Reading at night丨taking "The First Burning Incense" as a still picture of the circle of friends will make the text ashamed

Tian Ran

After 1900, Einstein's theory of relativity helped and revolutionized literary writing the most was the feeling of time and space: mental activity, thought dynamics; consciousness, memory and dreams all had legitimacy and materiality, and the characters no longer lived in inertia.

Smart, twenty-something girl, Zhang Ailing, who likes Western pendulums so much, willfully started her 20th century with an incense burner. Some European writers searched for their own everyday objects corresponding to Einstein's theory of relativity, and it is said that they found the giant cheese in the Christmas market, saying that the holes in the irregular cheese could be compared to the Chinese things, and those holes were tunnels that could lead to the past, and time fissioned and fell into the black hole of words.

As for a space called a city, it is better to have no name, and even if it has a name, it is a fixed space; a girl, it is better not to have a name, she is no longer a female teacher in the Brontë era, at least a public or private school teacher, she can probably be a typist, and go to a movie in her spare time: "Many years ago... ”

Such an expression appeared in the pen of all writers after the 20th century in all the languages of the world, and later it appeared in the film world, and to this day, the human heart has already passed the tempering of the two major wars of the 20th century, and has also leapt into outer space, but why should they be obsessed with a story "many years ago".

After 1900, all the disciplines were far removed from literature, and the disciplines of history, as the last nostalgia, also acquired their own spiritual strength, and they all declared their independence; at the same time as independence, there was a film denounced as industrial culture, which abandoned light and told stories in the dark.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the relationship between film and industry was greater than that of literature, and film flew like wings through the cities or villages of every country. Around the theater and reading is different, there are many snack bars and snacks can only be paired with movies, it can become a Shanghai girl biting her lip to see alone, or it can be a group of rural girls biting their lips and many people watching.

After 1900, Miss Zhang Ailing, who studied in the new school, Mr. Chekhov, a medical school graduate, and many writers caught up with this era. Their struggle with traditional literature is not space, but time, not language but speech. Tolstoy, who had walked through the old times, had written in his diary to learn from Chekhov in order to catch up with this kind of speech; a year before his death, to inspire the sense of mission of local films, Tolstoy participated in the filming of a documentary, and his wife said to the camera crew: You shoot us walking, as if we did not know how you followed us; he himself saw so many people in the filming place, and Tolstoy, who was not good at public speech, said: I am very happy, I am very moved, and then I cry.

Literature should still be so timid as to the image, the former over time, the latter over space; since literature does not want to be independent, it should be as powerful in the text as Tolstoy, be a timid person in front of the camera, and desperately study film. As for the relationship between literature and film, it is like the oleanders that fill the streets of the south after June – there are poisonous flowers and fruitless; it is the subtropical wind of the 1940s – it does not matter whether It is Shanghai's Hong Kong's or Xiamen's, the wind blows through them, it is all the love and hate of the end of the world.

Such a discouraging relationship between literature and film has also been a hundred years old, primate people grow tall and fat, and have not opened their eyes, and the text is too much, until the actors in the image are bitter. In just a few months of shooting time, let the actors express the hearts of the characters in large sections with words, and use words to drive action, in the end, it takes many years of dramatic training to really have the drama of "a moment". It is said that people call this "moment" "love".

The film is a little shaky in front of the text, hesitantly do not know how to use space for time to express this "moment", do not know whether the first exam between the aunt and nephew in the novel should have a proctor teacher to divide some lines, since the audience has long known that Ge Weilong finally fell, the film simply let her fall early; simply changed those examination papers about piano and tennis in the movie to Situ Xie to examine; simply let Ge Weilong be pushed and shoved by several pushes as soon as he got on the ship.

I don't quite believe this shot, ordinary girls in Shanghai can also afford to suffer, especially from the suffering given by others, this point, I think Ma Sichun still interprets the ordinary Shanghai girl, that is, others owe her a hundred hanging money: she is the wind or the water is a moment you can't catch.

Our mistake is that we shouldn't think of the movie "First Incense" as just an unpublished copy of a writer's slippery hand, a GIF after a photographer's hand shakes, or a draft by a musician. At the beginning, the film line is still the rules of montage, not the rules of the quill pen to the five strokes of input, at least it should not be the rules of WeChat. This old incense burner should not be regarded as a static picture of the circle of friends, not only screenshots, but also posted screenshots and chat records in their circle of friends, which make the text shameful and embarrassing the image.

Film has been independent for more than a hundred years, and we should have known that the struggle between literature and film should still be spiritualized. As for the materiality of literature in the film, it should tell the actor what the real pronunciation of "nagging" in Mandarin is. For Zhang Ailing, today's young children, who are disciplined by literature or disciplined by data, will unanimously believe that Zhang Wen's moon is "round" and Zhang Wen's character is "beautiful". Even the sinking person Ge Weilong is also a sinking in the theory of relativity, she enters a black hole of time, which is full of a cloud of light, a fog and a fragrance.

So the loud laughter that this movie provokes in the theater seems to say that we don't read much, but you guys come together to tell us another story of "seventy years back in time", worried that we can't understand another "moment". The audience still felt offended, after all, squeezed the weekend evening peak, bought a movie ticket above 50 yuan, the backpack contained a 10 yuan bread, the movie ended without the last subway, shouting a taxi to be ranked after twenty or so.

With the temper of Miss Zhang Ailing, who is in her early 20s, she published a sensational "First Burning Incense", and must have come to you naughtily and bit your ears: it is really not worth it.

One of the things that this movie does right is that Yi chose a season of late blooming of osmanthus flowers, everyone thinks that the summer days in Shanghai this year will make the osmanthus flowers chaotic, I don't know the geometry of the good time, but in the thick night of October 22, 2021 in the Gregorian calendar, the osmanthus flowers are still wrapped in fog and fade the cold layer by layer, it is still so shy and heavy, and Wei Longsi should be intertextual, it should be mixed.

Editor-in-Charge: Li Qinyu

Proofreader: Liu Wei