◎ Black Selection Ming
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Conductor Valery Gergiev, an old friend of Chinese music fans, conducts the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and gave a concert to people in the epidemic the other day. I hadn't seen him for a long time, and when he came out, he was still a little surprised, obviously aging a lot. More than twenty years ago, I translated the "brother-in-law" who led the Maria Theater (unfortunately, this ancient and noble Russian theater has always been mistranslated as "Mariinsky") to China. He had the appearance of a typical Ossetian man, which invisibly added some strong momentum and sense of strength to him. In contrast, today's "brother-in-law" inexplicably has a sense of sadness in the context of the epidemic. The most impressive performance of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra was Schubert's "Unfinished" Seventh Symphony (eighth, mostly marked seventh in German-speaking countries).
Why is it called "unfinished"? Is it because it has only two movements? But musically, it's already highly accomplished. If "unfinished" refers to the "afterglow" of the work, refers to the long aftertaste after listening, reading, and watching the work, and even the audience combines their own experience to develop their own set of explanations, then it makes sense.
An "unfinished" symphony is a work that does not require the listener to have much classical music experience and will be directly "understood". The first movement is a sonata-like structure, and Schubert uses a tritonic combination to convey a melancholy mood at once, and this "mist thick clouds and eternal day" gradually removes the clouds through the solo of the wood pipe, revealing a clean clarity. In the second movement, in a sad background, the tone of the tuba and the violin magically combine the two different emotions of melancholy and brightness. It ultimately feels peaceful, but it is a kind of tranquility under the danger, a clarity that can be maintained as much as possible in the face of an uncertain future or disaster, and listening to this work when the epidemic is still in full swing around the world will be more resonant.
This resonance may not come from "believing that good things will happen", but more from the ordinary mind of "what should come will always come".
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Although the Shanghai International Film Festival was late, it came after all, and in the dense list of films, the first thing you saw was Yasujiro Ozu's "Only Son" (1936). Most of Ozu's films are produced by Shochiku Film Company, and this year's Festival has set up a unit for Shochiku - Shochiku Company can be said to be modest on the surface, in fact, it is very thoughtful to select several works that are not well known to passers-by to participate in the exhibition, but each one will shock the audience "unexpectedly".
Akira Kurosawa's "Scandal" Needless to say, Masaki Kobayashi's "Belly Cut" - just the last hand knife drop, crisp and sharp to the extreme duel, instantly made some sought after kung fu films become circus juggling; Nomura Yoshitaro's "Sand Instrument" is Tarkovsky's top ten film list - I remember watching Nomura's "Surveillance", from the first shot, I was deeply attracted, watched twice, thinking how the police genre film can be so artistic, almost jealous to deformation. Shochiku's move can be said to be the style of the old nobility, and in a low-key, implicit way, it easily shows that he is the "old money" in world movies.
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Shochiku's choice of Ozu's work is the same, "The Only Child" is his first sound film, and amazingly, this work shot in 1936 allows us to "substitute" ourselves for real life without any effort. The story tells that Ryosuke (Nichimori Shinichi), a child of a rural single-parent family, loves to learn from an early age, but his family is poor enough to support him to study. Persuaded by her teacher (Kasasa Tomohito), her mother (Iida Dieko), a female worker in a textile factory, longs to "get ahead", selling Bota's broken house, smashing pots and selling iron for him to study, and he is later admitted to a Tokyo university and stays in Tokyo to work after graduation. In the eyes of those around him, he has "come out", and the mother is proud that her son "works in the government department". But one day, when the old mother came to Tokyo with great anticipation, she found that her son was working as a tutor at night school after graduation, with a meager salary, and could only rent a cheap house in the suburbs to survive, eating bowls of ramen was already delicious.
At first, Ryosuke tried to hide his situation, and cobbled together money to entertain his mother, taking her out for sightseeing and watching movies (here is an interesting contrast to the plot of the later "Tokyo Story"), but as a famous saying goes, poverty cannot be hidden.
Ozu's plot here sets up a confusing plot: Ryosuke's wife sells her kimono and asks him to take his mother on a journey into urban life, but Ryosuke uses the money to pay for the medical expenses of the neighbor boy who is injured by a horse. The mother seems to be pleased by this: her son's noble moral sentiments are the reward for her years of effort. But after the climax of this suspected chicken soup story has passed, the mother returns to the countryside to continue to do cleaning, continues to maintain the illusion that her son is a "big man" in front of others, and continues to die alone without any guarantees; Ryosuke decides to take a teacher's qualification certificate and try to enter the "order".
- Ozu or Ozu.
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Ozu is not Akira Kurosawa – the profession of a teacher rarely appears in Ozu's films, while Akira Kurosawa does the opposite. Because Kurosawa's films have a strong sense of social indoctrination and humanitarian ideals, "I Have No Regrets about Youth", "Red Beard", and "Sunset Love" are among the representative works, and the images of these teachers are deeply respected and worshiped by students because they exude the noble personality charm of idealism. This teacher-student relationship is the opposite in Ozu's films: it can be seen in "The Taste of Saury" and "The Other Side of the Flower": the students' attitude towards the fallen teacher is ridicule, irony and relief, and idealism has no place. The teacher who switched to a small restaurant became a non-committal because he was poor. In other words, "sublime" has never been something that Ozu is interested in, and the same is true of "The Only Child."
Ozu has no intention of "solving" any social problem. He does not offer any schemes, his real interest lies only in observation. He is closer to Liu Beiqian — the economic downturn is just the background, and the focus of "The Only Child" is on the family.
Ozu, who never married all his life, made the greatest family drama, and he thought about the internal structure of the family and the relationship between family members very early on. "The Only Child" is the product of reading and thinking. At the beginning of the film, Ozu quotes the great writer Ryunosuke Wasagawa's "The Words of the Dwarf"—a style similar to Nietzsche's essay—"The first act of the tragedy of life begins with parents and children. We can also refer to the following passage of Ryunosuke Wasagawa," many parents in ancient times repeated this sentence: I am a loser after all, but I should make this child successful. ”
If "The Only Child" has touched today's audience on the two topics of "it is difficult to get a noble son in the cold door" and "Is reading useful", then another question, that is, the "original family", or whether the "failure" should be blamed on the "original family", is actually more important.
Ozu undoubtedly shows us the gap between the two generations: the mother is like an investment loser, gambling her son with all her wealth to get ahead, but in the end she is exchanged for the fact that she has no one to rely on, although she comforts herself with her mother's love and her son's "nobility", but the final frustration is obvious, which is also where she is inferior to "Tokyo Story".
The son was actually happy before the mother arrived, he already had a son of his own, and the mother knew nothing, which meant that for a long time they lacked communication. After his mother's arrival, he acted a little too hard, and this excessive force actually included letting his mother feel "modern urban life". This idea is actually no different from "Tokyo Story" 20 years later, and there is no sense of contradiction in putting the mother's line in "Tokyo Story" here: "Tokyo is watched, Atami is watching, it's time to go home." In fact, my mother was not really interested in "modern urban life" – and that was the reason for the real estrangement. "The Only Child" also shows this opposition in the language of video, the modern life of the city, the big chimney, including the cinema, is actually incompatible with her mother - she fell asleep in the cinema.
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The cinema section is quite comical — not only the cinema is the way of urban civilization, but also the spiritual world of his son — and he takes his mother to see the Austrian film "Unfinished Symphony", and he specifically tells his mother that it is an audio film.
That's right, Schubert's "unfinished symphony." It is a tragicomedy made by Austrian director Willy Foster in 1933. Foster was a prolific melodrama director, and his films are still quite watchable today, romanticizing the triangle of Schubert and his friends and girlfriends. Early sound films all had the characteristics of amplifying the treatment of sound to highlight their "sound film" qualities, and Schubert's "unfinished" was fully and repeatedly laid out in the film, and could even be regarded as a musical film.
Ozu "pays homage" to him in his first sound film, and the references to the sound and graphics of this film are even slightly "overflowing". But we might as well think of this music as a mental portrait of the protagonist Ryosuke, who does not accept the definition of "failure" and always retains his vitality.
In general, Ozu's protagonists are all impermanent, they know that the family is like a hotel, there will always be someone check in, someone check out. No matter how intimate the relationship, sooner or later it will have to be separated. He tirelessly patted his father marrying his daughter, and then the father returned home alone and sat alone. But at the same time, he can reach the realm of "mourning without hurting". "Unfinished Symphony" is also "mournful but not sad" - it is the calmness and restraint in adversity that brings us an "aftertaste", echoing Ozu's famous saying: The film uses the aftertaste to determine whether it wins or loses.
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