Today we come to talk about a profound topic, what is the essence of cinema?
This is a matter of public righteousness, but I agree with the suspense master Hitchcock:
We hide in the pitch-black cinema, peering into the every move of the characters on the screen, the camera is our eyes, the privacy of the character of the wanton invaders, and we get a sense of pleasure from it and satisfy a strong curiosity.
Because of the huge temptation of "voyeurism", it has become a subject that directors are keen to shoot, and if you search for the word "voyeurism" in the Douban movie, there are as many as 70 films in the title alone.
Today, choose 5 classics from a wide range of movies and sneak a peek with you guys!
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > American Beauty (1999</h1>).
Jenny is a typical adolescent girl, angry, upset, confused, inferior, thinking about saving money for breast augmentation all day long.
Her mom was a workaholic and her dad was a loser.
Jenny's new neighbor has a strange man named Ricky, who often hides in the dark and uses DV to secretly photograph her to satisfy his curiosity, and he learns about the life of Jenny and her family through secret filming.
For example, secretly filming an unpleasant conversation between Jenny and his father
Secretly photograph Jenny on the phone
Secretly photograph Jenny and his dad practicing dumbbells naked in the middle of the night
Secretly photograph Jenny getting out of the car after school and going home
After Jenny discovered that someone was secretly filming her, although she said no, but the body... Wrong... It is still secretly happy in the heart.
Without the love of her parents, Jenny, who is inferior and introverted and sensitive, finds that there is a handsome pot silently paying attention to her, and unconsciously shows a happy smile.
This shows that the person being spied on is not necessarily the victim, and they may enjoy being secretly concerned.
As Ricky and Jenny's relationship deepens, the candid filming is sublimated into a silent communication between lovers.
However, under normal circumstances, voyeurism is by no means a two-way effective communication, but a one-sided fantasy and obscenity, which can easily cause misunderstanding.
For example, in this scene, Ricky's father mistakenly thinks that Jenny and his father are giving Ricky "underneath" to eat...
"American Beauty" itself is like a pair of sharp eyes, peeping at the spiritual "cancer" hidden in American society, so sneaking and peeping in the film is by no means a gimmick, but a clever echo of the film's theme.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="26" > Rear Window (1954</h1>).
In Hitchcock's masterpiece, voyeurism runs through the entire plot of the film.
Jeffrey, a photojournalist who nurses a leg injury at home, sits on the edge of the bed and peeks into the lives of various characters in the opposite building, while we, as the audience, voyeur Geoffrey's voyeurism.
For example, couples who love dogs
Single Lonely Miss Fangxin
Frustrated composer
Newlyweds who just moved in
An actress who does housework while practicing dance
The lives of these people fill Jeffrey's boring and boring life, and one of the voyeuristic objects is the salesman and his bedridden wife, who often quarrels without a word.
Then a series of strange things happened, and Jeffrey noticed that the salesman had gone out three times a night and was sorting out a bunch of knives the next morning.
The neighbor's puppy was in the strange mooring of the flower bed, and then in the blink of an eye, it was broken and died.
The salesman's wife also disappeared for several days, and jeffrey, who became suspicious, decided to solve the case with his girlfriend.
In the film, Hitchcock not only uses voyeurism to advance the plot, but also delves into the voyeurism itself.
It is immoral to peek into other people's private lives, and In the film, Jeffrey also doubts whether it is moral to do so, but driven by curiosity and boredom, he still can't help but peep.
His girlfriend and caregiver oppose his voyeurism, but when they realize that they may be spying on a wife murder, they change their attitude and join Jeffrey in voyeurism.
Here, Hitchcock throws a moral dilemma at the audience – is it right to do justice by immoral means?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="44" > Voyeurism (1960</h1>).
Photographer Mark's hobby is to photograph the expression of fear before the death of women, he often looks for prey on the street, after locking the target, he uses the camera to track the secret shooting, waiting for the opportunity to commit the crime, and then use the camera to photograph their expression of fear before death.
The perverted murderer's operation is indeed advanced, but the hateful person must have pity, and it turns out that Mark's father is a psychologist who studies children's fears, and often experiments with his own son, which in the long run distorts Mark's personality.
In the end, Mark, who committed a series of crimes, was forced into a desperate situation by the police, and in desperation, he chose to self-destruct and photographed his pre-death fear as his last work. This professionalism will ask you whether you are satisfied!
When the film was released in the United Kingdom in 1960, it directly broke down conservative British audiences and film critics, and the British people violently attacked the morality of the film, and the British director Michael Powell, who directed the film, was devastated.
In the same year, also a British director and a perverted murderer with a voyeuristic plot, Hitchcock's "Horror Story" won unanimous praise in the United States.
Powell can only be said to be too weak, until later Scola and Scorsese supported "Voyeurism", the film was re-evaluated and positioned by the world, becoming a classic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="55" > Eavesdropping Storm (2006</h1>).
Eavesdropping is another form of voyeurism, and it's more imaginative, with the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film ,"Eavesdropping Storm" set in Berlin, East Germany, in 1984, where the entire country is shrouded in high-handed rule by the National Security Agency.
The secret police, Wesler, was ordered to spy on the playwright Dreyman and his actor's girlfriend Christina, who was rational, cold, and loyal, and strictly monitored their every move.
The conversation between the two on weekdays, the remarks of everyone at Dreman's birthday party, and even the snaps of the two were recorded one by one by Wesler and reported to the superior leaders.
Soon after his fortification, however, Wesler discovered that the Minister of Culture had asked him to spy on the playwright in order to seize his girlfriend and get rid of his love rivals; and Wesler's superiors wanted to use this surveillance to promote him.
The idealistic Wessler became a skeptic, and he began to realize the true face of the organization.
In addition, his cold heart gradually melted during the eavesdropping process, and his repressed humanity gradually recovered, and he infiltrated Dremann's house to take a book of poems, and was deeply moved by those verses.
When he overheard Dremann playing the piano with deep affection, he couldn't help but burst into tears, so he decided to sacrifice his career to help them.
He dispatched another policeman on duty, spied on them alone, rewrote the secrets he heard into parents, and helped Dreman escape his arrest in a critical moment.
Because he did not make any achievements, Wesler was demoted to the basement to work as a letter breaker. After the end of the Cold War, the organization ceased to exist, and Wesler continued to work as an obscure newspaper delivery officer at the bottom.
Later, when Dremann realized that Wesler was secretly protecting him, he wrote a book based on Wesler's story called Sonata for The Good.
So voyeurism (eavesdropping) may sometimes have unexpected surprises, transforming a cold-blooded and ruthless secret policeman into a good person who shines with the brilliance of humanity.
The film was the feature film debut of director and screenwriter Donasma, and was officially shot with the help of many former East Germans, who were able to shoot in many former East German office buildings.
The only one who refused his request to shoot was the former director of the East German prison museum, on the grounds that the script did not correspond to historical facts, because throughout the history of East Germany, a secret policeman with such a conscience as Wesler discovered, sorry, there was none!
I have to say that reality is always much harsher than movies.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="73" > Truman's World (1998</h1>).
The one who plays voyeurism to the pinnacle must be "Truman's World"! The whole film is a big carnival of voyeurism.
Truman is an ordinary American man who has lived on Taoyuan Island since he was a child and has not left a step for more than 30 years.
Truman often finds strange things happening in his life, such as the sudden disappearance of his first love girlfriend, the suspected resurrection of his drowned father, and so on.
And he was indoctrinated from an early age with the idea that the outside world was dangerous and traveling was dangerous, but he grew up to doubt the world around him.
For example, the roads near his home are filled with the same people and cars every day
His wife, who claims to be a doctor and goes to the hospital every day, is not a doctor
Truman, who doubted life, decided that "the world is so big, I want to go and see", but he found that relatives, friends, colleagues and all strangers seemed to be obstructing him.
It turned out that Truman's life was a large-scale reality show, broadcast to hundreds of millions of viewers around the world 24 hours a day.
The Peach Blossom Island where Truman lives is actually a giant studio, and every second of life there are thousands of cameras shooting at him.
His relatives, friends, lovers, and even passers-by are all actors with scripts, and the only one who is kept in the dark is Truman himself, and the area of Truman's psychological shadow that finally knows the truth cannot be calculated.
Driven by curiosity, with extraordinary wisdom and courage and perseverance, Truman finally broke through many obstacles and came to the intersection of virtual and real worlds.
Whether to continue to be a star in the virtual world, or to be a free ordinary person in the real world, Truman firmly chose the latter...
"Truman's World" is a social fable, and the reality TV shows that have been flooded for several years now satisfy our collective voyeuristic desires?
The ubiquity of the media and surveillance also makes us in danger of being spied on at any time, so to some extent, each of us is both a truman who is being spied on, and an audience that is voyeuristic.
The film's director, Bede Weir, claimed in an interview that he even thought about installing cameras in every theater where the film was shown, and when the film was placed somewhere, the projectionist switched to secretly photographing the audience's picture, and then cut back to the film picture, so that the audience could also experience the taste of being Truman.
Of course, this is just a thought.
In addition to the above five films, there are also some voyeuristic movies that have not been selected, such as David Ranch's "Blue Velvet", Michael Haneke's "Hidden Camera", and Coppola's "Eavesdropping Conspiracy" is also very good, interested friends can go to see.