#影视杂谈 #
He is a Japanese film director from Kore-eda (1962.6.6-) television documentary background, whose representative works are "Like Father Like Son", "Illusory Light", "Non-stop Walking", "Nobody Knows" and so on. He has won several international film awards. His film style is soothing and soft, with a strong modern Japanese family atmosphere, and mostly focuses on marginalized groups, like a modern poem with a distinct style.
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A-side
Slow, slow, like the pace of the old man in "Non-Stop Walking". Life is just a constant gallop, a continuous advance, suddenly one day the leg hurts, can not run fast, and then began to stop, look back at the past, find that everything in the past is the most beautiful memory.
- "Non-Stop" (2008)
The film is always telling life in the most elegant film language: the pleasant vision, the leisurely crowd, all kinds of daily imagery, everything is very calm, but it can always set off a few waves, engrave a shallow mark on the soul, and they tell the stories of most ordinary people's lives.
To explore the source of Kore-eda's delicate expression, perhaps we can start from a book, the title of which translates to "The Speed of Walking", which is a collection of essays by the director himself. This essay collection book was written in the preface in 2013, when Miracle had just been released, and he was working on the preparations for his next film work, Father Like Son.
In this book, he uses a few notes to describe his life: there are memories of childhood, feelings about participating in film festivals, mood when casting, etc., each of which is very short, but reading it will feel a fresh literary atmosphere, and you can also glimpse some of the shadows of his films.
One of the ones that impressed me the most was that he wrote that when he was a child, he lived in a dilapidated house surrounded by cosmos, so he had a special affection for cosmos. Later, during the filming of "Miracle", he found a large mansion surrounded by cosmos, so he and the children in the movie picked up the seeds of cosmos and brought them home.
The Train of Dreams Just Passed Here – Miracle (2011)
Kore-eda graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Literature of the First Faculty of Literature at Waseda University, and perhaps he was influenced by too much literature and art, and the films he made and the articles he wrote had a hazy sense of beauty. His films are interspersed with some very illusory content, both true and false, so that the film is in a state of truth and unreality.
In "Non-Stop Walking", a yellow butterfly floats in outside the door, and the old woman who was still chattering for a second suddenly remembers her deceased son. I don't know if it's true or not, but the old woman said the butterfly flew in from her son's tombstone. She got up to grab it as if possessed by something, but the butterfly miraculously stopped at the remains of her son.
More obviously, his earliest works, The Illusory Light, and The Next Stop, Kingdom of Heaven. "Phantom Light" tells the story of a woman who loses her husband without warning, and her otherwise happy life is disrupted by her husband's unexpected departure. This story is not conventional, the turning point of the story is in a moment without warning, seemingly illogical, but it casts a mysterious veil on the whole story, you want to look closer, but this thin veil can always block you out.
The big vista at the end of the film, the woman sees her dead husband at the seashore - "The Illusory Light" (1995)
"Next Stop, Kingdom of Heaven" is more like an adult fairy tale, the whole story is first of all overhead, but the director adopts a semi-documentary and half-feature film shooting method, the interviewer's perspective is completely on this side of the camera, facing the interviewee, forming a state of breaking the fourth wall (that is, the interviewee looks directly at the camera, similar to the movie "Rashomon"), which is a real shooting method. But the house where the deceased lived was in an isolated place, adding a false sense of mystery to the film.
If you have seen films by directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Hyohideen Hou, and Yang Dechang before, you will definitely unconsciously associate them when you watch Kore-eda's films. The fact is also that Kore-eda was greatly influenced by Hou Hyo-hyun and Yang Dechang, and when he first graduated, he made a documentary "When the Film Is Filmed: Hou Hyo-hyun and Yang Dechang", which recorded Hou and Yang's experience in shooting their own films, and also recorded the reasons for Kore-eda's road to film.
It was Kore-eda who personally presented the award to idol Hou Hyo-hyun at the Golden Horse Awards ceremony
But Kore-eda doesn't seem to acknowledge the similarity of his films to Those of Ozu. In mid-2020, Kore-eda was invited to share his shooting experience in a "master class" on the Youku platform, including mentioning that he was very little influenced by Ozu. The reason why the two will be compared is mainly the similarity in themes, in fact, the director's works are very different in the choice of composition and shooting angles, and there is a big difference in the adjustment of actors.
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B-side
Is the film really a calm sea? For some, it's a raging wave.
His films seem to have a topic that can never be avoided – "death". Most of his films are shrouded in the shadow of death, and the story progresses to a certain extent, and the sudden death of a person makes the tone of the film suddenly change, and even at the beginning of the story, the audience is informed that a person has died. Even if there is no death in the movie "Like Father Like Son", "Miracle", etc., there will be a lot of discord between families. The same story handling is also common in Shunji Iwai's films (such as "Love Letter" and "Hello, Zhihua").
The girl's father died at the beginning of the film – The Sea Street Diaries (2015)
Through some stories outside of the film, we may be able to explore Kore-eda's view of life and death. In an interview with a film festival, kore-eda answered questions about "death." In his view, life and death go hand in hand, and without the dead one cannot be a living person. In his collection of essays, he also wrote about "death", but he seems reluctant to call it "death" but "death".
He was interviewing at an elementary school where the children would regularly milk cows, and one day a cow died, and the children were sad, but they still went to milk. The death of the cow, though sad, made the milk squeezed sweeter. It was Kore-eda who said: "People experience not only grief during mourning, but also growth."
It is the director who consciously buries the "death", but it seems that it is always impossible to hide, and it sneaks out from time to time in the activities of the characters in the film. It's like an unknown horror box, you don't know when it will jump out, even if it is always there, the attention will continue to be attracted to it. If you happen to have a similar experience, there is a high probability that you will be poked in the pain point.
The death of the little girl in "Nobody Knows" is extremely easy to deal with with grief, but the film is not shocking here. Akira Fukushima (Yasuyuki Yanagi) and another girl calmly drag the dead little girl to her favorite railway track, burying her in the ground one by one.
The Silent Funeral – Nobody Knows (2004)
This treatment runs through each of his films, producing the energy worn by water droplets. His perception of "mourning" is not only reflected in his films, but also in his vision of Japanese cinema. In an interview, he said he was very concerned about the current state of Japanese cinema, which has been in a state of stagnation at the moment.
Friends familiar with the history of film should know that the most brilliant period of Japanese cinema was from the 1920s to the 1950s, during which Time, Japanese films broke through the "movie wars" with their unique national expressions. Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Akio Naruse, and so on, these prominent names have been admired by countless film descendants.
Since then, Japanese cinema has become less and less important in the history of world cinema, and among East Asian films, only South Korea has captured the wave of innovation. There is a voice that says that the reason why Japanese films have stopped moving forward is precisely because they are firmly imprisoned by the "invisible hand" of the master, and the innovation of the younger generation has not been able to escape the shadow of the predecessor, and the rise of Korean films is because there is no "obstacle" of the master.
——Floating Plants (1934) Yasujiro Ozu
It was Kore-eda who bluntly criticized the current state of Japanese cinema, and it was this tough attitude that was attacked by the Japanese people. For a time, "anti-Japanese" and "traitor" and other insults made Kore-eda and repulsed to the cusp of the storm, becoming the object of public criticism. What makes the Japanese people even more angry is that the film "Thief Family" about Japan's marginalized groups won the Palme d'Or, which made them feel greatly insulted and the criticism intensified.
Surprisingly, his films have become popular in China. At the Shanghai Film Festival, he was very surprised that the tickets for the screening of his films were quickly sold out. Perhaps it is this phenomenon that has made him pay attention to the Chinese market, and sometimes invited to answer the questions of Chinese film fans.
In addition, Kore-eda has had several wonderful encounters with a domestic director, who is Jia Zhangke, the leader of China's fifth generation of directors. The two had brief conversations at several international film festivals, and at the end of the last century, Jia Zhangke was invited to Japan to have an in-depth exchange with Kore-eda in an interview with a magazine.
It was Kore-eda and Jia Zhangke
In fact, the experiences of the two directors are very similar, they are both greatly influenced by Hou Xiaoxian, and their films are also known for focusing on marginalized groups, and even have similarities in their own encounters. Some media say that kore-eda has supported the entire contemporary Japanese film, which may be biased, but it can also see the serious challenges that Japanese cinema will face in the future.
As Kore-eda gets older, there is also an urgent need for some young filmmakers to take over the baton in Kore-eda's hands, will this person be Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has made a name for himself at the Venice Film Festival? Or the high-profile Ryusuke Hamaguchi these days? Everything can only be left to time to test.
——The above content represents the author's own views only, and I would like to dedicate this article to my favorite director is Kore-eda
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