Lu Xun, I believe that whether you have read his words or not, there are certainly not many people who do not know, of course, zhou shu and Lu Xun into two people believe that there are not many, but this can not affect the charm of Lu Xun 1881 born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, famous literary artists, don't look at his youth and old age, be seen as short, in the early part of the last century, Lu Xun's brushstrokes are like a sword straight into people's hearts.
Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" is lu xun's first short vernacular diary novel, and the first modern vernacular novel in China, written in April 1918. The article was first published in the monthly magazine "New Youth" on May 15, 1918, Vol. 4, No. 5, and later included in the "Scream" collection and compiled into the first volume of the "Complete Works of Lu Xun".
Through the image of the persecuted "madman" and the self-narrative description of the "madman", the novel reveals the "cannibalistic" nature of feudal etiquette, shows the author's resistance to The Chinese feudal culture with feudal etiquette as the main connotation, and also shows the author's profound sense of repentance. The entire work of "Diary of a Madman" is almost a confession of the inner world of a madman. The madman believes that everyone around him is eating people, and he himself will be forced to eat people or be eaten.
The madman was locked up, refused meals brought by his family, refused to be healed, and kept persuading those around him not to eat people again. Until the last madman discovered that he might have inadvertently eaten his sister's meat. The madman in despair uttered "Children who have not eaten man, or are there any?" Save the child...", the cry.
But because although this novel is extremely written, it is difficult to adapt it into other forms of works, especially film and television works, Lu Xun's novels have actually been adapted into many film and television works, such as "A Q Zheng biography", "Blessings" and so on, all I know over the years is a drama, I have not seen it. It can be seen that the difficulty is too great to control.
But in fact, in 1980, when the Hong Kong New Wave films began to sprout, the ghost director Xu Ke actually made a film "Hell Without Doors" that is very similar to Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman", and there should be not many friends who have seen this movie today, and resources are scarce, but if you have the opportunity to see the true face of Lushan, you will be shocked.
The second part of Xu Ke's "Chaos" trilogy (the other two being "Butterfly Change" and "First Type Danger") is indeed chaotic enough, but this is like reading Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" for the first time.
But "Hell Without Doors" can be said to be an allusion to the society at that time, using an unknown village as a metaphor for the entire social environment in Hong Kong, and the indifference between people, contempt and even killing each other, are no different from the cruel struggle in reality.
In that crazy and messy cannibalistic society, such crazy and numb collective unconscious behavior cannot help but remind people of the turbulent and terrible times in history. The cheers of the people when they divide the human flesh are chilling. The cowardly student actually used a human flesh bookmark, which made people sigh. The heart of the human heart that Ah Lian held out after gaining her freedom reflected the psychological imprint of eating people and not spitting bones.
There are spoilers below, so I hope to read them with caution
This film is the work of Situ Zhuohan and Xu Ke, Situ Zhuohan, a well-known screenwriter in Hong Kong. Of course, the screenwriter who can be like Xu Kefa is not an idle person, look at his representative works resume "Adventure King", "Fuxing Gaozhao", "A Knife in the City", "New Shushan Swordsman", "Shanghai Night", "Summer Lucky Star", etc., you will know how powerful he is.
At the beginning, Xu Ke was a film and television worker with a strong sense of revolution and social whipping, perhaps because of the identity of overseas Chinese in Vietnam, in that war-torn region, it had a great influence on Xu Ke's outlook on life, although he did not experience which year of the mainland, but many of Xu Ke's works, especially in the early days, such as "The Song of the Sunset of the Hero's True Color", such as the "Huang Feihong" series, the "Laughing Pride" series, etc., have a lot of political and human implications in it.
Because the personal color is too strong, in fact, the people Xu Ke cooperates with often have conflicts, and there are early separations with Wu Yusen and Hu Jinquan. Of course, in 1980's "Hell Without Doors", Xu Ke is still in the tentative stage, so this film is actually not the most proud of Xu Ke, but it is precisely because of its youth and fearlessness, it is more straightforward and bloody.
Xu Ke used the style of Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" to independently develop his own story structure, the film began two farmers to build a raft to an isolated island to sell chickens and ducks, the atmosphere on the island was strange, the two suddenly encountered a group of masked people attacked in fear, the farmer died and fell, all of them were dissoluted by the butchers on the island as food distributed to hungry islanders.
It turned out that the island belonged to the big hometown, and at some point the islanders began to feed on human flesh, and the security team was responsible for maintaining law and order and food rationing.
After secret agent Jiujiujiu (Xu Shaoqiang) lands on the island with a cockroach thief who calls himself "Bao Tie Bi", in order to track down the Gangyang thief Rolex (Wong Jinshen) and defeat the butcher on the island, Jiujiujiu visits the captain of the hometown security team (Played by Kaohsiung), the captain leads him to the slaughterhouse, Nine-Nine Nine Forces fights the group and escapes from injury, and after being raised by the family of Alian, a daughter of a people, asks the captain for confirmation, but finds nothing.
Previously, Rolex chose his hometown as the deputy captain of the security team, in order to change his mind, who knew that things backfired but did the cannibalism, Rolex several times planned to ask for help from outside the island but all were destroyed, this time to the nine-nine-nine alarm is still ignored, helplessly released the prisoner's bag of iron guts, he was killed by the captain. Nine-Nine-Nine once again experienced a siege and was difficult not to die, he decided to flee the cannibal island with Bao Tiebi and Ah Lian's brother and sister...
Such a film does not live up to the reputation of Xu Laowei: grotesque, eccentric, weird fun, a fusion of horror, comedy, fight and other genres, but also can achieve the ultimate without indulgence. Some of the bloody scenes in the film, due to the integration of the farcical scenes of the early silent silent film period, immediately dilute the horror of the film; the exotic wonders of the East (such as dialects, old dramas) are mixed with the black humor of the West, which can be called a classic of cult films.
The isolated village is the epitome of a small society, the boldness of the theme, the cruelty of the scene, are impressive, but unfortunately, the story is only a metaphor and a black fable after all, and the excavation and extension of the theme is not enough. The inexplicable "Boy Dang Zhiqiang" soundtrack is really a bit of a jumping scene, but I have to admit that Xu Ke at that time was really much more interesting than now.
Xu Ke's cold personality of the sword is shown to the extreme in "Hell Without Doors", and the subsequent works now seem to only converge on his eccentric temperament, especially in recent years, the content is becoming increasingly empty, the ideology is greatly reduced, and he also tells the world with a clear attitude that what he pursues is more of a film form.
And the extremes of "Hell Without Doors" are enough to make people stunned. The film directly attacks the inferiority of human nature, and the habit of cannibalism is not caused by hunger, but comes from the numb habits of human nature after the fall of the moral and ethical system, and from the collective silence of the entire group in the face of barbarism, tyranny, and ignorance. The most shocking scene of the film is not the bloody dismemberment scene, but the cheering of the people when they divide the flesh, the collective carnival that induces the righteous to go to the slaughterhouse. The sadness of it soaks into the bone marrow.
Whether it is the horror of human nature or ordinary human nature, Xu Ke's gaze at them is full of helpless sighs and deep compassion, even in the living situation of a person eating people, there is also an unquenchable conscience.
After the film was released in Hong Kong, it failed miserably at the box office and was harshly criticized by film critics. At the same time, because it was too bloody, the film was banned in Taiwan. However, today, it seems that after receiving the baptism of Chinese and Western films for many years, it is believed that it is far from the deterrent power of that year, but it is still a classic of Hong Kong films in the 1980s.
At last. It is still worth pondering that making these things no longer resonate or shock is probably the real state of mind of Lu Xun and Xu Ke.