Courtesy of Visual China
I have always felt that it is a helpless adventure to temporarily choose a tour guide in the scenic spot. The choice of tour guide determines the absolute color of this journey, but just by appearance, you never know whether the other party is an expert with full of intellect, or a "repeating machine" full of clichéd knowledge in the head. Once the itinerary is opened, it can only be fully delivered with trust, and the effect is all by luck.
Fortunately, when it comes to the world of movies, we don't have to rush to make decisions.
When I saw Roger Ebert's two volumes of The Great Movie at the pageone bookstore, I didn't know he was a movie govamer who had read a million films, or that he was the first Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, but I was simply attracted by the hazy texture of the stills on the cover: the first was Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis, with workers turning their backs on the camera in black and white, pulling heavy mechanical hands back and forth in the fog; the second was Jacques Tati's 1958 work My Uncle. On the speeding bicycle, the uncle was at ease, smoking a long pipe while controlling the direction, and the "I" sitting in the back smiled playfully. Not loving the visual impact of commercial blockbusters, nor bothering to dissect the moving moments of niche films, Roger Ebert's selection criteria are to record "those films that uphold the value of art."
Although I usually watch a lot of movies, when I look at this list, I still have a sense of strangeness. Among the 200 films, there are both "City Lights", "The Birth of a Nation", "Eight and a Half" and other well-known classic films, but I can't survive the beginning, as well as "Last Year in Mariamba" and "Mr. Hulo's Holiday" and other previously unheard of literary and artistic masterpieces. In other words, this is not some popcorn movie that is active on the front page of major video sites and is within reach. The black and white tones challenge the visual habits of the audience, and the length of the shot is inevitably sleepy... Any single trait could dissuade the audience from "power"—we need a reason to watch these great films.
And Roger Ebert is simply a "Amway" master in this regard. He did not indulge in theoretical structures and terminology stacking like academic experts, making people feel unclear and foggy, nor did he deliberately cater to the public's existing cognition, and finally turned the film critics into a superficial chicken soup for the soul. His tone itself is like a condensed and restrained photographic lens, smoothly pushing and pulling, moving freely between detail and background, performance and shooting, music and picture, but without any confusion.
This is especially evident in the analysis of Fellini's The Night of Kabylia. At the beginning of the article, he keenly grasps the change in the heroine's makeup, conveying the subtle and unrequited emotions of the literary film: Kabylia's appearance is a clown-like wanderer image. Her eyebrows are two thick horizontal lines that are drawn above her eyes. She hid herself under a comedic mask as if she were a clown.
And when Kabylia was deceived by one man after another and finally found Oscar, who he thought he could trust, the line of his eyebrows suddenly became soft, bending like a willow leaf above his eyes, and his entire face appeared weak. You see, sometimes the interpretation of the classics of the film masters does not require a grand abstract theoretical application, starting from a simple eyebrow shape change, it is enough to say the tragic and happy plot of the protagonist's mood change.
In addition, he also relied on his full understanding of the director's style to point out the details that are difficult for ordinary people to pay attention to. For example, what is less well known is that as a poet of language and music, Fellini would play music in almost every scene, and the audience could even feel that the characters walked with some kind of rhythm. And What makes Kabylia special is precisely that: "She heard it, but often stepped on the backhand, as if she had her own set of melodies." Reading this, I have no doubt at all that Roger Ebert has read many of the books on the list dozens of times, and some even studied them on a shot-by-shot basis.
In contrast to films that are highly impactful and appeal to intuitive stimulation, "great filmmakers only explain what should be explained" and often do not provide a clear and straightforward answer. This is also the reason why many times we are not used to it and cannot understand it. Watching Ebert's film criticism is not to stimulate the obsessive-compulsive disorder of watching movies, to dig out the details and "Easter eggs" buried by the director one by one, but to learn a way to watch movies, so that the senses slowly open and gradually become sensitive.
When I read Ebert's articles, I often felt a very contradictory harmony. On the one hand, his brushstrokes are unusually sensual, full of personal cognition and feelings. The most classic example is his sentence "Every time I am in a good mood, I think 'Citizen Kane' is the father of sound movies, but when I am depressed, I think 'King Kong' is".
On the other hand, even through a thick subjective filter, he can convey the unique atmosphere of each film with great precision, and dozens of writing styles have been adopted in almost 200 film reviews. When talking about "Tokyo Story", there is a restrained melancholy throughout the text, as if it is integrated with the film temperament of Yasujiro Ozu. He pointedly pointed out that the film "is not that livelihood makes us too busy to take care of our families, but that we protect ourselves through busy livelihoods to escape major problems about love, work and death". When interpreting "An Andalus Dog", he changed to a cold, black humor writing tone, bluntly saying that countless analysts have applied Freud, Jung and other formulas to this film, and Buñuel laughed at them all.
To some extent, only after truly understanding can we make our film reviews like water and accurately present the original background of the film. Ebert's writing may be extremely subjective, but it is by no means a misreading. He sincerely discusses the life and social issues that the film masters are concerned about, without over-interpretation and without clichés.
If the reading experience is described in a painterly style, it should be most like Monet's Impressionist paintings. After reading it, I often no longer remember the specific details and storyline, but only a hazy, vague impression. That's why the author sometimes goes crazy with spoilers, but it's not too troubling.
Maybe it was the old-fashioned device that matched the great movies, and after reading the book, I immediately ordered a home projector. I remember Godard saying, "Movies aren't platforms, it's a train." "When the beam of the projector pierced through the dust of life and reflected immortal masterpieces such as "Sweet Life", I knew that this time I was on the right train and followed the right guide.
Ren Guanqing Source: China Youth Daily
Source: China Youth Daily