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Today, after more than a hundred years of development, the film has formed a relatively complete production mode from script conception to audiovisual language conversion to production
Generations of film scholars, through continuous analysis and research, have also summarized a complete set of theoretical support, and established a knowledge system for filmmakers to watch, learn and make films.
Lens, in the film presentation carries an important function, is an important aspect of audiovisual language, its construction mode, determine the narrative style and information transmission mode of the film, a variety of lens language construction mode, can bring moviegoers a completely different viewing experience. The lens contains various elements such as movement mode, film tone, composition, scheduling, and scenery.
Analysis of lens language construction
This film tells the story of a girl from a single-parent family, who is in a foreign land and finally embarks on the journey home because she cannot separate her longing for her hometown. Nancy is a native of Guangzhou, her parents' marriage broke down due to her father's gambling addiction, and her mother was determined to break with her old life and came to Shijiazhuang, a strange city, to start a new life.
Nancy is taken by her mother, but she finds that the typical northern city in front of her is very different from the hometown where she grew up in every way, and although she tries to fit into this environment, it provokes a stronger longing for her homeland.
In the end, the nostalgia in her heart and the longing for her biological father made her reject this strange environment more and more, and her differences with her mother became stronger and stronger. A-jie, also a native of Guangzhou, became the object of her confidant, and they traveled around the city, trying to find a trace of their hometown, but they could not do so. Nancy made up her mind to embark on her journey home alone.
The theme of this film is nostalgia, and the scenes in the film are all pictures of daily life, without violent dramatic conflict scenes, trying to replace the plot design with the diversity of lens language. The film uses a lot of long shots, accompanied by the protagonist's voiceover, and this kind of contemplation on the image is exactly the style pursued by this film.
In addition, shaking shots are also interspersed in different paragraphs, and the lens language form has reached a unity in a single scene, but the entire film contains different forms of lens language, fully showing the emotional characteristics and emotional states of characters at different stages, making the film style clear, but not chaotic, achieving a high degree of internal unity.
Long shots
In today's filmmaking trend, fast editing seems to have become the only way to attract the attention of the public and stimulate the senses. From action movies to feature films, from musicals to song and dance films, and even more and more life stream films have begun to choose a large number of quick editing, greatly speeding up the pace of the film, full of Hollywood-style dreams.
However, the resulting stories and images can only be based on editing logic, not realistic logic, and the audience is forced to choose the content to watch under the guidance of the director, and there is no opportunity to choose independently.
Long shots originally refer to depth shots, which are relative to the broken shots in montage clips. French film theorist André Bazin has publicly advocated its core concept - spatial reality, that is, the use of long lenses in films, restoring the initial form of life, without subjective deliberate modification and reconstruction.
In a long shot contains complex directing skills, such as scheduling, screen, performance, etc., which is why long shots have become the best means to show a director's ability to control time and space.
There are also many classic long shots left in film and television, such as the long shot of Angelopoulos showing the course of a person's life at the end of "Eternal Day", the scene of Qiu Ju looking back at the end of "Qiu Ju Fights the Lawsuit" directed by Zhang Yimou, and the shot of the little boy running to the sea in Truffaut's "Four Hundred Strikes".
There are many more such examples, each of which is a masterpiece of art carefully crafted by the director. In terms of shooting methods, there are three main forms of long lenses, the first camera position remains unchanged, and only a simple lens panning technique is used when shooting, that is, a long lens with a fixed camera position;
The second is a long motion lens that combines complex camera shooting techniques during the shooting process; The third is the depth of field lens, which uses the influence of the aperture of the photographic lens on the depth of field of the picture to cooperate with the scene scheduling. The long shots involved in this film are mainly fixed camera positions and sports long lenses. The following is an example from the film.
Fixed long lenses
Between the dining room and the kitchen, there is a frosted sliding door, and from the dining room, you can faintly see the figure of the person on the other side of the door. Nancy crossed the dining room to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and when she returned, her mother also walked over, and the two passed by without communicating. Nancy sat on the side of the dining table and fiddled with the begonia flowers on the table.
My mother's cell phone rang, and she picked up the phone and spoke fluent Cantonese, and through her tone, she seemed angry. Hung up the phone and stood in front of Nancy and questioned her.
This is the content of a long shot in the second scene of the film, the length of the whole shot is 1 minute and 15 seconds, which is a typical long-shot picture of a fixed camera position in the film, from the effect point of view, people feel continuous, real, like they are on the scene, the pace is slow, accumulating performance emotions.
Although this lens is fixed, the picture is not dull, because rich scene scheduling is designed inside the lens to increase the flow of the picture. First, Nancy walks in from outside the frame, enters the kitchen, her mother then enters the painting, and the two meet at the door of the kitchen and the dining room, but there is no communication between them, which is the first plot content explained in the shot
As a mother and daughter, this passing is a kind of silence, and it also hints at the estrangement that exists between the two. Then Nancy sat at the dining table, which is the far right of the picture, fiddling with the begonia flowers on the dining table, at this time, her mother went in and out once in the process of washing fruits and answering the phone, but Nancy did not pay attention to her actions, just continued to fiddle with the flower branches in front of her.
The mother became increasingly angry on the phone until she finally returned to the restaurant. After passing by, Nancy has been at the dining table on the right side of the picture, without movement, and her mother's activities are on the left side of the picture, from the composition of the picture, the mother and daughter at the two levels of the picture seem to be estranged, and the two do not communicate when they carry out their own actions.
In this paragraph, the relationship between the characters and the emotional atmosphere are revealed from the composition of the lens and the performance scheduling of the actors. In the end, his mother stands closer to the camera, and judging by the proportion of the two positions on the camera, the mother obviously occupies more space and Nancy less.
A character relationship and emotion is expressed through such proportions, when the angry mother is in a clearly strong position, controlling Nancy's words and actions, dominating Nancy's life, and also dominating the development of this paragraph.
In this passage full of truth and life, everything seems unintentional, but every detail is intentional. The begonia flowers in the picture have appeared at the beginning of the film, and the begonia flowers have the meaning of homesickness.
In the whole shot, only her mother was on the phone, Nancy didn't say a word, indifferent to her mother next to her, and seemed extremely silent, but we who were sitting at the other end of the camera, as if sitting quietly among them, looking at the scene in front of us, were also silent.
The use of this lens reflects a different world view and values from Westerners, without the intervention of the creator, just quietly watching the lives of others. In the works of the famous Taiwanese director Hou Xiaoxian, such lens language is often seen.
He is good at replacing the fierce contradictions and sudden plot design of traditional feature films through fixed long shots, life-like images and actors' dialogue. His films not only make the film show a unique charm different from theater art, but also successfully implant personal artistic ideas into the works.
In the second part of his "Taiwan Trilogy" - "Dream Life", fixed long shots have become the main lens language expression, successfully avoiding the obstacles to viewing caused by incomplete plots, but the choice of panoramic and medium scenes has brought surprises to the emotional performance of the film.
Choosing such a lens language can avoid montage guiding the audience too deliberately, but instead put the audience at a specific angle and describe a fragment of daily life with an almost plain attitude.
Sports long shots
Orientals are accustomed to observing the lives of characters in still lenses, like ink paintings, allegorizing stillness, while long shots in Western films are good at movement and carefully designed scene scheduling.
The famous Greek director Angelopoulos once said in an interview, for me, through the tracking movement of the camera, the space stretches out like an accordion, and in the closeness of the lens and the subject, the space expands and contracts, and the continuous flow of the lens brings an incredible flexibility, like an endless river.
In this passage, we can clearly appreciate his emphasis on this sense of flow, rather than the stagnation and calmness of fixed lenses, and it is precisely because of this that the long lens in his hand presents a complex scheduling under the combination of pushing, pulling, panning and other photographic means
It not only expands the amount of information inside the lens, but also constitutes the so-called "in-lens montage", which is created precisely through time-related continuous shots and space-related movements.
In "Foreign Land", there are several passages that use long shots in the form of movement, most of which use two shooting techniques, heel and pan, which mainly appear in the passage where the heroine Nancy and the boy ride through the city. This paragraph mainly shows the two walking through a strange city, looking for the shadow of their hometown.
The selected scenes in the film are also Shijiazhuang with certain regional characteristics, or representative landscapes in urban development, through the use of follow-up techniques, you can accurately grasp the characters' expressions in the process of emotional release in the process of finding their hometown, and help the audience to experience the inner feelings and psychological change process of the characters at this time.
At the same time, let the audience's eyes and the protagonist feel every corner of the city, showing the time that has passed, consumed or not yet owned. One of the characteristics of long lenses is that they will not arbitrarily interrupt the continuity of the audience's vision, making the picture more natural and smooth, rich in changes, and more full and rich in emotions.
However, shots that focus on the flow of life are sometimes misunderstood as meaningless superposition, because these shots show people the style and content of the shot that is unpolished, lacks dramatic conflict, and has a clear texture of the flow of life. Many of the emotions shown and recognized in the film are outside of our life experiences.
This emotional identification of the characters in the story needs to be based on the cognition of the characters' life experiences and details, so the accumulation of seemingly simple life fragments is actually the process of establishing the audience's identification mechanism. Excellent filmmakers show their ideas through the audience's visual and auditory gains in the process of watching movies.
The audience enters the cinema to watch a movie in order to obtain a life experience that is completely different from their own experience, not only to strengthen, but also to expand it, and what this expansion touches will be extremely broad and profound.
Shaking the lens
Shaking lens refers to the shooting of the camera body doing up and down, left and right, back and forth during the shooting process, often used as a subjective lens, such as drunkenness, mental trance, etc., or causing boats, car shaking, bumps and other effects, creating a specific artistic atmosphere.
Among the early Chinese films, Zhang Yimou's "Have Something to Say" is a pioneering film, in which the shots are all hand-held photography, but its over-avant-garde attempts also made many viewers dizzy after watching it and failed to achieve the expected results.
When shooting, the photographer must have a certain control over the shaking rhythm of the lens, and this movement and emotion are closely connected and regular. Similarly, if the lens language is used aimlessly, or just to show off the technique without considering the development of the plot, it will not only affect the expression of the content, but also make the audience confused when watching the movie.
In the contemporary film industry, there are more and more directors who express special artistic effects through handheld methods, and they are all practicing the unique charm of handheld lenses in film and television shooting to varying degrees.
In 2004, "Spy" developed its technical means to a new height, and also attracted the attention of film critics, and a group of excellent directors who used handheld photography to the extreme emerged in China.
Lou, a leading figure in China's sixth-generation director group, has not abandoned the use of handheld photography in his works for many years, and in his recent work "Floating City Mysteries", he also used a large number of shaking shots to express the hesitant state of the characters in the play.
In "Guanyin Mountain", director Li insists on using shaking shots as the main lens language expression, hoping to show the state closest to reality through this kind of close recording, weaken the narrative in the expression of the theme of the film, and highlight the emotions.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this free shooting method that "Guanyin Mountain" looks particularly real, different from the tear-jerking technique in "1942" and "Jinling 13", but brings viewers a hidden painful experience.
Inspired by many directors, "Foreign Land" also uses handheld photography to replace narrative with emotions to express the complex inner feelings of Nancy, a girl in a different place. There are two passages in the film that use the shaking lens of handheld photography as the main monetization method of lens language.
The first part is the passage in which Nancy rides around the city with the boy, looking for the shadow of her hometown. The two rode an electric car through this strange city, where she did not get her mother's care, had no friends, and even the diet was very different from her hometown, it can be said that she experienced not only strangeness, but also lack, unsound family, and incomplete life.
Although he was searching, he understood that the result of this search was mostly futile, and this was her last hope for the city, so his mood at this time was expectant and disappointed.
In order to match her complex psychological environment, handheld photography was chosen in this creation, because the characteristics of handheld photography add some regular movement to the picture, and these lenses are also sports lenses, including follow-up shooting, panning, etc.
On the basis of the movement of the main body, with the shaking of this lens, giving the picture more movement, it should also be with her inner fluctuations, and at the same time bring this fluctuation and anxiety to the audience, so that the audience can directly experience the same state of mind as the protagonist from the visual senses.
The second use is at the end of the film, Nancy decides to return to her hometown to see it again, when she looks back at the city in front of the train station, her face is no longer the hesitation and confusion when walking through the streets, more let go, perhaps a brief return is the best choice to adapt to this strange city, the breeze blows, long hair flutters, and the ease in the lazy light is a relief.
The camera also abandoned the calm and calm of the previous paragraph, and with the release of Nancy's mood, it also became relaxed and lively, and the previous dull and depressing tone was replaced by a bright and fresh picture, making the end of the film break free from the sadness covered with dark clouds.
Both paragraphs in the film "Foreign Land" choose to use handheld photography, but they express the protagonist's two completely different states of mind, which shows that this photography technique can carry completely different emotional expressions in actual film and television creation.
As a unique lens language, shaking lens has its own unique charm, which also confirms from the side that there are no certain rules for the use of lens language, and it should be reasonably selected according to the needs of the film itself in the creation.