Introduction: I wanted to stand and worship the Buddha.
Nowadays, in the genre films directed by Ning Hao, it is difficult to see the rebellious and reflective side of the sixth generation of the group, and perhaps it is not wrong for other sixth-generation directors. According to the reason, ordinary people burn incense and worship what Buddha, but if you are a monk, then you have to have a Buddha in the temple and a Buddha in your heart. The reason is that people and things in reality are always in a helpless kink. As Ning Hao's directorial debut, the film "Incense" is easily reminiscent of Jia Zhangke's debut work "Xiaowu" in the story, unlike in the underlying narrative that shows the period of China's social transformation, the narrative symbol of "Incense" makes a satirical symbol of the tearing between the personal ideals and social reality of Ning Hao and the groups he refers to. The film tells the story of a monk who painstakingly repaired the Buddha statue and finally got his wish but faced the crisis of demolishing the temple. The film is shot in a documentary video style, and the narrative presents the space showing the countryside and counties and towns in a specific period, and the overall film presents a rough feeling that points directly to reality from the background to the technique.
I. Architectural images of the times
As a kind of space-time art, film is an important object of expression. Under the camera's eyeball, whether intentionally or unintentionally, spatial information is automatically transmitted through this eyeball into a kind of "memory nerve." Thus, cinema has the medium advantage of a deep and authentic representation of the times, to which Aldo Rossi says: "I believe that Cannaretto and Piranesi of our time are directors, those who make films: they depict the modern city, its center and its periphery... The fringes of these cities were first discovered by film, not architects. "The spatial representation of directors in different eras, countries, and ethnic regions is not the same, but their works have become a good sample for the study of corresponding politics, social culture, and it is also one of the tasks that make the archaeological work of cinema meaningful."
The sixth generation of directors grew up in the era of reform and opening up of economic recovery, and experienced a series of changes in social and humanistic relations brought about by the institutional change in the economic transformation of Chinese society. The decline of the sense of sacredness of the film makes the sixth generation of directors show the rebellion and sharpness of "adolescence" in the realistic encounter of the transition from art to products, and under the identity label of "the sixth generation", the films they create show the bravery and sincerity in this special social period, the intuitive appearance of society, the bottom living environment and the helpless fate of people are vividly and vividly expressed by them through the lens.
The film "Incense" is a typical case of this creative feature, which takes place in the geographical space from small town to rural area in Huairen County, Shanxi Province. The film was filmed in the director's hometown, so Ning Hao has more vivid thinking when presenting the appearance of Chinese villages and towns. With its earth-yellow mud walls, gray-white sand roads, and clustered village houses, the film's rural display is different from the traditional picture performance. The director chose to pull the camera up, and the whole picture of the entire countryside was completely presented in the audience's field of vision, such a picture comprehensively reflected the structural characteristics of the countryside and the material memory, while the low houses in the countryside were more squeezed in the picture, and the difficult and humble life at the bottom was expressed in the form of space. When the camera enters the rural living environment with the characters, the scene of the lens is reduced, and the content in the frame is limited to the limited activities and vision of the protagonist, and a monotonous and tedious sense of loneliness of the small characters arises spontaneously.
In addition to using scenery to express the macro structure and micro material of rural buildings, the director also uses the lens to record some buildings with the characteristics of the times. For example, the rural drama stage with Chairman Mao's quotations printed on it, the broken temple in Nanxiaozhai, the rural classroom with radio, and so on. These spatial buildings not only represent the unique products of the times in the countryside, but also are the memory footnotes of the director's history and emotions.
After the story enters the town, the height of the camera falls to the level of the characters, and the camera is intended to show the relationship between the characters and the urban space that represents socio-economic transformation. In the process of the characters' travels, the depth of field of the picture highlights the spatial characteristics of the town. In some of the scenes where the story takes place, such as the street propaganda blackboard, song hall, hair salon, etc., the architectural space serves as a narrative stage at the same time, but also expands the plot and meaning outside the place. The director's camera performance is also different from before, and even the low-angle camera position clearly reflects the loss and search of the character of the monk in the small town space, which is also the appearance of the lower-level people in the social period at that time.
Second, the metaphor of space and architecture
In the design of architecture, metaphor as a common design technique has been applied to different historical periods through various forms, from macro to micro, and the building itself is a metaphor for spiritual products such as theocracy, monarchy, and human rights from abstraction to figuration. In the film "Incense", the architectural scene has an important symbolic role in the narrative and ideological expression of the film from the author's side of the director's authorship.
In fact, the film tells a story about "faith", in the author's opinion, what is the relationship between faith and people, what is the situation of faith in the face of the social environment and the national system, and what kind of way faith is pursued and settled in the reality of life are the three issues that the film focuses on. In the answers and interpretations of these three questions, architecture becomes the subject and object of the question.
The film actually does not give the whole picture of the broken temple, more of a scene title, and the highlight of the picture is also "a Buddha statue". In fact, this temple, which does not give a full picture, represents the sense of confusion and uncertainty of the sixth generation of directors in the period of social transformation. They represent the dual identity of the monk and the audience, on the one hand, they live in the temple, but the Buddha has become dilapidated in history, on the other hand, they feel unknown and strange about this living environment, and the director at the end of the film writes in a sad and helpless way - for the familiar environment in the past, even if someone is doing repair efforts, but in the face of the force majeure of the times, it can only be sprayed with a big "demolition".
In addition, the last empty shot of the film may represent the director's philosophical or comforting answer. Under the sound of the Buddha, the camera slowly turns to the vast and lonely yellow land, the land is the foundation of human survival, under the confusion of the times, the director tries to restore the hope back to this original homeland again, they may all be like the monks who worship the Buddha, starting from a faith but always in a changing environment suddenly overwhelmed, and the original land of the growth belief may be the true philosophy that answers the confusion of this reality.
epilogue:
Just like the ending of "Xiao Wu", although the monk is not chained to a telephone pole, he is also locked in the social system as a helpless posture. The traditional legality has become illegal today, but the deception of money has become the "transformation" of modernity. In the film, the satirical plot design paints a black reality, and the light that the character has just refracted with his hand is overturned by reality before it returns to the body of faith. Through the reproduction of real space, the film moves serious social propositions to the stage of reality for discussion, and in a sharp joke, architecture and space become high-energy texts that record and review the times.