zeitgeist. His works are almost all intellectuals, middle-class love, as mentioned above, his films seem weak in terms of dramatic action, and especially rely on lines and words to promote narrative. So some people say that his films are characterized by talkative.
The so-called talking is actually a kind of meaningless chatter. But re-watching Hou Mai's film today, I think this view is wrong. In his words, he still reflects the ups and downs of the inner world of the characters, those words are not irrelevant, they are still looking at the problems of happiness and spiritual difficulties in life, the problems of loneliness, and the problems of human relations. These issues are not unimportant.
Hou Mai is recognized as a master of emotions because he is meticulous, has a thorough understanding of the motivations of the characters' actions, and has a meticulous understanding of human feelings. His films rarely have love stories such as rushing to the earth and cutting their wrists and committing suicide, but instead explore some delicate emotional fluctuations of characters under free choice, and the left and right drift of people's hearts. He has insight into the secrets of male and female interactions, the secrets of love, but Hou Mai does not seem pessimistic. I think he's very active in exploring all of this, and you can feel that he's observing and enjoying it, and he's constantly making fun of male characters. Especially when the men in the film circle between several women and are finally rejected by everyone, the audience will feel very funny, and will send out a smile that has ridicule and sympathy. The Story of Summer (1996) is one such work.
Houmai is particularly good at depicting human loneliness and the dislocation of interpersonal relationships, such as "Green Light", which won the Venice Golden Lion Award, which presents a lost woman wandering in Paris and the suburbs, unable to reconcile and agree with the outside world. Others are in a happy state of mind during the holidays, enjoying the beautiful scenery and partying with people, and she can't enjoy it in all places, and the beautiful scenery around her is missed by her. The presentation of this state is very subtle, and of course it also depends on the director's film control. Hou Mai can often have a good grasp of a person's lonely and inadmissible state of mind when gathering, and the audience can often empathize after watching it.
Although American film critics believe that Houmai is an expert in asexual eroticism and indulges in the vulgar bourgeois linguistics, Houmai's aesthetic is the aesthetic of the middle class. But Hou Mai himself was not impressed. He believed that cinema was not the art of illusion, and that his work was free, still following the spirit of the New Wave. But what is the spirit of the New Wave?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > make subtle mental activities into movies</h1>
The French New Wave was also divided. We know that after Bazin's death in 1958, Houmai took over as editor-in-chief of the Film Handbook. The relationship between the French New Wave of Cinema and this manual is familiar to everyone, and I will not repeat it here. By 1963, due to the struggle between left and right positions, Hou Mai and the young people of the "manual faction" had a clash of ideas. The young people of the "manual" forced him to accept more radical ideas, and at this time, Hou Mai chose to leave the "Film Manual".
▍ Stills of "Female Collector"
In the process, Houmai and Truffaut's positions may be slightly aligned. But we know that Truffaut has also been criticized by Godard. Truffaut himself did not agree with Godard's radicalism, and Truffaut's origin should have produced radical ideas, but in fact this was not the case. Truffaut's later works seem to have some similarities with Houmai, and of course, their differences are obvious. After all, Truffaut was born as a street boy, and his emotional presentation could not be like Houmai.com.
Hou Mai was considered conservative, even stale, and unroathical, and Hou Mai's films were widely recognized relatively late compared to other New Wave directors' works. But today, I think his work is still hugely groundbreaking, and therefore revolutionary, and this revolution does not mean a strong current politics, but a revolution that takes place in the field of art.
Visually, his visual language is relatively ordinary, but he himself seems to be very insistent on this language, which shows that this may be HouMai's firm aesthetic principle. His films have more long shots, but there is no cumbersome scheduling on the movement of the camera, most of them are soothing shakes and shifts, and there are many follow-up shots, and the scenes are mostly fixed medium and short shots, and there are few extreme scenes. His lens point of view is also mostly the point of view of ordinary people's daily lives. It looks ordinary, but he uses this visual language to bring a field of life and daily psychology that does not have a sense of cinema to the screen. I think that's a huge groundbreak.
Today we often say that what movie is a Houmai-style movie. Because Hou Mai has done the ultimate in this regard. For example, Hong Shangxiu's films, we think of them as "Hou Mai style". Some foreign critics also commented on Hou Mai: "The most exciting thing about Hou Mai is not the literary nature he exalts, but that he has successfully transformed some subject matter that is not suitable for film into a movie, and found a way to make a movie." ”
We all think that Houmai's films are related to the psychological depictions and realism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French novels. I think this is right, after all, Hou Mai himself is also a fiction writer and is passionate about words. Therefore, many of the ideas of his films must also have an intrinsic connection with those French novels. Some people also say that watching Hou Mai's film reminds him of Proust's novel "Remembrance of The Age of Water". The tasting and chanting of the details of daily life is indeed very similar to the details of Hou Mai. It may be said that Houmai made a film of proust-like subtle psychological flows, and this is where the pioneering and revolutionary nature of Houmai's films lies.
Hou Mai's film is also a meaningful reference for us Chinese filmmakers. Our film shooting love often lacks such a tact, delicacy and patience, but we can make the palace fight in "The Biography of Zhen Huan" so evocative, perhaps in our unique social life, we still have to learn more how to love, to understand more warmly, to touch and soothe people's inner world, then watching Hou Mai's film is a good learning.
Source: Beijing Daily Client | author Wang Xiaolu
Editor: Jiang Baojun
Process Editor: Dan Guo