1: A film written with life, a torture of life.
On February 16, 2018, a film called "Elephant Sitting on the Ground" was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, and the four-hour film appeared lengthy and repetitive throughout the film circle, but no one left during the screening.
The 68th Berlin Film Festival's Fabisi International Film Critics Award was awarded to this previously unknown director and writer, who re-studied for four years before finally entering the Beijing Film Academy.
This is the posthumous work of young director Hu Bo, and it is also his last work
2. Ordinary characters, simple stories, breathless grayness and ruin.
The story takes place in a small gloomy city in Hebei, a region where modern cities and urban villages are intertwined. The gray sky, the dilapidated board houses, the towering high-rise buildings, and the people struggling to survive.
Four people who have a messy life are linked by an elephant sitting alone in a zoo: Huang Ling and Webb, who attend the worst high school in the city, Yu Cheng, the head of the chaos, and Lao Jin, a widowed old man who is disliked by his family.
They were all forced to breathe in the mud of their lives.
Every morning, Webb was reprimanded by his father, and he accidentally pushed the school Yu Shuai down the stairs.
Yu Chengcai slept with his brother and wife, and when his brother found out, he jumped upstairs in front of him. Later, he received the news that his brother was rolling down the stairs of the school and was unconscious.
Huang Ling and the school director of teaching were in love, but they were unexpectedly exposed in the school group, and then they were abandoned by the director.
And old Jin is just an old widow who is rejected by his family and will be driven to a nursing home to wait for death. He had only one dog by his side and an unworldly granddaughter willing to take care of him, and soon after, the dog was bitten to death in the alley.
Four people who have become desperate for life want to escape their current environment. Either by coincidence or by fate, they invariably embarked on the journey to Manchuria, only because there was an elephant there, and it sat on the ground all day, motionless.
3. Art is the record of life, but also the sublimation and pure feeling of life.
"The Elephant Sits on the Ground" has four hours, which is essentially just four ordinary stories that happen almost every day in life, and the director deliberately extends these stories to four hours, which is almost a torturous viewing experience for ordinary audiences.
The director stubbornly adds a particularly large number of long shots to the film, opening with four protagonists waking up from their beds, and adding a snow shot between these scenes, with a few yellow weeds messed up in the thick snow.
The opening scene is an aggressive sense of suffocation, this oppressive atmosphere and slow transition of the scene, from the beginning to the end of the film.
There is a very special point. It is that his lens seems to be shaking all the time, and there is almost no light, often in a scene, except for the face of the character who is focused, the face of others is blurred.
One detail is that whether it's a moving shot or a still person shot, you can hear some noisy sounds in the background, which are sometimes the voices of the protagonist walking on the side of the road, and it may be the roar of some kind of electrical appliance, the sound of vehicle horns. It could also be the sound of train wheels hitting the tracks.
Because of the various elements above, while creating a sense of despair and depression and illusion, it has an almost cruel sense of reality.
If you watch a four-hour movie all the time, you will be immersed in this atmosphere, but most importantly, you will feel that it is too real, the real is not like a literary film, no rendering, no embellishment, not even superb shooting techniques and editing, some are just heavy and raw long shots, and constantly frozen character close-ups.
He is more like a documentary, because of this rough expression, showing the life of the most real urban marginalized people, abandoned by society, rejected by the world, and finally everyone chooses self-exile.
One of the most intuitive feelings is that you will feel that you are watching a person use DV to take pictures of the lives of the people around you, what happens to them is not far away, maybe something happens to you, before watching this movie, you may never think that the original daily life is so unbearable, but most of us have long been used to it, as long as we can't die, then you can make it up to live.
There is too much shredding and violence in life, unbearable and embarrassing dark sides, trivialities and quarrels in a chicken feather.
After reading it, you may think of such a sentence: "How long do we have to be hurt when we live?" ”
Lens language is the unique style of each director, Hu Bo is using this technique to tell the audience that life is like this, it is very difficult, but you can't go anywhere, it's useless to go anywhere, you have to solve your current problems, there is no elephant to live for you.
4: The vacuum under the lens is the pain and struggle of longing to understand.
Art is the expression of emotions, and emotional use is a language that everyone can understand.
There's a scene in the movie where Webb throws a wet match against the wall overhead, and the burned matches leave black marks on the gray and white wall.
It was as if Webb was painting the walls with a match, and the black marks that had been smoked out resembled black crows.
I'm guessing this scene comes from a dream described in The Great Rift
"He had dreamed of a flock of white crows flying around on a mound, and he thought it was his little world."
"The Great Rift" is an autobiographical novella by Hu Bo, in which he wrote that when he failed the second college entrance examination, his father completely broke with him, and in the movie, all the characters and parents were like enemies.
At that time, Hu Bo lived in a vacuum that was not understood by anyone, and his self-positioning was extremely pessimistic, and he wrote in the book:
"There are more than 1.6 million teenagers in this city, and I think I am the most dirty five percent of them."
That school, in his heart, was a garbage dump on a wasteland, and he had been in that wasteland for a long time, and he didn't know what hope was.
That's why we said, "The world is a wasteland."
This is his most intuitive feeling about life. We may still believe that the world is beautiful, and maybe sometimes we live in the mud, but we don't think that some people live at the bottom of the quagmire.
But would you say that Hu Bo was desperate at this time? I don't think so. On the cover of the book The Great Rift is a prominent sentence: "Everything has cracks, and that's where light comes in." “
At this time, Hu Bo said in an interview that his favorite thing at that time was to watch movies in the Internet café all night, and in the book, he wrote:
"I look forward to an entrance that will change everything around me, an entrance that is touching, singing a song from chaos to the clouds, a hope rooted in the deepest depths."
He was expecting a light to shine through the cracks of this chaotic thick cloud, and he could follow this light, clinging to it, and finding an exit to another life.
He once wrote in the afterword to The Great Rift: "I started college at the age of twenty-two, and the whole adolescence was anxious and frustrated, and I crossed the stage of writing a young adult novel, because I really couldn't feel it." But I have an obsession with the good, whether it's poetry or film, and these beautiful things make me believe that creation makes sense. “
Therefore, film and art, for Hu Bo, are not only dream careers, but also perhaps a kind of redemption.
At the end of the movie, under the illumination of the bus's headlights, Webb, Old Jin, Huang Ling, and the people riding with them kicked the shuttlecock together, and they slowly formed a small circle in the cold wind, in the dark, after a sound of elephants.
If we cling to each other, we may be able to withstand all the sufferings of this world.