Text: Overnight flowers
With leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood become popular in awards season, Quentin Tarantino is once again in the audience's sights. When trying to get to know a director, in addition to the collection of works that represent his highest aesthetic achievements (perhaps Pulp Fiction in Quentin's case), his debut is not to be ignored. It usually shows a director's most sincere emotions and initial creative passion, and the video style embodied in it has become the master of all subsequent explorations.
From the blockbuster of his debut film "Falling Dogs" in 1992 to the sensation of "Pulp Fiction" in 1994, although it was only two years, it was the result of years of accumulation. Quentin had worked in a video store for many years, and in the films that followed, the tribute to the French "New Wave" such as New Hollywood and Godard was obvious and the embodiment of the fan complex. And his films invisibly interact to a certain extent with the postmodern deconstruction of Chinese film master Wong Kar-wai and the violent aesthetics of Lin Lingdong, which is also a pleasure that Chinese audiences can experience more deeply in his films.
The intricate gang relationship, the "broken thoughts" mode of small people talking to themselves but with great interest, the combination of strong sensory impact elements such as blood, violence, and desire, and the absurd and impermanent fate, all constitute the unique and recognizable "Quentin Film" logo. Most importantly, black humor, full of banter and irony and deconstructing tradition, has become a model for avant-garde film analysis in a postmodern context.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > open-ended nonlinear narrative structure</h1>
The classical linear narrative in past films, on the one hand, is subject to the level of film development and greatly influenced by traditional stage dramas, and the most important thing is that the sequential mode has reduced the "viewing threshold" to the greatest extent, which is the most audience-friendly narrative means. With the improvement of the level of viewing and the strengthening of the director's creative stylization, the closed structure and linear narrative are gradually abandoned, and the open non-linear narrative structure begins to be loved by the audience.
Compared with the flashback reproduction of the character's subjective perspective in the classic non-linear narrative Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon", "Falling Water Dog" first uses the creator's omniscient perspective to subvert the order of narrative; secondly, this non-linear structure does not have much psychological, sociological and philosophical symbolic meaning, it is more to enhance the suspense of the story, increase the "reversal" of the plot and the viewing pleasure of "reshaping" the perception.
The vein of "Falling Water Dogs" is very clear, a pair of gangster fathers and sons, six thugs who do not know each other, fail to rob the jewelry store, which gives rise to the suspense of the movie: who is undercover? Who are the traitors? If the traditional sequential approach is adopted, this may be a very prosaic crime film. However, under Quentin's hidden key information points, cause and effect inversion, and layer by layer of cocoon-like narration, the perception of ups and downs, the character impression and story cognition are also constantly being refreshed and reconstructed.
The initial aimless conversation triggered the suspense of "what is the movie going to talk about"; the failure of the robbery led to the main plot reasoning line of "who is undercover"; the revelation of the undercover identity in the final stage triggered a psychological contest, who is the final winner in the struggle?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the metaphor of composition and the expression of detail</h1>
In a large narrative structure, Quentin constructs the story with the ideography of the picture and the vividness of the details of the text. Therefore, for many films with fancy forms and unsmooth stories, it is a positive textbook model. The six robbers do not know each other and are called by code names: Mr. Bai, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, Mr. Jin, Mr. Lan, and Mr. Brown. This alienated relationship makes it difficult to pass. A deep interaction between each other explains the character of the character.
Quentin, on the other hand, completes the metaphor by composing the subtle relationship between the characters in the three-dimensional space through the composition of the two-dimensional picture. For example, at the beginning of the film, Mr. Bai (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Rose) are often in the same static composition from the same perspective, suggesting that the subtle friendship and spiritual interaction between the two is much closer than others. The orange bottles in the bathroom are separated from the red and white sides, and the orange balloons floating by are all hints that Mr. Orange is really undercover.
The vivid presentation of the integrity and three-dimensionality of the characters is a great interest in the film. Mr. Bai has a sophisticated, capable and calm personality, but values love and righteousness, and after establishing a deep friendship with Mr. Orange, he is convinced of him, and even defends the simple friendship and spiritual appreciation between gangster men in defiance of the order of the gangster world. To some extent, the relationship model between Mr. Bai and Mr. Orange is like the gangster played by Li Xiuxian in Lin Lingdong's violent aesthetic peak work "Dragon and Tiger Storm" and the undercover played by Zhou Runfa.
And Mr. Jin's personality is obedient and violent, and the intimacy between the father and son of the gangster boss is also hinted at in the more casual and spontaneous interaction. Therefore, this contradictory and complex relationship between each other appears to be more layered and tense, and cooperation in the face of great interests has clashed at the level of their own higher spiritual pursuits, and everything has come to fruition.
Quentin pays attention to the ritual sense of the character's violent behavior, and unlike Wu Yusen's exuberance, his exaggeration always contains a kind of mockery and foolishness. From the domineering cool slow-motion display of the "all evil people" style at the beginning, the arrogant arrogance of Mr. Jin's solo dance in the middle, to the final dispersal of the song after the rain of bullets, all the violent games are ultimately a "joke", but this humor contains a trace of fate.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the dissolution of postmodernity in the traditional sense</h1>
The ambiguity of the identities of the six strong races is similar to that of Wong Kar-wai's Chongqing Forest, which uses code names 663 and 223 as leung Chao-wai and Jin Chengwu as policemen, and has the same magic: the name is just a code name, and they know nothing about each other.
Combined with Quentin's consistent motif of "life and death", it is similar to what the postmodernists say: the loss of subjectivity emphasizes the impermanence and contingency of fate. Mr. Black became a "symbol" of robber contention because of his cool name, and Mr. Purple was regarded as an unlucky symbol by the gang boss because of his accident. This paradox and absurdity is further reinforced by Quentin's playful tone.
If the lines are everyday and the language is lifelike, it is still only a common feature of realist films, and it is not uncommon in documentary films in France, Italy, and even the world. Then the language in Quentin's films, in a way, even crude and casual, is full of slang. There is no deliberate pursuit of elegance and literature, but close to real life and full of popular interest. From a deeper perspective, the language in Quentin's films is even mixed with some meaninglessness and uncertainty, that is, not every line means something, and may even be a "nonsense" without any purpose and expression.
For example, the beginning of the 7-minute long "nonsense", in addition to explaining the plot and reflecting the characters, their own dialogue does not need to be interpreted too much, Madonna and other popular culture as a daily talk, humorous ridicule between the sexes, just like the daily life of sentient beings in modern society, not all Yangchun white snow, more is the love of hot spots, stars, gossip, and paragraphs.
Therefore, from the narrative, language, and the core of the theme, the postmodern deconstruction of Quentin's films is extremely obvious. Life itself is in the midst of all sorts of messy, disorderly, unknown, misplaced, absurd, and cannot be fully expressed in a clear linear logic.
At the end of the movie, people with names and surnames, ideals and pursuits, morality and justice, and personalities and sharp edges all died in a big scuffle of layers of wrestling. And in the end, he escaped with the jewelry and escaped with the nameless, surnameless, and even unknown Mr. Fan who did not know where he came from. He has no fixed position, no proud obsession and ethics, and any of his actions are based on personal interests as the absolute standard. But he became the one who manipulated his own destiny and became the final "winner".
This kind of black humor and pungent irony is exactly consistent with the deconstruction of traditional postmodernity in the content and form of the film. He abandoned what others saw as absolute value: the defense of male dignity, the observance of justice, the protection of friendship, the maintenance of order, the control of power, but made a complete rebellion and dissolution of established values and beliefs in life, like a "falling dog" who escaped and escaped from justice, achieving a postmodern hero myth.
Under the Hong Kong-style violent aesthetic discourse system such as Lin Lingdong and Wu Yusen, the classical heroes of Zhou Runfa, who abide by traditional morality and simple beliefs, appear lonely and frustrated in the change of times, and are always sad and fatalistic; in Quentin's films, the postmodern heroes who have dissolved the established value system and the will of authoritative discourse survive, but we cannot feel relieved, and we are more confused and confused about the value orientation and the meaning of life.
This is the most subtlety of Quentin's films, which does not try to plan and persuade the audience with an established value and outlook on life, but in a postmodern deconstruction, let the audience feel a profound, complex life form that does not need to be dwarfed and bound by any stereotype
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