Chinese there is an old saying: look at eighty from a young age.
In fact, an artist's style may mutate, radicalize, and change, but there is often one thing that cannot be changed for life, that is, the inertial thinking, speculation and contemplation rooted in the blood and soul will always determine the actions and behaviors in a lifetime, determine his imagination and creation, which may be the reason why "looking at eighty from a young age" can be established. Because even if people reach old age, some of its essential ways of thinking are likely to be the constant deformation, variation and variation of the thinking habits of childhood.
"Winter and Spring Days" is the first film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, filmed in 1993, 24 years after the release in 2019 and the filming of "The Long Day" in 2017.
It's almost the length of a youth.
However, in such a long period of time, we still find that Wang Xiaoshuai's film shooting method has not undergone any major changes.
In fact, looking back at "Winter and Spring Days" to find today's Wang Xiaoshuai's shooting style is not a meaningless thing.
"Days of Winter and Spring" can glimpse some of the essential secrets in Wang Xiaoshuai's films, because this movie, after all, is a film independently directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, it is not a film that is more imprinted with other factors according to the established approved film script, so that "Winter and Spring Days" because Wang Xiao wrote the script himself, he raised more than 200,000 yuan needed for the film, aiming at the life of the painter he is familiar with, so that "Winter and Spring Days" is not interfered with by any other factors. You can express the ideas that Wang Xiaoshuai wants to express as much as possible.
We noticed that "Winter and Spring Days" laid the foundation for Wang Xiaoshuai's unchanged mirror-moving style for decades.
And this style may be the reason why the images of "Long Days on Earth" are not popular with the market.
Wang Xiaoshuai's lens style has been basically formed in "Winter and Spring Days".
One is the operation of the camera in motion, following the movement of the character. This is a very common shot in Wang Xiaoshuai's movie, in "Long Day", we also see such a mirror style, for example, showing the parents of the stars in search of missing stars, "Long Days in the Earth" does not hesitate to use long shots to show the process of character searching, the film lens faithfully follows the characters, recording the form of the characters in front of the camera, we can see that the father and mother of the stars, in this group of shots, are divided and combined, resulting in a very documentary sense of real scene.
Of course, we must also point out that such a lens style brings a lengthy feeling to the audience, because the audience pays attention to the psychological performance of the characters, and there is no strong viewing interest in this kind of moving and changing action.
This is also the reason why Wang Xiaoshuai's films are not attractive to the audience.
What we must note is that the way of transporting mirrors like Wang Xiaoshuai has been abandoned in the community of cutting-edge directors who have no generational division after the sixth generation.
The sixth generation is almost the last generation of directors who can be divided by generations, and the subsequent director community rarely sees the seventh and eighth generations to divide, the fundamental reason for this is that the tide of film industrialization and marketization has sprung up, so that subsequent directors can uniformly shoot their own films in accordance with market principles, and they only need to decide their own artistic trade-offs in the market, so that they will not form a fixed group style.
The sixth generation of mirror language, it can be seen that it is getting farther and farther away from the requirements of the film market. They still put their greatest interest in European film festivals, but on the road to marketization, they still behave differently and strangely, and it is difficult to win the favor of the audience. Because of their handling of film shots, the audience feels unbearable and feels unusually slow.
In "Winter and Spring Days", we see that Wang Xiaoshuai had to be simple on the lens because of the limitations of the original shooting conditions, and the use of long lenses can be said to be a simple and easiest film language to use when the equipment is simple, but this kind of lens language that was forced to be helpless when debuting was subtly injected into Wang Xiaoshuai's blood, until "Long Days on earth" still stubbornly appeared in the movie in large quantities.
The second is that the lens does not move, and the character moves in the frame.
The opening part of "The Long Day" shows a scene in which the stars drown and their parents come to the rescue, which is a long shot in the distance, indifferently watching the performance of the characters, we see that the adult enters from the right side of the frame, and then walks to the scene of the incident, picks up the child, and the camera slowly moves back.
Such a tense and sad scene, the film uses a long-distance zero-degree participation lens to present, directly placing the audience in a position of remote observation, in fact, the audience's eyes become cold and indifferent.
Then we see the camera panning down, showing Hao Hao's mother walking toward Hao Hao. The whole set of shots actually reflects the reproduction and interpretation of the inner space of the lens imported from European films in the long lens theory learned in the film school, and in the director's view, this scene is very classic to the spatial performance of the long shot theory, which can be seen as the result of paying tribute to the masters of European film, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, and Fellini. The films of these masters have one sign in common, and that is anti-Hollywood.
In "The Long Day", we can also see the indifferent viewing effect of this kind of lens placed in the hospital paragraph. And in "The Long Day", such a scene has appeared twice, once after the star drowned, was sent to the hospital, and once was the star mother committed suicide and was sent to the hospital. The shots are all set up at the end of the corridor, and then the characters come from a distance until they turn a corner and enter the corridor space of another medical room.
In this set of shots, the characters are moving, and the camera is not moving, which is also a way of moving the camera that European film masters like to express.
And this kind of lens expression method has been interpreted in "Winter and Spring Days" in advance.
In a scene in the film where the heroine goes to the hospital to have a miscarriage after becoming pregnant, the camera is also set up in front of the door of the ward, you can see the patient waiting on the bench, the heroine comes out of the ward, and then the doctor calls the name of the next patient, and the sick get up and walk indoors, while the other waiting patient moves to a level. This set of shots, just let those insignificant other patients occupy Nestle, occupying the foreground position of the film. Just like in "The Long Day", we see that in the scene of the star drowning and hugging into the hospital, in the stagnant shot, after the figure of the star's father has passed, he is still facing a nurse with an indifferent expression, striding behind him until he walks behind the camera. This set of shots is very ridiculous, because it is very artificial, completely artificially set by the director, because even if the nurse is not alarmed, but after a team of rescuers whose life and death are hanging on the line, the nurse should at least have a certain reaction. However, the characters in front of the camera, under the director's arrangement, if there is no one around, turn a blind eye, which will naturally give people an unreal sense of awkwardness.
Wang Xiaoshuai's way of transporting the mirror has led to his films, placing a large period of time in the scene where the characters walk, while the inner collision of the characters is hidden, and it can be simple and simple. It cannot be said that the amount of information in his films is not rich enough, but Wang Xiaoshuai has always been afraid to put the characters into a fierce inner conflict to show them, but through a large number of indifferent shots, to show the indifferent correspondence of the characters. In "Winter and Spring Days", we see that a pair of lovers is silent most of the time, and their conflicts are also explained and completed through narration.
This style also exists in "The Long Day". In "The Long Day", there are soul fighting scenes that involve important character relationships, and the film has made the performance of the snake of nothingness. In "Long Time", there are actually two most important links, which are important aspects of portraying characters, but the film lacks power in these two important links, which is also the reason for the lack of appeal of the entire film.
One of these two links is the harmonious relationship between Xingxing and his parents when he was a child. The lack of details in the movie, did not shape the character of the child of the star, in the childhood paragraph of the film, the star and the haohao face is difficult to distinguish, do not know who it is, and the film takes the scene of family harmony, only through a set of birthday scenes, simply can not meet the needs of portraying the character, because this kind of meeting place shows a popular, big hulong emotional appearance, it is difficult to touch the real delicate warm core of a family, so the stars in the movie have a trigger meaning for the image of the existence of parents. The film did not shape it, so that the scene of the characters after the stars drowned and died later did not have a strong impact on the audience, and even the exaggerated action scenes of the star father saving people, under the handling of Wang Xiaoshuai's lens, had a strange feeling.
Another link is why the "generation" stars are incompatible with the family. The film also has no foreshadowing, and finally simply blames the adolescent rebellious psychology of the "generation" stars, which determines the key part of the important plot direction in the movie, but it is not a word in the movie, which is a habitual way of expression in Wang Xiaoshuai's movie.
For example, in "Rizhao Chongqing", the father is shown to find out why the son born to his ex-wife took hostages, and when he met his ex-wife, the ex-wife was angry, but the film did not explain why he and his ex-wife broke up, which determines the key background of the current event, so that the movie only becomes a superficial illustration of the event. Similarly, in "Left and Right", a couple who broke up, in order to save the children they had previously born, must give birth to another child, in fact, this theme is very difficult to grasp, the most critical difficulty is why the couple broke up in the first place, but this important character background factor is also not mentioned in the movie. This shows that when Wang Xiaoshuai pays attention to real life, he is always vain and contrived to the key plot direction that is very difficult to grasp. Now it seems that this habitual avoidant weakness also exists in "The Long Day".
If you trace back to the roots, you will see that in "Winter and Spring Days", the portrayal of the characters is also quite flat, from the beginning of the film two men and women have entered the state of marriage, in a flat no progress of the emotional backwater swamp, in fact, the internal structure of this film, equivalent to the main plot of Lu Xun's "Wounded Death", but Lu Xun still wrote a pair of young people from love to loss of the process, but "Winter and Spring Days" just from the beginning to the end there are no ups and downs and no waves, Choosing the same static life to unfold its expression, the character's love antecedent has adopted a virtual means. This mindset, which has been formed since his debut, has continued to affect Wang Xiaoshuai's film creation, and has also led to the lack and embarrassment of the logical line in Wang Xiaoshuai's films.
For example, in "Intruder", the front desk of the movie has a major suspense, that is, a boy specially tortured and killed the left-behind elderly in the city, but the mystery that was finally unveiled was that the child was robbed of the quota in the third-line construction and thus retaliated against the person who grabbed the quota, this "cause" has its possibility, but it cannot reach the "fruit" of killing the left-behind elderly in the film, that is, the logical misalignment of the film cannot be established.
In "Winter and Spring Days", we can see that there are some basic elements that Wang Xiaoshuai must have in his future films. Roughly listed: First, the impact of pregnancy on life. The heroine in the film conceives a child and then has an abortion. This plot reflects Wang Xiaoshuai's interest in the daily trivialities of life, and later he constantly enriches and develops the various bizarre landscapes of life twists and turns born of pregnancy, such as "Long Days on Earth" contains two miscarriage abortion plots, it can be seen that abortion in Wang Xiaoshuai's film system, is a prototype material containing a very rich plot power, so he repeatedly uses it. The second is the shadow obsession of death. In "Winter and Spring Days", the male protagonist has a mental breakdown while mentally confused, and is finally sent to a mental hospital. In the next film" that almost followed the development of the plot of the movie, "Extreme Cold", it shows the absurd birth and existence of a painter who blindly seeks death. Death has become an image and idea that is repeatedly forbidden in Wang Xiaoshuai's films. The third is to go to distant places to find the source of life. In "Winter and Spring Days", a large section of the plot is placed in the city, but the film suddenly swings at the end and pushes the camera to the northeast countryside, which constitutes a kind of habitual routine for Wang Xiaoshuai to weave stories in the future. In his films, when the plot cannot be unfolded, the film will suddenly drift to another place, from where to find the cause and effect of things, showing the depth of the background of the film, but because this spatial transition is too arbitrary, it does not give people a convincing feeling. In "Long Days on Earth", it jumps from Baotou to the fujian seaside fishing village, "Rizhao Chongqing" jumps from Chongqing to Rizhao, and "Intruder" is suddenly pulled from Beijing back to the remote ravine where the third-line factory in Guizhou is located. This style has already laid down his structural model in Wang Xiaoshuai's first film.
In the filming of films, Wang Xiaoshuai can maintain the similar concepts and technical techniques unchanged for more than 20 years, reflecting his persistence and perseverance, and he has continuously impacted the European Film Festival with his unchanging shooting methods, won many affirmations and trophies, and walked out of his successful path. Perhaps this path cannot be copied, but in the process of looking back, we can grasp the trajectory of Wang Xiaoshuai's creation, so that we can better see the variables and outliers of Wang Xiaoshuai in "The Long Day", and more of them have not changed and the original intention of the debut work.