Author: Zhao Qi
Six: Chinese Survivors on the Titanic (the "Six") is an awe-inspiring film that is worth more than just a documentary, a movie, it reshapes a Chinese history. The film's main creator, British director Luo Fei and American journalist and writer Schwank are all Chinese. The first documentary they collaborated on, The Poseidon Incident, can be seen as a precursor to "Six", digging up the truth about a shipwreck that occurred off the coast of China in 1931. Prior to this, Luo Fei's first documentary, Yangguan Sandian, depicted the real life of several retired performers living in Shanghai, and "Six People" continued the artistic style of the film's subtle exploration of the psychological activities of the characters.
The Internet and truth are not necessarily opposed. There is only one truth, and in the Internet age, the "truth" we obtain is usually the result of information games plus self-selection, rather than the only truth itself. An interesting paradox arises: we know more and more, but what we really know may be less and less. As a documentary that makes full use of the Internet to dig up the truth, "Six" undoubtedly gives an inspiring declaration: the truth is still there, and we still have the opportunity to approach it with time and wisdom.
Schwank's "detective team" is a researcher from all over the world, and the Internet is their basic tool for mining, researching, and contacting. Without the digitization and sharing of archives that are taking place around the world, the project would not have taken 10 times as long to complete. Of course, some of the film's important archives still need to be accessed in a paper archive depository, but the Internet provides many key clues. For example, the first clue about Fang Rongshan, the first protagonist of "Six People", came from a privately released "gossip" on the Internet forum, and the main line of the story almost started from this point. At the same time, the film also shows the difficulty of falsifying and verifying in the face of a variety of information: it requires professional knowledge background and experience, as well as the insistence on maintaining a non-credulous attitude and independently confirming or falsifying. In Six, the Internet is reduced to technology and tools themselves, and people's choices determine the value of the information they provide in the process of uncovering the truth. The Internet and the truth are not necessarily opposed, and blind obedience is the real opposite of truth.
Telling stories with documentaries has a different kind of shocking power. Prior to Six, there had been two very successful feature films about the sinking of the Titanic, in addition to James Cameron's Titanic in 1997 and Roy Ward Baker's 1958 Wade Baker's Wreck on the Ice Sea, which was also an outstanding disaster film; the latter focused on the sinking process, while the former was based on the love of the hero and heroine, intertwined with the shipwreck event to form a huge narrative tension. "Six" further backgrounds the sinking of the Titanic, with the search for six Chinese survivors as the main storyline. As a documentary, it has the same intensity of shock as the above two feature films, but the way to achieve shock power is different.
Film theorist pioneer Sergei Eisenstein said: "It doesn't matter to me what means a film uses, whether it's a feature film or a documentary." A good film should show the truth, not the facts. He does not say, however, that the most powerful weapon a documentary can possess in the pursuit of truth is that it naturally has the potential to be closer to the facts themselves.
From "Wreck of the Ice Sea" to "Titanic" to "Six", it focuses on the tenacity of human nature in disaster. In contrast to the poetic way of the feature film, there is a passage in "Six" that impresses me: in order to experience first-hand the feeling of the survivors being surrounded by icy water after falling into the sea, Schwank simulated the situation in the pool and personally went into the water to feel it. When he finished the test sitting by the pool freezing uncontrollably and shivering uncontrollably, the feeling of coldness was not poetic, but very real. The younger generation of the Fang family inadvertently mentioned a poem sent by Fang Rongshan: "The sky is high and the sea is wide and the waves are waves, a stick saves me, and there are several brothers together, wiping away tears and laughing." "The shocking power of that kind of real and simple human nature is very different from the shocking power of fictional feature films that have been artistically refined. The difference is that the documentary is closer to the truth itself, through the tracking of his life deeds by "Six People", Fang Rongshan, after nine deaths, is to continue to walk the still difficult road of life with "laughing hehe", this "laughing hehe" is related to the most basic survival dignity of people, one step in place to break through my heart.
The Titanic, which was released in China in 1997, removed a set of footage in which five lifeboats commanded by Harold Lowe rescued a Chinese floating on the door panels. Most Chinese viewers remember only Jack and Rose's love affair, but they don't know what the Titanic has to do with Chinese, let alone know anything about the eight who boarded the ship and the last six surviving Chinese.
After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, six Chinese were stigmatized. In the documentary, almost all the surviving newspaper archives about the shipwreck at that time describe them as greedy for life and afraid of the dead, and even say that they pretended to be women to board the rescue ship. After escaping death, they were denied entry by the United States and once again drifted away from the sea. "Six People" not only returns their innocence to them with strong evidence, but also unveils a history of Western Chinese exclusion in which Chinese workers have suffered inhumane treatment overseas. In this history, the unimaginable hardships and forbearance of the Chinese in seeking a living space overseas are unforgettable. The reason for the moving is that the exposition of the documentary is closer to the historical truth.
The objective part of history is the real occurrence in the past time, which cannot be fully known, and can only be as close as possible through the information scattered in various objects and records. The history that people come into contact with is generally its subjective part, that is, the exposition of the objective part. Such expositions inevitably contain certain distortions for different reasons; and the pursuit of truth is a common psychological appeal of all mankind, and such distortions have created a gap between historical subjectivity and objectivity, which needs to be reshaped. The use of film as a tool to reshape history belongs to the current era of imagery. The advantage of the film is not only that it has a very intuitive ability to explain, but more importantly, as a way of mass entertainment, the film's exposition content can also be quickly and widely disseminated. (Zhao Qi)
Source: Liberation Daily