The hottest concept in the film industry in the past two years is parallel time and space.
Cartoons, super-British commercials, small-budget independent films, and even TV series should try the feeling of different worlds coming together.
Movies are undoubtedly the best way to present the concept of parallel universes.
Through montage collage, you can quickly shuttle through different corners of different worlds, and easily list different images of a character in different universes in front of the audience.
In fact, as early as many years ago, filmmakers tried to show a person's life in different worlds in a movie.
"Millennium Actress" is undoubtedly the earliest and most perfect work, presenting a parallel universe style with images.
When it comes to "Millennium Actress", everyone will think of the eight-minute montage clip that is famous in film history.
As Chiyoko runs, the camera shuttles through bicycles, carriages, trains, cars, oceans, spaceships, to Sengoku, Edo, Taisho, Showa, Heisei and the future, and through Chiyoko's childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age.
In every world, around every Chiyoko, on every vehicle, the audience follows different but similar characters, pursuing them until they reach the painting in the snow, blending with the snow.
In the painting, it is the back of the painter that Chiyoko has pursued all her life.
The movie is an illusory dream, and what Chiyoko is pursuing is also a person who has dissolved into the painting and turned into an illusion.
"Millennium Actress" begins with the life of Chiyoko Fujiwara.
Chiyoko Fujiwara, as the representative of the most glorious period and most brilliant actress of Japanese films, has only two goals in her life.
One is to change into a different person in the movie.
One is a painter who found her girlhood and only had one side, and the painter gave her a key and agreed to meet again in the future.
So Chiyoko began her lifelong pursuit in order to meet the painter again.
She became a film actress also because she heard that the painter was in "puppet Manchukuo", and when she made a movie, she would go to "puppet Manchukuo" to shoot.
After that, Chiyoko starred in a princess in the Warring States period, a female ninja in the Edo period, a prostitute in Yoshiwara, a geisha in Kyoto, a housewife in Tokyo, a female doctor in a monster movie, and a female astronaut in a science fiction film.
The biggest commonality between these characters and Chiyoko is that they have also been looking for something that cannot be seen or touched.
An illusion, an obsession.
The princess in the Warring States film, on the castle tower, met an old woman shaking a spinning wheel, and the old woman tricked the princess into drinking a bowl of tea.
The princess, who thought she would follow the general, only learned after drinking this bowl of tea that this is the tea of eternal life, which will make her immersed in the torment of love fire for thousands of years.
Drinking this bowl of tea is not only the princess in the movie, but also Chiyoko, who plays the princess.
Chiyoko is transformed into a world of sentient beings in the movie, and these characters written by the director and screenwriter replace Chiyoko and accompany Chiyoko in different worlds, pursuing thousands of years.
The lens makes her image span thousands of years, and the film makes her pursuit immortal and immortal for a thousand years.
Until one day, she suddenly realized that she was too old to play a girly and beautiful woman on the screen.
At the same time, she is no longer the bright girl that the painter painted on the wall and perhaps worried about.
At this time, Chiyoko realized through the mirror image that the vicious old woman who had been following her closely since the Sengoku Princess was herself.
"I hate you to the bone, and I love you to the core."
What Chiyoko has always loved is the self who is chasing illusions, the journey she keeps embarking on in order to pursue, or rather, the life of the characters in the movie who are different but also looking for something.
At the same time, she hates herself, hates that she will grow old, and hates that she cannot be as young as the characters in the movie.
I hated myself, in fact, I no longer remember what that person looked like.
Chiyoko is the old woman, she personally hung the key on her chest, personally bound the obsession of pursuit to her life, and personally fed herself to drink, the bowl of tea that will be immersed in the torment of love fire for thousands of years.
When Chiyoko realized this, she let go of all her life goals, she quit the film industry, and she stopped obsessing herself with finding that person.
She kept her best self in the movie, not letting the audience realize that the goddess on the screen will gradually get old.
At the same time, he also kept his most cherished self, the woman he had been pursuing, on film forever.
Let the Sengoku princess, Edo female ninja, Yoshiwara prostitute, Kyoto geisha, Tokyo housewife, female doctor, astronaut, these women in different worlds, Chiyoko's face and spirit.
Forever in place of Chiyoko, in their world, endless pursuit.
She herself may have always known faintly that the painter had been hunted down and interrogated by the gendarmerie many years ago and had been killed.
And in the end, it doesn't matter what the painter looks like, who he is, or even whether he is a person or not.
He supports Chiyoko, creating one beautiful screen image after another in different movies and different worlds, and experiencing the lives of different women one after another.
Chiyoko, who has experienced the lives of these characters and firmly pursued the path, is forever immersed in the beautiful dream of pursuit, and immersed in the joy and warmth of pursuing the event itself.
So, when Chiyoko dies, she has no grief, she can continue to pursue the path in another world, in the world where the person may also exist, in the unknown world she has not yet created.
She found the joy she was looking for, and she found the bright girl on the screen who was always running and always looking.
The image of Chiyoko, and the woman with Chiyoko's dream in this world, live forever on the screen and never fall for thousands of years.
What the audience sees in front of the screen is also a dream world built by filmmakers, and through the unique form of the film, these worlds appear so real on the screen.
Between dreams and reality, the film creates parallel universes. The dreams of filmmakers and audiences are turned into reality with lenses and special effects.
Chiyoko's life may also be a portrayal of a filmmaker.
The prototype of Chiyoko Fujiwara is undoubtedly Setsuko Hara, the representative of the great actress of Japan's Showa.
The image of this golden age superstar of Japanese cinema is probably the deepest impression that many people have on classic Japanese movies.
Setsuko Hara's gentle and sunny smile in Yasujiro Ozu's film has become one of the biggest features of Ozu's movies.
Setsuko Hara's screen career is almost an account of the golden age of Japanese cinema.
The moment Setsuko Hara stepped into the film industry, Japanese films became the leaders of Asian cinema with the establishment of companies such as Shochiku and Toho, as well as the emergence of giants such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.
Setsuko Hara collaborated with these companies and filmmakers to create classics in Japanese film history and world film history.
In 1961, with the annual production of more than 500 Japanese films, the Japanese film industry reached the peak of glory and has since declined.
In 1962, Setsuko Hara retired after starring in her last work.
The screen image of Chiyoko Fujiwara in "Millennium Actress" also pays tribute to many classic images created by Setsuko Hara on the screen.
Fujiwara Chiyoko's retirement is also quite similar to Setsuko Hara.
Setsuko Hara also retired at her most glorious moment, leaving her infinite brilliant self to the screen forever, and has never appeared in public since then, and few people know about her return to the ordinary life of an amateur and the appearance of aging.
And throughout the film of "Millennium Actress", Chiyoko Fujiwara is the symbol of all Showa actresses.
In her, we can see actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Isuzu Yamada, Ayayo Tanaka, Kyo Machiko, Jasmine Okada, and Li Xianglan.
And the movies she starred in also paid tribute to "Chaos", "Spider's Nest City", "Late Spring", "Gion Sisters", "Twenty-Four Pupils", "Godzilla", "Sand Vessel" and other famous works in the history of Japanese films.
"Millennium Actress" also depicts a ukiyo-e painting of the Japanese film industry, from its rise to glory and then to ruins.
Chiyoko Fujiwara is also a filmmaker in pursuit of the process of movie dreams.
Filmmakers paint on canvases called the screen, creating one world after another that is born out of reality but is completely different from reality.
In the world of movies, filmmakers spend the parallel world they yearn for in their minds, and bring this world to the audience.
When the audience watches each movie, it seems that they follow different characters and experience the style of different worlds.
In this world called "movies", there may never be real reality, or even just an ethereal dream.
But it is such a dream that attracts generations of filmmakers to follow the previous servants, and also attracts generations of moviegoers, fascinated by this fictional world on the screen.
The film industry in every country has experienced from glory to decline, and even the entire film industry has experienced countless shocks, from silent to sound, from black and white to color, from physical stunts to computer special effects, and the continuous rise of the television industry, VR industry, and short video industry.
But there are still filmmakers who continue to embark on the road of pursuing their movie dreams.
Perhaps throughout their lives, many filmmakers do not know what they are filming.
Before each script is written, before every scene is built, before every shot starts, before each finished film is cut, and before the official release of each movie.
No one knows what kind of film they will get, no one knows what kind of film it will become.
Generations of filmmakers are clinging to this ethereal dream.
The road to pursuing your movie dream will never stop.