What is the countryside for today's young people? Is it the yellow land that the ancestors passed on by word of mouth, the wheat waves in the film, or the distant scenes depicted in the textbooks?
When we follow the lens of director Jia Zhangke, the film scene of the vast land flashes in front of us, as if unveiling a layer of foggy shadows, reflecting the deep ravines on the faces of generations of people.
It is also at this moment that the intention of the countryside becomes clear, it is not only a rural sound, a bunch of homeland, but also Jia Pingwa's "Qin Cavity", Yu Hua's "Alive", Liang Hong's "Out of Liang Zhuang", with a more popular and more life-like romance.
Image source "Swim until the sea turns blue"
Director Jia Zhangke's new work "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" is being released, which is also another documentary film by director Jia Zhangke after 2010's "Legend of the Sea".
Receiving an invitation from Elephant Spot, elites said they had the privilege of participating in the premiere of the documentary in Shanghai and wrote this article to chat with readers about "literature in a village."
Centered on three writers born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong, the documentary, together with Duan Huifang, daughter of the late Shanxi writer Ma Feng, depicts the changes in the countryside and the changes of the years through the open wind direction and personal memories of their generations, and presents a "history of china's spiritual changes" since 1949.
The poster is looking at a magnificent sea, but it is a continuous mountain, between the mountains and rivers, and the mountain road is winding, it is the hometown.
Jia Pingwa: You were born there,
In fact, half of you die there
Jia Pingwa, a writer born in the 1950s and often uses the Shaanxi dialect in his writing, always has a sincere and ordinary style, and has a real texture in the flat and direct narrative.
He said: "The novel makes people see that they are doing it, and what is done is skill, which is broken." The more some people want to break the way novels are written, the more they want to play tricks in form, which is counterproductive, and the more they write like novels. Therefore, the success of the novel is not determined by the subject matter, nor by the so-called structure. ”
The various inscription portrait bricks in "Gao Laozhuang", the large number of Qin cavity descriptions at the beginning of "Qin Cavity", and the description of the sound and shadow in "White Night" can suddenly arouse the reader's curiosity or remembrance of folk culture.
Image source "Swim until the sea turns blue": Jia Pingwo
In the documentary, Jia Lao told the reason why he stepped into the temple of literature.
During the Cultural Revolution, his father was branded a rightist, and Jia Pingwa, who should have received a good education, experienced a huge turning point in his life. He wanted to be a militiaman, he wanted to be a worker, but he was brushed off because of background checks.
In his early twenties, Jia Pingwo began to try to write, and also experienced a period of confusion. At that time, a large number of foreign literature was introduced, and Chinese writers were deeply influenced, eager to explore and explore a new literary path. But the starting point of innovation is always imitating, and Jia Pingwo is no exception. He said: "At that time, I was young and wanted to write everything, and after graduation, I also wrote a little bit about everything. In 1982 and 83, I felt that this was not going to work, and I had to find a direction. ”
During that time, Jia Pingwo returned to his hometown of Shangluo, and he and his friends rode bicycles around the village every day, admiring the scenery of the village, seeing the life of the people in the village, living in a fixed place, stopping with the road, feeling that life was happy and free of thought.
Only once, Jia Pingwo fell ill with a cold and went to a country clinic for injections. At that time, the material living conditions were backward, and the injection equipment was burned on the alcohol stove and reused. Because the injection supplies were not disinfected, Jia Pingwo unfortunately contracted hepatitis B, and then underwent 15 years of painful treatment.
But recalling that period of youth, Jia Lao still sighed infinitely: "The greatest pain and greatest joy in my life are at this time." ”
The image comes from Weibo @ Twist Entertainment
China's vernacular literature is naturally inseparable from the hometown, and even more inseparable from people's lives. The people of Jia Jiazhuang, the matter of Jia Jiazhuang, are the best writing materials. This has also become the origin of Jia Ping's inner coordinate system and the direction of literary creation, and with this village as the origin, it has spread to all corners of China.
Now, Jia Pingwo spends most of his time in his hometown, where he looks for inspiration and brings back his formed works here to shoot. He said: "Fenyang is my starting point, it is my hometown, it is also China. ”
Yu Hua: Looking back on the past or nostalgic for my hometown
In fact, it is just a pretentious calm in reality
Born in the 1960s, Yu Hua's hometown is Haiyan County, Zhejiang Province.
Chinese vernacular literature often focuses on those small people with ill-fated fates, recording the lives of ordinary people in an unusual way, and what is shown behind them is the memory of an era. Yu Hua's most famous novel, "Alive", tells the story of a person's difficult and painful life.
But when it comes to Yu Hua himself, he is not a person who is "bitter and deeply vengeful", on the contrary, he has a natural sense of transparency. There are not many connections between him and the work, and there is a kind of quiet alienation. However, it is also this writing style that allows Yu Hua to stand in the perspective of a bystander and calmly analyze the inner state of the characters and the joys and sorrows of the world.
Image source "Swim until the sea turns blue": Yu Hua
"I looked at the winding path that led to the city, and I couldn't hear my son running barefoot, and the moonlight shone on the road like it was sprinkled with salt."
This is a sentence written by Yu Hua in "Alive", an excellent metaphorical sentence. The road was like a child's wound, and the moonlight sprinkled on the road like salt on his wound. Not a single word points to sadness, but together they are painful.
Image source network: Yu Hua's "Alive"
In Yu Hua's memory, her childhood life was poor but not without lack of happiness. He said the morgue was very clean at that time, and it was summer, and he was lying on the cement bed, feeling exceptionally cool.
Recalling this fragment years later, he quotes Heine's verse: "Death is a cool night", the first half of the poem is: "Living is a painful day", childhood memories and adult realizations are closely linked, which constitutes Yu Hua's initial understanding of death.
Growing up, Yu Hua became a dentist, but he didn't like the job, "The job at the dental shop bored me to the extreme, tens of thousands of open mouths are the most scenic places in the world." 」 ”
At that time, he could always see the staff of the county cultural palace wandering in the streets, and he had a lot of time every day, so he was very eager to enter the cultural palace through writing.
From the "top stream" journals to local magazines, Yu Hua experienced countless manuscript returns, but he was optimistic by nature, more and more frustrated, and did not encounter the low mood of failure. Later, he was finally favored by the editor of Beijing Literature and asked him to go to Beijing to revise the manuscript. The arduous road from a no-name pawn to a famous writer, Yu Hua used self-deprecating words to brush it over.
The editor of Beijing Literature said: "The end of the original novel is a bit gray, and you have to change a bright ending before this manuscript can be published." Yu Hua joked: "As long as you can publish, you can change the light from beginning to end~
In just one day, Yu Hua completed the revision. For the next month, he kept walking, playing all over the city of Beijing, and when he returned home, he still carried dozens of yuan of revised subsidies in his arms.
Yu Hua's own personality is far from his work, most of his characters write about suffering and absurdity, but the way of narration is witty and humorous. Just like the stories he told in the documentary, it was originally a sad background, but it was "like a light weight", that town, that summer, that evening in Beijing, like a song with a long memory.
The simplest story, but its own long point.
Liang Hong: You have to listen attentively
In order to appreciate their pain and happiness
Liang Hong, born in the 1970s, is the only female writer in the documentary. Unlike several other writers, the expression based on female identity is sensitive, tough, delicate, but has its own power.
The so-called memory of his hometown is not wonderful for Liang Hong, but it has become an inseparable part of his life. Regarding her mother who died of illness, her father who was not good at words, and her sister who sacrificed for her family, after the passage of time, she chose to reconcile with the past.
This kind of kindness and expression and keen observation of life makes her writing full of innerness, she said: "Writing such an article is not to realize her creative dream, but out of a spiritual contradiction and pain." She did her best to make the peasants voice in this society, so that people could understand the living conditions of the countryside and experience the most real and contradictory inner emotions in the hearts of the peasants.
Image source network: Liang Hong's "China in Liangzhuang"
2007 was Liang Hong's seventh year of living in Beijing. After studying for a doctorate, getting married and having children, her son is two years old, and her life is stable and comfortable, but she suddenly loses the direction of life. So she decided to go back to her hometown for a while and record something.
Perhaps it is a different mood after ushering in a new role in life, she sees the widowed old man in the village, and sees the river she used to go to when she was a child, she has a different feeling.
She went to visit the elderly in the village and found that they often received phone calls from their families who worked outside the village, and sometimes received remittance slips from their children, and they were as happy as if they were celebrating a holiday. At this moment, Liang Hong realized that although many people are working in other places, they have always been concerned about Liangzhuang, and they are also one of these Liangzhuang people who work outside.
Image source "Swim until the sea turns blue": Liang Hong
Liang Hong said: "When you really go into the countryside, especially when you enter the village with the emotions of a loved one, you will find that as a person who has left the countryside for a long time, you do not understand it. You have to listen attentively and treat them as individuals, not as a general group, so that you can experience their pain and happiness.
Their emotions, their languages, their wisdom are so rich, so profound, that even a person like me who makes a living from words and thoughts will be shocked by this, because these emotions, words, and wisdom come from the earth and the life of the earth. ”
In the documentary, Jia Zhangke also interviewed Liang Hong's fourteen-year-old son and asked him to introduce himself in Henan dialect. And Liang Hong's son grew up in Beijing, and he has long forgotten how to say the Henan dialect, and his mother can only teach him to repeat it sentence by sentence.
For the next generation, the memory of their hometown is fading away, and the inheritance of rural sounds may be their only connection with distant history.
Swim until the water turns blue
In the documentary, director Jia Zhangke has been trying to show the alternation of new and old things with the changes of the times and the inheritance of small families. Several writers were pulled down from the altar of literature, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Liang Hong, no longer just the writing arrangers of words, they were given more roles, father, son, mother, and so on.
What they talk about is not their own creative methods, but the parents in life:
Mr. Jia told his daughter that she should be a good mother and wife, and that it is okay to write poetry, and not to poeticize life; Yu Hua talked about his father's need to move his family to the hospital in Haiyan County because he wanted to treat schistosomiasis patients; Liang Hong said that his mother who had suffered a stroke and his father who was not good at words did not understand his father to slowly re-establish a relationship with his father.
Although Jia Zhangke does not appear in the documentary, he is hidden in the group portraits of several writers. The meaning of hometown and hometown in their own creations has repeatedly appeared in the mouths of several writers. The same is true of Director Jia, who often has a shadow or metaphor of his hometown in his films. In the past two years, he even moved back to his hometown, which is where the film began - Jia Jiazhuang.
Jia Dao's interviews with several writers are very useful in borrowing the mouths of others to tell their own "local feelings". When a bunch of soil and a tree in my hometown are slowly exposed in front of the camera, just like the writer Shen Congwen said: "I am really a countryman."
Image source network: Jia Zhangke
At the end of the film, Yu Hua looks at the Qiantang River in his hometown and says: When he was a child, adults told him that the Qiantang River was yellow. But the sea tens of kilometers away is blue. Once he swam in the sea, it was like swimming all the time, swimming all the time, swimming until the water turned blue. After saying this, the movie came to an abrupt end.
From the countryside to the small town, from the homeland to the world, in the decades of change in the writer's writing, there are too many people who try to swim towards the sea.
In 1993, Jia Zhangke left Jiajiazhuang and entered the Beijing Film Academy. In 1996, he filmed his first work, "The Hill Comes Home", and since then he has been swimming on the road of art, hoping to reach the blue ocean of his dreams.
The waves stirred up on the surface of the sea are the dreams and desires held in the hearts of countless people, such as Jia Zhangke, and so are you and me.
Author: Vera, elite says author, thinking out of the box, imaginative, love to write, until death.
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Resources:
Documentary, "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue"