A still from the movie "Cinema Paradiso"
Stills from the movie "Empire of Light"
A still from the movie "Dream House"
Dai Shuo
If you were to choose a Hollywood "decathlon" director, Spielberg might deserve it. Throughout his more than 50 years of directorial career, his works have almost touched all tracks of the genre film spectrum, including not only commercial blockbusters such as "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park" that create box office myths, but also highly speculative humanistic masterpieces such as "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan", not to mention "Ready Player One" and other avant-garde works that expand the boundaries of film grammar, it can be said that Spielberg has always been like a teenager full of whimsy, with an inexhaustible curiosity about the world around him.
In his twilight years, the legendary director finally returned to basics, looked inward, and completed the semi-autobiographical film "Dream House", telling the story of how he embarked on the path of film director. To be fair, this film is not bright in the sequence of Spielberg's works, the narrative is decent, and it does not intend to carry too heavy social issues and cultural reflections, but "Dream Maker" is a sincere master's self-way in the director's poetic retrospective of the creative process, and it is a "love letter to the film" written affectionately.
Throughout the world film creation map, well-known directors write a "love letter to the film" seems to constitute an important aesthetic phenomenon, from the early years of Tonadore's "Cinema Paradiso", Scorsese's "Hugo", Michelle's "The Artist" to Almodóvar's "Pain and Glory" in recent years, Zhang Yimou's "One Second", Damien's "Babylon", Mendes' "Empire of Light", etc., silent film wonders, film history secrets, private memories are all-encompassing, and directors collectively recall the lost years of movies.
These "love letters to the film" series of works, what common narrative strategies and image ideograms are presented, and what kind of aesthetic experience is precipitated, which may be glimpsed through "Dream Maker".
Traumatic Narrative and Image Redemption
"Love letters to film" must take the film itself as the referent object, so such works have the morphological attributes of meta-cinema, that is, marking an inward, ontological consciousness, self-knowledge and self-reflection film world, "film about film". Many similar works also have autobiographical attributes, and its core narrative path is how light and shadow participate in individual life experience and personal growth, and "Dream House" is a typical "meta-movie + autobiographical" work.
Baudelaire wrote in The Flower of Evil that any lyric poet is ultimately destined to embark on the road back to the lost paradise. When many directors look back on their own life experiences in the past, they usually unveil the warmth of the time filter, sincerely dissect it, and show the pain in the growth process, thus forming a unique trauma narrative style.
For example, Almodóvar tells the story of the elderly film director Salvador in "Pain and Glory" who began to look back on the past and reconcile one by one in the face of multiple blows such as physical illness, creative bottlenecks and the death of his mother. The three protagonists of Zhang Yimou's "One Second" Zhang Jiusheng, Liu Girl, and Fan Movie are also "historical hostages" who have suffered different traumas in a specific era, and their pain has also formed an intertext with the movie.
In "Dream House", the film has also become an important medium for the protagonist to reconcile with trauma and achieve self-healing and redemption. Sam, who suffers from neuroses, fell in love with this magical species after watching the scene of the train collision of "King of Drama" in the theater for the first time at the age of six, and the image has become his way of controlling his fears, from the toy train collision, tooth extraction, skeletons and growing westerns robbers, human flesh war movies and other landscapes filmed in Sam's footage, you can see the narrative logic of channeling emotions by presenting "panic" scenes, and growing up since then, the movie has become Sam facing his parents' divorce, school bullying, Emotional sustenance in times of identity and other issues.
The treatment tool of psychoanalysis for psychological trauma is "speech", and the patient expresses the emotions of the stimulating event and objectifies the event, and then realizes the function of emotional catharsis and trauma repair, which is the underlying logic of the trauma narrative, and the image has an irreplaceable function in developing trauma and healing trauma, which is also the deep reason why directors are willing to face trauma and confess sincerely in "love letters to movies".
Self-presentation and memory of the times
"Love Letter to the Film" is a work that should first be a murmur of personal growth memory, a "small narrative" related to the self, the director artistically reproduces and reproduces the private personal memory, in the narrative process, the real past, memory and image presentation of the individual are organically combined, marking the film with a unique director's recognition. For example, "Cinema Paradiso" Sicilian quiet town and movie-watching memories reproduce the picture of Giuseppe Tonadore's childhood life. Zhang Yimou's portrayal of the film projectionist Fan film in "One Second" is also an affectionate review of childhood memories and creative processes.
The plot setting of "Dream Maker" is deeply involved in Spielberg's personal imprint, such as the identity setting of the father as a scientist and the mother for the artist and the direction of his marriage relationship in the film, which truthfully reproduces Spielberg's personal experience, and Sam's first time saw the movie "The King of the Drama" and the relationship with the well-known Hollywood director John Ford, etc., are also the director's real experience, according to actor Seth Rogan's revelations, Spielberg was very emotional during the film's production and cried many times on the set, This may be the embodiment of the uneasy feeling of reminiscing about the past.
But at the same time, individuals cannot exist beyond the times, the director's growth will not be separated from the specific context of the times, even if the private murmur narrative will still have the imprint of the grand era, individual memory and collective memory, self-presentation and the imprint of the times have achieved ingenious aesthetic dialectics.
"New Yorker" columnist Richard Brody criticized "The Dream House" as just creating myths about the individual and lacking a sense of historical responsibility, like Spielberg's blockbusters. The timeline of the plot of the movie - 1952 to 1965 is the most turbulent period in contemporary American history, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the start of the Vietnam War... But the Sams seem insulated from these historical events.
This criticism seems pertinent, but it is actually biased. On the one hand, "Dream House" is more inclined to present and explore private image memories, and the director himself does not intend to get too involved in the grand narrative, and judging from Spielberg's past works, he is not without the ability to control epic works in a big way. On the other hand, "Dream House" does not purify history, but uses spring and autumn brushwork to integrate the major events of this historical interval into the narrative, such as Sam's implicit reference to the Vietnam War in war films, his mother's plight reflecting the rise of women's independent thought, and Sam's school bullying also looks at the anti-Jewish tendencies in the United States in the 60s. It can be said that in autobiographical films such as "film love letters", the intertextual relationship between individual encounters and the torrent of the times does not have the formality of pen and ink weight, but is more related to the director's creative orientation.
Nostalgia and cultural nostalgia
The quiet rise of streaming media has reconstructed the movie screening window and even user content consumption habits, and the repeated shutdown of theaters during the epidemic has also increased a lot of pessimism in the film industry, not only the terminal projection market, but also the entire film industry has produced "ontology anxiety", an existential question is very loud: Do we still need movies in the future?
In this context, rebuilding confidence in the film industry has become a priority, requiring salaries from everyone in the film industry. As a universal social feeling structure, nostalgia constitutes the emotional resources that the current "Love Letters to Movies" series can effectively call, through the affectionate retrospection of the golden age of cinema and yesterday's reappearance, reawakening the audience's enthusiasm for watching movies, perhaps to a certain extent to combat the relative decline of movies under the change of media.
This seems to be the reason why many "love letters to movies" such as "Babylon", "Empire of Light", "Poet", "Blonde Monroe" and "Dream House" in 2022 are gushing. Through the juxtaposition of the binary narrative pattern of "instrumental rationality and value rationality", "Dream House" re-examines the existential significance of film in the crisis of modernity, emphasizes the healing function of art and film, and pays tribute to classic Hollywood films through the layered structure, as well as the materialistic presentation of traditional filmmaking processes, creating a rich nostalgic landscape.
Looking closely at the whole film of "Dream House", you can always find a lot of "Easter eggs" in film history, including "playing terriers" on the golden age of Hollywood, and there is no lack of looking back at the source of their own works. For example, Spielberg's first movie "The King of the Drama King" and John Ford's classic western "Double Tiger and Dragon Slayer" appear directly in the form of "play within a play". There are also many Sam's "studies" that also imply the grass snake gray line of Spielberg's works many years later, such as Sam's Western gunfight short film for "Indiana Jones", the war short film "Nowhere to Escape" for "Saving Private Ryan" and so on.
Li Yang pointed out in "The History of Fan Film Culture": "'Film obsession' is like a modern form of cultural religion, a new religion in the era of secularization... Let the 'Shadow Seekers' seek out the new worldly gods, rely on piety and sacrifice, and emphasize the purity of cinema." It should be said that the "love letter of the film" series of works is the fruit of the fan culture, those nostalgic lights and shadows, tribute bridges, and spiritual confessions, all reflect the filmmakers' deep cultural nostalgia, and rebuild their love and sincerity for movies at a time when the film industry is facing difficulties.
(The author is a lecturer and doctor of the School of Television Art, Zhejiang University of Media and Communication)
Source: Wen Wei Po