Wen | Qian language talks about the style of writing
Editor|Humble language on book style
In October 2015, on the occasion of the release of "Mountains and Rivers Departed", Jia Zhangke was interviewed by reporters. When the reporter asked him what is the ultimate destiny of life that everyone has to face, Jia Zhangke replied without hesitation: "Lonely." He believes that everyone's final outcome cannot avoid loneliness, which is the other side of life.
"Loneliness" is the most basic and core theme of Jia Zhangke's films. Xiao Wu, who was abandoned by society in Jia Zhangke's early film "Xiaowu", Zheng Qiaoqiao, a wine merchant saleswoman in "Ren Xiaoyao", Zhao Xiaotao, a scenic spot dancer in "World", and Han Sanming, a peasant and miner who is looking for a wife for thousands of miles in "The Good Man of Three Gorges", are all lonely individuals.
His wandering and scattered life opportunities not only arouse the audience's feelings, but also highlight the director's philosophical thinking and humanistic feelings for contemporary Chinese society. "Mountains and Rivers Departed" tells the story of three generations of Shen Tao's family from 1999 to 2025 in the structure of "one point and three lines" and the art form of "time segmentation", showing China's 30 years of social changes.
As in previous films, the remembrance of the dying life and the worry of losing his root-like hometown have always given Jia Zhangke abundant creative passion and inspiration.
In "Mountains and Rivers Departed", Jia Zhangke uses "loneliness" through the past, present and future three eras, expressing his thinking on the contemporary Chinese's mental state and survival situation, and presents it in front of the audience in a primitive and crude way. The loneliness lies in the past that keeps saying goodbye, in the vague and mysterious future, and finally to the mountains and rivers are no longer there, and the old people are nowhere to be found.
The loneliness that comes with cultural rootlessness
As social beings, human beings always exist in specific cultural situations. Culture, as a historical system of meaning, gives order, value and direction to human life. Only in culture can individuals find their own existence value, form identity and national belonging, and have a dialogue with others to warm each other.
The reform of the market economy has thrown individuals who were originally fixed in the countryside into the tide of rapid social changes, and behind the expansion of capital is a sense of cultural drift. China's traditional culture and interpersonal relations are facing unprecedented tests under the two-way squeeze of modernization and globalization.
As Jia Zhangke said in his film Xiaowu: "This is a movie about the burning reality of reality, and some good things are rapidly disappearing from our lives." We face collapse and find ourselves in difficult situations, and life becomes lonely again and appears noble. ”
"Mountains and Rivers Departed" continues this theme, and reflects on the social civilization and spiritual construction in the process of China's modernization through cultural inquiry into the causes of loneliness.
The solitude of possessive individualists
After the 80s of the 20th century, the clarion call of market economic reform sounded in every corner of China, people looked for opportunities to get rich in a rapidly changing and uncertain world, and the double aberration of law and ethics gave birth to possessive individualism: "In a possessive market society, the essence of the individual is understood as his own owner."
Neither a moral subject nor an integral part of a community, he is himself, and he proves himself through the possession of himself and the property he owns. Under the influence of this possessive individualism, individuals can only make meaningless dialogues with commodities in addition to themselves, and interpersonal relationships become increasingly distant and indifferent.
In "Mountains and Rivers Departed", Jia Zhangke presents the destruction of traditional culture and interpersonal ethics based on emotions by the "possessive individual" represented by Zhang Jinsheng in three fragments: "taking advantage of the situation to make a fortune", "financial speculation" and "fearing crime and going to the country". Relying on the strong position of capital, he successfully won Shen Tao's love in the love battle with Liang Jianjun.
caused his friend Liang Jianjun to run away in anger and drift in a foreign land; In the divorce battle with Shen Tao, he successfully obtained the custody of his son Zhang Zhile, causing his wife Shen Tao to guard Fenyang alone. But this "possessive individualism" eventually "eats back" Zhang Jinsheng. He left Shen Tao, left Fenyang, had infinite wealth, emigrated overseas, and lived in a large villa with sea views.
I thought that I could have freedom after going abroad, but in the end, I was alone with each other, and it was difficult to return to my homeland; He bought a pistol, only to find that there were no enemies long ago; He tried his best to send his son to study abroad, but his son was a stranger to him. In this kind of family dominated by a "possessive culture", Zhang Jinsheng, Shen Tao and Zhang Zhile as family members are emotional and spiritual islands.
In a society dominated by a "possessive culture", although people are social animals, they are destined to isolate and hurt each other, and everyone is insecure. The emotional alienation and cultural rupture caused by the logic of capital bring about the loneliness of the individual is an unavoidable problem of the times in contemporary China.
The loneliness of the cultural drifter
In Foucault's view, "heterotopia" is created by "culture", because "there is no culture in the world, and the situation of multiculturalism is 'heterotopia'", and this "heterotopia" experience will cause the people living here to have a crisis of cultural identity and seriously examine which world they live in.
In "Mountains and Rivers Departed", Jia Zhangke fictionalizes a future time and space, placing Zhang Zhile in the "heterotopia" of Australia in 2025, examining how a rootless young man chooses and arranges his life in the collision of Chinese and Western civilizations. Although Zhang Zhile has excellent material conditions.
But without the company of his mother, loneliness is innate, so there will be a yearless love with Chinese teacher Mia to make up for the lack of maternal love. He was sent abroad by his parents to study and live at a young age, forgetting his mother tongue. As a Chinese, Zhile does not speak Chinese, and he needs to use Chinese interpreter to communicate with his father.
This cultural irony characterizes the cultural anxieties and identity crises Chinese in the context of globalization. Zhang Zhile's lack of maternal love characterizes the double absence of his biological mother——— "Shen Tao" and cultural mother——— "Chinese culture" in his growing up.
Although he briefly reunited with his mother Shen Tao in his hometown Fenyang, he could only carry the "key" representing his hometown, look at each other across the sea, and die alone.
"Within the same nation or different peoples, each relatively unchanging society in which different times live is a 'heterotopia', because from the perspective of another society, the form in which this society operates is completely different." Under the influence of the market economy and the cultural mechanism of possessive individualism, Handan and Shanghai, which are juxtaposed with Fenyang, also have the meaning of "heterotopia".
The hometown of Fenyang has become a symbol of the spiritual home of mankind. In "Mountains and Rivers Departed", Jia Zhangke sets the time background of the first story in the late 90s of the 20th century. In his view, this was a period of "relatively classical emotional relations between people, not much different from China in the Ming and Qing dynasties", full of longing for "thinking about the king every day without seeing the king".
The rapid changes in society and the rapid changes in identity and status make everyone can't wait to cut off the connection with the past and hometown, and the spiritual home originally established by emotional maintenance and cultural identity is becoming more and more nowhere to be found, and the fall of "hometown" makes everyone lose spiritual support and value guidance, and finally become a rootless "fragmented" individual.
It profoundly reveals the collapse of the spiritual home under social changes. For Liang Jianjun, leaving his hometown is the only way for him to gain dignity; For Zhang Jinsheng, his hometown is an existence that he urgently needs to forget, for which he even gave himself the foreign name "Pete"; And for Zhang Zhile, he may never have had a hometown.
Although he kept the key given to him by his mother, he would never find his way home. Although Shen Tao stayed in Fenyang, after repeated changes, her hometown was only a geographical "hometown" for her, and the hopeful "spiritual home" in her heart had long ceased to exist.
"Asking the old people to meet each other, seeing the mountains and rivers unchanged" and "the mountains and rivers are no longer there, the old people are nowhere to be found" constitute the ideal and reality of "Mountains and Rivers and the Departed". "The past has been hurt several times in the world, but Yamagata is still in the cold." It is not so much that Shen Tao is the "watchman" of his hometown, but that "Fenyang" is a "witness" of the changes in mountains and rivers and the disappearance of old people.
In Jia Zhangke's view, "loneliness" is not a social dilemma that modern communication tools can solve, but a heavy philosophical topic in contemporary China and a cultural "homesickness" that must be solved. In contemporary China, where the rapid changes of the times create oblivion and everyone is eager to cut ties with the past, Jia Zhangke uses his films to return again and again to the source of his personal life experience——— Fenyang.
In the cultural picture of the juxtaposition of urban, modern, Westernized and rural, traditional and Chinese, from Liang Jianjun-style low-level people to Zhang Jinsheng-style capitalists, from dusty Fenyang to blue sea and blue sky in Australia, Jia Zhangke's perspective has expanded again and again, from marginal to successful, from small county to metropolis, the only constant is to adhere to his humanistic spirit.
Insisting on using realistic techniques to record the joys and sorrows of small people in the big era, presenting the humanistic state of contemporary Chinese society and family, gazing at the pain of Chinese society, calling for the return of emotions and cultural reconstruction. "The fast pace and constant change of modern life is a nostalgia that inevitably arises from the nostalgia of wandering and homelessness of everyone in it.
This is a kind of modern nostalgia, but also a kind of cultural nostalgia, which reflects the contrast between ideal and reality, it is an innate sense of distress for the countryside, and it is also a trace of attachment to the past while modern human beings strive for progress and perfect society. ”
The drastic changes in status and identity between Zhang Jinsheng and Liang Jianjun and the resulting turn of fate, the loneliness and decadence of the characters at the bottom, and the cultural drift without roots and other "third world" life scenes shown in "Mountains and Rivers Departed", examine the existence value of traditional culture in the presentation of "alienated" images of the characters at the bottom, and deeply reflect on and sharply question the process of China's modernization.
The alternative narrative and aesthetic style provides us with an unofficial perspective on the life situation of the "people at the bottom". However, this nostalgic, postmodern way of historical interpretation and cultural reflection on the one hand biases the interpretation of the character's lonely situation towards fatalism: Shen Tao's loneliness is the result of punishing his wrong love choices.
Zhang Jinsheng's loneliness is the self-retribution of his possessive individualism, ignoring the subjective initiative and self-adaptation of the underlying characters in historical changes. On the other hand, as Jia Zhangke who walked the red carpet of the world film industry.
"Mountains and Rivers Departed" realistically presents the discourse strategy and aesthetic style of the "Third World" cultural picture in the image style of "restoring realism", which is more in line with the artistic interest and aesthetic standards of the Western film industry.
epilogue
As the meaning world and value guide of human lifestyle, culture is developed and renewed in the process of mutual construction and circulation with society. Historically, there is no immutable cultural tradition and spiritual home, and the "cultural rupture" caused by trying to stitch modernity with non-historical cultural traditions is just a nostalgic poetic imagination and self-comfort.
"In Jia Zhangke's dialogue with the Western film industry, there is actually no place for Chinese audiences, firstly, because his exploration of film language is far from the appreciation habits of local Chinese audiences, and secondly, because his observation of local life is as calm as a camera, which is bound to be difficult to trigger a sense of identity among Chinese audiences."
In the film market where small-town youth have become the main moviegoers, Jia Zhangke, as the best spokesperson of "County China", has not won their recognition, and there is a strong contrast between the prestige of the world-renowned film industry and the cold and lonely market acceptance in China.