55 years ago, there was a great Swedish director in the film to blame God, he claimed that "God is dead" decades later, this unsolvable proposition, shocked the heart of a person, his name is Ang Lee, in his more than half a hundred years old, in order to overcome the inner "fear" he made "The Fantasy Drift of the Young Pi", which is also the work closest to his idol in the true sense. Like Bergman's rebuke to God at the end of Virgin Springs. Son of Thor is also challenging God's authority.
For audiences accustomed to watching Hollywood movies, the way to look and feel of "Son of Thor" will undoubtedly become a huge challenge. Because from the first shot, he is "anti-traditional". The frame is "anti-traditional", and the shooting focal length is "anti-traditional", but the only thing he does not oppose is the absurd and unreasonable lament of the war.
Amazing start
At the beginning of the film, what the audience can see is not a clearly visible depth of field shot in a normal situation. It is a piece of nothingness, without a trace. The only narrative function is the mournful vocals that appear in the voiceover. Sound plays a "preconceived" role here. After a pause in the camera, the protagonist Thor walks into the screen from the end of the screen, and we still can't see his appearance (which is very much in line with the pattern in the real scene) and then there is a large close-up that Thor almost sticks to the camera. Finally, we followed him through the camp. The director's explanation of this technique is that "here, we want to be realistic enough, so we have the following setting - more precisely, we want to shoot how the protagonist moves in this internal space, and the so-called "inside", which actually refers to the extreme state of human encounter in the concentration camp, that is, the time and space experienced internally, in a fragmented way." And not a God perspective.
Immediately after, the audience seems to have become a shadow of Thor, followed by him. Closed composition, the only lines that appear are piled up by the corpses of the concentration camp. Obviously, the director has established two perspectives here, one is attached to Thor's subjective perspective, and the other end is the objective perspective of watching Thor. The camera switches between the two in a race against the clock, leaving the viewer stunned and breathless. The director "abandoned" the perspective of God that would often appear in traditional war films. Instead, it adopts a more authentic and cruel attitude. The audience is thor one second (dazed) and the next second becomes a bystander (full of sympathy for Thor, full of fear of war), the director makes the audience become awkward and passive from the beginning of the film, but this is the essence of war, no one can be a survivor, because in the face of war, we are all weak.
In the 7 minutes before the subtitles of the movie, the director designed a total of two black-time shots, and the most exciting part was the control of the rhythm. When the audience witnesses the tragic situation of "gas chambers, mass graves, carrying, and mountains of corpses" through Thor's "eyes", the psychological expectations that have been there have obviously reached their limits, and the suppressed emotions have crossed the frame and extended around. But the director unexpectedly used only one solo shot of Thor before the subtitles were released on black field! Make the switch! But the voiceover is a flood of cries and cries. At this moment, the charm of the lens itself has been highlighted, although this shooting method is slightly "simple and rude", but the director has restored the essence of the film lens, direct and clear sound and painting combination, and conveyed the most intuitive subjective feelings to the audience. There's no more footage here, but at the edge of the shot, the dark tide is surging. After all, the greatest fear is not fear per se, but the human imagination. (Like in The Shining, the audience never sees a ghost, but no one can escape it, do you dare to say that you are not frightened?) ）
The charm of shallow focus
It was only because of "Son of Thor" that I realized for the first time that the original shallow focus lens could also take on this responsibility. Under the lens of 1.33 frame ratio, in most cases, the place of brilliance does not seem to lie in the depiction of the deep focus lens, but stems from the edge of the picture, a large number of shallow focus shots, blurred and fragmented. Perhaps this attempt is more adventurous than a standard depth-of-field lens. The meaning explained by the director is more often not "inside the picture" but in the "outside the picture" is the intention of the anti-space.
Through this visually strong "contrast between shades and shades", the director divides the whole world into two major media, and when you are completely detached from this layer of media, the charm of the image itself will be infinitely magnified.
Vivid voiceover
The picture of the film is tangible and limited, while the sound is invisible and boundless. In the limited picture space of the film, the addition of sound is undoubtedly a deep expansion of this two-dimensional plane. In the movie, the time, place and character of the story are the three basic elements, and for the positioning of the space, in addition to the direct explanation of the picture, it can also be reflected through sound, which is mainly manifested in the sound. For example: "PTU Mobile Force" begins with only subtitles, and when the picture has not yet appeared, it uses a rich background sound to explain the environment in which the story takes place. The sound of engines driving by and the noise of people explaining the background of the development of the street at night. Another example is the submarine film, where the background is paved with a low-frequency roar, reminding the audience of the underwater space of "submarine".
The film does a pretty good job in terms of sound. In an interview with "The Positive Film", the director elaborated on the use of sound in the film: "Precisely because the film treats the picture as fragmented as possible, rather than showing the whole, the intervention of the film's sound tells the audience that what they see is not all." Sounds are always present and used to give different cues, forming a circle that surrounds the image in the center, but at the same time maintains its own subjectivity. The sound of the film cannot be 100% realistic, otherwise we would have to match the film with screams from beginning to end: in fact, the cries of the gas chambers never stop, even if they go far to the warehouses of the concentration camps, they can still be heard. We have to make trade-offs. Human voices can be heard throughout the film... In the concentration camp, there was talk, there was instruction, the voice of the prisoners who had just arrived at this huge factory. Different languages mingle together to form a true Tower of Babel. ”
God is dead
At the end of the film, when the blonde boy appears, we seem to see the "Son of God" shot completely swimming away from Thor for the first time, the moment Thor and the little boy look at each other, as if exchanging all the sad emotions, the audience and Thor, facing this childish face, as if it is a miracle, everything is full of hope. But the boy turned away, the perspective was completely taken out, followed by the boy's back, what we heard was the gunfire of the massacre, at that moment, God was dead, he (the boy) walked into the end of the screen, the shade of the trees shuttled through the gap of time, the secrecy of time and the cruelty of the massacre, as if nothing had happened, the movie ended.
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