I was in my hometown and found the way
Poetic road
Text/Lina Wang
2020/09/03
Little Moon Ablikim Ableti - The first parting of the movie soundtrack
On the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, eighty-two degrees latitude and longitude range, there is Niya to the south and Shaya to the north. As a prominent oasis plain on the northern edge of Taklamakan, it crosses the Tarim River for 220 kilometers from west to east, and merges with the Weigan River in the "vein-shaped" netbshaya.
More than a hundred years ago, the American anthropologist Morgan wrote in his book "Ancient Society": The Tarim River Basin is the cradle of world civilization, and if anyone finds the golden key left by the old man in Taklamakan, the door of world culture will be opened. Arnold Toynbee also said, "If life could happen again, I would like to be born in the Tarim Basin, because the four great civilizations of mankind meet there." "And I was fortunate enough to be born in Shaya, Xinjiang, in the hinterland of Taklamakan. Poplar wood is made into canoes, driving on the Tarim River, camel bells ringing from the hinterland of Taklamakan, and the rustling of thousand-year-old poplar leaves, which is another life you never thought about. Only in the vast wilderness outlined by the rivers, the desert, the Gobi, and the poplars can I feel the chaotic mathematics and vitality of the swept winds, and my childhood was derived from this land, which carries the sense of disorder of the wilderness.
I was born in the late 1980s, and I spent my entire childhood in the village of Kumutokaj in the heart of Taklamakan, with the impression of a mirage after the rain, my childhood playmates and I lay under mulberry trees on the side of the road, waiting for the arrival of a carriage, the road was full of red willow flowers on both sides, and in the distance was a large cotton field and Gobi wasteland, the air was full of the fragrance of mud and buds, and the sound of horses' hooves was heard in the distance, and the Uighur old man on the carriage would shout: "Naughty child, let my horse take you for a ride"! When sad, the old man will also say: "The child will count my beard, as long as there is something to do, people will not be sad." "We carefully count the old man's beard, no one can count, but all emotions are dissolved in the time of counting the beard, and at the end the old man will reward us with the grapes in the basket." There are often a group of prime-aged palm falcons riding horses past, leaving us and dust behind, and at that moment we also imagine growing up to ride a horse. Looking back now, in my childhood, I was born with a wind-like time, sitting on the desert at night, watching the shooting stars in the night sky, listening to the words of the night and the words of the trees, imagining taking out the red moon in the nest of the trees, and then floating to the red moon to cool off.
Looking back at the fleeting time, the most vivid picture in childhood life is sitting behind my father's bicycle, going to every strange Uighur village to take pictures. Today, many years later, the photographic scene on the country road in the memory is still there, and the deceased in the photo has changed from a child to a prime-age, from a prime-age to an old-age person. Azezi Ahun, whom my father met because of his photographs, said that "everyone in the world is a relative", which once made me enlightened. For me, the childhood experience of following my father from house to house to take pictures was more like visiting relatives, and in that barren era, the warmth of the world was like a blood bond, intertwined in my life.
In middle school, I went to the county town to study, reading allowed me to discover another world, in the county library I saw the complete works of Sanmao, Tarkovsky's "Carving Time", Aitmatov, Hardy, Rumi and other masters. Literature has given me another vast world of freedom, abstract and figurative, yet so fascinating.
It was also there that I found the Twelve Mukams, and I was fascinated by its title, which I seemed to understand, but I bought it anyway and read it in the long night, but never finished it. Poetry is a light and winged sacred thing, and the main source of the lyrics of the Twelve Muqams that has survived to this day is still the poet. Up to now, Muqam has always left me with the impression of some Yoshimitsu Katayu: "My Sattar is the string of the bond of life, it can comfort misfortune, give it pity and sorrow, I am deeply involved in Muqam to make it haunt me, if I am in the vision of love, I will play in front of the Iren Zun", "If a person has no sympathy, even if he is the sun, what is the use". But in adulthood, countless sleepless nights will remind mukam of those poems with the simple philosophy of the earth. It praises the earth, the mountains, the wilderness, the sun that praises the setting sun, the sorrow of the nightingale, the fragrance of sweet grapes and buds, the cheerful rivers and the eternal desert, and it depicts and praises the life in the hinterland of Taklamakan, a life that is neither all deep wisdom nor all heroic, but like a lost home, it haunts everyone with spiritual cultivation and heroism, because it is the oldest, the simplest, the most pious life. In the hinterland of Taklamakan, music is regarded as the "salt of language", and when eternal love, the sun and the river have been chanted for thousands of years, the music that reaches the heavens and the earth through fire and light releases a force that is enough to make people solemn, where music is the land, the source, the air and the milk. It is vast enough to take in all the sorrows of mankind and give me new revelations.
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to take a train to a strange place and feel different customs and customs, perhaps only by walking one foot to the ground would I have distance and thinking, and all walking could ultimately help me understand my hometown. When I return to my hometown again, Taklamakan is like a huge screen, and there are daily movies about life and nature in this land. People sing and dance, deserts, Gobi, grasslands and other images that we are familiar with are actually just a surface, the deeper thing is poetry, is poetry, and the language of their daily life is also like a poetry movie line, which is a kind of love for life and after going through vicissitudes, it is refined by the tenacity and open-mindedness of human nature.
The uniqueness of the film is no less than literature, it has all kinds of possibilities, when I made "The First Parting" I did not realize what kind of film it would be, I just looked for childhood experiences based on my own growth experience, and this childhood experience is still alive and well.
I started doing fieldwork, looking for my characters, and I met Kyli Binur, an elf-like girl in a red dress, and his brother Elenazi. Their family had a yard with a patch of grape racks, and once they were just in time for Kelly and her brother to write their homework under the grapevines, and Kelly Binur said as she wrote, "As soon as I cry, it will be light, and I will run to the lion to take a picture of the lion, take a picture of the white deer, take a picture of the cow, take a picture of the grapevine, take a picture of the poor, take a picture of the rich, I can look at them with my eyes." The younger brother then said: "The sun is full of moon and it rains, the exam is by luck, I usually take the test 80 points, 100 points seem to have a vendetta against me," Kelly Binur said: "If you are higher than me, I will cry for a night, if I am higher than you, I will be very happy." The younger brother said, "If you cry, your parents will quarrel." Kylie Binur said: "Mom and Dad quarrel, if I divorce, I will become an orphan in the world, if I become an orphan, my classmates will laugh at me." 」 The younger brother said, "Then we would be like the orphan Sarah Edin." Kylie Binur was silent for a moment and then said, "My love for my mother is a thousandth anyway, and she won't leave us." "I was deeply moved by this seemingly chaotic dialogue, which sent me back to my childhood to understand the world of a child, who did not describe the world, but discovered it. They rarely think about what they look and sound in front of the world, their perspective is very intuitive, they pay no attention to conventions and traditions, and the way of looking at problems always gives you unexpected surprises and natural frankness.
I also read an essay written to my mother by the protagonist of the film, Aisa, in Kyzylosa, where he said: "I was brought by my mother from the outer sky, my mother's ears could not hear, I could only communicate with her with my eyes, my mother's heart was as clear as spring water, her love nourished me, and I only lived for my mother." I went to Isa's house, the sun was shining on the wooden shelf, Anda was barefoot, holding a little lamb to feed it, and the little lamb did not obey, and he kissed the little lamb with his own mouth. This image also awakens memories of my childhood, when we all had our feet covered in mud and became intimate with nature and animals, and then continued to experience goodbye and eventually grow. This time, he returned to his hometown and began to interact differently from the land where he lived in the past, and interacted with his past experiences. Life is an experience, and only when you experience it is not wasted, so that you can create your own life. You don't belong to it until you create it. Kelly Binur and Isa sang the folk song "Little Moon" during filming, when the folk song of Taklamakan came out in the millennia-old poplar forest: "Mom said I was the moon / But the moon grew in the sky / If I were the moon / Mom would cry alone (on the ground)". My gaze crossed the golden poplar, the rustling of thousand-year-old poplar leaves, our childhoods met under the same poplar tree, and my heart was so calm, so vast and eternal.
During the filming, I met a young folk artist who heard that I was a Shaya and said, "You used to leave Shaya on a donkey and a bicycle, and now you're back in a plane with knowledge and culture. "And I asked Abbabakri in the village of Kokchole, what are the specialties of his children who are about to enter junior high school? He honestly replied that his child's greatest strength is to be particularly honest, and he will not cultivate his own strengths until he is in high school. On the red flag bazaar I met the drummer Uncle Turkhon, and as soon as his drum sounded, people couldn't help but dance, and the young people I met in the village who wanted to run away and the old people who were willing to stay in the village for the rest of their lives were pulled together by the drums.
My hometown has thus opened the way to poetry for me, and these specific people have made me have the desire to make movies and become more and more intense, so that I can feel the singing of the musician He Li in "Poems and Songs of 1/7 Billion": "Every person's small body contains the amazing potential of the person, if the wheat he has eaten in his life suddenly sprouts, and the water he has drunk suddenly converges." He said there are 7 billion people on earth, and I am one of them. It is these ordinary people who make up a huge 7 billion, and you and I are among them. The energy these ordinary people give you is so powerful that I don't want to take the camera away from these faces.
Looking back now, a year of documentary filming is particularly important for the birth of "The First Parting", and the way to construct the script in the way of making a documentary is particularly luxurious but also precious. The precious things that cannot be replaced in the film are not outside of daily life, but hidden in the details of daily life. Observing the details of life, the seemingly simple and bland plot can also become a movie, and many of the details and dialogues in "The First Parting" come from a year's observation. For example, the scene of the family meeting in the film is based on the necessary assumptions of the story structure, but ultimately comes down to the reality and concrete facts of life.
The experience of shooting for me is a kind of self-discovery, but also prompted me to form my own film belief, at least for me from the documentary into the world of images, the work is not produced in the self-fantasy, but in the place where "I" and "the world" meet, it reflects the world I live in and my thinking. I think the ideal film is documentary, not the documentary of shooting techniques, how to sincerely reconstruct and tell the way of life, I hope to see the poetry in daily life, can break through the barriers of linear logical thinking, and reproduce the subtlety and depth of life, complexity and truth. Even in fictional stories I'm willing to add documentary elements, and everyone has a principle of appeal to intuition rather than reason. I want them to give mysteries that we can't create, mysteries about their individuals.
Literature makes me macroscopic, but I don't ignore people, and I am always interested in the inner world of people— and for me, it is more important to show the mind that reflects the nourishment of life, literature, and culture. For example, Kelly Binur's father sang "My Lark Lover" written by his wife in the cotton field when he divorced:
"I am your sad lark
The lark lost its lover
I lost my lover Tajiguli
My lark-like lover
You are like a celestial being
Your eyebrows are like bending the moon
Your eyes are like clear water
When you abandon me
My heart was crying in the middle of the night
I was so sad/flowers also cried for me
Eight heavens are nothing compared to your beauty
I lost the person I loved the most
Tajiguli like a lark".
The entanglement between people, the unusual emotions, the poetic beauty that creates a faint pain, the fragile warmth and longing, the shy face of Kelly Binur's mother like a girl, flashing through the movie, I am always moved by such moments.
I've always believed that good movies are benevolent, like the creaking of cradles and plain lullabies, and bees and hives, far better than bayonets and gunshots. Mahmud Kashgari, on the other hand, returned to his hometown after traveling the world and wrote the following verse: A good farmer is a farmer who sows chamagu, and a good person is a man who grows old in his hometown.
"The First Parting" is a long poem I dedicate to my hometown, the poetry and truth contained in life in this land itself is the source of this film, and I am especially grateful to the children and people who live here, they are so comfortable and moving, it is these specific people who make up the film. When I wrote this, "The First Parting" became a thing of the past, and when I started to shoot this film, my hometown quickly and effectively grabbed my heart, and from then on until I passed away.
In any case, this film is a gift from Shaya in the heart of my hometown of Taklamakan, and a gift from my hometown to the world.
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