[Horizon] The appearance and color of intellectuals
——The creation concept of the movie "I Love Dunhuang"
The biographical film with Fan Jinshi as the protagonist, co-produced by Gansu Fengxing Film and Television Culture Co., Ltd., was recently officially named "I Love Dunhuang" (the public name of the record is "Dunhuang Daughter", and the former name is "Dunhuang JiYi"). Through the innovative way of interspersing plot and records, the film shows the extraordinary life of Dunhuang guardians represented by Fan Jinshi, the winner of the national honorary title of "Outstanding Contributor to Cultural Relics Protection", who has protected, studied and promoted Dunhuang culture for decades.
The film has been planned since the end of 2018, under the guidance and support of the Propaganda Department of the Provincial Party Committee, the Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, the Jiuquan Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government, since the beginning of 2019, the producers Hao Ping and Pan Hongyang have accompanied the screenwriter and director Miao Yue to Lanzhou, Dunhuang and other places for in-depth interviews, experiences, concepts and script creation, revision, repeated exploration and restoration, and in accordance with the phased shooting plan, at the end of September of that year, the preliminary shooting was carried out at the end of September of that year. In November 2020, the film was officially launched and filmed intensively, with the full cooperation of the Dunhuang Research Institute and the support of the first producer of the film, Emei Film Group, at the end of January 2021.
The middle-aged and elderly Fan Jinshi in the film is played by the famous performance artist Chen Jin, and the famous actors Lin Yongjian, Huang Pinyuan, Sun Min and Zhang Zhengyong play different important roles. The artists' creative sincerity and superb acting skills ensure the high quality of the film's art. Lei Chengkun, a young actor in our province, also has an excellent performance in the film. The film was filmed in Dunhuang throughout the real scene and part of the simulated scene, and many experts, scholars and staff of the Dunhuang Research Institute were invited to star in the film, which made the film classic and professional, and presented an artistic realm of perfect integration of freehand and realism.
The film will be released this year.
Seedling month
The theme of expression is inheritance
The theme of our film "I Love Dunhuang" is inheritance, and the story told is the effort of Mr. Fan Jinshi's life, in order to pass on the national context treasured by Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes.
Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes has a history of more than 1,600 years. Today, when we stand in front of the statues and murals created more than 1600 years ago, close to the distant history, because we really see and feel the real historical and cultural relics, which makes us have great respect for the inheritance of culture, and makes us deeply realize that the cultural context of the nation is a long river, flowing from distant history through our times, and from our times to the future, passed on to future generations.
The construction of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes is a great miracle, and it will also be a miracle to maximize the protection of this great miracle and pass it on to future generations.
The Book of Han explains the word Dunhuang: Dun, Daye; Huang, Shengye.
The painted sculptures and murals of the Mogao Caves, which have been built for thousands of years, are grand, but in the following centuries, they have experienced loneliness, desolation, and in the early 20th century, they have been plundered by the great powers. It was not until the founding of New China and the establishment of professional conservation research institutions in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes that Dunhuang gradually returned to a grand and solemn atmosphere.
Today, Dunhuang has entered a great new era, which is an era of incomparable respect for history and culture, and it is also an era of great development of science and technology. For more than 70 years, generations of young people have come to Dunhuang, they are artists, college students, experts and scholars, and skilled craftsmen, who have handed over their lives to Dunhuang from youth to middle age to old age and become the sons and daughters of Dunhuang. Among them, there is a special female Fan Jinshi, who came to Dunhuang after graduating from Peking University in her 20s and has never left since, and became the third president of the Dunhuang Research Institute at the age of 60, creating digital Dunhuang, using the best art and technology carrier to retain Dunhuang and inherit the context.
The movie "I Love Dunhuang" expresses the theme of inheritance by telling the story of Fan Jinshi.
Pay attention to and celebrate intellectuals
When it comes to Dunhuang, scholars who study Dunhuang think of Dunhuang studies.
Speaking of Dunhuang, ordinary people will think of many stories about the Mogao Grottoes that are widely spread in folklore.
To shoot Dunhuang's films, we chose the life journey of an intellectual in the context of Dunhuang's grandeur.
In Dunhuang, inheritance is a spirit, an art, and a technology. After the founding of New China, a group of intellectuals crossed the desert and became the guardians of Dunhuang with respect for national culture and art, dedication to their own causes, and adherence to spiritual beliefs. Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes contains a broad and profound cultural, academic and technical content, how to study, how to protect, how to carry forward, more than 70 years, in Dunhuang generations of intellectuals have worked hard to explore a set of experience. Generations of intellectuals have settled down in the Mogao Grottoes, relying on the power of culture, the power of spiritual belief, the sense of mission and responsibility. For more than 70 years, generations of intellectuals in Dunhuang have gone through hardships and strived to inherit the cultural context of the nation, and their life experience has allowed us to see how excellent intellectuals have the appearance and color they should have. When we shoot the Dunhuang film, we hope to give this group a attention and praise, and we hope that through this film, we can make a deep and emotional narration of this group.
Restore the layers of life of the characters
Fan Jinshi, the third president of the Dunhuang Research Institute, is the protagonist of our film. Dunhuang carries history, and Fan Jinshi represents reality, so this should be a biographical film of realistic figures set in history.
Retaining Dunhuang and inheriting Dunhuang is Fan Jinshi's action line, career line, and destiny line, and the story line of our films.
In an inconspicuous corner of the office area of the Dunhuang Research Institute, there stands a stone sculpture that is not very tall, called "Youth". The main body of the sculpture is a young girl, full of spirits, short hair, carrying a straw hat on her back, walking with full of movement. This is exactly what Fan Jinshi's generation looked like in their youth.
Fan Jinshi's name is very beautiful, although the person is thin, the aura is very strong. From young to old, Fan Jinshi is a short hair with a straight ear. Many of the murals in the Mogao Caves do not have more than one level, and the murals of different eras are covered in layers. Fan Jinshi's life story is also like the murals of the Mogao Grottoes, covering layer by layer, and we need to uncover and tell layer by layer. When we see the elderly Fan Jinshi, we can also go through the pictures and colors of life layer by layer, and see the fan jinshi of youth and the fan jinshi of middle age. Fan Jinshi has many layers, covered layer by layer, forming the thickness of her life. Unveiling the background of layers of life and restoring the layers of life of a character is the mission that our film strives to complete.
Whether in the past or today, loneliness is a key word in the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes. Every day at dusk, when the last tourist bus carries tourists away, the silence of the Mogao Caves is the same as it was a thousand or two thousand years ago. The brass bells on the nine-story cornice swayed with the dusk wind, as if from a long history, and as if floating to a long time, this is a continuous echo, connecting history, today and the future...
In one book, it is written: "Fan Jinshi and her predecessors and her successors chose such a life, just like those monks who once wandered in the Zen cave and practiced devoutly, and like those former dynasty painters who once insisted on painting and were indifferent to silence, the surprise and throbbing at the beginning of the encounter with Dunhuang eventually became a sense of mission on their shoulders, supporting them through all the hardships, like the protagonists in the classics depicted on the murals, who have been determined through nine deaths." After all, it was bitter. However, this suffering was borne by himself, but Gan was left to Dunhuang..."
There is a smiling Buddha statue in Cave 259 of Mogao Caves, which Fan Jinshi calls "Zen Buddha". In our films, this Buddha statue appears again and again in different stages of Fan Jinshi's life, in her emotions, in her thoughts. In order to achieve the realm of Zen delight, she experienced various bittersweet tests of life, lonely youth, lovesickness with her lover for 19 years, hardships in middle age, apologies for her son and family, and after becoming the third president of the Dunhuang Research Institute, she realized that the biggest life test came from mission and responsibility, and she had to undertake the heavy responsibility of promoting the protection and research of the Mogao Caves...
All the characters who have formed an influence on fan jinshi's life, or who have been influenced by Fan jinshi, will appear in the film, and there are many characters, but they are not noisy. Fan Jinshi's life, no matter in which era, has a quiet aloneness, all the anxiety, worry, enthusiasm, joy, in her inner world, finally returned to peace. Decades of life seemed like a practice, giving her an ability: in the silence her heart would beat eagerly, and when the noise came, she balanced herself and allowed herself to have a calm... From the beginning of the lonely youth to the enthusiasm and attention of the people pouring into the Mogao Caves in the 1990s, Fan Jinshi's heart has been joyful or excited, but more than ever, the tension and worry have never been! Fan Jinshi knows very well that people cannot protect behind closed doors, people should enjoy this precious and excellent cultural heritage, but cultural heritage cannot be reborn, nor can it be immortalized, and the breath exhaled by people who come like a tide has a huge impact on the cave, bringing great threats to the inheritance of Mogao Grottoes, and the greater threat comes from commercial interests... Fan Jinshi was worried, in order to defend the Mogao Grottoes, Fan Jinshi gave up her reticence, and even slapped the table to quarrel. Fan Jinshi has both deep emotions and calm reason, as well as a brave and fiery temper, Fan Jinshi has created a different appearance for intellectuals. In the end, Fan Jinshi used the wisdom of intellectuals to do something that could only be done in this era: to establish a digital display center for the Mogao Grottoes and to use modern scientific means to display the ancient cultural spirit of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes. "Digital Dunhuang" processes caves, murals, painted sculptures and all cultural relics related to Dunhuang into highly intelligent digital images, and also collects Dunhuang documents, research results and related materials scattered around the world into electronic archives, using "digitalization" to permanently preserve Dunhuang information, and the latest measurement, remote sensing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cloud computing and other technical means to reconstruct digital cultural heritage. In the era of modern digitalization, Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes are even more grand!
Fan Jinshi does not like fame, does not show arrogance, is loyal to her duties, scrupulously abides by her duties, is rational and rational, and walks with her hands behind her back from the nine floors of the Mogao Grottoes, she is the appearance of an intellectual.
Fan Jinshi said that the fate of the country determines the fate of the Mogao Grottoes. The country has become independent, the country has become stronger, the country has developed, and the cultural relics have been protected, and she has a special feeling of raising her eyebrows.
Fan Jinshi expressed the feelings of a generation of intellectuals for the country and the nation, and they knew emotionally and intellectually that the fate of the individual and the fate of the country and the nation were bound to be closely linked. Only when the country and the nation are big and prosperous can Dunhuang be truly grand.
Fan Jinshi's choice was an inevitable choice for the young intellectuals of that era. Fan Jinshi has been in Dunhuang for more than half a century, from a young girl to an elderly person. Dunhuang, one end is connected to the cultural context of the nation, the other is connected to the real society, and in the middle is the life course of generations of intellectuals.
Fan Jinshi, an intellectual, is the inheritor of Dunhuang and our protagonist.
(The author of this article is the screenwriter and director of the movie "My Love Dunhuang", and the pictures in the article are the posters and stills of the film)