Text/Nanke Documentary
Editor/Nan Ke Documentary
<<——Preamble——>>
The film was once called "the most unlikely cinematic mission in history".
In fact, for the director, translating the novel into a film form is itself full of challenges, not only to attract the novel's own fan base, but also to bring in the added value of the film.
And the appearance of the movie "Cloud Atlas" is a surprise to the audience, because the whole novel spans six completely different time and space, and it is almost an impossible task to complete the transformation of lens language.
However, with the cooperation of the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tikwe, the film was finally released in 2004, and it hit a high score of 8.5 on Douban shortly after its release.
So what's so shocking about this movie? Let's take a look.
<<·——蒙太奇盛宴——·>>
The film is made up of six stories that are independent of each other but are subtly connected.
The first story takes place in 1849, when Ewing, a lawyer, travels to the South Pacific islands to sign a slave sale agreement, and on the way home, he is poisoned by an adulterer but is rescued by a slave.
The second took place in 1936 in the correspondence between the composer Frobisher and his homosexual Smith. The third took place in 1973, when journalist Louise, with the help of elderly Smith, escaped the hunt and uncovered the oil company's conspiracy.
The fourth takes place in 2012, when publisher Timothy successfully leads other elderly people to escape after being imprisoned in a nursing home by his brother, and the fifth takes place in 2144, when the clone Semei joins the resistance group behind the scenes after learning about the unity, and declares the truth to the world on the launch tower.
The sixth occurred in the 106th winter after the decline of humanity, and the last remaining human beings were helped by the indigenous Zachary to find the transmitter tower and move to an alien planet to survive.
The director uses the classic "cross-cut" approach to narrating these six intricate stories, and the film begins with six parallel montages of time and place written on screen.
Ewing sets off from San Francisco, Frobisher escapes from the window, Louise drives a monologue, Timothy types in front of a typewriter, Hoshimi is interrogated, and Zachary tells a story under the stars after the Great Decline.
These six montages establish the style and setting the background of the film, and then the random interstitching of the clips forms the three directors' unique film and television time and space, with Tikwe's first three stories with a strong classical flavor and Wachowski's futuristic rebuke.
The different effects of their fragmented stitching and the skill of telling up to five stories at the same time allowed the film to surpass Griffith's "The Party and the Difference" and advance the art of visual storytelling, becoming the pinnacle of montage in the history of cinema.
Since these six stories are intrinsically connected, it takes skill to highlight these connections without disrupting the overall rhythm of the film.
For example, the main characters of the six stories have star-shaped birthmarks in different positions on their bodies, and the director combines the plot, sometimes taking large close-ups, sometimes just letting the camera pass inadvertently, so that we can notice this connection without leaving a trace.
In addition, these six stories reach a climax almost at the same time, and they end in a concentric cycle, which not only makes the film exquisitely structured, but also in line with the theme of the film, which is meaningful.
In addition, the film also uses flashbacks, sound and picture parallelism, empty shots, special effects and other techniques many times to maintain attraction and enhance the audience's sense of substitution.
Zachary's mind suddenly flashes through what seems to be a past life, and Timothy's thoughts of meeting his first love on the platform when he was young when he is on the train, are typical flashbacks and psychological montages, which can be used to express the subconscious and mental state of the characters.
The use of crossover montage can be seen everywhere in the film's intense chase, with cannibals chasing down natives and unity chasing down Omi and the resistance group, all of which are cross-montages that quickly and frequently cut together the clips.
After that, there is the use of empty shots in the film, because there are too many story lines, in order to prevent the audience from getting lost in the frequent camera cuts, the director has set up iconic empty shots for several of the stories.
For example, every time the first story is told, the camera will show a sailing ship sailing in the South Pacific, and this drifting boat will tell the audience that we are now back in 1849.
The author believes that among the many film languages in "Cloud Atlas", the most skillful and successful point is the parallelism of sound and picture. Parallelism refers to the phenomenon of asynchronous sound and picture in the film, and here is just one example.
After the Great Decline, the natives revered Hoshimi as a goddess, and Zachary asks the priestess for a revelation, and when the priestess gives the revelation, the camera shows Hoshimi receiving help from the Resistance, Frobisher creating a symphony, Timothy looking for her first love, Louise reading letters, and Ewing helping Xinu.
Each shot corresponds to the revelation: "Our life is not only our own, from birth to death we are intimately related to others, past and present, every sin and every good deed, there will be retribution in the afterlife".
The sound and the picture unfold according to their own logic, as if they are separated but complement each other, rendering the artistic conception and increasing the depth.
<<·——“福柯式”的监视与反抗——·>>
In the same way that "The Matrix" tries to explain the ultimate philosophical question of "where did humanity come from and where is it going" from a technological perspective, "Cloud Atlas" has never hidden its ambition to show philosophy through film.
Michault Foucault's handicraft-like "micro-view of power" and "strategy of resistance to power" permeate the entire film.
In the fifth story, Hoshimi is one of many people who serve the Unity, and the clones follow a strict schedule every day, waking up at 4 a.m., wearing uniform uniforms, serving humans for nineteen hours in a row, and returning to the sleeping pod at night with a bag of soup and food.
And the human surveillance of the Conquerers is pervasive, isolating them in a confined space, and the requirements for them are very strict, and the humans who manage the clones have hierarchical supervision, forming a rule from top to bottom that is invisible to the Conquerers but exists everywhere, which is in line with Foucault's interpretation of the "circular prison".
The clone doesn't know if he is currently being watched, but he doesn't dare to make a mistake, and once he resists, he will be like the clone Youna played by Zhou Xun in the film, who was killed on the spot after attacking humans.
This Foucault surveillance forms a "huge instrument of power", whereby each individual is subject to the supervision of a different power relationship.
In addition to these, humanity has given clones the hope of a better future, and any clone who has worked for twelve years can be freed.
Solzhenitsyn said: "Just give something, and you can rule them forever".
So Xingmei, like the other Kedean people, worked diligently every day until she knew the truth of the matter.
Where there is power, there are coping strategies, and when we look at the whole movie, we will find that every story of it is a rebellion of free will against the constraints imposed on the outside world.
Unwilling to be driven to smuggle onto the ship as cattle and horses, the black slave resists feudal slavery with Ewing: Frobisher challenges his father and the authority of the music industry to create "Cloud Atlas Sextet": journalist Louise insists on press freedom in the face of strong capital intimidation and hunting, and publisher Timothy rebels against the institutionalized management of the old people's home and leads the elderly to "escape" from prison.
After learning that the so-called last freedom of the Kezhu people was actually killed and dissolved, Xingmei resolutely joined the rebels and told the truth through the radio.
There is a chronological internalization process of these rebellions, from the initial rebellion against the external system to the final rebellion against the inner demons, the director seems to imply that the essence of freedom and liberation has always originated from human beings themselves.
Foucault said: "The analysis of the mechanisms of power does not show that power is invincible".
He divided the rebellion into two types: short-term and long-term, short-term that is, revolution, which would be at the cost of life, and long-term, which was reform, and which was a permanent scattered revolt.
In the film, the phrase "I will not give in to violent criminal acts" is uttered through the mouths of several characters, including Yona and Timothy, and Frobisher also said in his letter to his lover: "The line between noise and music is just a stereotype." All boundaries are stereotypes, and if they are broken, they can only be broken if they dare to think about it."
The spiritual strategy of rebellion against power embodied in these lines is exactly Foucaultian, and freedom through struggle is the real aesthetics of survival
<< - Populist Propaganda and Orientalism - >>
Compared to the high box office of "Cloud Atlas", the film did not receive recognition in the professional film industry, and was only nominated for Best Score at the 70th Golden Globe Awards for the main award, and even less for the Oscars.
There may be two reasons for this. First of all, since "V for Vendetta", the Wachowski siblings' films have carried populist genes, and they do not hesitate to use many of their works to promote populism.
"The machine that breeds clones must be shut down, whether we are born in children or containers, we are all pure-blooded people, and we must fight, even at the cost of sacrifice, to tell the truth to the world," Hoshimi said.
This kind of highly inflammatory discourse is clearly something that mainstream society cannot encourage.
Said argues that there is a kind of Orientalism in which Westerners invent or view Oriental culture with prejudice.
In "Cloud Atlas", humans use spice jars to make indecent movements against Youna, played by Zhou Xun, and the old Seoul bustling and shabby street dressers expose pole dancers......
In the director's view, these erotic displays of the Orient seem to be intentional, bringing exoticism to the audience, but also prejudice and Western stereotypes of the East.
<<·——Conclusion——·>>
Watching "Cloud Atlas" reminds me of Zweig's masterpiece "When the Stars of Mankind Shine", the former is six stories that influence each other, and the latter is a moment that determines human history.
When a strong personal will collides with history, perhaps just like the declaration made by Xingmei to the world on the launch tower:
"Our lives are not only our own, from birth to death, we are closely related to others".
The first and last shots of "Cloud Atlas" are long nights, distant and brilliant stars in the sky, and before the moment when will and history collide, there will inevitably be a long and inexorable passage of time.
What we have to do is probably to try to grow in this waiting time, and hope to become one of the shining stars.