People who have a hometown return to their hometown, and people who have no hometown go far away
- Ye Yijian
Watching Li Ruijun's new work "Hidden in the Dust and Smoke" last night, while being touched by the story of the hero and heroine in the film who are dependent on each other for life and death, I also vaguely found that in terms of writing the homeland and expressing nostalgia, Li Ruijun's "Hidden into the Dust and Smoke" and Jia Zhangke's "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" seem to have the same magic.
So, I wanted to write a film review about it; When I dug deeper, I found that Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun, two regulars of the three major international film festivals, have striking similarities in terms of creative motivation, theme expression, and artistic style. So I decided to write an article to explain the similarities and differences between the two directors before writing the film review of "Hidden in the Dust".
From the perspective of the starting point of the two directors, Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun have received professional training in film creation (Jia graduated from the Beijing Film Academy; Li graduated from Shanxi College of Media), and both started as independent filmmakers.
The so-called "independent film" usually meets two conditions: the first is self-financing, self-organized team, and self-shooting without the support of the mature film industry, which is different from the main theme film or pure commercial film guided by public will, audience interest or box office indicators in the mainstream market dominated by relevant departments or capital operation; The second is that the film has a strong personal style and value expression of the main creative team (especially the director and screenwriter). This type of film is also commonly referred to as an author's film, or a writer's film.
Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun's respective debut novels, "Little Mountain Homecoming" and "Summer Solstice", both belong to the category of independent films. In fact, under the influence of the new wave of European cinema, most directors, including Ning Hao (especially those after the sixth generation), have a similar starting point. Although "Home from the Hill" and "Summer Solstice" are not successful, the inside of a seed itself contains all the information of life, and these two works also set the color and tone of many of the directors' subsequent works.
Judging from the narrative content of early works, the biggest common denominator between Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun is to adhere to the localization narrative of their hometown. Jia Zhangke, born in 1970 in Fenyang, Shanxi, in his "Hometown Trilogy" ("Xiao Wu", "Platform", "Ren Xiaoyao"), tells the story of the survival of marginalized small-town youth in Shanxi. Li Ruijun, born in 1983 in Gaotai, Gansu Province, in his "Land Trilogy" ("The Old Donkey's Head", "Tell Them, I Went by White Crane!"). "Home in a place where water and grass are abundant"), the camera is focused on the land of Gansu and the people who are struggling to survive in this land.
Jia Zhangke "Xiao Wu"
Li Ruijun "Tell Them, I Went by White Crane"
In addition to the narrative scenes placed in their hometowns, Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun's early works insist on using local untrained people as protagonists. Wang Hongwei, Zhao Tao, Liang Jingdong and others who participated in Jia Zhangke's early films, as well as Ma Xingchun, Wu Renlin, Zhang Min, Tang Long and others who participated in Li Ruijun's films, are all relatives and friends of the director in his hometown town or village, and have no previous performance experience. On the one hand, this is to save the shooting cost of the film, on the other hand, to enhance the realism of the film. Compared with the early creative experience of the two, Jia Zhangke may be more constrained by cost, while Li Ruijun may be more concerned about the cultural attributes of the actors themselves. The subtle differences before and after also more or less reflect that the whole society has slowly moved from capital shortage to capital abundance or even excess capital.
The same is the local narrative, the inherent nuance between Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun is that the protagonists of the former works are mostly young people in the era of change, the protagonists in "Xiao Wu" are young pickpockets and prostitutes, the young actors in the literary troupe in "Platform", and the frustrated young people running for the future in "Ren Yao"; The hometown under the lens of the latter is mostly old people and children, and the protagonist in "Old Donkey Head" is an old donkey head over seventy years old, "Tell them, I took the white crane!" The protagonists in "" are old people who do not want to be cremated after death, and children who are ignorant of death, and the narrative subject of "Home in a Place with Abundant Water and Grass" is the Yugur "brother" who goes to find his father after his grandfather's death.
Due to the different narrative subjects, Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun's respective trilogies also present different themes and style colors. Jia Zhangke deliberately portrays the young people in the early days of the change of the times, wandering, wandering, lost state of mind, here are the differences and changes between farming traditions and modern civilization, there are also personal ideals and real environment conflicts and reconciliations, it is a bit like the Japanese director Nagisa Oshima's early works reflect the content, but the anger value in Jia Zhangke's works is far less than Oshima Nagisa, he downplays the explicit conflict in the work, more like a wild documentary, is a truthful observation of the people who were knocked down in the era of change.
Jia Zhangke", "Ren Yao"
In Li Ruijun's "Land Trilogy", young people have almost disappeared in their hometown (and even if they have, they are only some small dotted roles), leaving only left-behind children and empty nesters at both ends. In them, Li Ruijun does not deliberately emphasize the conflict between the changes of the times and the real society, but retreats all this as the background of the film narrative, focusing on excavating and presenting the characters' outlook on life and worldview in a specific environment, which is what the famous psychologist Jung called the "collective unconscious" that is used daily without self-knowledge.
Li Ruijun", "Old Donkey's Head"
The root cause of this difference, in addition to the individual differences in the artistic orientation of the two directors, another important factor is time. Jia Zhangke's "Hometown Trilogy", set in the first twenty years of reform and opening up, was the period when the first "peacocks" began to "fly southeast"; At that time, the traditional family structure was still relatively complete, and the mood and trend of the times were the awakening of individual desires and "towards a new era", how to bid farewell to the hometown and write the "story of spring" in a new place (the Yangtze River Delta by the sea, the Pearl River Delta and even the foreign land on the other side). Under such a surge of thought, the early Jia Zhangke deliberately turned the camera to focus on those young people who were left alone or knocked down in the torrent of the times. They were wrapped up in the crowd, waiting hopefully on the platform; The train stopped in front of them, but because they couldn't get on the train without a ticket, they could only watch the train go to the far side of their trance...
Li Ruijun's "Land Trilogy" also reflects the same people who have been left behind or knocked down, but it reflects the current situation in the countryside in the past two decades after the reform and opening up.
At this time in China, the urbanization process has begun to slow down and is basically complete; Industrialized large-scale production has extracted surplus labor from the countryside, and with the intensification of land desertification, the hometown has become less and less suitable for human habitation - the countryside of the Great Northwest has long been unable to see many young people; And in "Hidden in the Dust", even the figure of the child is gone, and there are abandoned old houses that have not been inhabited for a long time.
In Li Ruijun's "Land Trilogy", the theme that runs through it is no longer the wandering, unwillingness, struggle and powerlessness of young people under Jia Zhangke's lens, but "loss" in the general sense: the land is degrading, and the hometown that was once rich in water and grass has become a Gobi and desert full of yellow sand; The history, traditions, memories and cultures of nations are also dying out; Loved ones are leaving one by one – going far away or to heaven; In the process of leaving the land and living in the building, the blood ties that used to maintain the social interaction of acquaintances have been severed, and the innocence and simplicity in human nature have been lost little by little...
Entering the second stage of creation, Jia Zhangke filmed works such as "The World", "Twenty-Four Cities", "Three Gorges Good Man", "Useless", "Legend of the Sea" and so on, while Li Ruijun presented "Passing the Future".
Also from the hometown, Jia Zhangke's "The World" and "The Good Man of the Three Gorges" and Li Ruijun's "Passing the Future" have many similarities and subtle differences.
Jia Zhangke's "World"
Li Ruijun,"Passing through the Future"
"The World" tells the story of the survival of the first generation of migrant workers who came out of Shanxi in Shenzhen, a modern emerging city known as the "window of the world", and is the encounter between young people and young cities. The two protagonists in "Three Gorges Good People" are also from Shanxi, a man and a woman from Fenyang and Taiyuan to Fengjie to find their wives and boyfriends; In the process of searching, they take on the choice between "picking up" and "giving up". In this movie, Han Sanming, who plays the true color, and Shen Hong, the nurse played by Zhao Tao, one is a farmer with a good temperament, and the other is a citizen with a literary temperament, and the two have no obvious intersection in the movie, like two dualistic worlds that do not intersect with each other. From Shanxi to Chongqing, from the Yellow River Basin to the Yangtze River Basin, from farmers to citizens, from the Geographical Three Gorges on the map to Tang Degang's "Historical Three Gorges"... Jia Zhangke completes the isomorphism of personal fate and national destiny in this film; With the expansion of the scale of the city and the growth of the citizen population, people in the "Three Gorges of History" period have also formed a typical "urban-rural duality" at the level of social class and cultural-psychological structure.
Jia Zhangke's "World"
Jia Zhangke,"The Good Man of the Three Gorges"
Li Ruijun's "Passing the Future" also focuses on the "Gansu people" who are struggling to survive in Shenzhen, but it tells the survival situation of the second generation of farmers. If the characters in "The World" and "Three Gorges Good People" still have a clear hometown, but when it comes to the male and female protagonists in "Passing the Future", the concept of hometown becomes blurred: their parents are authentic Gansu people, but they themselves grew up in Shenzhen and know little about their parents' hometown; Supposedly, the hometown of these two young people should be in Shenzhen, where their parents have shed blood and sweat, but their household registration is in the strange Gansu. After their aging parents were eliminated by the ever-changing Shenzhen, they were left with few choices, and they had to return to Gansu, either farming or going to construction sites to continue to work as laborers. The young peasants, on the other hand, have to face the confusion of their psychological destiny, as well as the blurring and marginalization of their social identities.
In this film, two second-generation farmers in Shenzhen get to know and understand each other because of paid drug trials, which is a transaction that bets on individual health, involving the "body autonomy" or "body politics" often mentioned in sociology, that is, in the modern industrial society built by capital and power, people at the relative bottom or marginal must sell their bodies in exchange for the right to live. There is also a narrative isomorphism between the heroine's drug trial behavior and Shenzhen as a "test field" for reform and opening up.
From "The World" to "Passing the Future", the two generations presented in the film are facing the same kind of confusion and dilemma: even if they cannot return to their hometown, they cannot integrate into the city. Perhaps because the situations they face are too similar, neither film points out a clear way out for their respective protagonists. At the end of "The World", the protagonist continues to sink in the "New World"—like the theme of Nagisa Oshima's mid- to late-stage works; At the end of "Passing the Future", only the speeding train and the dying young life are left, and the fate and ending of the characters are not clearly explained, and the answer is floating in the wind.
Jia Zhangke's "World"
In the transition period from the second stage to the third stage of Jia Zhangke, "Destined for Heaven" is the most eye-catching. This film not only inherits his usual sharp social perspective and criticism of the times, but also begins to mature and mellow in narrative techniques, and is a work that carries on from top to bottom. The film uses the technique of Hong Kong martial arts films (violent aesthetics) to stitch together several "events" that really occurred in Shanxi, Chongqing, Hubei and Guangdong, outlining the heavy side of the era of change, and Jia Dao also makes a lot of use of tigers, cows, snakes, fish and other totems, images and symbols to try to complete the redemption of suffering and misfortune, and raise the theme of the film to the height of humanistic care.
Jia Zhangke's "Destiny of Heaven"
Later, in "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" and "Children of Jianghu", Jia Zhangke slowly retreated the changes of the times into the background of narrative, further weakening the contradictions and conflicts between individuals and society, and further enlarging the two major elements of space and time. "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" uses different proportions of pictures to divide time into past, present and future; Spatially, it has also been gradually enlarged into Fenyang, Shanxi and overseas. Despite the cutting of time and space, the theme of the film is still a "love" word: love, friendship, family affection, nostalgia (melancholy).
Jia Zhangke,"The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers"
What stands out in "Children of jianghu" is a "righteousness", which includes both the righteousness of brothers and sisters who are out of the house and meet in Pingshui, as well as social justice (benefit) outside the blood and family. Love and righteousness are the "basis of existence" and moral bottom line that Jia Zhangke and his characters in his films find after experiencing the turbulent changes of the times. Jia Zhangke,d'être, who wanted to rush into the sea and embrace globalization and modern civilization (see Ren Yao, The World, and Legend of the Sea), fell to the Confucian ethics of advocating "benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, and faith."
Jia Zhangke,"Children of jianghu"
Attentive viewers may have noticed that Jia Zhangke's films always use some stage or opera elements consciously or unconsciously.
At the end of "Xiao Wu", the young pickpocket who was handcuffed to the iron railing by the police squatted on the street, attracting more and more strange eyes from passers-by, and the whole square became a stage with him as the core.
In "Platform", the stage can be seen everywhere, and at first, young actors perform for the people on the stage of the theater; Later, they drove trucks, built a makeshift stage with a car bucket, and toured the roadside, revealing sadness in romance.
In "World", Xiao Tao, played by Zhao Tao, wears a gorgeous performance costume and performs for tourists on the stage of the Window of the World Scenic Area.
Jia Zhangke's "World"
In these early works, Jia Zhangke not only expressed the desire of the young people at that time to step onto the stage of the times, but also implied the determination of the late-developing China to step onto the world stage (to integrate into the forest of the world's nations). Whether it is Jia Zhangke himself, the characters in his shots, or the main theme of the entire era, there is an internal impulse that rushes from the edge to the mainstream and is eager to grasp the pulse of the times.
The ending in "Destiny of Heaven" is even more meaningful, and the director directly takes the Jin opera "Su Sanqi Xie" as the end of the film, which not only further sublimates the theme of the film on top of "crime and punishment", but also pours out the director's deep humanistic care.
In "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers", the director uses opera props and character changes as tools to mark time, and ponders the eternal and unchanging scale in the change.
Jia Zhangke,"The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers"
The statue of Guan Erye, which appears repeatedly in "Children of the Jianghu", is also related to folk opera and folk beliefs, and is a symbol of "loyalty and righteousness".
Jia Zhangke,"Children of jianghu"
This unconscious habit of Jia Zhangke is related to the long-term growth and living humanistic environment of Shanxi people. Since ancient times, Shanxi's civil society has preserved a strong tradition of opera, so Shanxi is also known as the hometown of opera. In the past, the opera culture popular in civil society was an important means for the rulers to perform the duties of indoctrination of the common people, and an important carrier for Confucian ethics to sink into civil society--edutainment and etiquette (reason) under the common people, including "Shilang Visiting Mother", "Su SanQi Xie" (Yutang Chun), "Lost Space Chop", "Twenty-Four Filial Pieties" and other plays, all of which are highly sung works. While enjoying opera on the festival day, ordinary people also unconsciously put the concepts of "courtesy, righteousness, honesty, and filial piety" into their subconscious.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Jia Zhangke, who was born and raised in Shanxi, will eventually turn around and look for a cure for the diseases of the times in Confucian ethics.
Jia Zhangke's "Twenty-Four Cities"
It is worth pointing out that although Confucian ethics cares about the value of life, it still focuses on the situation and order of the present world, and does not provide answers to the ultimate destination of people, so whether it is "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" or "Children of the Rivers and Lakes", although there is human warmth and righteousness, it always seems that something is missing. By "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue", Jia Zhangke seems to want to find a more profound "existence" on the basis of agricultural traditions and Confucian ethics, but he is still unclear and unclear.
Li Ruijun, who came up later, seemed to have a very strong sense of death and religion from the beginning.
The first real work he returned to his hometown to shoot, "Old Donkey's Head", the setting of the old man played by Ma Xingchun guarding the graves of his ancestors, from the very beginning, stood at the depth of death and the height of religion to fight against the various "unbearable" in the world (the desertification of the land threatened the safety of the ancestral graves, and he tried his best to control the sand; The richest man in the village wants to seize the land, and he will stick to it; His family objected, and he ignored it), and this power, which was as determined as a donkey, was ultimately defeated by his own death, and a new round of absurdity was staged (the children held a "lively" funeral to divide up his family property and compensation).
In "Tell Them, I Went with the White Crane!" In ", the old man, also played by Ma Xingchun, because he did not want to be cremated after his death, let several children bury themselves alive, and taught these children to tell their families that they flew away with a white crane.
Although "Home in a Place with Abundant Water and Grass" takes its name, it tells how the native Yugur people (nomads) lost this homeland of lush water and grass.
The film begins with the audience telling the audience about the demise of the Uighur kingdom of Ganzhou in the past; Then there is the digging of wells underground that cannot produce water; Grandpa died desperately after selling the sheep; Camels die of thirst on the way to find their father; What was once a lush pasture with abundant water and grass is now the Gobi Desert; The house where he lived on the ranch as a child has weathered into ruins; The ancient temple that has existed for thousands of years, and because of the lack of water, the lamas in the temple have to move to the town to live... All of this is related to drying up and death! Li Ruijun, on the other hand, threw the path of salvation at the Buddha overhead.
The ending of "Home in a Place with Abundant Water and Grass" is still meaningful, when the brothers finally find their father in the upper reaches of the river, they find that their father and other herders are panning for gold by the river; By this time, they had given up their former nomadic lives and had become employed gold diggers. The brothers led the camel up against the current, with the stones and sand at their feet, the sound of the rumbling detonator exploding next to their ears, and the dust rising in front of them... They climbed over the hillside, and in the distance was a chemical factory billowing with smoke, and their father led them towards the place where the smoke rose...
In "Passing through the Future", the director deliberately "placed" the blind singer Zhou Yunpeng in the bustling urban crowd, "watching" the struggle and fate of the hero and heroine trapped in the quagmire of desire. At this time, Zhou Yunpeng was already the embodiment of death and god. This section is imitated from Polish director Kieslowski's "Killing Commandment", "the eternal bystander". At the end of the film, Zhou Yunpeng's poem "September", adapted from Haizi, is a poem and song with the theme of "death". Here it is implied that even if the heroine who is seriously ill and dying is on the train back to her hometown, she may not be able to return to Gansu alive to reunite with her family; It also raises a highly religious question on top of the "urban-rural duality": Where will the soul go?
In "Hidden in the Dust", this middle-aged couple who are almost completely abandoned in this life print petals with wheat on each other's arms as a sign of recognition in the next life... These are manifestations of the consciousness of death and religious feelings.
Li Ruijun", "Hidden in the Dust"
Li Ruijun's strong sense of death and religious feelings are also related to the environment in which he grew up and lived. Gansu covers most of the Hexi Corridor, which used to be lush with water and grass, gave birth to splendid cultures and civilizations (Ganzhou Huilu Kingdom), and was also the throat of the ancient Silk Road. From Dunhuang to Lanzhou to Chang'an and Luoyang, this is also the only way for Indian Buddhism to spread to the Central Plains in the past, with ancient temples, groups of monks and believers along the way. The grottoes and pagodas in Dunhuang, Maijishan, Chang'an, Luoyang and other places that have survived to this day are strong evidence of the prosperity of Buddhism in the past. Li Ruijun, who grew up in this land, and his protagonists under his lens, could not be untouched by Buddhist culture.
Li Ruijun,"Home in a Place With Lush Water and Grass"
Coupled with the deterioration of the natural environment (climate change and man-made environmental damage, resulting in water depletion and desertification), people living here also have to frequently face the reality of animals and plants (especially crops and livestock) dying of thirst and sunburn. Such a difficult reality of survival also indirectly triggers people's thinking and exploration of death and "existence".
Under the dual forces of historical tradition and living reality, Li Ruijun's sense of death and religion has also become increasingly strong, and he has unconsciously introduced it into the film.
Li Ruijun,"Home in a Place With Lush Water and Grass"
Another nuance between Li Ruijun and Jia Zhangke is their attitude towards the mainstream (or torrent of the times). The two of them seemed to have gone in opposite directions.
Jia Zhangke's early works are actually from the marginality, and the protagonists in the "Hometown Trilogy", whether it is social identity or way of living, are in a marginal state; But later, whether it is the identity of the characters in the story or his narrative and expression, they are getting closer and closer to the mainstream, and by the time of "The Old Man of The Mountains and rivers" and "Children of the Rivers and Lakes", the boundaries between the marginal crowd and the mainstream group have been blurred, and the values expressed are also the Confucian ethics that have come out of the mainstream of history; By "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue", the interviewees, including Jia Pingwo, Yu Hua, Liang Hong and others, are all cultural elites who are active in the core of meaning, and the marginal people have almost disappeared from his picture.
Kill Matt Youth in "Ren Runaway"
Deep drift in The World
Garment factory worker in Useless
The good people of the Three Gorges in "Destiny"
Chen Danqing in "Legend of the Sea"
Jia Pingwo, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong in "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue"
Li Ruijun's "Land Trilogy" first appeared in "Old Donkey Head" in the village's richest man and donkey-like old man, and then "Tell Them, I took the White Crane!" And the children in "Home in a Place with Lush Water and Grass", some of them are the local social elite, and some are ordinary people who are widely present in the village. In "Passing through the Future", the hero and heroine are marginal people who are physically and mentally separated between the city and the countryside (the second generation of farmers). In "Hidden in the Dust", this marginality is handled more thoroughly, they are not only knocked down by the rolling forward era, but also rejected by their original families, and the only people who really accept them are the land under their feet and the gods above their heads; And it is precisely this extreme marginality that binds the fates of the two tightly together.
Li Ruijun", "Hidden in the Dust"
From the perspective of social development, Jia Zhangke and Li Ruijun's two different paths are also isomorphic to the region in which they are located.
In the first two decades of reform and opening up, Shanxi, with its abundant coal resources, delivered energy to a rising China day and night. During this period, although Shanxi was not in the center of the stage and the core of meaning, it at least played an important role in economic take-off; At that time, Jia Zhangke chose to swim against the current and aimed the camera at those young people who "did not catch the car".
In the past two decades, the whole country is generally facing the dilemma of overcapacity, the development model at the expense of traditional energy output is no longer applicable to Shanxi, and its role and status in China's economic development are gradually declining - the whole of Shanxi is facing the reality of "falling in the middle of the family road". At this time, Jia Zhangke, perhaps out of his feelings and responsibility for his hometown, gradually gave up his criticism of reality and system, and chose to move closer to mainstream values and explore some immutable "existence"!
From anger to hope, from going out to finding roots
Due to the limitations of its own conditions, in the more than forty years when the process of urbanization and modernization is in full swing, Gansu, which is located in the great northwest, has always had a very low "degree of contribution" and sense of existence, and it is increasingly marginalized, or even left behind. This also indirectly influenced Li Ruijun's creative concept, making his narrative subject increasingly marginalized. At least, the increasingly mature Li Ruijun's desire to integrate into the mainstream of the times is far less intense than that of Jia Zhangke in the middle and late periods, and he is still more concerned about "existence" itself.
And "Hidden in the Dust" released this year, in terms of its artistic achievements, can also be regarded as the director's "question of existence"! Frankly speaking, this kind of niche literary and art film can enter the mainstream film market that is currently in disarray, which is really a blessing for the audience!
In the next article, I will focus on Li Ruijun's masterpiece "Hidden in the Dust" from the aspects of film theme, cultural connotation, creative technique, and realistic inspiration, so stay tuned!
In fact, man is the same as a tree, and the more he yearns for the sunlight in the high places, the more its roots will reach out to the dark underground.
- (de) Nietzsche
"To be continued..."