In China's Confucian classic "Analects", there is a famous saying about the logic of life and death: "Unknown birth, knowing death." At that time, someone asked Confucius about ghosts and gods, and Confucius said that the affairs of people were still unclear, so how could they interpret ghosts and gods? The man then asked what about death? Confucius replied that he did not understand the truth of life, how could he understand death? On the question of man and ghost, between life and death, Confucius did not give the world a pale answer with his own knowledge, but he left the world with endless thinking about the meaning of life. He put the death problem that people are most curious and afraid of after it, and puts the problem of survival before, Confucius wisely interprets the logic of life and death, so that people can actively think about the preciousness of life, so as to cherish the life and realize the value of life.
Regarding the meaning of life and death to life, there are many celebrities who have interpreted the classics, such as Su Shi, a great literary hero in ancient China, in "Chibi Fu", with the classic quote that "if you look at it from the change of the person, then the heavens and the earth cannot increase in a moment, and from the perspective of the unchanging one, then things and I are endless" sighed his open-mindedness about the phenomenon of life and death. As Apple's founder Jobs said in his famous "Stanford University Speech": "No one wants to die, even if people want to go to heaven, they don't die to go there." But death is the common end point for each of us. No one has ever been able to escape it. So it should be. For death is one of the best inventions of life. It will purge the old ones in order to make way for the new. You are new now, but soon from now on, you will gradually become old and be sent off the stage of life. I'm sorry it's dramatic, but it's very true. In the year leading up to this speech, Jobs had just finished treating pancreatic cancer.
Human life begins with birth, but man truly knows how to cherish life, but it begins with knowing that man will die. As Jobs famously said, remembering that you will always die is the best way to avoid getting caught up in the "life is lost" thinking. It is true that death is a difficult fact to face, but it is an unavoidable ending for everyone. From Jobs's rational speech, from Confucius's wise philosophy, and in Su Dacaizi's Daguan Zhizhi fate, we feel the ultimate meaning of death to life, this seemingly sad and desperate setting, but in fact, the sword of Damocles hanging high above everyone's life reminds us to cherish the present, that is, to practice life.
On June 21, 1990, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3-7.7 on the Richter scale occurred in the northwest region of Iran, and according to the data of the four days after the earthquake, the earthquake caused 50,000 deaths, 200,000 injuries, and 3.5 million homeless people. This sudden disaster not only broke the orderly life of the people in the disaster area, but also, in a sense, the process of human civilization in this region. Based on the earthquake, the famous Iranian director and film master Abbas created a film called "Life and Growth Stream", which is formally similar to a post-earthquake documentary interview, but in fact, it is a film work that Abbas made a year later based on his experience after the earthquake.
In order to bring the film closer to a documentary, Abbas framed the film as a director going to the disaster area to find a young actor. The language of light and shadow that Abbas has created on the screen that is close to objective reality has narrowed the distance between him and the audience. The charm of Abbas's cinematic language lies in the fact that he forges a narrow and textured strip between reality and art, story and truth, poetry and objectivity. The audience felt the taste of Abbas's life from reality in the difficult to distinguish between true and false.
If death is a wake-up call to a person's life, then natural disasters are God's will for the entire human society. The film "Born and Growing" uses a road documentary method to reproduce the experience of a small actor after the Great Iranian Earthquake, and in the first half of the film, Abbas uses the protagonist of the film to lead the audience to appreciate the trauma brought by the earthquake to the whole society from a long-distance perspective, which is a tragic scene that people dare not approach and imagine. However, the director cleverly added the role of son. Unlike the shock that the male protagonist feels, the son is still immersed in his own world, he and his father continue to talk about the ongoing World Cup, he is still looking for frozen drinks in the dilapidated store, and he will catch a grasshopper in the field.
And the male protagonist is only concerned with finding his target, the small movie actor whose life and death are uncertain. He can't even remember the names of the countries on both sides of the tournament that his son said, because in his feelings, the World Cup is no longer so important as the current earthquake. However, what he saw during the journey changed the male protagonist's attitude towards the earthquake more and more, and he gradually changed from the perspective of looking for small actors to thinking about disasters. It seems like there is only one afternoon of the story, but in fact Abbas filmed for several months. In the film, Abbas skillfully introduces the audience into his story perspective with a reconstructed world of light and shadow, and uses the perspective of the protagonist of the film to exchange father and son, so that the audience can see a completely different post-disaster world.
In the concept of the traditional audience, a movie about disaster should have a lot of touching life and death, thrilling life and death rescue. And the weakness of human nature exposed in the disaster. Obviously Abbas did not fall into the cliché, not only did he not deliberately look for touch, he even deliberately avoided touch. In his shots, people after the disaster calmly and rationally deal with everything in front of them, whether it is life or death, family destruction or death, some have quietly happened, and everything has been cast as a foregone conclusion. What should people do? Is it crying about the unexpected undead, or taking good care of the survivors. In the film, the director's answer is obvious, life will go on, but the sadness has been integrated into the vast light and shadow of Abbas as a collective pain relief.
A film critic compared domestic disaster films and used a short review of "dissolving the difference between suffering and consumer suffering" to express his respect for the film "Born and Grow". In the film, Abbas has been trying to interpret the actual meaning of death and disaster for the progress of modern civilization. When his son bought soda, he didn't seem to understand the devastation of life caused by the earthquake, and he still complained about the lack of ice soda, still wondering why there was no cashier in the store. And when he presses the fragments of glass bottles shattered by the earthquake on the banknotes, the audience feels the paleness and powerlessness of modern civilization in the face of natural disasters. This contrast is precisely the "value" of the disaster that the director wants to convey to the audience.
When people are taken away by a sudden disaster that robs their loved ones and destroys their homes, the first thing they feel is despair and grief. And then with that comes the yearning for the happy life before. The story of "Life and Growth" takes place on the fourth day after the earthquake, and the most emblematic passage in the film comes from the fact that near the end of the film, a group of refugees in a shelter set up a TV antenna on a hillside to enjoy the Night's World Cup soccer match. Curious, the male protagonist thinks that there were no casualties in the home of the man who set up the antenna, but the man's answer is that one of the siblings died in the earthquake. When the male protagonist was curious about his optimistic attitude, the man responded: "The earthquake may be once every 40 years, and the World Cup is once every four years".
Similar questions, the male protagonist asked a lot of survivors of the disaster, he did not get the answer he wanted. The subjective opinion of the male protagonist, and the objective display of the interviewee in the film, embody Abbas's thinking on the meaning of disaster and death in life in a subtle way. Just like the way Confucius answered the question, Abbas cleverly avoided giving a pale conclusion, throwing the question to the audience in front of the screen, allowing the audience to find, think, feel, and understand in his reconstructed reality of light and shadow. After stripping the cocoon and drawing the thread, Abbas uses light and shadow to weave sentimentality about the time of life, about the hope of growing and flowing.
However, unlike Confucius, Abbas's questioning was reversed, and his proposition of light and shadow became: unknown death, knowing life. In the land destroyed by the great earthquake, among the people who were baptized by the great earthquake, Abbas felt a kind of cherishing life and nostalgia for the past life after being tortured by the god of death. After the disaster, life will go on, young people who have lost dozens of relatives will get married, fans who have lost their brothers and sisters will watch the World Cup, and old ladies who have lost their wives will continue to drink tea. People with stoves, kerosene lamps, gas cans, in the long winding mountain road, in the melodious poetic light and shadow, continue to carry the weight forward, this moment life is suffering, but compared to the relatives who died in the earthquake, life is so worth cherishing. This should be the most sincere and objective wake-up call that death brings to life, a kind of torture of "unknown death, knowing life".