This weekend, the "Men and Women on Earth - Eric Houmai Retrospective Exhibition" hosted by the Shanghai Film Museum opened at the Daguang Cinema, and the movie tickets sold out early.
The French film master Hou Mai was sought after by young men and women in literature and art, largely because of the frequent "golden sentences" in his films, and human men and women engaged in love confrontation in dialogue. Hou Mai's "Moral Story", "Proverb Story" and "Story of the Four Seasons" are regarded as the encyclopedia of love.
But the reason why Hou Mai is Hou Mai is not just because he is good at writing the proverbs of love. At the age of 40, he made his first feature film, wrote novels, and he has a sober understanding of the difference between movies and novels. He once pointed out that the dialogue in an audio film should neither be used mechanically to explain the plot nor as a simple sound process, and the dialogue must be perfectly integrated with the camera, and each word still has value.
In the old article "Hou Mai on Dialogue", he sternly pointed out that "until now, there has not been a real style in sound films: an original way to compensate for the absence of dialogue." ”
Time has passed, and when we revisit his "dialogue films" that are regarded as classics, we may wish to think: Have we got the "style of sound films" that Hou Mai longed for?
I'm going to talk about the doubts of the best directors about the essential and crucial power of language... If sound film is an art, dialogue must be a symbol corresponding to the character who spoke it, not just some kind of sound element. Although it still has a special status compared to other components, it always ranks second in front of the visual part. There is even a tendency today that a film would be better if it could be easily understood without dialogue, and that a viewer who enjoys the original film should have little fun without reading the subtitles.
We marvel at Lost Weekend precisely because of its sheer visuality, which means – or rather – that Billy Wilder is able to articulate the subtlest intentions of the characters, and in the end, we regret that they still have to speak. Dialogue is neither entirely superfluous, but it is also not indispensable, and in principle, dialogue should not be added unnecessarily, nor should dialogue be deleted regardless of the damage caused to the film.
It is no exaggeration to say that one can think that until now there has only been "sound film". [instead of "talkingfilm"]. The mistake of the filmmakers of 1930 was that they thought that the first important problem was the processing of sound effects and the solution of the dialogue problem, and the second important problem was how to introduce a language-emphasizing technique into a visual art. - It will be solved after getting the answer to the first question. In fact, all future attempts tend to weaken the power of language. It soon became clear that language was first and foremost a sound and an immediate meaning before it was used as a symbol.
Dialogue is used as a way of explaining the plot, not as a lesson. But a line in a movie doesn't just depend on the lines before and after it: it exists in time rather than in the script; as one of the most basic units in a movie, it also depends on other units. Even those who have always been low-key support this: "The main problem of a film screenwriter," Andre Malraux said in Verve in 1940, "is to know when his character should speak." ”
The dilemma of dialogue cannot be reduced to a simple background issue. I know some screenwriters understand that they can't write for a movie the way people who write plays or novels. On the contrary, some people use the excuse that movies need special treatment, feeling that they don't need to change the script at all. Although the effect of that modification on the narrative mode is far greater than the impact on the meaning of the dialogue. It is appropriate to think that most of the dialogue created for film to date has been fictional-style dramatic dialogue. Film actors' scripts usually note those "he said" parts, just as the novel emphasizes the character dialogue with bold dots. But their content has never reached the objectivity of the latter. For example, dialogue in American novels, and experience shows that American novels cannot be perfectly adapted to the screen. In fact, the only advantage of this dialogue is that it can lead people to experience the world in the novel. Cinema, on the other hand, is a world in which the line no longer needs to emphasize dialogue but is merely a supplementary explanation, and because of this, it must have a deep enough connotation to avoid being completely destroyed. #FormatImgID_3 #
Those who have ideal dialogue have indeed tried in various ways to build bridges between the world of words and cinema. The famous poet Jacques Prevette's plays are often written in poetic or humorous commentary under a certain picture, but his mistake is to treat the picture only as an element of the film. This is also a problem that has existed since the birth of sound films. Griffiths, Sjøstrom, the German Expressionists, Chaplin, Guns, and Eisenstein all used their own ways to create silent film languages that have been shown to be almost as rich, fluid, and expressive as spoken languages. This makes the text feel like a parasitic element... The simultaneous existence of the two languages has led to a real weakening of their respective expressiveness, and not only that, as we have already seen, not only are words treated as sound effects, but even the visual part is treated as a simple set or background. The picture is never really beautiful but is carefully crafted by experts. For these experts, the 30s and 40s, especially in France, were a real golden age. The director will always give them full freedom in the arrangement of the actors' positions in the shot and the distribution of lighting and shadows.
In my opinion, there must be a completely different relationship between the visual elements and the dialogue. There have been many films that show us how language can really play its part. It is these films that have created the new concept of "shooting scripts" over the past decade or so. Perhaps not all dialogue writers should be blamed as directors, who often think that the words spoken by their actors don't matter, and then focus all their efforts on finding photographic angles and determining the subtle rhythm of the transition from ordinary to close-up just because a character is working on a radio or driving through a crowded street and pronouncing a proverb from La Rochefoucauld. Deliberately using exclamations and stutters to break up the flow of dialogue does not mean that he is speaking the true language of cinema.
The art of directing is not to make us forget what the character says, but to help us not miss even one word. The most perfect dialogue That Cocteau has ever written is in The Women of the Brugne Forest, like The Best of Pravitt's In Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Because Bresson and Renoir told them to just write the dialogue that is essential to understanding the film (it's not just anecdote). This necessity becomes even more pronounced when using still lenses. The weakness of Citizen Kane is that the dialogue is still treated as a voice. On the other hand, in The Great Abesun Family (I think it's better than the former), even the shortest words are important because they reveal a side of the character that we don't know, a narrative technique that [the director] is used to. The best two examples are undoubtedly still shots in dining rooms and long motion shots on the street, where the transition from motion to close-up weakens the expressiveness of the characters in those scenes. The rhythm of the first scene is stagnant, perhaps reflecting the stubbornness of each character's heart. Auntie's phrase "don't eat so quickly" is completely different from the large number of life fragments released in the movie, and from a classical point of view, Auntie's words are necessary and not just used to create a sense of reality. As for the motion shots on the street, the monotonous changes reveal the emptiness in that endless discourse. The discourse and—not with the picture, but with a purely cinematic element: the vibrancy of the lens–maintain harmony, although in both cases this vibrancy is obtained through static tension.
Simply put, it is necessary to find the means to perfectly combine discourse and "film" and not just "the world in film" as a whole, whether it is with the shot of speaking or with the passage before or after. The downside of Previtt's text (a dialogue between Yves Montand and Natalie Nattier) in the garage passages of Hot Nights is that he constructs a hypothetical character who is "detached" from the film, a technique often used in dramatic narratives. On the other hand, the passage in The Crime of Mr. Longue that Rene Lefevre tells Maurice Baquet what he was doing on Sunday afternoon is excellent. Both because it hints at the passages before the film, and because his story is a lie at all. There's always not enough lies in the movies, except maybe the comedies. (In any case, we will naturally think of the best films that René Claire, Liu Bieqian and Capra completed in the 30s and 40s.)
If you want to weaken or control the power of dialogue, you should not reduce its importance but make it deceptive. People never lie in drama, whether it's comedy or tragedy. Discourse is never a simple act of acting for others to see, but is responsible for itself, or rather, long-term effective. There is never ambiguity in the dialogues of Dostoevsky, Balzac or Faulkner, and we have found that ambiguity in the best films of the past decade or so. Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Bresson's The Women of the Blaugna Forest, and preston Sturges' work and some American detective films like Houston(director) Hammett's "The Maltese Eagle" and Hawkes Faulkner's "The Big Sleep." In Orson Wells's work, the spacing between the meaning of dialogue and the visual elements, the counterpoint between text and the picture (which is completely different from the sound counterpoint established by Pudovkin and Eisenstein in the past) is expressed more through the means of commentary. So many directors over the past few years have used this perhaps too simple technique, which shows how urgent it is to return to the true role of dialogue and apply it to film.
So the difference between film and drama is not whether the dialogue is important or not. We have a huge advantage over filmmakers in the '30s: we're no longer haunted by the specter of dramatic cinema and can now focus on the basic question of writing vernacular that was actually created for cinema. For the screenwriter, this requires a rich understanding of the visual elements that the director intends to express. For the producer (ideal when the two are not the same person), this requires him to actively use dialogue as one of the key parts of his work.
Until now, there has not been a true style of sound films: an original way to compensate for the absence of dialogue. As difficult as it is, the avant-gardes – if it lives up to its name – must demand that style themselves. From the moment the sound film was born, we have waited for it for too long and too long.
Author: Eric Houmai
Editor: Liu Qing
Editor-in-Charge: Liu Qing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.