Movie "Snake"
In the memory of a generation of Chinese filmgoers, the French film Le Serpent has a special place. It is not a timeless classic, it will make people constantly review, replay, or be written into the history of film, with exemplary significance. Nor is it the kind of film that represents an era, and every time it is played, it evokes the collective memory of a generation. Of course, it is not the kind of film that is forgotten, and if you ask Chinese film fans born before the 1970s, many people are still impressed by this old film from more than 30 years ago. You may not remember the storyline, but when you talk about the memorable translations and productions of the 80s, you will be reminded that there is also a French film "Snake".
First, the international production of the "Cold War" era
This 1973 film produced by the French company Labeti has not left a strong mark in the history of French cinema, with little research material and few film reviews. It also made a makeover to the American film market, and when it was released in North America that year, the title was changed to "The Night Flight From Moscow." In fact, the film is tailor-made for American audiences. French director Henri Verneuil equipped the film with a strong hollywood star cast, starring Henry Fonda, Yul Brynner, Dirk Bogarde, all popular superstars. Coupled with the French star Philippe Noiret, who played the protagonist of the famous film "Old Gun", the use of lines, English, German, Russian four Chinese, the story space spans the boundaries of the Soviet Union, France, the United States, Britain, Germany and other political and geopolitical powers, which can be described as a real international production in that year. But the response of american film critics was flat, and there was very little relevant text left about the "Snake" film, and I asked the old seniors of American film critics, who were not deeply impressed by the film.
But it means different things to Chinese audiences, and in the early 1980s, Chinese mainland introduced "Snake", and as soon as it was released, it was launched in the form of cover stills in the influential magazine "Popular Film" that year. In January 1982, "Popular Film" published Hu Sisheng's article "The Revelation of the "Snake"--Commenting on the French Film "Snake""," which said that the film had the greatest enlightenment for Chinese audiences: "The modern secret service methods of the Western spy agencies that are unheard of and unseen by ordinary people: from panic detectors to analog sounders, from various wiretaps to indoor closed-circuit television video installations, will increase their insight and enlightenment." Obviously, the "various" espionage techniques displayed in "Snake" at that time surprised the Chinese people, and even had the risk of "grass and trees being soldiers". Indeed, although "Snake" belongs to the spy suspense genre, some of the images are accompanied by a large number of voiceovers, tirelessly explaining the CIA's lie detectors, mixed recording imitation equipment, metal material analyzers, mainframe computers, eavesdropping equipment, video splicing technology, and monitoring and translation of books and newspapers in the media around the world, which made the audience marvel at that time. The narrative style of this part of the film is quite similar to that of science and education films, which deviates from the development and advancement of the overall suspense plot. It is no wonder that before the film was publicly screened in China, it was once screened as an "internal reference film" in government agencies such as foreign affairs and public security. In terms of China's scientific and technological level in the early 1980s and the limitations of external understanding, "Snake" has some "scientific and technological content", which also helps to increase foreign affairs knowledge. However, it should be noted that at the level of acceptance by domestic audiences, this film is far from being covered by the single level of the modern technology "expo", it was once a cultural event of rich significance, and at the historical node of the alternating stages of the "Cultural Revolution" and the "New Period", it brought chinese audiences information that the author of the film did not expect.
This article starts with the background of the "origin" of this French film, and analyzes what kind of "twist" has emerged between the author's "intention" and the "acceptance" of the Chinese audience. At the same time, how did The special cultural context of China in the 1980s give birth to the "novelty" that the film originally did not have.
Second, the illustration of geopolitics
Lie detector
"Snake" was filmed in the freezing point era of the "Cold War" - 1973: the outbreak of the Fourth Middle East War, the world oil crisis, China's test explosion of hydrogen bombs, the pace of global expansion of the Soviet Brezhnev regime suddenly accelerated, intervened and remotely controlled the Afghan government. What kind of message is the French director Henri Venard trying to convey when he makes a spy film in this cold and bitter era? On the one hand, "Snake" scandalized the British Intelligence Agency, and calculated the loopholes in NATO's defenses in Britain's account. On the other hand, it shakes an olive branch to the United States, recognizes the leadership of the United States in NATO, hopes that the United States will understand France's willfulness in withdrawing from NATO, and also cares for France's isolation in the "Cold War." The historical background on which the film is based is that France withdrew from NATO in 1966, and because the tough President de Gaulle was dissatisfied with the "brotherly love" between the United States and Britain, he refused to allow Britain and the United States to dominate NATO. He believed that France was also a world power, so he asked the three giants of the United States, Britain and France to work together. It also requires a conditionality: the integration of French Algeria into NATO defense. The United States turned a deaf ear to the demands of this humiliated country, which had become a servant of the Nazis. Therefore, France decided to withdraw from NATO, defend itself independently, and make peace with the Warsaw Pact alone. De Gaulle's autonomous diplomatic posture, not commensurate with the reality of France's isolation and weakness, made France suffer a lot. This film is a vivid portrayal of the geopolitics of that year: the United States is overbearing but also benevolent, and the British are evil, and the lines in the film are called "a basket of rotten apples that stink"; the defeated west Germany has been "humiliated" and silently becomes a victim of the collusion between the Soviet Union and the British intelligence agencies; France always wants to try and make a difference, but it has no choice but to make a small country, "no capital" (movie line) to show its grand plans. The most intriguing end of the film is that The French intelligence director Lucien Berthon was nearly killed by a British spy, and finally got the CIA's sympathy, he used a bandage to hang his injured arm, escorted the Soviet spy to exchange American pilots, and finally earned Back the dignity of the "Free World" righteous fighters for France.
This complex, thrilling, and confusing film was too difficult for Chinese audiences in the early 1980s to digest. After all, China has just opened up, has limited understanding of international politics, and such a tangled historical background and such delicate international relations have been thrown to Chinese audiences who have been isolated from the world for decades, and the effect is of course very different from today's appreciation of Western films. A French film with lines in multiple languages, on location in many European countries, with all the actors using international stars, and the director's goal is clearly aimed at the international film market. But I'm sure Henry Wiener would never have anticipated the grandeur of his film's release in China, nor could he have understood what it would mean for Chinese audiences.
Third, the temptation of the snake
The narrative perspective of "Snake" focuses on the French intelligence director Berton, the protagonist of a French political film should be French after all, but the really impressive character is not him. Colonel Aleksey Teodorovic Vlassov, second counselor at the Soviet Embassy in France, and Allan Davies, director of the Central Intelligence Bureau, are the highlights of the film, and it is these two characters who drive the ups and downs of the plot. At the beginning of the film, Colonel Vlasov takes a flight back to Paris Orly Airport, when suddenly he runs into the airport police station and asks for political asylum. The French Intelligence Service immediately realized that a big fish had been hooked, and the director of the bureau, Bertón, personally directed the interrogation, trying to extract valuable information from Vlasov's mouth. However, the Soviet colonel refused to speak, insisting that he be sent to the American Embassy in Paris. Berton exhausted his tricks, but none of them worked, and finally lamented: "France does not have the capital to buy traitors."
CIA Headquarters
The camera switches to the CIA headquarters building in Washington, where Colonel Vlasov successfully deceives a lie detector and gains the trust of Alan Davis. He then provided the CIA with a wealth of intelligence to inform the KGB's SPY network and interrogations in NATO. But incredibly, almost all of the West German generals and French intelligence officers in key positions were Soviet spies. Thus began nato's internal investigation and purges. Senior West German military officials committed mysterious suicides, and French intelligence director Berton was framed. The film does not come out until the end, and Vlasov pretends to defect, but in fact has a KGB mission to conspire with Philip Boyle, a senior M16 officer of the British Intelligence Service, to overthrow NATO defenses. CIA Director Davis found out that NATO has been severely damaged. All he could do was to give NATO a minimum compensation and exchange Vlasov for prisoners of war. Davis, along with the wounded Berton, watched the "evil" KGB colonel cross the border and exchange a captured American pilot from the Soviet Union, with little left of the exposed Soviet spy.D.
The film satirizes the McCarthy doctrine of the 1950s in the United States, when Republican Senator McCarthy frantically bit the CIA and the U.S. government, identifying hundreds of Communists hidden in the government, and the intelligence services also lurked a large number of Soviet spies, and American society fell into the "Red Menace" (Red Menace). In 1962, Hollywood filmed "The Manchurian Candidate," which portrayed the McCarthy incident as a Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government, manipulating a McCarthy-style senator to engage in a political purge to dismantle the American polity. The film was rated as one of the century-old classics.
"Snake" differs from "The Manchurian Candidate" in that the french film is based on the espionage cases that took place in Europe, that is, the Philby and Cambridge spy gangs that shocked the world in the 1950s and 60s. Before World War II, a group of young people who graduated from Cambridge University joined the British Intelligence Service, but they had communist romantic ideals and were willing to serve Stalin. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Cambridge Spy Gang provided the Soviet Union with a lot of NATO top-secret intelligence, and finally fled to Moscow for refuge. The movie "Snake" chooses this theme as the starting point, interpreting the internal struggle of the entire NATO and the "hot war" of the intelligence of the two camps.
Types of "Cold War" and "post-Cold War" espionage
If compared with the current popular spy films, "Snake", a film produced in the "Cold War" cold era, has quite unique features. For example, although the core character of the film, Vlasov, has many similarities with the "post-Cold War" spy image: the personal information about him is limited, there is no vivid biographical background, and any dramatic conflict or reversal will change the audience's sense of identity. For example, the lost returnees who defect from the free world suddenly become sinister double agents, and the audience changes their psychological identity as the plot takes a sharp turn. However, he is very different from the "post-Cold War" spy film to create a character type. The identity of "post-Cold War" spies has been uncertain from beginning to end, and they will always be the "other" in mainstream society, not belonging to any country or political community. For example, Jack Bourne, the protagonist of the American film "Spy Heavy", loses his identity from the beginning, and the whole plot is the process of finding identity. [2] The "post-Cold War" spy film has a distinctly anti-political national character, and the spy genre film is pulled by the huge engine of global integration, constantly alienating the audience from the sense of political identity between the audience and the characters in the film. Between the "other" and the mainstream, between the individual and society, between alienation and tension, the "post-Cold War" spy film deconstructs national identity, collective identity and political consciousness, and fictionalizes the legend of individual freedom and wanderers. In the movie "Snake", which was produced in the smoke of the "Cold War", the political identity of each fictional character is unquestionable, they directly represent national sovereignty, and the main role is the intelligence chief of the United States, Britain, France and Germany, which is like the embodiment of the four big countries. Fonda's CIA director Alan Davis harmonizes with the real historical figure Allen Dulles (who was the CIA director from 1953 to 1961), philips, a spy installed in the British Intelligence Agency M16, and Kim Philby in the Cambridge Spy Gang, with obvious references and insinuations.
The distinctive feature of "Snake" is that it has a strong sense of the times, rich political significance, and even today when watching it, you still feel the haze and cold of the "Cold War" Iron Curtain. Therefore, the film should first be defined as a political film, and its style is realistic. Secondly, in order to apply the spy film genre, suspense and thrilling elements have also added a lot. Like many spy movie classics such as 007, the plot of Snake unfolds in a panoramic way through the switching of urban spatial pictures: Paris, Washington, Munich, Bonn, London, Moscow, but different from the "post-Cold War" Hollywood spy films. The picture of "Spy Movies" always cuts quickly from one city to another, and the long-range view overlooks the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Colosseum, London Big Ben and other landmark buildings, showing the audience a postcard-like scenery, allowing people to travel the world without leaving the theater.
Snake, on the other hand, is filmed on tourist landmarks, but close-up photographs of buildings symbolizing international political power: the Elysee Palace, the Soviet Embassy in Paris, the CIA building, 10 Downing Street, and Moscow's Red Square. The image space never indulges in the floating light of global tourism, but insists on using the lens to outline the geopolitical pattern of the "Cold War" and the road map of the power game. Within the framework of the popular genre of spy films, "Snake" still tries to maintain the element of realism, reproducing the two worlds separated by the "Iron Curtain", fighting openly and secretly, and competing for power. Perhaps, the reason why the genre of spy films has flourished for a long time stems from the integration of the two heterogeneous elements of thriller suspense and realism, and in the collision and compromise of each other, a huge aesthetic tension bursts out.
If the spy type is to enhance the sense of reality through the transformation of space pictures, then "Snake" can be described as ingenious in its image processing for the political space of Moscow's Red Square. The urban spaces of the "Free World" in the film are all filmed on location, while the Red Square footage only appears on the screen in the screening hall of the CIA building. The CIA, along with allied intelligence officers, assessed the hypocrisy of the Soviet colonel's defection, and a large documentary was released on the spot: Khrushchev's red square military parade, and Brezhnev's presidency of the Kremlin Party Congress. The film allows the audience to watch the unattainable enemy country "from a distance" through two screens, making the audience consciously aware of the existence of the film lens: both Red Square and the Kremlin have been carefully screened and processed by the Soviet propaganda machine. The effect is a sense of defamiliarization: the viewer's "sense of presence" when viewing Paris, Washington, and London is gone, and therefore cannot experience this incomprehensible "evil empire". The treatment of the image of the Soviet colonel is also similar, with Ubrana playing Vlasov with only a cold, dull face, and no one can see through his inner world. This is the face of the Soviets in the "Cold War" era: only the shell, no inner emotions, they are cold, cruel, inhuman, incomprehensible, inexperiencable.
Double screen
Fifth, reconstruct the picture of the world's imagination
Although director Henry Venal was deliberate and conveyed his ideas in a nuanced film language, his painstaking efforts in Chinese cinemas in the early 1980s may not have been understood. Ordinary Chinese audiences, accustomed to watching Cultural Revolution films and Third World films, have only three words to look at this Western spy film: they can't understand it. I still like it, because it is novel and chic, and I feel that there is too much background knowledge in "Snake", and the emerging technologies and film means are also dazzling, it is a film with rich meaning, from which you can learn a lot of new things, so I want to watch it again.
Interestingly, not long ago, I screened and explained this film in the "Cold War Spy Movie" film series held at Peking University, and the young students actually found it difficult to understand, and the reason was that the "Cold War" was too far away. But Chinese audiences in the 1980s were in the midst of the "Cold War" and also felt "far away." In the early 1980s, the West was so "far away" from us, because the Chinese people knew almost nothing about the Western world, and it was the remoteness caused by the isolation of space. Today, Western culture is in close contact with Chinese social life, and the sense of distance is gone, while the "Cold War" has long passed, and time can be almost forgotten.
There is also a geopolitical factor, the "Cold War" years in which China oscillated between the poles of the United States and the Soviet Union. One pole is the Soviet Union, once a "big brother", as close as a brother. However, Sino-Soviet relations were at odds, and suddenly they became "Soviet revision imperialism" and became the "biggest enemy at present" of the Chinese people. Of course, its face is abominable, but over the years, influenced by Soviet literature and art, Chinese audiences are emotionally close to the Soviet Union, at least it is "perceptible" and "recognizable". The film "Snake" deals with the image of the Soviet Union in a defamiliaristic way, and on the level of acceptance, Chinese and Western audiences will not feel the same. The other pole of the "Cold War" is the United States, which after the Korean War was the most sinister enemy and Chinese not with it. However, with the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States and the reform and opening up, the image of this enemy has begun to become ambiguous, either as an enemy or as a partner. At the beginning of the reform and opening up, Chinese began to be fascinated by everything in the United States, hoping to understand why this young country was so rich and strong, but little was known. Throughout the 1980s, French, American, British, Japanese and German films flocked to Chinese cinemas, and television screens brought Western film and television works to thousands of households. The eye-opening Chinese audience is like watching a dazzling and colorful drama, although it is too late to savor the delicate relationship between NATO countries represented in "Snake", and there is no time to understand the director's lament about the embarrassing situation in France, or to confide in the United States, but its state of mind has long been broken by the film critic Hu Sisheng: whether it is understood or not, Western films will always "increase their insight and enlighten". [3] In the last years of the "Cold War", Chinese gradually changed their role identity in the movie, the heroes in the films of socialist countries lost their aura, and the humanity expressed in Western films was deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and the utopia of the future ideal was constructed.
Spy Bridge
In my memory, "Snake" also brought a "by-product" to the lives of Chinese, which was even more unpredictable to the director. Since the 1980s, the number of people going abroad in China's foreign affairs department has been increasing day by day, and there have been frequent "defections" incidents. Whenever I heard a document conveyed from the authorities saying that so-and-so had defected from the "going abroad group" at the Paris or London airport, I had in my mind the scene that began with "Snake": the bald Colonel Vlasov bought a bottle of wine at the Paris Orly Airport Duty Free Shop, quietly stuffed a note to the clerk, and then suddenly rushed into the airport police station and asked for political asylum. I later heard that some of the "defectors" behaved dramatically, like imitating a movie, making people feel exciting and thrilling, and the ghosts of Soviet agents roamed China. In the 1990s, the wording of the organ documents was changed, changing "defection" to "exodus", and the mysterious feeling disappeared. Soon, the enthusiasm for "running away" was gone, and the Chinese people "economically immigrated" through legal channels. And now, in just 30 years, the most popular is already "returnees", and this history has long faded from people's memories.
Defection at Orly Airport
However, after all, the "Cold War" changed the fate of NATO countries and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the two Germanys were reunified. To today's young audience, even the terms "Soviet Union" and "West Germany" are unfamiliar, let alone the history of the "Cold War." Perhaps, serious reflection on the "Cold War" has only just begun.
exegesis:
[1] See Hu Sisheng, "The Revelation of the Snake: A Review of the French Film "The Snake"," Popular Film, No. 1, 1982.
[2] See Dai Jinhua, "Spy Movies: A Cultural Analysis of Spy Films," Film Art, No. 01, 2010.
[3] See Hu Sisheng.