Canadian director Guy Martin is known for being a "geek".
His themes of absurdity and poetry, dreams and desires, death and rebirth have remained unchanged over the years, but his filmmaking methods have become more and more avant-garde and experimental, and he has gone farther and farther on the road of exploration of expression and theme.
The 2015 film Forbidden Room was once again eye-catching, and he made a movie that was both crazy and beautiful, a combination of the styles of his previous works.
[Forbidden room]
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Highly stylized sense of form</h1>
The film was inspired by a live performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, an installation called "The Seances", which was originally intended to recreate 100 "lost films".
These seemingly random, fragmented images produce a new semantic in different permutations and combinations (and the imaging is one-time, and the sense of form that burns after reading has something in common with its web interactive form).
It has a unique aesthetic function in creating the form of cinema, which is called the spirit of reviving the "lost film", with the intention of re-finding the essence of the films of griffiths, Kenji Mizoguchi and Jean Vigo.
Poster for the "The Seances" art project
Martin used 17 of the so-called film "fragments" as "negatives", and the images after the eight-millimeter film were fused with it, reassembled, and remastered with post-digital remakes to "recreate" the celluloid film style of that year, and Martin's assistant director Evan Johnson also contributed a lot.
The project has attracted many big names, such as the literary giants Geraldine Chaplin and Matthew Amalek, the new generation of French actresses Adella Harnell, the cult general Udo Chiel, the Canadian dancer Lara Fury as a sexy figure, and even Martin's wife, film critic Kim Morgan (one of the screenwriters of the film).
Of course, the biggest surprise undoubtedly came from Charlotte Lampling, a literary goddess who added another highlight to the film.
From the first shot of the film, we can feel Martin's consistent visual effects style, the image is drifting, the rough picture quality, the focus is distorted, the lens is overexposed, and all of them present the antiquity of the film.
The film's footage presents the antiquity of film
This graininess is the same as [the saddest music in the world] and [sad Dolores], and of course more importantly, because of Martin's consistent tribute and parody of silent films.
In addition to the silent filmization of the image style, the large number of filters used also indicates the great revival of the "lost movie", the fiery red filter throughout, like the fire of hell burning, strange and strange like the end of the world;
Occasionally, a blue filter, such as a representation of a lover forced to separate, is inserted to show melancholy and painful emotions.
The form of the subtitle card is also extremely unique, the font pursues retro, the typography has a gothic aesthetic, and even the narration or verse is constantly changing shapes, to some extent participating in the narrative function.
Things like "Every minute is melting!" "Bones! bone! The deformation and distortion of the font emphasizes mood and rhythm.
"Melting every minute"
"Bones! bone! bone! "
We can also see the expressionist tendencies of the scene installation, such as the Cave of the Red Wolf, which is quite rich [Dr. Caligari's hut];
Red Wolf's Cave
[Dr. Caligari's Cabin]
At the same time, whether it is a close-up of emoticons that emphasize the virtual focus background, or a simple sci-fi scene arrangement (such as a flaming volcano), it creates a simple sci-fi style that is close to the Méliès period.
"Magic" has a strong flavor, but it is very much in line with the overall style of the film's dreamlike, and it is impossible not to think of his 2000 "Heart of the Earth".
This six-minute short film can be seen as a prelude and practice of [Forbidden Room], with sharp editing, accelerated soundtrack, deeply influenced by soviet montages, playing a surreal carnival, and the picture is dazzling.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Dream nesting maze</h1>
The film unfolds from "What Are We All Thinking In the Bath" to "One Thousand and One Nights" in the bathtub, story sets stories, dreams stack dreams, from the "passage of dreams" to the next layer of stories/dreams, and then from the "passage of dreams" back to the previous layer.
The characters are similar, the characters are crossed, and no one is inserted or disappeared, and the story/dream of the same level is complex enough, and the intertextual correspondence of each level is like walking through the dreams of the strangest dreams.
Transitions are usually simply and rudely cut directly and hard, parachuting characters or direct line transitions, and there is an extra clue to the life; even after the sudden black screen, another story/dream is directly unfolded.
Combing through, there are roughly three paragraphs with large spans. The first paragraph uses Keats' verse to dissect the cross-section of the dream.
1. The crew of the submarine eat pancakes to inhale oxygen, and suddenly break into a woodcutter.
The crew ate pancakes to inhale oxygen
The woodcutter who suddenly broke in
2. In the next layer of dreams, transform into four lumberjacks to pass through the layers of levels to rescue Marg from the hands of the Red Wolf.
3. Marg escapes from the passage of dreams and becomes a nightclub singer, nested in another man whose brain is cut off after hearing the song and unfolding the story.
Marg, who became a nightclub singer
Men who have their brains removed
4. Retreat to the submarine (looking for the captain) and the bathing man (this person has the function of pulling back the theme, cutting back to the main screen, ending the first paragraph).
The second paragraph begins with Milton's Paradise Lost.
1. Lava erupts and volcanoes fall asleep (Marg also appears).
2. The robbed Baron Benheim looks for the gardener and interviews the new gardener.
3. The baron reads the newspaper and sees that he fell in love with Dr. Deng, who was injured by a motorcycle accident, and dr. Deng, who treated her.
4. Dr. Deng was hijacked by Skull Face and his skeleton insurance fraud gang, and after putting on a toxin-covered skeleton suit, his soul was gradually corroded.
5. Dr. Xiao, who succeeded him, re-treated The Dragon and witnessed another story while observing the X-ray of the pelvis.
A railway appears in the pelvic X-ray, and a new story is about to unfold
6. On the German-Columbia Express train, Dr. Dean treats Ms. Labati, using Jungian psychology to elicit her "inner child", shoot her past self, and remove the demons in her heart (including the experience of her parents).
Ms. Labati shot her past self
7. Dr. Xiao and Jung look for Dr. Tang, who has completed his depravity.
8. The scene cuts to baron Benheim reading the newspaper (hinting that the above story is just a fantasy in his mind), and after 17 months, the baron falls ill, takes a steam bath according to the doctor's advice, removes the shackles from the bath, and the shackled gardener runs to freedom (echoing the bath in the first paragraph).
The third paragraph is led by the verses of Sappho.
1. Eve is arrested for murder and squid theft and awaits the volcano's ruling (echoing the previous article).
2. The crew talks about the volcano (the bathing man also appears later), and retreats to the upper dream.
3. The woodcutter finds allies to the backs, the stone tiers, and the hearers (these four are the lumberjacks in the first paragraph).
4. The listener listens to the story of snow, amnesiac Marg appears, and her ex-boyfriend becomes Aswan Banana (echoing the content of her nightclub singing).
5. Sadius believes that his servant stole his gift to his wife, shot the servant and changed his appearance, and the cut off servant's beard became another kind of "dream channel".
Sardeus put on a servant's beard to transfigure
6. The dead servant returns home as a father (this theme is also presented in 1986 [The Dead Father]), and the son replaces the father as a patriarchal symbol (the mother's pancake echoes the first paragraph).
The son took the place of his father
7. The dead father repeatedly returns home (see Bruno Schultz's theme of "Alienated Father"), and the diplomat who writes his memoir appears in the final farewell party.
8. The diplomat once gave his fiancée a statue of a two-faced monster, but after being rejected, he alienated himself into a tailed monster, tracked his doppelganger and told him another story.
The diplomat stroked the cursed statue and did not expect to transform into a tailed monster
9. Groom's mother drank opium.
10. Under the distortion, surge, mutation, and dangling of the image, several layers of dreams are returned one by one: the diplomat & doppelganger, the memoir, the dead father, the shooting of the servant, and the witnessed Bythias to the Minister of the Interior, it is a birthday surprise (again implying that the above story is just a mental illusion).
Dreams turn into birthday surprises
11. Dreams are receding: Marg amnesiac, the listener who listens to the snow, the rescue of Marg, the crew search for the captain, find the Book of Climax in the "Forbidden Room", and finally reach the peak of drama in the strange montage.
At the end of the movie, there is finally a brain melon, and the audience who can insist that the brain does not short-circuit this scene will be looking forward to the next moment of blowing up the brain
12. The last step is to return to the bathtub.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 A sense of nightmares in a thick, deep darkness</h1>
In summary, the appearance of this film is as complex as a kaleidoscope, but in fact, the structure is rigorous and tightly sewn, and it is also highly consistent in the expression of the theme and the use of techniques, the first paragraph is the "mother" paragraph, which is outlined by verses, and the "sub" dreams under each paragraph are also arranged in an orderly manner.
"Look out at the vastness of the sea / If your eyes are confused and weary," Keats's sonnet of Wing Hai cuts from the bathtub straight to the sea.
Using a fast montage, a series of common images, such as soap bubbles, melting blast glue, volcanic lava, etc., are flowing like stories, and the main trunk of the climb has never wandered.
The dream volcano is furious and spews out righteous lava, but the Forbidden Room bursts out not just lava, but more of Guy Martin's bizarre brain hole.
Guy Martin is a fan of David Lynch, with a collage of enchanting colors, scattered fragments of shots like layers of nested, scattered eerie and mysterious dreams,
Just like the non-linear narrative of "Demon Night Panic" and "Blue Velvet", psychological analysis is used in many places to dig into the darkness of human nature and explore the depths of desire, as if it is the most extreme of nightmares, the deepest layers of hell, and there is no way to enter or retreat.
"Who am I?" Marg, the amnesiac, can be described as a character throughout the film, repeatedly questioning her own existence, and listed alongside the man with the brain removed as a symbol of identity search.
The film has many characteristics typical of Lynch, such as mentioning two places to get rid of the heart demon - shooting the "inner child" and eliminating the doppelganger.
Such as the manifestation of human "alienation" - the erosion of Dr. Deng and the repeated return of his dead father;
Such as the Oedipus complex of the father and the mother;
On the basis of jung and Freud's psychological knowledge, the nightmare lesions are reproduced by imaging means.
[Forbidden Room] Correction of silent films, operas, B-grade films, German Expressionism, Soviet montage experiments stewed, rough texture instantly drags time and space back to the era when the film was just starting.
The world says that Martin is "weird", and the same is true of this film, under the serious and grand theme, it is difficult to hide a serious nonsense.
The woodcutter rescues Marg from the Red Wolf test, passes four levels in a row, and the name of the pass is spoofed; the song sung by Marg and the name of her ex-boyfriend are "Aswan", derived from the legend of the Philippine jungle vampire.
Podwell believes that the ambiguity and openness in art films are the biggest characteristics of the author's films, and dismembering art like a cattle dismemberment of the cow by Ku Ding is really a big scene.
So, the next time you take a bath, you might as well have a brain storm!