The autobiographies, notes, interviews and even diaries of the great masters of 20th-century cinema are undoubtedly a hot topic in the domestic publishing industry in recent years.
Like Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), Federico Fellini (1920-1993), Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996), Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) and Michelangelo Antonioni (1918-2007) Autobiography of 1912-2007, Interviews with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), Wim Wenders (1945-), Notes and Diaries of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), Essays and Miscellaneous Feelings of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), It's all the best of it.
Their prevalence is obviously a certain necessity of the development of the Chinese home theater era to a certain stage, so that the film history masterpieces that originally belonged only to the library of specialized colleges and universities (or even not necessarily) have become the private collections of film fans. If you have perseverance and a mood, it only takes two or three years to collect most of the nearly 10,000 (mainly Western) art films listed in the China Film Archive, which seems not to be difficult.
But then the question is, how do you see the film reviews that emerged at the beginning of their release and later on with the endless array of expert perspectives due to the success of the works themselves?
Strictly speaking, among the readings mentioned above, there are very few film critics in the true sense, rather they provide more of a mental portrayal of the author himself, who has changed his mind, mood swings and worldly weather signs before and after the creation of a work, and, it seems to be based on some kind of game rules, they seem to be deliberately avoiding criticism of other people's works, and when it comes to their own works, they seem to be more willing to talk about the secrets of behind-the-scenes production (which is exactly what most readers are interested in).
We have accumulated a lot of introductory and informative texts about art films, but the real sense of personalized commentary, that is, the text that answers the basic questions of why a film is good and where it is good, the valuable text for judgment and interpretation, is still rare, and the critical text in various film history textbooks is either a one-word arbitrary conclusion or a general reference to a single word.
In short, a sincere, insightful, widely-read, highly documented collection of film criticism, and preferably by a film master, should be presented to fans with a certain vision.
François Truffaut (1932-1984), a French director who lived only 52 years, if I remember correctly, the first way Chinese mainland cinemas accepted the New Wave star in the mid-1980s was by performing his masterpiece ,around "The Last Subway," considered a compromise to business.
Today, from the standpoint of a fan, you can take stock of his work, you can not be accustomed to his screenwriting of "Exhausted" (directed by Godard), do not like the exposure of the trivial director's life in "The Black of Day and Night", do not accept his imitation of Hitchcock's films, but you can't refuse his autobiographical style of "Four Hundred Down", "Jule and Jim", which explores the possibility of a three-person relationship, and "The Story of Adele Hugo", which was handed down as a strange psychological growth memorandum.
Equally legendary to his directing career was his upbringing, dropping out of school at the age of 14 to work in and out of the theaters of Paris, until he met Bazin 7 years later and began to write reviews for the famous Film Handbook, when his accumulation of more than 3,000 films had been completed, and his film journey from outside the academic school began.
The text in Truffaut: The Film of My Life can be distinguished by the time of the advent of Four Hundred Down (1958), previously written by Truffaut as a film critic and then by Truffaut as a director, and the common point is that they are all written by a lover of film, and the flashes of sincerity, intuition and inspiration form the basis of these words.
The book is divided into six parts, the first part, "The Big Secret", dedicated to the people who entered the silent film era and continued to shine in the sound age, those who know that "they did not waste film in the past" (Jean Renoir), including Chaplin and Truffaut's life idol Hitchcock, as well as Abel Gons, Jean Vigo, Dreier and John Ford.
In the second part, "The Sound Film Age: The Americans," I think the most valuable is a 1958 film review of Kubrick's The Glorious Road, which was perhaps the first valuable document to affirm Cush's talent and foresee his future achievements.
Similarly, there is another document about Lumet's debut novel, The Twelve Angry Men (1957), and this year, the great Russian director Mikhalkov has just presented a well-regarded remake of the film.
In the third part, "The Frenchman," I was extremely pleased to read the author's brilliant review of Jacques Baker's prison escape film The Hole, which I had never read in a domestic publication before.
In the text about Bresson, I saw his infinite respect for his predecessors, but unfortunately I was not able to see the evaluation of masterpieces such as "The Pickpocket" and "The Adventures of Baltezar", and it is equally regrettable that with regard to Melville, this book contains only a film review of an early work that does not represent his achievements, "The Terrible Children".
Another wonderful reading experience for this part comes from the contrast between the author's cool review of LaMoris's "Red Balloon" and my own liking for the film.
The fourth part is titled "Cheers for Japanese Cinema," but covers only four films that are not first-rate (the most valuable of which is probably Ichikawa Kun's Harp of Burma) and is less than seven pages long.
The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of Japanese cinema, and the author did not leave room for Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kio Naruse, in any case, it is difficult to understand, the author's preface "What is the Dream of a Film Critic" has a general comment on other chapters, but the Japanese film is silent, so where does the "applause" come from?
In the fifth and sixth parts, the author comments on his contemporaries in Europe, and it should be noted that he expresses his identification with Orson Wells's "strong European attitude", here we can see the insight into Citizen Kane, the place of Rossellini who "prefers real life" in the author's mind, the zeitgeist poured into the "rebel for no reason" James Dean, the new wave colleagues Aaron René, Varda, Louis Mahler, Godard and Jacques. Levitte and others on their respective paths.
In the final analysis, what we see is actually the frank and rational emotional transmission of the truant boy who spent his whole life in the movie- the truant boy who grew up, discovered, and loved in the dream, and left traces of true feelings wherever the artistic tentacles driven by love went.
If we agree with Truffaut's famous quote: "A director whose films are all his films is his life's chronicle." "Then, this "Movie of My Life" is a precious collection of love letters for movies.