Liu Qing: Walking in the crowd is like a drop of water falling into a river

The movie "Liu Qing" focuses on Liu Qing's life experience of creating "History of Entrepreneurship" from Beijing to Huangfu Village in Shaanxi Province for fourteen years in order to go deep into life and take root in the people between the 1950s and 1970s. The film strives to restore an important chapter in Liu Qing's life, reproduce Liu Qing's "understage effort" of writing a realistic picture of Rural China," and the behind-the-scenes story of shaping many classic character images.

The change in dress symbolizes that Liu Qing has completed the role transformation in her personal psychology. The movie "Liu Qing" cleverly uses the tone of light and shadow and the angle of pitching to show the transformation of Liu Qing's social identity and spiritual world. When Liu Qing first came to Huangfu Village, she wore an ironed white shirt, suit pants, gold-rimmed glasses, a delicate hairstyle that was not messy, carrying a briefcase, sitting on an ox cart, watching the elderly and children compete for cow dung from a downward perspective. Seeing his compatriots, he commented: "Yang lives very well. After shaving her hair, Liu Qing, who appeared in front of the camera again, wore a melon skin hat, wore Chinese-style cardigan blue cloth pants, smoked dry cigarettes, pulled up cuffs, and ate, wore, lived, and traveled like local farmers. At this moment, Liu Qing is determined to truly go deep into life, enter into the object of his writing, and never lose the "feeling of an ordinary person".

He is a writer who gives reports to young students in a bright and clean auditorium, writes in a world of one side, is also a grassroots cadre who abandons his position to break the restrictions of professional writer status and fully participates in local life, or a Guanzhong fellow who talks with his fellow villagers in the fields and deals with "tooth family" in the grain market and livestock market.

For Liu Qing, going deep into life not only means being close to life and observing life, but also understanding life, studying life, and understanding life as an effective way to intervene in her own era. Liu Qing carefully observed the various character images and living conditions in the countryside at that time, carefully pondered the psychology, mental state and behavior habits of the characters of the "novel object", and even familiarized herself with the personalized language used by each character. This creative path of going deep into life is not only to write characters, but also to "play" characters in the context of specific rural social reality.

Lu Yao once commented on Liu Qing's creation: "With a microscope in one hand to observe the life in and around Huangfu Village, and the other hand holding a telescope to look beyond Zhongnan Mountain, his works not only show the vivid and detailed details of life, but also reflect the epic grandeur in general." "Liu Qing is very sensitive to the series of changes that have taken place in Chinese society. In the era of "the land of China is full of giant paintings, symphonies and collective dances of the First Five-Year Plan", the countryside has shown a new atmosphere. The new object of writing calls on him to refine real life with heart and emotion, and to write about the changes in China's rural society.

"To shape a hero, first shape yourself." Liu Qing made demands on the personality of the writer. The opening shot of "Liu Qing" is full of quiet beauty, the morning light is faint, the mist gently envelops the earth, Liu Qing gazes at the open field in front of her, hands her daughter a piece of iron, and says in a serious tone: "In this life, without thousands of hammers, it is a piece of scrap copper and rotten iron." In Liu Qing's view, literary creation and the personality background of the writer should be closely linked, "literary career is a lifelong undertaking, we must be diligent and earnest for a lifetime, can not see different thoughts."

What does Liu Qing's desk look like? In addition to the manuscript, Tolstoy's photograph is placed in front of Liu Qing's desk, which is the epitome of the film "Liu Qing" that tries to convey Liu Qing's lifelong faith and spiritual pillar. It suggests that Liu Qing can never lose the conscience of a writer, and must constantly introspect herself based on the historical value embodied in literary works and the responsibility of writers.

When someone came to see Liu Qing and asked about the progress of writing, he said, "How, it's been a few years, you should also cultivate to achieve positive results, right?" Implicit in this is the assertion of literary creation, as if a writer can write a literary work as long as he invests time and energy. As a professional writer, liu qing's lack of published works for two or three years is certainly difficult for Liu Qing to feel at ease, but it is obvious that it is even more difficult for him to cope with the task of publishing with unsatisfactory works. In the face of the manuscript he had painstakingly written, Liu Qing was not satisfied and resolutely burned it. This is Liu Qing's conscience, and it is his loyalty and persistence in the literary cause as an ordinary writer. Compared with the scenes in the film where Liu Qing participated in several forums before and after, even if the aura of a well-known writer on Liu Qing gradually dissipated, it showed a writer's simple insistence on literary career, and the serious attitude towards literary creation with the heart of passing down the world and the consciousness of writing history became more and more distinct.

The six-year shooting cycle of the movie "Liu Qing" is countless visits, research, and repeated polishing of the script. In this sense, the film "Liu Qing" and Liu Qing's own creative concept are resonant at the same frequency. The creation method of the film and the creative path of Liu Qing respond to the realist spirit of the times and the conscious consciousness of "standing biography" and "writing history", are isomorphic and born in the same direction.

Today, we understand "Liu Qing", understand Liu Qing's realistic creative path of going deep into life and taking root in the people, and also respond to the times we live in. We need to inject new era connotations into literary works and create Chinese stories in the new era.

(Author: Gong Mingshan, Ph.D. student, Department of Middle Chinese And Speech, Sun Yat-sen University)