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Still
Stills: Photos of the plot. There is no physical difference from ordinary photos. The difference is that the latter captures reality, while the former is fiction (a captured image). Another significant difference between them is that ordinary photographs maintain a considerable degree of privatization and closure (except for a very small number for publication or exhibition), while stills are naturally used for publicity.
The creators of the stills chose a key image of the film as a screenshot (this picture must be a representative or eye-catching shot in a continuous plot) and copied it quickly. Usually, film stills are copied in large numbers as a series, and due to the scarcity of space, it is actually unable to complete the task of telling a story, although the vast majority of the stills are accompanied by short and concise explanatory text, but compared with the capacity of the entire film, the limited interpretation is inevitably short and deep.
Before the opening of the movie, the audience stops in the ticket hall and various promotional materials (stills, free movie brochures, movie posters) help them pass the boring time.
Stills from Dunkirk (2017).
Stills are displayed in the promotional windows of the theater, which are cooler than comic strips but more minimalistic, in fact, it is easier to see as a film that has been dismantled. Stills do not replace the core of the plot, but only float on the surface of the story. The invisible thread between them (the essence of the plot) cannot pierce a true story at all: even a lucky symbolic still can only be used as an abstract cue.
However, between the stills and the frame of the stills, there is a considerable volume of tension, and the associations they produce fall into each other's huge gaps. When we watch the movie and re-watch the stills, we often find that the stills and the content of the film seem to be unsatisfactory, or even contrary to the way. Indeed, due to space limitations, stills often make jokes about plot pranks. Essentially, it is an advertising technique.
Stills were popular before the Internet era, and now, with the upgrading of theater hardware, the traditional propaganda medium has accelerated its reconstruction. Theater ticket halls rarely have stills bars (just as there are few newspaper columns on the streets) and are replaced by movies that are more suitable for Internet distribution, but this is just an upgraded version of the stills.
posters
As an advertising poster for the movie, the poster can be traced back to the beginning of the birth of the movie, and those pictures that are not uniform in size are listed in the city and are stopped by the audience. After the film's screening period, it was ignored and abandoned, and it was hit by wind and rain, damaged and faded. More often than not, they are removed or covered, replaced by new movie posters.
Printed posters are generally designed and produced by film production agencies (offset printed on coated paper or cardboard) and distributed to theaters for scattered posting. Old-fashioned cinemas often have self-drawn posters, which are grand in length and drawn by professional artists on fixed walls, although the degree of refinement is inferior to that of prints, but because of the texture of oil painting and the free creative space, it gives the vision a stronger impact.
Also as a derivative of the film, the poster's graphics add a creative component to the stills, making it look like a meaningful work of art. In addition to the giant posters on the walls of the theater, moderately sized (common folio or sixteen open) printed posters like old-fashioned monthly signs and advertising paintings, especially suitable for collection, by the literary and artistic small fresh, fashion shop owners and collectors of the respect, some limited printing posters are Luoyang paper expensive, appear in galleries or art consumer market, used by buyers to hang in the living room, study or door silhouette side, more are equipped with frames arranged in cafes, bars and tea shops, Complement the smooth or hoarse cinematic music coming from the background: like coffee and milkshakes.
Posters are also collected, re-edited, and bound into volumes (or distributed as official publications). A thick movie poster album was born, which looked like a stamp book without perforations, just a smell of dreams.
Golden statue
The golden statue only represents a symbol, in terms of materials, the trophy may not be made of K gold, but also made of crystal, jade, silver, other metals or materials. In terms of shape, it is not limited to portraits, and other appearances are common in its family: coins, canes, palms, hats, globes, bell covers, and half a zoo: horses, leopards, bears, butterflies, roosters, beetles, the molds of these crafts, generally from the hands of famous masters, usually sealed in secret rooms or bank safes, waiting for sacred missions.
Although beautifully designed and made of nice materials, the physical value of the trophies is limited until they are awarded. They differ from other crafts because they are given a special meaning, and the honor they symbolize will be recorded as part of history.
The trophy is awarded to the winner, and then all of a sudden, its own meaning suddenly disappears and becomes a simple souvenir (similar to stamps, antiques, oil paintings and all other objects available for collection). To put it more clearly, if there were no trophies, the honor would already exist, and the historical record is the award-winning event, not this beautiful craft.
Essentially, the trophy is a materialized professional height and reputation, the winner is proud of the award itself, the trophy is just a fictitious document. It should be noted that no award can be a true standard, and great artists do not have to rely on awards to enter history – awards are judged by men, not by gods – and any award is biased, aesthetically preferred, and emotionally appealing, and will not be completely impartial. The artist's merits are always above the trophy, and after the award, if it is not to show off vanity, even if the trophy is lost, destroyed or auctioned, it does not matter.
gaze
The viewer has the right to keep an eternally critical eye, and the visual image records not the original life, but to a certain extent plays a role in restoring and condensing real life - Sauron Kierkegaard said that the dialectic of repetition is not profound, because the property that is repeated already exists, otherwise it cannot be repeated, but it is precisely the fact that it already exists that gives it a new meaning - the accumulation of images is similar to recording the process of a leaf falling to the ground, and the camera can put the leaf that has been attached to the ground back into the branch. Slowly return to where you were before landing. For a good cinematographer, he has the potential to create an impulse that is entirely possible to inflict a sudden little disruption on the director's intentions (tearing the leaf into a cracked image), and a poorly skilled and crappy cinematographer can do the same.
The film that collects the required footage is edited, placed in a container (projector), projected on the screen, and then, the gaze, the black pressed against the long-awaited eyes of the crowd, is cast on the screen: a collective glimpse into a story that has lost its privacy.
Common eyes converge on the same screen, and a group of people who don't know each other complete the interpretation of a movie (after leaving the theater, they will quickly disappear into the streets and at the end of the story). In different eyes, the story takes on different meanings. For the vast majority of people, watching does not mean recreating, their eyes overflow the door of reason as the picture progresses, while others remain critical, twisting their thoughts into their brows, refusing to walk into the story as sober bystanders, these eyes are scattered among the audience, but automatically wander in consciousness.
From time to time, late spectators appear in the corridor, looking for seats at a loss, but their eyes do not leave the screen. For them, it was a story with no beginning but only an end.
Tickets
Tickets are used as a proof of viewing, allowing observers to legally enter an occasion that offsets their currency value (parks, museums, exhibition centers, theaters, playgrounds, and various performance sites). Of course, the scope referred to here is much narrower, referring only to cinema.
The audience walked into the screening hall with their tickets in hand, and they fished in, willingly accepting the scrutinizing eyes of the ticket-tearing staff. They sit down in the prescribed seats — especially when full, where seating is not allowed to be wrong and should match the order of the ticket — the ticket is a temporary document and a deed that reminds the audience of order and public norms, and theaters provide screening services, including security. With the rise of e-commerce, the purchase pattern of tickets has changed, just like virtual electronic tickets, it is possible to buy paper tickets in the physical sense without having to buy them in advance.
The ticket as a voucher does not indicate the audience's social identity (status, financial strength, popularity, and marital status are irrelevant to it), it can only prove that it is eligible to watch a movie. This narrow, thin slip of paper allows the holder's vague social identity to be replaced by another clear identity: the observer.
The audience sits safely, the couples holding popcorn, which looks more like a ritual (with a sense of solemnity that is not felt when watching TV at home), and the audience is willing to be controlled by order and detention (and as willing to be moved by fictional stories). The lights dimmed, and the screen began to show the film, exchanging the fictional story for the remaining value of the tickets.
Podium
Before walking onto the podium, the winners sat in the audience with other guests until their names were read out by the host. The winner is struck by a surprise falling from the sky, and the excitement instantly engulfs the body - in fact, there are two situations in which the award is won, one is known in advance, and the other is really revealed on the spot - we can often see an old drama bone on the podium to move out of shape, where is his excellent acting skills?
It can be seen that the performance is false after all, the reality is revealed, and finally it becomes an instinct to follow the technique, and it becomes more and more skillful with the condensation of years and experience - in what scene should be used what style has become the performance inertia. At the end of the day, the statement that seems to perform with the heart (which is illogical and as ridiculous as lying with the heart) is not as good as saying that the actor uses the mind as well as the right tool.
To some extent, actors have qualities that ordinary people do not have, and can manipulate and modify emotions at will. A trained actor can cry or laugh wildly when the plot needs to, without any auxiliary conditions. On the podium, these alternative emotional techniques temporarily vanished, for the simple reason that the actor re-entered himself (the real body), and the great joy made him powerless in the emotional vortex. If the award ceremony is broadcast live, the audience can get lucky to see the true colors of the actors, rather than the skillful pretense on the screen.
But for the award-winning professionals, the above assertion may be overturned again. In a state of habituation, these people used the podium as a stage for performance: to play as a personable gentleman or an elegant girl. From the red carpet to the signature board to the podium, in full view of the public, with a delicate smile on your face, you can receive glory and applause. For these out-and-out performers, we can only respond with good intentions. Of course, the podium is essentially a runway.
animation
The animation is a way of quickly flipping cards, with parallel motions of the picture to string together a story. In retrospect, its initiators may have learned from ancient puppet shows and shadow puppet shows.
With the continuous improvement and upgrading of computer drawing software, animation, as an increasingly important technical element, appears more and more in movies. Adapting and fabricating fairy tales, fables and interesting legends, this special form of art originally had children as the main audience - especially comic-themed animations gave birth to many works full of jokes and fantasies - with the development of the theme, more epic grand narratives, new myths, love of the wind and snow, and small and fresh sad stories became the themes covered by the animation, from the initial childish sketches to all-encompassing, completely breaking the age boundaries of the audience, and the proportion of adults in the fans became higher and higher.
Animation may be popular because of the increasingly rare childlike fun in the mundane world — everywhere is a calculating face — animation breaks through the conservative brushstrokes of the past and attracts the audience with a more vivid, three-dimensional, anthropomorphic form.
In terms of expressiveness, the arbitrariness of animation is incomparable to the film, the film is interpreted by live-action, the actor has physical limitations, encounters tasks that cannot be completed or other obstacles, and can only rely on stunts to solve. But even if it is a stunt, there are also bottlenecks, and many of the wear shots stem from the lack of completion. Animation can be imaginative, really a magic pen Ma Liang.
In the accumulation of animation history, some animation works have created a classic image of the popular population. But industrialized mass production has also made computer animation homogeneous, like the counterfeits of mutual plagiarism, so the slow work of hand-drawn animation is invaluable (craftsmen are more likely to achieve exclusivity). In addition, there is a kind of live-action and animated composite film, as if the magic between virtual reality, closer to the essence of film dreams.
Film critics
It's a leaderboard era, an annual ring of merchandise hoarding, and new films are being born faster than ever. They are surging forward and mostly stranded on the sands of art. The bad films that fill the screen use all kinds of gimmicks as a selling point: tampered history, pseudo-folklore, crude and blunt narratives, chaotic crossings, patchwork of secular myths. At one point, quality from quantity became the best argument.
Fashionable film critics try to get through the barrier with a brushstroke that avoids the real and the virtual, and the bribed gunmen and sailors no longer adhere to the ethics of criticism. Film critics have lost their impartiality and flattered mediocre works. Some film critics have the same style of writing, like news releases, while others are hollow and dull, and Wang Gu is the opposite of honesty.
Although the filmmakers, entertainment reporters, and film critics who are mixed in the film circle do not look up and look down, it is inevitable to say some polite words politely, but occupy media resources and platforms, use public instruments for private use, obtain benefits by cheap advocacy, immerse themselves in illusory praise, and let the bottom line of criticism fall short, which is essentially a shameful wish.
However, as an audience, there are also tips to avoid being misled, for example, the film reviews released before the release are mostly the personal drafts of the film's contract. Celebrities, for example, flock to a movie without warning. For example, only praising the actors, special effects, music, but not the story, can basically be classified as exempt from watching - in fact, for the audience, everyone has their own list - the task of film criticism is to analyze and criticize a movie, not a simple letter of praise, or a love letter to the filmmaker. When film critics become less objective, film critics will eventually find a desk of their own. It should be noted that film critics use professional credibility as collateral to interpret a film, which can be recommended to the audience or dissuaded from entering the theater. If you do not cherish the feathers in the face of affection and interests, you will eventually not be trusted by the audience and slowly lose your right to speak.
montage
Literary and artistic works have their own ways of moving at their expressive speed, such as literature using silent recitation to verify whether it is complete and smooth, and music using playing to define whether the melody is full and pleasant. Of course, in comparison, they don't express the speed as directly as the movies.
The film uses pictures to express the "rhythm", but the "speed" of its initial state cannot guarantee the composition of the beauty. The speed requirement of the picture is harsh, and the aesthetic composition stems from the addition of appropriate rhythm (a kind of insertion and articulation with rhythm). Rhythm does not act as a castration in speed, but instead makes loose or dragging pictures slightly tense, or meets appropriate density requirements.
Krakauer once pointed out that the novel expresses spiritual coherence, while the film is the coherence of matter. The second half of the sentence here determines the sensual kinematic properties of the cinematic picture. For rhythm, Mardan has also used practice to emphasize that it is not just "to manipulate the time value between shots, but the coherent time of the shot and its combination of attention", so it is not an abstract time rhythm, but a rhythm of attention.
Of course, the rhythm of the film picture is not as static as the swing of the pendulum, and it is even difficult to interchange with each other in different plots and details. Although there are split-shot scripts, the camera's recording of the frames and the director's ultimate intentions during editing will lead to very different finished products—some with beautiful rhythms, some with gaps, some with only fleeting moments at the junction of a small section of the picture—and of course, there are also eccentrics like Fassbinder, who strictly follow the split-shot script, and he swears: "I really did this, editing exactly according to the order of the script, to be precise, according to the number of shots on the sample." ”
More often, whether a film's narrative is close to perfection, the material on the film is certainly important, but more important is the selection of the combination of materials. A clever director can edit a masterpiece from a messy mind, but the hands of mediocre talents are always a mess. Or, it could be said, that cinema is essentially the art of editing.
makeup
The film makeup transforms the actors to match the image of the characters in the play - the elderly return to youth, the lads are covered with years, the pleated skin is tightened, the smooth skin is painted with fine lines - the actor looks left and right in front of the mirror, temporarily losing the truth of appearance (so-called age makeup).
The success or failure of makeup largely determines the success or failure of the actor's role, the actor's natural face cannot be tampered with, and the appearance of the role is ever-changing. In the early years, due to technical and material limitations, the role of makeup artists was not prominent. Now, as the "magician of the shell", the makeup artist is no longer a subordinate supporting role in a film, but has become very important. It can also be said that the makeup artist is a kind of "stand-in" outside the body.
Makeup is a modification and supplement to limited body language, not just limited to the facial features, and body shape modification is also one of them. Don't show flaws in makeup, a good makeup artist should be a script speculator, a stylist and a friend of the character, and in addition, an extremely picky audience.
During the filming, the actor is sitting precariously, a pen, pastel paint, and other small tools swimming on the face (and perhaps filler), which is a painting skin that is repeated every day. It wasn't until the makeup was removed that it returned to its original shape.
In the movie symbols of gods, aliens, half-human, half-beast, it is impossible to complete the task with a pen and simple auxiliary materials, and it is necessary to make a perfectly made structure, use a variety of suitable materials, and perfect them with realistic details like photography - hair, texture, and demeanor - to make a visual image that deceives the audience, so the task to be completed by the makeup artist is much more arduous. It should be pointed out that the "makeup artist" here actually includes the integration of painters, programmers, designers, and even specimen makers, and finally with the help of computer data control, the role between the virtual reality is "dynamic" and vivid on the screen.
Xia Shang, writer, lives in Shanghai. His major works include the novels "Chronicle of the East Coast", "Herbarium", "Beggar Wandering" and so on.
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