Old street corner, grocery store. Black long straight with braids.
Blue shirt, tearful face. Small county town, old lover.
Probably since the May Day holiday, following the popularity of "reverse county tourism", a group of portrait portraits or street photography with the background of the county and small towns and winning in the yellowed nostalgic style have been pushed into the public eye.
People call this style "county literature", and after "Versailles literature", "nonsense literature" and "crazy literature", it once again stirred up a pool of Internet traffic. On an online community, the topic of "county literature" has more than 16 million views, and the number of views on related short video platforms has reached 420 million.
On May 9, the "God of Henan Rap" released the work "Factory", which contains a song about looking back at his hometown, a music video shot in Jiaozuo, and a collapse process that crushes the village to rubble under his feet. Gao Zan commented, "This is the real county literature." He sang "I didn't love here, I was just born in this place", singing the hearts of countless wanderers who ran away from the county.
Screenshot of the MV of "Factory".
They walked out of the county and drifted in the big city, becoming unknown people and becoming the denominator of big data. The city is big, but it can't accommodate them; I want to go back to my hometown, but I am unwilling.
The literature of the county town has the core of nostalgia, and there is also the alienation of individual narratives.
This spontaneous fragmented creation on the Internet, whether it can be truly named "literature" or not, has indeed pushed the county town to the center of the field of public opinion.
Tracing back to the source, we will find that the county has never been absent from contemporary literary and artistic creation. From taking root in the county seat in the 1980s, to feeling hesitant about the county seat in the 1990s, and fleeing the county seat at the beginning of the century, when he first saw the glimmer of the city, and now looking back at the county seat, generation after generation of literary and art workers have used their life experience to nurture the creation of county literature.
Literature and video have always kept pace with the evolution of the county and the flow of population.
In the county seat, see the world
In 1986, writer Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" began to be published in "Flower City" magazine.
This is the story of a poor young man who ran away from the countryside to study and work in the county town, gritting his teeth like a cow and horse to endure the pain of fatigue and being tempered by life and fate.
The county seat is much wider, richer and more wonderful than the small villages in the loess ravine, where there are theaters, courts, banks, and factories, which are the dreams of a small person in Sun Shaoping's world. Going round and round, he finally changed his fate as a coal miner.
In the TV series "Ordinary World", Sun Shaoping played by Yuan Hong
Sun Shaoping's story also has traces of Lu Yao's life. Lu Yao, the "farmer's son", was "the poorest student in Chengguan Primary School", who almost dropped out of school because of his poor background, but with the support of his fellow villagers, he was able to enter the middle school in Yanchuan County to continue his studies.
After becoming a writer, he continued to live in a corner of the Loess Plateau, endured the torture of poverty, loneliness and illness, and created a literary masterpiece such as "The Ordinary World" with pen and paper, measuring the breadth of the human spirit with the struggle of a rural person.
Like Lu Yao, the county seat is the starting point for many people to observe the world.
In 1997, Jia Zhangke, a boy from Fenyang, returned to his hometown after completing his studies at Beijing Film Academy and focused the camera on Xiao Wu, an idle young man wandering around.
Xiao Wu occasionally borrows money, is accustomed to stealing, is always in a daze, and wants to fall in love. Along with the wandering of the characters, there are dirty streets, psychedelic song halls, broken brick walls, and cramped houses in the county seat. Such people are the thief friends who really appeared in Jia Zhangke's life, and they also appeared in the life of you and me in the county, they are classmates who have not studied well since childhood and were kept in class, and they are street slickers and gangsters who walk the streets and alleys all day long when they grow up.
Stills from "Xiao Wu".
If Lu Yao's county seat in the 1980s gave Sun Shaoping the story of achieving a class leap and opening up the possibility of life, then in Jia Zhangke's lens, the county town that was undergoing drastic transformation in the 1990s is a kind of metaphor for people, Xiaowu is a portrayal of the county's young people who can't keep up with the development of the environment, and it is a traditional social relationship that is gradually collapsing due to external shocks.
The former, accepted by the county, is a high-spirited narrative and a chapter of personal struggle. The latter, abandoned by the county seat, looked back frequently with a nostalgic mentality, but was powerless to change.
The difference in narrative tone depends on the relationship between people and the environment, whether it is synchronized in the same direction or deviated from it. But what hasn't changed is that the county has been advancing.
The county seat in the movie
In 1998, "Xiao Wu" made the Fenyang boy shine in the world film industry, after that, Jia Zhangke continued to focus on the Taihang Mountains of the county, the surging Yellow River and marginal individuals, in the first 15 years of the 21st century, he successively created "Platform", "Destined", "Ren Yao", "Three Gorges Good Man" and other works.
In the decade after 2000, the urbanization rate of the population increased by an average of 1.37 percentage points per year, and half of the population has completed the transformation of urbanization.
Stills from "Heaven is Destined".
In this migration of rural population to cities, as the basic unit in the process of urbanization and the transition zone from rural China to a modern country, the county often assumes the function of executor and transit station.
Reality provides a variety of materials for literary and artistic creation. Like Jia Zhangke, a group of people use images to faithfully record the stories of actively or passively fleeing the countryside and county seats. They share the same name: the sixth generation of Chinese directors.
Geographical features are often an important element in the construction of images and literature, and unlike the "fifth generation", which focuses on the local tales of life and death fatigue on the loess, for the "sixth generation", the complex and lush style of the county provides the core image for their narratives.
With the passage of the film background from the township to the county, the creative theme of this generation of directors has shifted from the vernacular fable under the isomorphism of the family and the country to the confusion of marginal individuals.
seems to be a historical coincidence, and the fate of the current online "county literature" being crusaded against has also befallen the sixth generation of directors. When they use their lenses to focus on the displacement of individual life, the confusion of spirit, and the closed and backward environment under the urbanization construction of the county, this creative style has been criticized as the limitation of personal experience and the "beauty of ugliness".
But this creative style comes from the author's strong sensitivity to the times, Jia Zhangke said: "In the current China, I feel a surreal atmosphere, because the whole country and society are developing rapidly under an inexplicable huge driving force, and people are carrying unprecedented pressure. ”
In Fenyang, where he lens, "every afternoon there is a strong sun, under the unobstructed direct sunlight, wrapping the mountains and rivers in warm colors." It is from here that Qiaoqiao, Brother Bin, and Han Sanming are carried forward by the rolling forward times, and the era homes of the Three Gorges County are submerged by the torrent of the times.
Stills from "Let It Go".
Also on the edge of the Three Gorges, in Wushan County, the hometown of the "sixth generation" director Zhang Ming, it is covered by water vapor clouds and rain rising from the Yangtze River all the year round, and is forgotten like Pluto, but the situation on the edge cannot stop the spontaneous desires of young men and women in Jiangcheng, like the vegetation in the continuous mountains, ready to move and full of vitality.
In Wang Xiaoshuai's shot, her parents left their hometown for the construction of the county seat in Guizhou and took root, while the "green and red" escaped the damage caused to her by fate, generations and love by leaving the closed and disorderly county, and longed to exile and heal their souls in the prosperity of the city.
When the era came here, the coordinate system of population flow had formed the sequence of countryside-county-city, and the story of "green and red" continued the narrative of the county town to the glitz of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the opening up of big cities.
Escape and look back
Escaping from the county was once the fate of aspiring young people in the county. Specific to this group of "sixth generation" directors who are mainly "post-70s", most of them have a label: North Drift.
Jia Zhangke said: "I really got my hometown because I left it. Zhang Ming's work unit and household registration are all in Beijing, but he said: "Beijing doesn't seem to have anything to do with me...... I have never regarded Beijing as my hometown, I have always felt as a guest and always have a sense of intimacy when I return to Wushan. ”
Stills from "Qinghong".
They all have a strong sense of nostalgia, looking for a sense of belonging, wandering in the huge and indifferent city without stability, but they frequently look back at their hometown in the city and reshape their hometown in the image.
At the turn of the century, urbanization has conquered a period of progress on the land of China like an iron army, the tide of marketization and globalization is surging, the Internet is spreading, and super cities are rising. Internet literature, which is based on daydreaming, follows the logic of capital and comes to the front of the stage through network cable and wireless communication.
More and more people who fled from the county are joining the creation of online literature. With post-80s writers as the main body, they no longer write about county seats, but about cities, and write about glamorous and drunken cities, and the concept of "youth literature" has surfaced in the market.
In 2003, a writer from Gongfushun County published his first novel, Phantom City, which attracted attention for a while. So far, this writer from a small county, short and thin, who no one knew before, knew that he was Guo Jingming.
Since 2008, Guo Jingming's literary business empire has moved upward with the birth of "Small Times", as reflected in Guo Jingming's novels, the times and the world have squandered their attention to the city, and the realistic county narrative has been reduced to a niche taste.
Stills from "Little Times".
But there are still people who insist on documenting the county. Sun Pin, a writer who is also a "post-80s" writer such as Guo Jingming and Han Han, insists on recording the people in the hometown of the small town. Sun Pin is also from Shanxi County, located in Jiaocheng County, in the Luliang Mountains, and has a history of thousands of years since the sixteenth year of Emperor Kaihuang of Sui.
Sun Pin's memory of the small town is always inseparable from the woman's abuse and the smell of rotten apples, so sharp and rich, it is a neighbor's past when she was growing up, and it is also the painful product of cruel life to all things in the world, spicy and fresh.
In 2008, the year after graduating from Lanzhou University's Department of Chinese, Sun Pin began writing in the midst of daily pain and despair in Taiyuan, faithfully documenting the story of mountain people from the countryside to the county seat, from the county town to the city, and back again. She calls the "Mountains and Forests Trilogy" her "rediscovery of her hometown".
In "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", the protagonist who took root in the county town lost his hometown and childhood forever. The factory children in "Castle in the Sky", the sudden arrival of the textile factory, is a symbol of urbanization, impacting the peaceful life of the county, between the old and the new, the individual is separated, there is nowhere to take root, and the heart is uneasy. Later, in the "Seaside Trilogy", she walked out of the Taihang Mountains and came to the southernmost town, but what remained unchanged was that she continued to write about the young men and women who wandered between big cities, small county towns, and old villages.
Sun Pin said: "I am full of interest in the characters in the gap of the times, they ...... Precipitous, secluded, lonely, and embarrassed, like a needle deeply embedded in the texture of the times. "And the county seat, isn't it also a life that grows and develops between the rural pattern and the modernization process? A total of 2,844 large and small county-level administrative districts, scattered in all corners of half of China's territory, have been trying to absorb and develop themselves for a long time, and they are also like those marginal people, waiting for the call and summons of the times and fate.
Regression
Now, the heavy responsibility of the times has fallen on the county seat. In 2022, a policy document will be issued, and the county will become an important carrier of urbanization. What followed was the return of the county's narrative to the field of public opinion.
"The hotly discussed county lady" and "Beipiao youth are laughed at by the poverty of the county life", putting the strong consumption power of the county economy in front of the stage. Starbucks, covering more than 800 counties in China, and similar multinational groups and first-line brands regard the county as a blue ocean market and flock to it. Academic topics such as "county Brahmins", leftover women in the county system, the collapse of the county, and county and township China have focused the eyes of the world on the field of the county.
"County literature" with highly unified creative characteristics is in the ascendancy on the Internet. The character's cold temperament, hesitant demeanor, stubborn eyes, looking back and tears with a sense of brokenness. In front of the characters are the withered, dilapidated, and dilapidated streets of the county town. The words "can't get out, can't see through" and "take me away, leave the county" are the tone of sadness and sadness.
These everyday elements are the cultural genes of this Internet carnival, constructing a set of highly homogeneous template formulas that can be easily copied by imitation.
Wearing faded blue shirts, retro red skirts, card players, CCDs, and film cameras, they poured into the county one after another, clumsily imitating the image style of Jia Zhangke and Wong Kar-wai, either highly saturated or faded, shooting a sense of film, punching cards, taking pictures, and posting to Moments, with similar landscapes and emotional atmospheres, piecing together their imaginary county appearance.
Actor Xu Ruohan posted a photo of "County Literature" on social platforms
In the words of Guy Debord, "the landscape is not the accumulation of images, but the social relations between people mediated by images". The extension of social relations to real life is intertwined by the external environment, lifestyle, interpersonal relationships, and inner emotions. These are the basic elements of the story. This may explain why the public often uses the "sense of story" to evaluate whether a literary and artistic work is attractive enough. The same evaluation also appears in the cultural phenomenon of "county literature".
People who chase "county literature" are moved by the nostalgic style, the humanistic pyrotechnics, the sad but resolute eyes of the characters in the photos, and the atmosphere of the characters who are broken and resilient.
But "county literature" also provoked people living in the county. They believe that the old urban picture of "county literature" has smeared their thriving hometown, and they posted the development details of their hometown on social platforms against the first- and second-tier cities, and counted the milk tea shops, coffee shops, and high-end brands in shopping malls near their homes, so as to show the fashion, convenience and comfort of the current county life.
On the one hand, there is the brand-new beauty of the modernization of the county in the real world, and on the other hand, there is the cultural carnival of the cyber world's imagination of the withering county. And whether it is praise or disapproval, it essentially points to the same mentality: now we are nostalgic for the county, and we are also yearning for and embracing the county.
Stills from "Heaven is Destined".
The modern army ran over the land of the county, and the dust raised blurred the living individuals. Fortunately, we still have literature and movies, which can salvage these vague individuals from the torrent of life, and reproduce, describe, record, and preserve these vivid lives in the world of literature and art.