丨This article was first published in the Pippi movie
Pippi Movies / A great movie recommendation every day
Some Chinese-themed Hollywood films are often controversial for "demonizing" Chinese, with the exception of the Hollywood blockbuster that Pigo recommends today, which was shot in 1944.
- Preface
On September 4, the Disney movie "Mulan" starring Liu Yifei will be broadcast on overseas networks.
As the first Disney princess, Liu Yifei's role in "Mulan" this time can be described as widely concerned and out of the limelight.
But as far as the film itself is concerned, "Mulan" has been criticized for its involvement in plot changes, styling and casting clown Chinese issues.
In fact, there are many traditional Chinese themes that have come into the hands of American film and television companies, and they are often changed beyond recognition. Even if the surface looks good, the key core has long been replaced by the American spirit.
For example, "Kung Fu Panda" and "Picking Gold", when the Chinese people do not know why in the carnival, have actually been encoded by political correctness.
Hollywood is using the magic of cinema to turn the American dream into a global dream.
This behavior is, in communication terms, "cultural diversion":
The strong culture takes the elements from the weak culture for its own use, but it does not care about the real connotation of these cultural elements and the people who create these cultural elements, and steals other people's things and takes their own core.
The "god film" we are going to talk about today is much more advanced.
Dragon Breed
This American film (yes, american film) was released in 1944, when China's War of Resistance Against Japan was not over.
Although the director is American, the actor is American, and the lines are in English, the scenes, costumes and stories, including the theme and core, are all properly Chinese.
What's even more surprising is that the film was nominated for two awards at the 17th Academy Awards, "Best Supporting Actress" and "Best Cinematography".
That is to say, when the War of Resistance Was Not Over, it allowed the people of the whole world to see the arrogance and arrogance shown by China and the Chinese people in this war, and at the same time filmed the great harm caused to the Chinese people by this "unjust" war.
Not only that, the heroine of "Dragon Seed" is Catherine Hepburn, known as the "Evergreen tree of Hollywood", a woman who has received 12 Oscar nominations and four Oscar winners.
The American Film Institute once described her as the greatest actress in the history of American cinema.
Hepburn plays a rural woman named Xiaoyu in Dragon Seed, who is the daughter-in-law of the Tan family and a progressive young woman.
The film is set in rural China in the late 1930s.
Originally peaceful and peaceful, there lived a family surnamed Tan, and this family had a large population: there were two old people of Tan Ling, Tan Ling's old mother, a daughter and three sons, as well as the daughter-in-law, the eldest son and the daughter-in-law of the second son, and several grandchildren of all sizes...
This is the standard "four generations in the same house" in the traditional Chinese saying.
At first, although this big family also had small fights and bumps, they were still in love with each other on the whole.
This kind of harmony is not lacking in some of the dross in traditional Chinese culture that we see today.
For example, Lao Tan has a deep-rooted concept, that is, men are the head of the family, and women only need to cook at home and do housework to have children and raise children.
What if a woman disobeys? Fight, women don't fight honestly.
But Hepburn played by Xiaoyu does not eat this set, as a progressive young woman, she is always learning to read, reading, and listening to various rallies organized by college students, running out as soon as she has the opportunity, so she is complained about by her in-laws.
I have to say that Hepburn is worthy of being a Hollywood film queen, and playing a Chinese rural woman is also a look and a deep essence.
In order to play this role well, she once read a lot of information about China, and in order to look more like Chinese women, she also forced her double eyelids to be a single eyelid.
When college students spoke in the village that the Japanese army had entered China, Xiaoyu was the first and only person in the audience to stand up and say that he would join the war.
As for Lao Tan, the old farmer's first reaction when he heard the news was: Don't do bad things, and don't be afraid of ghosts knocking on the door.
But the Japanese soldiers are not even as good as ghosts, they don't care if you do anything wrong, you just fight if you want.
Sure enough, it didn't take long for the war to spread to Lao Tan's doorstep, where three attitudes toward war appeared:
Xiao Yu, and the second eldest who was enlightened after her orders, represent the progressive youth ideas in the era of The Alternation of Old and New in China (please read in Kang Hui's tone):
Ordinary Chinese people are reluctant to fight, but they are not afraid to fight, and they have to fight when necessary.
Talk, the door is open.
Fight, accompany to the end!
The Chinese nation, which has experienced more than five thousand years of ups and downs, has never seen what kind of formation, no big deal!
The second is the thought of Lao Tan, the representative of the traditional small peasant thought:
I don't run away! I was born on this land, and I have to live here for the rest of my life!
I love my land, and isn't loving it patriotic? I will die on this earth.
The third is Wu Lian, the son-in-law of the old Tan, who has the idea that "businessmen value profits over parting" and "business has no nationality and no borders".
He was a small shopkeeper, and when the Japanese army entered the city, he aimed at business opportunities and sold Japanese goods.
While selling Japanese goods, students marching in the streets smashed his shop.
At that time, he thought he was right, in fact he had always felt that he was right, and he also felt that college students were much worse than Japanese soldiers.
It is not he who does bad things, it is not he who kills people, he just did some small business, but he wants to live, he wants to live better, is there anything wrong?
So he said: The person who knows the time is Junjie.
Later, Wu Lian, who knew the current affairs, became a traitor.
This is to cover his eyes and say that there is no blood outside, and he is unwilling to let him open his eyes, commonly known as pretending to be blind.
The whole process of the film is actually a struggle between the thoughts of the first kind of people represented by Xiaoyu and the thoughts of the remaining two people, and the progressive ideas represented by Xiaoyu are the themes that the film wants to promote.
But the process of struggle is never easy, often at the cost of life and blood.
At first, Lao Tan was reluctant to go, but reality forced him to leave.
First the elderly mother was raped and killed by the Japanese army, then the eldest daughter-in-law was raped and killed, and then several grandchildren died of starvation and illness.
Under such circumstances, the Japanese army also arrested the old two to grow grain, and after the harvest, they had to hand it over. How do the people live?
Live by the fat on your body!
In fact, many ordinary people have this kind of personality, that is, they are afraid of things, more is better than less, and they are not willing to move their nests, preferring to feed little devils in their own land to steal things and eat, rather than leave.
But the devils all rode to their heads and, and they couldn't stand it.
Old Tan, under the persuasion of Xiao Yu and his three sons, burned down the house and farmland and left.
And Xiaoyu's son, the child who was raised under the collision of traditional ideas and new ideas, is a real dragon species.
He has five thousand years of cultural accumulation, but also the ideas bred in the new era, the new and the old are not confrontation, but blending and sublimation.
As a Hollywood film shot by a major American film studio, mainstream director and popular star, "Dragon Seed" can be regarded as the most impartial depiction of China's spiritual outlook in history, without smearing or rumors.
The film is very realistic.
The crew spent two years in California to build a Chinese village in the 1930s and 1940s, which can be said to be highly restored and has no sense of violation.
In Calabasas, thirty-six miles from Los Angeles, in calabasas, the San Fernando Valley, the producers built one hundred and twenty acres of farms, and fifty acres of hillsides were converted into terraces; twelve inches of pipe was paved more than a mile long to flood the area with five million gallons of water.
Even the slogan during the parade was heartfelt:
Interestingly, at that time, the prop team did not buy a "soil dog" in rural China, and could only replace it with a Schnauzer that had not yet been introduced to China at that time.
In addition to the set, the actors in the film, in addition to their looks, the posture and action are completely Chinese.
Planting seedlings, pulling cattle, ploughing the fields.
The old lady wanted to chew and feed the rice to the little grandson, but Xiao Yu immediately stopped it, saying not to do this, this is an old concept, unhygienic.
The traitor has a fat head and big ears, and looks like a traitor.
Not only the main actor, but even the hair of the group actors who flashed in the film was dyed black, which can be said to be quite meticulous.
If the Chinese crew had this seriousness, they would not always be found with all kinds of absurd bugs.
In addition to the high degree of restoration of details, there are many Easter eggs in the film:
For example, "Dragon Species" chose the English version of "Volunteer March" as the theme song, and this time is still many years before "Volunteer March" becomes China's national anthem.
Another example: the scene in the film where the workers drag the machine through the village where the Tan family is located, hinting at the defeat of the Battle of Songhu. By this time, much of northern and central China had fallen, and the Nationalist government had moved important factories to the southwest in an attempt to retain its strength.
The Chinese anti-Japanese films produced by Hollywood can be made so realistically, in addition to the main creative intentions, they are also inseparable from a woman and her works.
The film is based on the original novel of the same name by Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, "Dragon Species".
An American writer and feminist activist, Pearl Buck spent her childhood and adolescence in Zhenjiang, China. She has lived in China for nearly 40 years, Chinese her "first language", and Zhenjiang, her "hometown of China".
Pearl Buck, who had experienced war and famine in China, became familiar with the land and the people of the land, and later even became a Chinese citizen.
She loves China and says, "Chinese people are too kind, and the Chinese land is too beautiful." ”
In 1942, Pearl Buck came to China for the last time to collect materials and organize materials to support the Chinese people's War of Resistance Against Japan and conduct in-depth propaganda.
It was also in this year that she wrote Dragon Species.
Many of the plots in "Dragon Seed" are exactly what she saw in the newspapers and what she saw on her last visit to China.
In the film, the rape, plundering, burning, and looting of the Japanese army, as well as the unyielding resistance of the military and the people, are all from real events, such as the "Three Lights Policy" and the "Nanjing Massacre" massacre.
When I revisited Dragon Breed decades later, I had to admire the film and television practitioners at the time.
We can see the shadow of many Chinese classic films from this film:
Xiao Yu's awakening and spirit of resistance as a "new woman" also appears in the works of the 1930s such as "New Woman"; Xiao Yu and her husband's implicit and soothing emotional advancement is full of the introverted subtlety in "Spring in a Small Town"; the resistance of Chinese peasants in the film is involved in countless films...
Regarding "Dragon Breed", there is another question worth pondering: that is, why did the United States go to great lengths to make this excellent Chinese anti-Japanese film in 1944?
Was it because he was moved by the anti-Japanese feats of the Chinese people to spontaneously shoot propaganda films for China?
Putting "Dragon Seed" into the context of the time, it is easy to come up with an answer.
By 1944, World War II was drawing to a close, and the world political landscape was already beginning to emerge. The United States has always wanted to prod up suitable agents in the Far East, and the pro-American Chiang Kai-shek government is one of the goals.
During World War II, the United States donated aircraft, guns and other war supplies to China, and even took the initiative to train some Chinese youth into excellent pilots, armored soldiers and other important branches of the army.
The United States wants China to win, and the United States also needs China to win.
Therefore, the main theme of the film "Dragon Breed" in the service of politics appeared.
Behind the seemingly innocent works of art, the political intent is so hidden that one has to admire Hollywood's profound skills. To this day, Hollywood is still incorporating political intent into movies and acting as if they were nothing, very naturally.
We need to be vigilant about this, and we also need to learn this, and we need to learn this skill to control yi.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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