丨This article was first published in the Pippi movie
Pippi Movies / A great movie recommendation every day
After experiencing the successive "file removal" storms last summer, the audience waited for more than a year, and finally waited for the final release of "Eight Hundred".
Before entering the theater to watch this movie, let's first go through a movie and review Guan Hu -
"Killing"
Released in the summer of 2012, the film is directed by Guan Hu and starring Huang Bo, Ren Dahua, Yu Nan and Su Youpeng.
The lineup setting of "famous director + powerful actor" can really make this movie "hear its voice before seeing its name", which has hooked the audience's desire to watch the movie.
The film "Killing" is one of Guan Hu's "carnival trilogy" (the other two are "Bullfighting" and "The Cook's Play"), which has a strong "pipe style" characteristics, namely underlying care, non-linear narrative, allegorical style and emotional imagery.
In 1992, Guan Hu self-financed the filming of "Hair Disorder", and became one of the sixth generation of Chinese directors with his wandering posture inside and outside the system and his pioneering and rebellious video writing.
After filming his second work, Romantic Street, he began to self-reflect and embarked on a path of active pandering to the system.
After that, works such as "Goodbye, Our 1948", "Let's Go in the Car", "Xi Shi Eye", "Bullfighting", "Killing", "Cook's Drama Leper" and other works have almost successfully entered the mainstream theater line and been released in theaters.
A closer look at Guan Hu's work reveals that he has a great passion for history, with almost every work having a clear time and context, with nearly half of the films based in the 1930s and 1940s.
Guan Hu's shooting of "Eight Hundred" is also the continued development of his focus.
However, Guan Hu is not committed to restoring the historical appearance of that time and place, but uses history as a narrative trap, alluding to the current practical problems and thinking about the complex aspects of human nature.
As Guan Hu himself said: "History is ruthless, and the film wants to create a sentient world for them." ”
Guan Hu's creative concept is vividly reflected in the film "Killing".
The film's story is set in "a corner of old southwestErn China in the early 1940s", a time when China was in dire straits during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
However, it is interesting that Guan Hu pointed out the time at the beginning of the film, but completely eliminated the traces of the specific era in the whole movie.
This setting makes "time" an absent field in the film, and abstracts the history in the overhead history.
We can't see it everywhere, but it's everywhere.
In addition to the fact that time is "absent from the field", so is space.
The film tells the story of a town of Longevity, which is surrounded by mountains and geography, alluding to its antiquity, isolation, conservatism and mystery.
Such an enclosed space setting has to remind people of Lu Xun's metaphor of comparing China to an "iron house". The visual expression of this metaphor has long been expressed in films such as "Yellow Earth", "Ju Dou", "Big Red Lantern Hanging High" and other films.
In longevity town, no matter what means are used, "longevity" is the only and highest indicator.
The villagers have long lived under the norms of the "Seventy-Two Articles of ancestral training", depressed but orderly.
The appearance of the cow sturdy makes the calm of the town cease to exist, and he is the destroyer of the stability and order of the longevity town.
He ate meat without paying, went to the butcher and took it and ran.
The cow has been peeking into the private life of the painter for more than ten years, which also leads to the painter and his wife hating the cow to the bone.
There is a ritual of taking holy water from the town of Longevity, that is, to extract the clearest water from the well for the health and longevity of the people.
But when everyone was performing the ceremony with a serious and solemn expression, the cow jumped into the well and took a bath...
There was a young man in the town who became a relative, and the cattle sturdy planed the ancestral graves of others, and dug out gold and silver jewelry from them and gave them to others...
There was a centenarian in the village who was about to choke on his breath, because he would be able to break the town's longevity record in a dozen hours, so the mayor tried everything to prevent him from dying.
At this time, the cattle were strong again.
He poured a pot of wine into the old man's hose of hanging salt water and fed it to the old man, and the old man died without taking a few sips.
After the old man's death, the people of the town dressed in black held a grand funeral ceremony for him, and asked the old man's young mute wife to accompany him.
Just when everything was going very solemnly and seriously, the cow was strong and not idle—
He jumped into the river to rescue the beautiful little widow and carried her back home as a daughter-in-law.
This ritual is the most spectacular passage in the film.
The deceased was dressed in a white robe and lay on his back on a raft made of white dead wood, and the mourner, a small mute, also sat on the side of the deceased in a white robe.
The funeral procession was all dressed in black hats and cloaks, clenched their fists and beat their chests from time to time, occasionally roared in the sky, and finally the principal wearing white clothes and red hats recited prayers, pushed the raft into the river, and carried out water burial.
The whole process presents an ancient, primitive and mysterious audiovisual atmosphere, which can be compared with the mourning and funeral in Zhang Yimou's "Ju Dou".
The most excessive thing Niu Jian had ever done was to pour an aphrodisiac into the drinking water of the villagers, causing the whole town to lose their minds and do all the absurd things, and Sven swept the floor.
What the cattle have done for more than a decade is, in the words of the half-immortals, "the rules left by the ancestors have been destroyed by this house."
But the beatings of the blacksmiths, the beatings of the crowds, and the expulsion often led to a stronger resistance of the cattle.
In order to discipline the cow's strong and lustful body, the townspeople also tried to punish him by widows being buried and even castrated, but as Half Immortal said, "This cow has been spilled for decades, and the knife and gun are not entered."
Just when people were frowning and couldn't find a suitable reason to get rid of the cow, they thought of a person: the cow doctor, that is, the cow doll of the year.
When Niu Jian was a child, he always stole his family's things, and the cow doll sealed all the seams in the house in one breath. This letter is a big problem, the grandfather of the cow baby is suffocated because of the charcoal burning, suffocation.
Since then, the cow doll has hated the cow sturdy.
As soon as the cow dolls who had left the foreigners to become intellectuals heard that the villagers wanted to get rid of the cattle, they immediately rushed to offer advice.
His plan is simple, but it is also extremely cruel: let the whole town put on a play, and the content is that everyone makes Niu Jian think that he has an incurable disease.
As a result, as soon as the cow is strong enough to go out, the passers-by will pretend to be afraid and retreat, as if the cow's strong face shows that he is terminally ill.
A moment later a man came and said that his life was short, and a man came over and helped the cow carry something firmly, as if he were going to fall down in the next second.
Even, in order to make the cattle fall ill in self-doubt, the young people of the town stripped off their shirts in a heavy rain and jumped in the rain to show their strength and strength.
At this time, the cow, who had already had great concerns about his health, also took off his shirt to join the carnival in the rain.
This seemingly power-filled is a turning point in the film, after which the cow is really sick.
Later, the same scene reappears in the town mayor's memories before his death, only the carnival in the rain turns into a deliberately cruel murder show.
The two appearances of the same scene from different perspectives hint at the director's celebration of free life and his critique of authoritarianism.
The film is adapted from Chen Tiejun's novel "Children's Play Killing", according to director Guan Hu's own words: ""Killing" tells the story of a group of people who kill a person who does not conform to the rules. ”
The "unruly man" of the cow actually represents a kind of "freedom of the self."
He broke through the shackles of conventional morality and institutions, and everything was aimed at his own happiness as the highest goal. He is so free-willed that he breaks through the perception of many viewers and presents a state of "evil".
In fact, ultimate freedom is indifferent to good or evil. Good and evil are a standard, and as Dostoevsky put it in The White Nights: "The higher the morality, the more egoistic it is." ”
The cow is what Bakhtin calls "the power of revelry." He ignored traditional rituals, hierarchical order, and moral traditions, allowing life force to flourish.
But "Killing" is not what Bakhtin calls a "carnival square."
For Bakhtin's revelry is for the sake of rebirth, for reconstruction; and in "Killing", the vigorous vitality represented by the solidity of the cow is snuffed out in a crumbling space.
The carnival of "Killing" is tragic and unfinished.
The townspeople let the cattle stand firm, either he died or the son he and the little widow gave birth to died.
In order to save his son, Niu Jian had to choose to commit suicide.
Before he died, he returned all the things he had robbed to his father and fellow villagers, and knelt on the ground and prostrated his head three times in a row, saying "Baby is not guilty" with each prostration.
After three heads of stumbling, the cow dragged the coffin in the style of a blue boat made for itself to a cliff cave, where it ended its life.
The colors in "Killing" are mixed and oppressive, and the sturdy sky blue coffin of the cow is like a pure dream, a beautiful hope for freedom and life.
In the next life, he will be a fish, swimming in the sea, looking at the sky, whispering with seagulls, and then listening to the stories of the fish that migrate across the ocean to tell the stories of the distant, and follow the waves in the sunset.
After filming "Red Sorghum", Zhang Yimou believed that after thousands of years of holding back, Chinese could finally "live a breath", and life could finally be vigorous and wanton.
But decades have passed, and Guan Hu has used a "Killing" to show the world that the "killing" of the "Iron House" is far from the past, but is constantly reincarnating.
The cattle are strong and can only die alone in a utopian cave.
Guan Hu uses a brushwork between absurdity and reality, magic and original ecology, to tell a "national fable".
And this absurd reality of cannibalism is like Mr. Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and Han Shaogong's "Daddy and Daddy".
"Cow Solid" is not only the "madman" who lives in the shadow of "eating people", but also the "C cub" who witnesses the primitive ignorance.
Guan Hu once said that "Killing" originated from his admiration for Mr. Lu Xun and regarded it as a simple version of "Diary of a Madman".
We open every chapter of history, which has no age, and on every page of the crooked slope are written the words "benevolence, righteousness, and morality." I couldn't sleep horizontally, and I looked carefully in the middle of the night before I could see the words on the screen, and the two words written throughout the film were: Eat people! But fortunately, in the gap between these two words, we can also see the "human feelings" that the director riveted into...
"History is merciless, and cinema is sentient".
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
© Original 丨 Article Copyright: Ppdianying
Please do not reprint in any form without authorization