The scene of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics
Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang Jianwei
The opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics has achieved great success, it is not only the façade of major sports events, but also a delicate work of art, which has won unanimous praise at home and abroad, and has also brought new enlightenment to our current literary and artistic creation.
The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games is dedicated to the concentrated display of China's 5,000 years of culture, movable type printing, tai chi gossip, thousands of people beating, "quaker father chasing the sun"... A large number of traditional elements are overwhelming. At the same time, the tactics of the sea of people are adopted, all the actions are uniform, and the details are tightly sewn together, highlighting the majestic momentum. We have a strong desire to show our family foundation and strive to show our long history and deep heritage to the world.
The same practice also appeared in the literary and artistic works of the time. In those years, the martial arts movie scenes were grand, the action design and composition were colorful, and they created a very impactful aesthetic style. However, some films have thin stories and focus on the motifs of revenge and power struggles, creating intense dramatic conflicts. Some of the films are hollow in theme, and even domestic audiences cannot be impressed, but they are bent on going to the world. Although it wants to reverse the long-standing Western imagination of China's "Orientalism" and show the ugly, weakened, and over-mystified East in a majestic posture, it still has not completely got rid of the situation of being viewed. In the final analysis, The cultures of the East and the West have not been able to find a real point of convergence, and still understand each other from their own perspectives. The same is true of some large-scale evenings, where the double superposition of traditional elements and visual effects dilutes the emotional connotation and obscures the theme expression.
The opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics made a subtraction, and the theme was more condensed - how China, as an important member of the community of human destiny, gathered in the vast ocean and played an active role. Zhang Yimou said in an interview that he not only tells the story of China, but also tells everyone's story, and has achieved a leap from "me" to "us".
Scholar Cao Weidong believes that this transformation of presentation is a kind of "metaphor" to "metaphor" - from indirectly telling the world "what China is like", to directly showing the world "what China is", telling the world "what the world is in the eyes of Chinese". In this way, the realization of the common Olympic emotion of mankind from showing "me" to showing "us" and showing "going to the future together" is realized.
The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics still tells the "Chinese story", which not only "condenses the common experience and emotions of Chinese", but also the story of how China goes to the world and plays a role in the context of globalization, and is the story of Chinese unique experience and emotion constantly encountering the world and seeking common ground while reserving differences, shifting the focus from the story of "China" to China's "story", and changing the 5,000-year-old culture from a static display to a dynamic description. It presents how China, with its unique historical experience and cultural structure, strives to interact with the world, constantly adjusts, and demonstrates the responsibility of a great power. "China" is no longer a static cultural element, but a highly dynamic participant. People play an important role in the middle, and they continue to reflect on their participation, such as the torch lighting method not only shows China's continuous efforts to environmental protection, but also expresses that the concept of low-carbon environmental protection has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
Behind this change stems from the rapid development of China in the past 14 years and the profound changes in its role in the world, showing that it resonates with the changes of the times. The era is not a background board, history is not a few old photos, but a real change in the lives of each Chinese, so the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics pays special attention to the presentation of a better life for the people. The "sense of the times" has become more concrete, it is the children in mountainous areas who have the opportunity to contact the world because of their poverty alleviation, and the sincere smiling faces of people of all ethnic groups working together. For some countries' misunderstanding and smear of China's existence, the most "artistic" response has been made. In terms of presentation, it pays attention to adding high-tech elements to replace the consumption of past man-sea tactics with simulation, which can better represent the development of the times.
At present, although some literary and artistic works also want to show the style of the times, they are too elemental to present the "sense of the times", thinking that showing several iconic scenes of the times captures the special style of the times, but in fact, they fail to grasp the pulse of the times and fail to truly reflect the values of the times. At present, China is in an era of great transformation of social structure, an era of profound changes in civilization, an era of reconstructing oneself, reconstructing the world, and reconstructing knowledge, and everyone feels the changes personally, so the audience is more and more attracted by works with a "sense of the times" and wants to find their own trajectory and direction of progress from the works. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics made a demonstration, the times are the ordinary life that lives endlessly, the times are to give every hard worker an opportunity, the times are science and technology to change life, and the times are constantly eliminating the barrier to enhance understanding.
The biggest highlight of the opening ceremony is the confident standing of the torch in the middle of the snowflake world. In the past, people always expected the unexpected way the torch was lit, like the shotgun that appeared at the beginning of the story and was bound to sound at the end, and this abrupt reversal of the plot used to be our expectation of literary and artistic works. Life is too plain, and people always want to experience the ups and downs of emotions in literary and artistic works, but they have gradually evolved into an IQ contest between the audience and the creator. The creators tried their best to surprise the audience, but ignored whether the plot could be harmonious and self-consistent, and the audience often used "rotten tails" to condemn the creators for failing to play the imagination of "breaking the sky", but forgot that the original intention of literary and artistic creation was to inspire people and arouse people's sense of participation. The opening ceremony enlightens how literary and artistic works can be described smoothly, turning the abruptly reversed curve into a continuous accumulation and promotion of emotional points, and this superimposed feeling can penetrate the hearts of the people.
The "Ma Lan Flower Children's Choir" sang in Greek at the opening ceremony
Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Li Ga
The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics is still an open structure, with a story wrapped around a story, and a line indexing another clue, constantly prompting the audience to explore the deep meaning. The opening ceremony was full of "behind-the-scenes stories", and Deng Xiaolan, a retired police officer in Beijing, began to teach music at Malan Primary School in 2004, and held four Malan Children's Music Festivals in Malan Village, taking children to CCTV, Beijing TELEVISION and other places to perform. The deeper clue is that her father, Mr. Deng Tuo, once ran the Jin-Cha-Ji Daily in Malan Village, Fuping. Fu Baohuan, former vice principal of Beijing Chongwen Primary School and special music teacher, came to Shihou Primary School in Fuping County as one of the first batch of old principals to go to the countryside to teach. Their joint efforts brought the Maranhua Choir from impoverished areas onto the stage of the Winter Olympics, singing the Greek Olympic song "Ode to the Olympics" in a natural voice. In the "Shining Snowflakes" program, five hundred children holding the glittering "peace doves" ran happily in the bird's nest, and a "little pigeon that fell behind" was found by the sister, and the two of them returned to the team hand in hand, and the details of countless netizens in this poke were inspired by a mistake in the rehearsal. These "behind-the-scenes stories" and "background clues" allow the opening ceremony to be watched repeatedly. Every time you watch it, you can make new discoveries and inspire new ones.
Some creators often complain that the audience is infected by the online media, the appetite is getting more and more tricky, "nothing new under the sun", but they turn a blind eye to the people who are happening around them. They like episodic stories, but they lack patience for the long-winded daily routines. In fact, the people's life is the inexhaustible source of literary and artistic creation, how to take the initiative to get close to ordinary life, patiently observe, fully accumulate, truly be with the people, and start from the people is the direction that literary and art workers need to work towards.
The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics won unanimous praise from audiences at home and abroad, and found the greatest common denominator between them, which not only showed the Chinese-style romance, Chinese feelings, but also reflected China's spirit of active participation and integration into the world. With the development of the media, literary and artistic creation is more and more subdivided according to the different objects of appreciation, and those seemingly personalized theme branches also contain the rejection of other fields, and gradually develop a set of their own rules and secret languages, which only attract specific groups, and become more and more closed. While flaunting "niche" and "personality", it has lost the ability to tell good stories to the public, and has only fallen to the level of "freshness" of the theme to meet the expectations of the people's spiritual and cultural life, rather than the "novelty" and "effectiveness" of the techniques. How to reflect the people's lives in an open and inclusive spirit, but also actively open yourself to let the world know, and truly achieve the integration of "you have me, I have you", we must reflect through the success of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games.
From the overwhelming display of China's image in the 2008 Olympic Games to the Chinese spirit of 2022. After 14 years of development, China's literary and artistic creation has also moved from refinement to fragmentation because of the development of media. When literature and art cannot provide the audience with the spirit of the times they want, they rely on short videos and non-fiction works to depict the spirit of the times themselves, although in a certain aspect it does reflect the changes of the times, but it is also fraught with problems, and it will evolve into a routine, resulting in chaos of "de-ideologicalization", "de-value", "de-historicization" and "de-mainstreaming". Literature and art are crucial to the development of an era, leading the style of the times, as a delicate literary and artistic work polished by the Chinese outstanding team for several years, the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics has achieved the unity of national characteristics and human commonality, achieved the integration of the times and history, and showed the world the spiritual temperament of the Chinese nation to keep pace with the times, be inclusive and actively participate. This also makes the long history and profundity of Chinese culture more concrete and more acceptable to the world. It brings many enlightenments to the current literary and artistic creation, and will profoundly affect the direction of future artistic creation.
(The author is a young scholar at the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)