丨This article was first published in the Pippi movie
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For a long time, we have been accustomed to using the "hymen" as a basis for judging whether a woman is "chaste" or not.
Nowadays, this feudal concept seems to have undergone a qualitative change, but there will still be men who are proud of taking women's "one blood", and there are still women who are imprisoned by backward ideas.
It is hard to imagine how much white-eyed and humiliated women who did not see red on the first night of China's past thousand years of history had to suffer.
This humiliation can be seen in the following movie -
"Bloody Morning"
In 1992, Li Shaohong's work came out and shocked the world.
Adapted from García Márquez's novella A Murder In Advance, "Bloody Morning" won Li Shaohong many awards after its release at the Nantes Three Continents Film Festival.
As the title suggests, it's a "pre-publicized" murder, with the victim, the killer, and the motives clear, but Márquez tells the whole story with a sense of fate in its ingenious structure.
Li Shaohong's adaptation succeeds in grafting a story of magic realism onto Chinese reality.
Li Mingguang, a primary school teacher in Dashuikeng Village, was killed on his way to school. According to the forensic medical examination, the upper wound on his abdomen was 9 centimeters long and 1.2 centimeters wide.
The murderer is Li Hongxing's older brother, The Dog Baby and Ping Wa.
When they were arrested, the two of them still had a good word: we were not guilty of murder, he killed my sister, and he was guilty.
The investigators who came to investigate began to call the witnesses and the parties concerned.
This is a murder in which the victims, the murderer, the witnesses and the motives of the crime are all clear, a murder that can be avoided in the end but leads to tragedy.
Just like Guan Hu's "Killing" released in 2012, Li Mingguang and Niu Jianjian, two characters symbolizing "light" and "vitality", were eventually "killed" by all the villagers.
With the reversal of the camera, the real cause of Li Mingguang's death gradually became clear.
In the family, he was the pillar of strength, his father died early, his mother remarried, and his grandmother was old and confused.
Li Mingguang is one of the few cultural people in the village, and one person has to teach the second, third and fourth grade courses at the same time.
Seeing that some of the students came to school with their younger brothers, he directly carried the children over and carried them on his back so that the children could concentrate on learning.
However, such a teacher was not respected in a backward village.
In the eyes of the villagers, Li Mingguang is a primary school teacher who can't grow crops well, a worthless waste:
"Look at what he planted on those acres of land!"
"Just for a teacher, I put my life on it?!"
"That person is like tofu, really without poking, three or two clicks will be finished..."
In this backward and ignorant village, culture is despised and questioned.
In the eyes of the villagers, what Li Mingguang represents is not even "civilization", but can only be said to be a "by-product" of the era when the tide has receded -- the "by-product" of the movement of intellectual youth to the mountains and the countryside.
"In the past, the students who lived in the city in the village, Mingguang learned from them, and now teaches the dolls in the village..."
The bright light caught between civilization and ignorance is only "a deformity, a distant echo, a discordant note." ”
Even so, the two young girls in the village were still attracted to Mingguang's reading book "Popular Movie", and often went to his small room to watch the magazine together.
Unexpectedly, this matter fell out of the hands of the people in the village. And the more it spread, the more evil it became, and there were even rumors that two women and a man hugged each other late at night.
One of the girls is Li Hongxing, the heroine of this film.
Hongxing's two older brothers, Pingwa and Dogwa, have been playing bare sticks because the family is poor and cannot afford the bride price.
This is very disgraceful in the village, and it is impossible to lift your head.
Later, hongxing was promised to Zhang Qiangguo, a local tycoon in the village, in the form of changing relatives.
In exchange, Zhang Qiangguo mated his sister Xu, who had a disability in his hand, to Pingwa.
As a character who does not appear much in the film, but has the greatest significance, Zhang Qiangguo is a person who has gone out of the countryside and seen the big world.
He "went out to work and made a lot of money", used the renminbi to take over the right to speak from the ancient system of elders, and became a figure that the whole village looked up to and respected.
Zhang Qiangguo, who has tasted the taste of women in the city, made his value judgment: "To find a wife, we still have to be a country woman." ”
In his eyes, the city is where wealth lies and where "unchaste" lies.
Rural women, on the other hand, are equal to "chaste."
Therefore, when Zhang Qiangguo opened the sheets when he was newly married and found that "there was nothing", he went crazy and got up all night to take someone to Li Hongxing's house to grab the dowry and his sister.
At this time, the truth of the naked exchange under the ancient ceremony is revealed.
After Pingwa lost her daughter-in-law, she and The Dogwa threatened to kill the adulterer. On the way there, the village chief led someone to take the murder weapon, and the two were detained for several days until the storm subsided.
However, although the farce was stopped, Li Hongxing, the "bad guy", still bore the notoriety.
We will never know whether the red apricot is simply not seen in the first night, or whether it really has someone to like.
It doesn't matter either.
What we see is that she was blinded by the villagers, beaten by her two older brothers, trapped in the depth of field shot with nowhere to escape.
In that long-range shot, the mountain is so big and heavy, and the small body of the red apricot looks so helpless and sad.
"We all think we don't dare", "They all look down on us", "Don't say clearly? Don't say it clearly, just do it! ”
In order to save face, Pingwa and Dogwa later really cut the knife on the body of "adulterer" Li Mingguang. Finally, we saw the more cruel "red" from under the knife of the Pingwa brothers.
Later, Pingwa and Dogwa were caught, and Hongxing committed suicide by throwing herself into the river.
At the moment when Pingwa was escorted away by the public security organs, his last words to his mother who were about to lose all her children were: "Mom, the money to buy fertilizer is under the kang mat, not enough for you to borrow some more from someone!" ”
We can't even blame anyone, there is no total evil, only goodness eroded by ignorance.
Behind this overwhelming despair, there are countless villagers standing and the shadowy land and mountains behind them.
When all the dust settled, the investigator stopped in front of the elementary school where Mingguang used to teach.
At this time, there were no children laughing and playing in the school, only two strangers were nailing a brand new wooden plaque next to the door, which read "Jinghui Temple National Grade II Protected Cultural Relics".
The light was killed, the school became a relic, and the door of the village was closed again. The next time it opened, the young and middle-aged people fled the city, and the countryside became a faint cry.
If, in Márquez's novel, the death of the protagonist Santiago is an exposure of insidious humanity, a trick of absurd fate.
Then the death of Li Mingguang in "Bloody Morning" is an inevitability.
Li Mingguang, flipped over is the light, this meaningful name runs through the entire film. His death was a sacrifice of traditional ignorance and at the same time a necessary price for the disintegration of traditional society.
When cities come wrapped in so-called "civilization," the countryside and ignorance must sacrifice themselves in conflict and confrontation.
This is a "pre-publicized murder" and an inevitable death.
It's just that the bright light that is a fragment of civilization just happens to become the embodiment of that death.
And the spectator mentality displayed by the villagers, and all kinds of acquiescence, excitement, schadenfreude, and even encouragement, are all hands clutching the knife.
No one really passed the news to Mingguang, and everyone knew he was going to die, except Mingguang himself.
"How did you get out?"
"They all said you knew!?"
"Don't you want to run yet?! Everybody's coming! ”
Therefore, when Mingguang fell in a pool of blood, he still did not know why he was killed and what he had done wrong. He knew only one thing, and that was: "Uncle, they... Kill me... finish. ”
A faint hope died in the watchful eye of the crowd.
Villagers, on the other hand, will pay for their cold-bloodedness and numbness for decades or even centuries to come.
"Bloody Morning" begins with a death that everyone knows, and as the plot progresses, we see the horrors of the human heart and human nature.
Li Shaohong's sober images tell the story of the inevitable "homicides" that China has experienced and is still experiencing to this day.
This murderer is ignorant, numb, indifferent.
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