CCTV network | source
Yin Hong | author
As a "New Year drama", "The World of Man" was broadcast on CCTV in a set of golden files and iQiyi, showing the enthusiasm of the times and the audience for the creation of realistic themes, and also reflecting the important harvest of TV dramas on the road of realistic themes.
Whether it is China's arduous road to the transformation of the modern state in the past hundred years or the arduous quest of New China for the rejuvenation of the country's prosperity and strength and the happiness of the people in the past seventy years, how many vicissitudes of the world, how many lives and deaths, how many worlds have been turned upside down, how many hardships have come, each of us and everyone's family has almost many fate stories that make people feel broken.
It can be said that a hundred years of China has provided a rich "story treasure" for artistic creation with countless fresh lives.
This is the realistic basis of Mr. Liang Xiaosheng's novel "The World of Man".
The novel uses the "three generations of the Zhou family" in the world to condense the dramatic background of the fifty years of China's times, and portrays the dramatic tragedy and joy of the fate of the characters in the background.
The novel won the "Mao Dun Literature Prize" and became a "history of the lives of the people" in Half a Century of China.
This million-word novel provides a solid literary guarantee for the TV series.
Directed by Li Lu and served as the chief producer, starring Lei Jiayin, Xin Baiqing, Song Jia, Yin Tao, etc., this "Human World" stands on the shoulders of literature, just like Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" and Chen Zhongzhong's "White Deer Plain", which are also adapted according to the "Mao Dun Literature Award" works, etc., which have gained wider public dissemination, triggered the historical memory of more "people who have come over", and also inspired more "latecomers" to look back at history in an empathetic way.
"The World of Man" still uses the most mainstream "home country" narrative in Chinese narratives. Home is in the foreground, the country is in the future, writing people with home, writing home with people, people's fortunes are related to the times, and family fortunes are connected with national fortunes.
In the play, the three generations of the Zhou family in a certain northern city include workers Zhou Bingkun (Lei Jiayin) and Zhou Father (Ding Yongdai), intellectual Zhou Bingyi (Xin Baiqing), and Zhou Rong (Song Jia), who has a strong literary and artistic youth color and later entered the education industry, as well as various identities and occupations, constituting a microscopic "Chinese society".
From this huge production, we can see the different "living methods" of different roles of an ordinary northeastern worker family from the late 1960s to the new century.
Behind the different paths they have traveled and the different choices they have experienced are the development process of the country from the years of youth to reform and opening up, from the market economy to common prosperity.
"Family" has always been the most important social organization in China, from the blood family to the revolutionary family, from the family individual to the family community, the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family, fifty years of Hedong and fifty years of Hexi, everywhere reflects the changes and reorganization of China's way of life in the modernization and transformation.
On the one hand, in the torrent of the times, everyone is "small" or even insignificant, but on the other hand, family-based affection, kindness, and love are "great" and even invincible.
In the trailer, the creator uses "life is a lifetime, grass and trees are autumn, come like wind and rain, go like dust" to describe "The World of Man", trying to clarify the ordinary life of a family, which can also become an epic.
Falling a leaf and knowing late autumn, peeking at a tube and knowing the whole leopard, scooping a spoon and knowing the cold and warm, this is the value of realistic theme art.
In a sense, the endless vitality of the Chinese road, the Chinese miracle, and the Chinese is precisely reflected in the ordinariness, bridging, and regenerativeness of the "home".
From "The World of Man", we can read the "cultural code" of "home", which is full of Chinese flavor.
I believe that the audience can also have inner emotional resonance and moral resonance because they can consciously or unconsciously resonate with this code.
With a span of nearly fifty years in the novel, the challenge for the presentation of the TV series is enormous.
Actors have to go through the changes of "fifty years", not only in the appearance of clothing is very difficult, speech and demeanor, the temperament of the times need to "keep pace with the times".
In the past fifty years, China has experienced almost two or three hundred years of history in many countries, from streets and cities to room furnishings and living props, which can be said to almost all need to be "archaeological" restoration.
Military uniforms, tooling, slogans, bicycles, telephones, water bottles, watches, radios, televisions, locomotives and cars of different brands and models, etc., all have the regional spatiality of the northeast and the temporality of the changes of the times.
In this regard, the TV series can be said to respect history and life as much as possible, creating a real sense of "age". This is also an inevitable requirement for the "typical environment" of realistic theme creation.
It is in such an "era" environment that actors can maximize the situationality of life, so as to better shape the characters of different eras and the changes that characters experience in different eras.
The creation of realistic themes is not only a will, but also a series of creative methodologies. The World of Man provides us with an important model in this regard.
Due to its special genre style, TV dramas have higher requirements for drama. In many works, "screenwriting" tends to become "fabricated" drama. Genre, strong conflict, and extremeization often become the first choice for TV drama methodology. Some works are "made up" and "made up", almost becoming the biggest "public enemy" of the audience.
In fact, only the drama that comes from life itself, the conflict that comes from reality itself, has a stronger human impact and appeal.
From the beginning of the first episode of "Who Goes to the Countryside", "The World of Man" has opened up the dramatic conflict of "the palms of the hands and the backs of the hands are meat", each conflict means the fate of the characters and affects the emotional world of the audience.
In this regard, literature provides a solid historical foundation and human tension for tv dramas. As Liang Xiaosheng said, emotion and responsibility are Chinese engraved in the genes and indelible, and "the pain of life can become the ultimate beauty in art."
It is this "extremeness" from life itself that makes the TV series have a strong "literary nature", the characters have more thickness, the history has more texture, the plot has more realism, and the theme has transcendence.
The three generations of the Zhou family and the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family, there is no so-called "bad guy" in the genre drama, there is no so-called "good person" in the perfect sense, they are all "this one" with practical significance, in the words of Marx's classic writers, in addition to the truth of the details, they are all "typical characters in a typical environment".
The emergence of the "Human World" TV series is not accidental.
In recent years, reality-themed TV dramas such as "The Age of Awakening", "Mountains and Seas", and "Loading Stage" have become representative works, even phenomenon-level works, which on the one hand shows that after China has experienced more than 40 years of reform and opening up, people have the spiritual need to learn new things from the past; on the other hand, it also shows that the creation and production of TV dramas is upgrading from simple "cultural products" to "cultural works".
More and more creative production institutions have a more conscious willingness to create realistic themes, and they also have better ability to create realistic themes.
In particular, emerging film and television enterprises that have grown rapidly thanks to Internet technology have more consciously reflected an increasingly clear sense of cultural mission.
Tencent Pictures, the producer of "The World of Man", has tried to complete the creative turn of "paying attention to the stories that are happening in this era" in recent years.
Cheng Wu, vice president of Tencent Group and CEO of Yuwen Group, once said:
Realistic theme works record and praise our times, and also record the beautiful shining points in the history of the development of the Chinese nation that should be sung and recorded by us.
Young people in this era actually have a strong sense of national pride and a strong sense of social mission, in this kind of work, in fact, it is easier for everyone to find emotional resonance.
As the second part of the "Melody of the Times Trilogy" of Tencent Pictures and Yuwen Film and Television, "Human World" came into being after "1921", a key film celebrating the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, and is the trend of "articles are written for the times, and songs and poems are written for the sake of things".
This epic drama with realistic themes with emotional temperature and historical thickness reflects the trend of China's large-scale film and television cultural enterprises in the new era.
"The World" proves once again that the real great drama comes from life.
Of course, how to present the sense of historical situation in which the character image is located is more accurate, how the narrative rhythm is more fluent in maintaining the richness of literature, and how the transmission of meaning is more tense and charming in the relatively simplified structure of the TV series, these are the experiences of the reality theme TV series adapted by "The World of Man" as a literary masterpiece that is worth continuing to explore and summarize.
With more film and television institutions and film and television creators attaching importance to the creation of realistic themes, with the deepening of our understanding of the big era and big history of the past more than a century, with our re-examination of China's code and Chinese spirit, as we go deep into life and take root in the people's physical practice, we expect that the ability of Chinese TV dramas to grasp reality "historically and aesthetically" will be greatly improved, and the facts are so "already" lived and should be so "unavoidable" The expression of life is also more historically reasonable and humanitarianly inevitable.
Author: Yin Hong (Professor of Tsinghua University, Vice Chairman of China Literary and Art Critics Association)
Transferred from: CCTV
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