In 2000, Jiang Wen's "The Devil Is Coming" shocked the world film industry.
At the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, the film won the Grand Jury Prize and was widely acclaimed. So far, the Douban score of this movie is still as high as 9.3 points in the case of nearly 500,000 people who have seen it, ranking among the top 250.
In the film, the sharp image of black and white tones is like a bayonet plunging into the depths of history, torturing the nationality of Chinese.
On April 27, 2002, "Here Comes the Devil" was officially released in Japan. Prior to this, japan's five major violent groups had sent faxes to distribution companies, saying that if the film was screened on Japan, the safety of the Japanese actors who appeared in the film would not be guaranteed.
Sure enough, many Japanese theaters experienced chaos after the screening.
What people don't know is that as early as forty years ago, in 1961, a Japanese film had already focused on Japan's own nationality and portrayed it in a spicy and naked way.
"Feeding"
The film is based on the short story of the same name by Kenzaburo Oe, directed by Nagisa Oshima.
The film tells the story of a villager in a backward Japanese village at the end of World War II who captured a black American soldier who survived the crash, but was forced to "breed" this black man because of vague government orders.
How, is there a taste of "The Devil Is Coming"?
Looking at the content, it is most appropriate to say that "Feeding" is the Japanese version of "The Devil is Coming",
But looking at the background of the creation, it seems that it is not very appropriate, because "Feeding" was completed in the front, but the popularity in China is relatively small, and only more than three hundred people have marked it on Douban.
Moreover, the Douban score of "Feeding" is only 7.7 points, which can be said to be quite low compared to its quality, after all, both the original author Kenzaburo Oe and the director Nagisa Oshima are the top masters in the industry.
As for why it is "underestimated", a large part of the reason is that "Feeding" is not as "good-looking" as "The Devil Is Coming".
Speaking of people, it is more difficult to understand, coupled with the age, the general audience can not touch.
So let's take a look at this veritable unpopular film today.
1、
In 2012, Mo Yan, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a special article recommending a writer: "He is the kind of writer who worries about the country and the people, and takes the world as his responsibility, and his literature has a strong contemporaneity and reality." ”
The writer recommended by Mo Yan is Kenzaburo Oe.
On December 7, 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the second Japanese writer to receive the nobel prize after Yasunari Kawabata in 1968.
In Oe's works, the most common theme is anti-war.
In Japanese anti-war literature, the objects of war that are rendered in thick ink are often Britain and the United States, and the background is mostly centered on the Pacific Theater. Among them, the depiction of China can be said to be very few. Works such as Takeda's "Judgment" and Ishikawa Tatsuzo's "Living Soldier" are among the few novels that use the invasion of China as the theme or background.
Beyond that, the more serious problem is that Japanese anti-war literature often sees itself as a victim in order to emphasize the cruelty of war, and hardly reflects on their responsibilities and reflections on the war as aggressors.
Instead of whitewashing the peace and shirking his responsibilities, Oe chose to face up to the problems in his own nationality and the crimes committed by Japan.
When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he made it clear that Japan had invaded Asian countries during World War II, and that he was "saddened by the tragic acts committed by the Japanese army in Asian countries and should be compensated."
Around this theme, Oe created works such as "Hiroshima Notes" and "Pinching Away Sick Shoots and Strangling Bad Seeds".
His short story "Feeding" reflects on the extreme nationalism exhibited in Japan in World War II with violence and death in the eyes of a teenager, and won the washikawa Literature Award, the most prestigious in the Japanese literary world.
2、
In the early summer of 1945, at the end of the Pacific War, an American bomber fell into the mountain, and a black soldier parachuted to escape, but he was caught by a trap set by the villagers.
Unlike the villagers in "Here Comes the Devil" who passively accept the little Japanese child, the villagers here take the initiative to catch black people.
In their words, it was "chased in the mountains for a day."
As for why it is chased, the reason is very simple, that is, to give it to the public after the change of some big benefits.
Moreover, the village chief also said that the black comrades must stay, and they must not be killed, otherwise they will be punished.
Okay, then keep it.
At first, the negro was in a terrible situation, tied up in an abandoned house, his feet caught in the grip of the beast had begun to decay and maggots, and half of his body began to burn.
From the way the Chinese and the Japanese treated captives, we can already see the difference in the personalities of the two peoples.
In "The Devil Is Coming", the Chinese peasants themselves are tight, and they also have to let the captives eat spicy, wrapped in large cotton quilts, dumplings to eat, in addition to the inconvenience of movement, it seems that they are simply enjoying tourism.
In "Feeding", the villagers of this Japanese village do not care whether black people are dead or alive, it is best to die.
The children of the village, who stood in front of the window of the house where the black man was, asked the village chief to allow them to remove the beast clip and alleviate the pain of the black man a little.
It was also these children who secretly brought food to the negro on weekdays, gave him goat's milk, and took him around when he was healed.
But soon, the "intruder" model ignited an intricate contradiction within the (nation), and the ugliness and selfishness of human nature were nothing new since ancient times.
Ever since the Negro came to this village, even though he did nothing, he gradually became the "target of everyone".
When there is often no food in the village, the villagers will secretly instruct their children to steal things from the village chief," not just one or two, but "simply take them all."
In addition to the village chief's family, these children will also steal indiscriminately, and whoever has good food, their little hands will reach into the pot of whichever house.
No, once I was caught.
Originally, it was said that educating bear children and letting parents apologize and compensate was over, but the direction of things gradually began to be wrong. In order not to hurt the peace, the villagers pointed the spearhead at the blacks: "All the blacks are stealing food, we tell the above, let the above give us compensation." ”
Good fellow, the black buddies are really miserable, not to mention seriously injured, and innocently lying guns.
Next, the blacks were shot one after another.
The incest between the village chief and his daughter-in-law was discovered, and it was the black man's fault.
The village chief's niece and a man's one-night stand, the black man's fault.
A little boy's brother ran away from home, the negro's fault.
The villagers forced the black man to beat a boy who had made a mistake, the black man did not want to, the child fell down the steep slope during the beating, and the villagers said that "killing the black man earlier will not have these things."
A man who went to join the army died in Okinawa, and his mother wept bitterly: "My son died in battle because you cared too much about black people." ”
……
Oh my God, this is really a cauldron flying across the sky, and this black brother will have to die if he doesn't die.
Sure enough, when the news of Japan's defeat finally came, the village chief hacked the black man to death with a machete, and a group of people dug a pit and buried him.
Until this time, a big aunt was still saying something like", "Don't bury it in the ground, it's too obscure."
Throughout the process, we found that the farmers of this village were filled with a smallholder mentality and a short-sighted sense of self-interest.
"Feeding" is fundamentally a response within The Culture of the East, has nothing to do with racial or ethnic consciousness, and the change of regime outside the country has no impact here, it is nothing more than violent structuralism within a closed anthropological space.
This violent structuralism is divided into four groups—American prisoners of war ("blacks"), middle-aged and elderly, young (young), and children.
Blacks are the object of abuse, and the three remaining groups have very different attitudes towards blacks.
Among them, the middle-aged and elderly groups are very chaotic, incest, rape, theft, they are the main abusers.
Teenagers, on the other hand, are in a state of vacillation.
Only children, innocent and kind children, who do not obey the lies of the adults, know that black people are not wrong, and they even wanted to help black people escape at one point.
After the adults buried the negroes, the children lit a bunch of bonfires across from the burials.
These scenes in "Feeding" are actually allusions to the ignorance, incompetence, self-deception, selfishness and laziness of the Japanese nationality.
The villagers obeyed the village chief's family, turned a blind eye to their ugly deeds, and devoted themselves only to it. They steal from each other, bully the weak, and finally put the blame on the weak and the innocent.
In order to cover up their respective ugly deeds, the "interloper" black man became the highest scapegoat.
Of all the people, only the children saw the filth and shamelessness of the adults with their pure eyes.
These children are simply the epitome of the New Wave standard-bearers, including Nagisa Oshima, who were born in the war years. They don't trust the government, they don't trust authority, they only trust their own eyes and experience. When they grew up, they changed the system with their own actions and actively fought against the government.
What is projected in black people is the evil in human nature.
What is bred is also the evil in human nature.
In addition to the theme, the photography of "Feeding" is also quite good.
From the indoor low camera panning long shot to the outdoor looking down and looking up long shot, the transformation of the camera in the film is in line with the ignorance of the villagers.
For example, in the passage where people scatter soil to bury black people, the camera looks down high, just like Mura Changping's "The Desire of the Gods", which metaphorically examines and criticizes the humanity of the villagers and the nationality of the Japanese, like a modern epic.
3、
Nagisa Oshima, a "post-war newcomer director" known as a "ghost talent".
Godard once expressed his deep respect for him in the History of Cinema: "The only directors who can represent Japanese cinema are Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Hiroshi Kawahara and Nagisa Oshima. ”
Like Oe, Nagisa Oshima has always stood at the forefront of the times, paying attention to and thinking about the problems existing in Japanese society, torturing the moral conscience of all Japanese people, and opposing tradition and system.
In 1960, he directed The Cruel Tale of Youth, which mixed sex, violence and politics to tell the love of two contemporary Japanese youths, and was regarded as the beginning of a new wave in Japan.
"Shonen" reveals the various social and political shortcomings of Japan's rapid economic development after the war, and sincerely sympathizes with the people at the bottom.
Featuring Shiro Amakusa, the leader of the Japanese peasant revolt, Amakusa Shiro, is an acura of the people's resistance to oppression.
Merry Christmas on the Battlefield tells the story of the collective madness of the Japanese people.
Released on October 9, 1960, "Night and Fog in Japan" has only 43 shots, and Oshima closely links his youth experience of participating in student organizations with the current political movement of "security" in Japanese social reality.
As Nagisa Oshima's first work to leave Shochiku, "Feeding" creatively depicts the small village that captured black American soldiers as a miniature version of the Empire of Japan that gazes head-on at the state of the wartime nation.
In the film, Nagisa Oshima criticizes the Japanese people's awareness of "no responsibility for war" in their attitude toward war more bitterly than Oe, and relentlessly pursues the moral responsibility of "unconscious crimes" that all Japanese citizens should bear.
The small mountain village is a metaphor for the prototype of the Japanese Empire, and this time, the Japanese no longer appear as victims.
It is like a mirror that exposes hidden scandals beneath Japanese society and places them on the screen for interrogation.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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