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In traditional narratives, directors mostly choose a linear narrative structure, which is carried out in the chronological order of beginning-development-climax-ending, in which the protagonist is placed at the center of the story, and the whole story is coherent and complete.
Robert McKee, the godfather of the famous Hollywood screenwriter, came out with a "story triangle" to divide different movie plots into: big plot, small plot, and anti-plot.
Among them, the big plot at the top of the triangle is the linear structure, which contains "cause and effect, closed ending, linear season, external conflict, single protagonist, coherent reality, active protagonist." ”
In "Revaluing the Value of Linear Narrative", Yang Shizhen gave a clear definition of linear narrative: "Linear narrative is a classic narrative method, which pays attention to the integrity of the story, the continuity of time, and the causality of the plot in the narrative, and this narrative concept contains the belief and appeal to the sense of order and certainty of the world." ”
The non-linear narrative structure in the film is more innovative than the traditional linear narrative. Before the emergence of film, non-linear narrative has gained great development in the field of literature, which also provides reference for non-linear narrative in later films.
Film is also an extremely free art, at the beginning "non-linear narrative" is existing in the art world's installation art and performance art, and then developed into film, but unlike the simple space-time art of fine art and music, the film juxtaposes time and space, and the unique material selection, arrangement, and recombination enhance the freedom of time and space, and also makes it itself have non-linear characteristics.
In the development of film over the past century, non-linearity has gradually become an indispensable aesthetic feature, and we can see the figure of non-linear narrative in many classic films in the past.
Griffith's "The Party is the Same and Different" uses four stories across history to compose the entire film, and the disparate histories form a common theme; The post-Hollywood film Citizen Kane and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon are examples of non-linear narratives;
Tarkovsky's "Mirror", "Ivan's Childhood", and Gehrig's "Two Big Smoking Guns" are typical representatives of non-linearity, and through the unremitting efforts of film masters, non-linear narrative has risen to the aesthetic characteristics of film.
However, in the film and TV series industry, traditional linear narratives still occupy the mainstream market, resulting in audiences having a prejudgment and understanding of the film in the long-term viewing experience, and films that conform to the audience's qualitative thinking will reduce their expectations.
Ning Hao's high sensitivity to film makes him bravely break the status quo of traditional linear narrative as the mainstream, borrow the structure of Gehrig, shoot the film in the form of multiple clues, with multiple perspectives, fragmented stories and chaotic time and space, creating a new non-linear absurd world for the audience, and non-linearity has also become Ning Hao's second major aesthetic feature.
In a narrow sense, nonlinear structures disrupt the narrative order and blur the concept of time; In a broad sense, non-linear narrative is not only a disorder of time and space, a transformation of narrative levels, but also an expression of anti-tradition and diversification.
Diversity of perspectives
It is not difficult to find in Ning Hao's film that the narrator in the film is no longer a single individual, and the narrative perspective appears in two or more individual characters, forming a phenomenon of juxtaposition of multiple perspectives.
Each narrator starts from his own subjective point of view, narrates around a thing together, integrates into a complete film plot through the narration of different characters and different perspectives, and creates different narrative levels from different points of view, so as to achieve the director's narrative effect and purpose.
Director Ning Hao does not deliberately pursue narrative results in the film, uses multiple perspectives to disrupt the order of time and space, focuses on pursuing a three-dimensional spatial structure, showing a diversified narrative process, and the characters are written from different angles.
At the same time, the audience also began to take the initiative to sort, think, and summarize in order to find out, no longer at the mercy of the narrator, and felt the pleasure and aesthetic feeling of watching the movie suddenly realized.
Timing disorder
The technique of plot timing disorder occurs from time to time in Ning Hao's crazy series of movies, and he often puts the climax of the dramatic conflict in front, disrupting the narrative order, no longer following the classic narrative convention, and time has become a variable.
It can be blurred and distorted at will, and arbitrarily reversed. But this causal plot timing disorder is carried out throughout the plot development of the film, not the cause and effect of the entire plot of the movie, but only a small segment that exists in the movie.
Putting the result of the event in front will largely create a sense of suspense, which meets the aesthetic needs of the audience, and the audience likes to watch movies with suspense.
After grabbing the audience's heart at the beginning, they are willing to sit down and wait for the development of the subsequent plot of the movie, and follow the plot to explore the reason with a sense of doubt.
For example, the crash in "Crazy Stone" first shows the plot of the collision of two cars, and then shows that the reason for the crash is because a Coke fell in the air and hit Bao Shihong's car, and the two got out of the car without pulling the handbrake, causing the car to crash on a slope.
The thief chasing incident first showed that Bao Shihong and his party were attracted by the fire truck outside and ran out to see the liveliness, and only realized that a thief was coming when they heard the alarm bell, and immediately ran back to chase the thief, but the thief escaped due to a power outage in the temple;
Then he explained that the sudden arrival of the fire truck was because Brother Dao called the police, and the tiger left the mountain to give the black skin two time to steal jadeite, and the sudden power outage in the temple was also because Brother Dao pulled the electric gate off after hearing the alarm bell outside.
The first story climax in "Crazy Racing" also uses the structure of the plot timing, the Taiwanese gangster and the Thai drug dealer are trading, interrupted by the sudden sound of the police car, thinking that the Taiwanese gangster who eats black and black ended the transaction, and only after this explained that the real reason for the police car was that Geng Hao beat Li Fara, and Li Fara reported the police.
The timing disorder in Ning Hao's works is not only a pattern of cause and effect, for example, in "Heart Flower Road Fang", the director set two timelines, one in front of the other, one timeline is the breakdown of Geng Hao and Kang Xiaoyu's relationship, after the divorce, his friend Hao Yi took Geng Hao to the south to hunt for Yan, wanting to forget the past and start anew;
Another timeline is that Kang Xiaoyu, a literary and artistic youth, travels alone to Dali, Yunnan, to tell the story of her and Geng Hao's first acquaintance here.
There are five places where two clues intersect in the movie, the first is that after Geng Hao failed to meet Avatar in Tianmen Mountain, the picture turned to Kang Xiaoyu holding a stray puppy into the inn;
The second place is when Geng Hao sees a non-mainstream girl who finds herself in danger of leaving after a big quarrel with her junior, and the camera turns to Kang Xiaoyu's embarrassing situation in a Dali bar; The third place is that Geng Hao met a beautiful woman due to the breakdown of the car, and the picture turned Kang Xiaoyu reprimanding his puppy in Dali;
The fourth place is Geng Hao holding a pot of flowers in his hand to pluck up the courage to confess with the beautiful woman he knows, and finds that the other party is homosexual, the camera turns to Kang Xiaoyu throwing the bar owner's mobile phone into the lake, and the conflict between the two intensifies and wants to leave Dali;
The fifth place is that Geng Hao and his friend Hao Yi fell out, Geng Hao went to Dali alone, the picture turned Kang Xiaoyu ready to leave Dali, thinking that he did not bring his dog back to find it, and met Geng Hao.
The two timelines are told in parallel and intersect with each other, and it is not until the end of the film that it is discovered that the two timelines do not take place at the same time and space.
Rather, the clues of the ongoing process intersect with the clues of the past completion, forming a sense of dislocation of relationships, disorder of time and space, and time reversal.
Ning Hao subverts the plot timing of traditional dramas in the film, deliberately disrupting the order, the consciousness of time and space is broken and dislocated, time loses its linear characteristics, and the simple narrative becomes complicated.
The confusion of the timing is the director's personal understanding of the film, and also the director's avant-garde exploration of the narrative structure, in the process to create a film with great ornamental and personal characteristics, showing a strong personal style.
Composiability of structure
Puslin wrote about narrative structure in Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative that "many narratives are not core narratives because the situation and state of the things they tell change more than once.
Specifically, many narratives are formed by combining one (core) narrative with another (core) narrative;
Either it consists of one (core) narrative embedded in another (core) narrative, or it is composed alternately from one (core) narrative fragment and another (core) narrative fragment. ”
Ning Hao uses montage-style techniques to express dramatic conflicts, he creates a lot of contradictions and conflicts in the film, and there are many small contradictions and conflicts under the big contradictions, which are distributed in plates, sometimes gathered together, sometimes separated.
There is no absolute main core plate, core characters, each plate and character is essential, mutual influence, mutual collusion to build the entire film, if you take away a plate, the framework of the story will collapse in an instant.
This structure that eliminates the main actors and the main part is a deconstruction of the traditional film structure, and it is also a revolution in the film narrative, catering to the postmodern concept of mass consumption, there is no starring role in the movie, everyone is equal, all supporting roles are combined into a comprehensive protagonist, and they jointly interpret the point that the film wants to convey.
"Crazy Stone" revolves around jadeite and unfolds the story of three sections, one section tells the story of the local thieves of Dao Ge, Xiaojun and Blackskin, who want to steal jadeite, but play the word "stupid" to the extreme;
The second section is Bao Shihong, the head of the "Security Section", who diligently protects the jadeite from being stolen; The third section is the story of Mike, an international thief hired by a person, who steals jadeite, but is teased by three petty thieves.
In "Crazy Racing", it is even more exaggerated, director Ning Hao designed a total of six sections, which go hand in hand driven by their own interests and jointly promote the development of the story.
The first section is Geng Hao, who was banned for life for endorsing fake products; The second sector is the skilled Thai drug traffickers; The third section is the Taiwanese gangsters who seem professional but always make mistakes;
The fourth section is Li Fara, who sells counterfeit drugs and hires killers to kill his wife; The fifth plate is two farmers who are not professional killers; The sixth section is two stupid cops bent on big cases.
The six plates are intertwined by various coincidences, creating a series of coincidences and absurdities, seemingly absurd and reasonable.
The films are grouped together in a plate-like structure, with disjointed realities between the plates, "disjointed realities being the backdrop of multiple modes of interaction."
The story chapters jump incoherently from one 'reality' to another to create a sense of absurdity. ”
There are several narrative space-times in a movie, and space-time and space-time seem to be talking to themselves, randomly due to chance, but in fact, each space-time plate will be connected, and they are glued and combined with each other, going hand in hand, and colliding.
The juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints, plot timing disorder and plate structure combination together constitute Ning Hao's non-linear narrative. Ning Hao's film structure is somewhat gamified, non-linear narrative.
The plot pursues orderly arrangement, but does not require synchronicity in time, and the order of the same timeline is disrupted and split, which increases the tension of the time span.
It is parallel and linear from the perspective of real time, and synchronic from the perspective of story time and space.
There will be multiple story lines, and when several clues are told in turn, the synchronic nature of time is no longer pursued, the concept of time becomes blurred, and it can be reversed and changed at will, some narrative lines are carried out in normal chronological order, and some are distorted in chronological order.
The perspective is no longer limited to the same time and space, the same character, and the same event is narrated from multiple perspectives. This narrative structure highlights the entertainment and drama of the film, presenting a huge narrative tension.
This personalized approach and structure brought the audience a dissociative aesthetic feeling, and also left a deep impression.
Disrupted by intricate clues, viewers shift from forced acceptance to active exploration, giving viewers an extraordinary sense of experience and the satisfaction of compulsive reasoning.