In 1935, the world's first color film "Flashy Family" was successfully filmed, marking the advent of color movies.
In 1948, Mei Lanfang starred in China's first color film.
Color films have developed for more than eighty years, but in the 21st century, there are still some directors who return to shooting black and white films, not limited by technical limitations, but actively pursuing a stylized effect.
Take some of the more famous films in China as an example.
2000 "Here Comes the Devil"
Sin City (2005)
The Artist (2011)
Snow White Bullfight (2012)
Nebraska (2013)
Tullow in 2015
2016 'No Problem'
August 2016
Rome in 2018
Cold War 2018
The Lighthouse in 2019
There are also 2017 domestic films "Village Drama", which are mostly black and white images, adding a little color picture;
There is also the interweaving of black and white and color tones in the 2017 Taiwanese film "Big Buddha Plus";
There are also "Mad Max 4" and "Parasite" that have been produced and released in black and white after the success of color films.
The artistry of these black-and-white films has been recognized by the industry and the audience.
The Douban score is mostly 8+, and the 7.1 of "August" is the lowest score, but it actually won the 2016 Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film, and I also went to the cinema to see it, and played four stars at the time.
Today I want to talk about another black and white masterpiece, the 2019 Venice Film Festival competition film "The Painted Bird".
The director is Czech Václav Marhaul, with Rotten Tomatoes giving 91% freshness and strict MTC giving 75 points.
The Hollywood Reporter put it this way: In a nearly three-hour film, the shock of cold incest, bestiality and sexual abuse, beatings, killings and maim is uninterrupted, yet the evil spectacle does not numb the audience, but is immersed in a depressing climax of horror, from which there is no escape.
Yes, it was an oversized and controversial film that was said to have sparked mass departures during its screening in Venice.
Recently, this god film has produced cooked meat resources.
The language that cannot be understood, the black and white picture, for a while, makes people confused about the time background and regional background, and it is necessary to watch it patiently.
The opening chapter is a little boy running with a small animal in his arms, and suddenly several people jump out and throw him down, someone beat him, someone snatched the small animal, poured gasoline on it, burned it alive, and no one spoke the whole time.
In fact, there is very little dialogue in the whole film, especially the protagonist little boy, who rarely speaks.
And the whole film is filled with this kind of unexplained evil.
"The Stained Bird" is divided into 9 paragraphs, all marked with human names, each paragraph representing a little boy's experience, which together constitute the little boy's turbulent and displaced journey to purgatory.
「Martha」
An old woman who takes care of a little boy
In response to the little boy being bullied, Marta says it's the little boy's own fault because he shouldn't have run out alone.
The little boy plays the piano song "To Alice", and Marta bursts into tears.
Marta passed away while washing her feet, startling the little boy by dropping an oil lamp, causing a fire and setting the house on fire.
Watching the flames soar into the sky, the little boy retreated backwards, gradually disappearing into the darkness.
The little boy wandered to a village and was beaten in sacks, and the villagers regarded him as a foreign demon.
The villagers were supposed to burn and drown the little boy, and finally sold him as an animal to a godmother.
「Olga」
The goddess who stood and peed
The godmother went around giving people false cures, and the little boy became an assistant.
There may be an epidemic in the area, many people have died, the boys are also infected, and the godmother pulled the dying boy into the wild and buried it, leaving only his head exposed.
Attracting a flock of blackbirds, the boy was pecked to the point of bleeding – the poster for the film is based on this passage.
An old woman appears, scares away the blackbird, and saves the little boy.
Then one day, a man drove the little boy into the river for no apparent reason.
「Miller」
The man who was gouged out
The little boy drifts all the way and is saved by a man, Miller.
Miller was a worker in a family, and the man said it would bring bad luck, but in the end he accommodated the little boy.
The man was an old man, suspected that his wife and Miller were having an adulterous affair, committed violence against his wife, and used a spoon to gouge out Miller's eyes, and the eyeballs were almost reduced to cat food.
The little boy escaped and returned the eyeball to Miller.
「Lekh & Ludmila」
An old man who keeps birds and a in the woods
Lekh, an alcoholic old man who keeps birds, takes in the little boy.
The sent a bird to the old man, and the old man and the were wild.
The famous scene of the dot appears in this passage, a bird is painted in oil and released into the flock, and the kind will not recognize it, but will expel and besiege it until it dies.
The bird keeper saw this as a game, but the little boy sobbed in pain.
The "stained bird" symbolizes the person who is considered "outlier".
The old man who raised birds hanged himself, the little boy saw that he could not save him, in order to shorten his painful time, the little boy jumped around the old man and accelerated the old man's breath with his own weight.
After the old man died, the little boy released all the birds raised by the old man.
「Hans」
German officer
The film goes on here, mentioning for the first time the identity of the little boy, who is a Jew.
So we know that this is the theme of World War II, the story of the persecution of the Jews.
A group of military thugs exploited a village and sent the little boy as a gift to the German barracks.
Officer Hans was ordered to shoot the little boy, but he was soft-hearted and released the little boy.
A group of Jewish civilians jumped from a moving train to escape, and were killed by German soldiers, even babies.
The little boy ripped his shoes from the dead man, but was captured by the Germans.
「Priest & Garbos」
Priests and pedophiles
The priest rescued the boy and asked him to work as an assistant in the church, but the priest was seriously ill and knew that his time was running out.
A man named Garbos offered to adopt the little boy.
He thought he was a good man, but he had pedophilia and abused little boys.
The little boy killed Garbos with a plan, thinking that he could return to the church, but the kind priest was dead, replaced by a priest, no one protected the little boy, and the villagers threw the little boy into the dung pit.
「Labina」
Sexually perverted woman
The little boy went into exile, and in the winter, the days were even more difficult.
At the end of the road, the little boy is saved by Labina.
Labina is a perverted woman with a personality, an old man dying on a sickbed, and she also has to do some rain with her.
The old man is dead, buried, and she is going to touch the little boy and force him to kiss her feet, so that she can get sexual pleasure.
When Labina Overlord hardened his bow, he thought that the little boy was not powerful, and slapped him - hey, hey, he's still a child, not fully developed.
And the little boy also feels guilty because of his own inadequacy, Labina provocatively deliberately has sex with the domestic sheep in front of the little boy... What a twisted sexual enlightenment.
The little boy was so angry that he beheaded the sheep and threw the bloody sheep's head through the window into Labina's room, and then the little boy ran.
The little boy also ambushed an old man on the side of the road, wounding him and snatching his clothes.
「Mitka」
Russian soldiers
A group of Germans slaughtered the village, the villagers died in various ways, and raped the village girl on horseback. But then a group of Russian soldiers arrived in tanks, and the regiment destroyed the Germans and hung their bodies in public.
The little boy was left in the barracks as a war orphan, arranged to stay with Mika, and dressed him in a military uniform.
Mitka sneaked out of the barracks late at night, and the little boy followed. He thought mika was going to be a deserter, but it turned out that he was going to avenge several comrades who had been hurt by the local villagers.
Mitka coolly sniped a few people across the trees, and asked the little boy to witness the whole process with a telescope, and told him: This is called eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
The troops were to be transferred, and Mitka and the little boy were separated, giving the little boy a gift: a pistol.
「Nikodem&Joska」
Father and little boy
The little boy was sent to a Jewish orphanage. Adults punish children, and there is bullying among suffering children.
The little boy was insulted and beaten by the vendors just because he looked at the Trojan toys on the stall.
The little boy takes revenge and follows the peddler all the way, taking the pistol that Mika gave him and shooting the peddler twice in a row.
Father Nikodem came to claim the little boy, the father knelt down, cried bitterly, hugged, but the little boy's face was numb.
When the father and son were alone, the father released apologies and love, and the little boy did not say a word and left in anger.
Eventually the little boy and his father embarked on a journey home.
On the bus, the little boy saw the number on his father's arm and should understand that his father was not easy, and that the numbering meant that his father was a Jewish concentration camp survivor.
The little boy wrote his name on the car window, and we knew the little boy's name for the first time: Joska.
And remembering his name means that the little boy has kept a heart.
No matter who took him in, the little boy worked diligently and competently, and was silent and not much, in fact, a good companion, and it was also excellent to be a servant, but he was always insulted and hurt.
The little boy has big eyes, long eyelashes, looks good, and the language seems to be fluent, at least he can understand what others say, and he rarely speaks, so he does not expose his accent, I don't know how others know that he is Jewish, and he has no good face.
The little boy has never laughed, from panic to sympathy to helplessness to numbness, from victim to perpetrator, the evil of human nature in the context of war will also corrupt the child's heart, and may make everyone become "the same kind".
Fortunately, the little boy who has endured hardships has survived, and reuniting with his father and returning home also means the hope of a new life.
I've seen a lot of anti-war movies, and there's no shortage of kid-oriented ones, but "The Painted Bird" is still unique.
On the one hand, of course, there are so many jaw-dropping visual displays of barbarism and brutality, and the shame is explosive;
On the other hand, the audiovisual language is prominent, 35 mm Cinemascope format shooting, there are poetic empty shots and close-ups of characters full of emotions, black and white pictures although reducing the impact of blood but also purifying the mood of the movie, and bringing out a retro feeling, the village is more gloomy, the little boy is more innocent;
In addition, the 169-minute length of the film has no soundtrack, only highlighting the sounds of nature and human activities, the contrast between soothing rhythms and stimulating plots brings out a sense of breathing, and the sense of realism brings out a sense of epicness;
It is also worth mentioning that petr Kotlár, a young Czech actor who plays a little boy, is too smart, the first time he acted in a movie, he is so delicate, his eyes and physical reactions are in place, he is now 12 years old, the film began filming in March 2018, that is to say, he was only 10 years old when he entered the group, I hope he is not frightened by this experience and continues to develop in the film industry.
At the end of the film, "Horchat Hai Caliptus" sounded, I couldn't understand the lyrics, but the melody and sense of language really poured another cup of shochu on the audience's heart - on the top.