On November 27, Zhang Yimou's film "One Second" was released in theaters, nearly two years later than the original schedule. In the four days of release, the film has accumulated more than 70 million at the box office. For Zhang Yimou, this box office performance is not a surprise, but at the time when many fifth-generation directors have lost their momentum in new works, the reputation of "One Second" is good, maintaining Zhang Yimou's standard in the hearts of fans.
Stills from the movie "One Second".
The film is about the experience of an individual in a big era. A father who had been in the labor camp for many years because of a fight and was not understood by his daughter heard that there was an image of his daughter in the opening news bulletin of the movie, so he secretly ran out of the place where he was detained. In the process of chasing the film screening, he met with Liu Girl, Fan Film and other characters, resulting in some intersections.
The most moving part of the film comes from the protagonist Zhang Jiusheng's love for his daughter, and driven by this deep father-daughter relationship, the film text acquires transcendent power. So, why is the father-daughter relationship that has been told countless times still touching people? In "One Second", this moving place comes largely from how Zhang Jiusheng broke through the rules and external constraints to approach the image of his daughter. The conflict behind this is actually an old topic: how to grasp the boundary and proportion between public and "private"? Why do individual desires and emotions deserve respect and have the power to touch people's hearts?
Written by | Heavy wood
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<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the contradiction between the individual and the external environment</h1>
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > become the conflict kernel of One Second</h1>
"The tide of the world is mighty, and if it goes along with it, it will prosper, and if it goes against it, it will perish", does this imply a certain fatalistic helplessness: that is, as a small individual in this mighty torrent, it is often insignificant, like a drop of water.
However, it is also here that we encounter the contradictions in "One Second". For a story that is inconspicuous to others, "one second" in a long movie, for Zhang Jiusheng, a man who escaped from a labor camp, is almost the whole of his life. For individuals, what they can feel and encounter is often the whole, the mighty flood of all.
When director Zhang Yimou affectionately traced the reasons for shooting this story, he mentioned his early experiences, especially his love and fascination with movies. Perhaps this is why the symbol and metaphor of "one second" appeared. As the basic unit of time that makes up a movie, it is these countless seconds that construct a magnificent movie. The relationship of a second to the entire film also symbolizes, to a large extent, the relationship between countless individuals and the history in which they participate, build, and create.
In the film, the image of Zhang Jiusheng's daughter as "one second" is both emphasized and ignored. On the one hand, this "one second" is the content that makes up the important news broadcast in the movie, conveying the trends and trends of the entire environment at that time, without this "one second", it is difficult to construct a complete ideological image; on the other hand, this "one second" is ignored, it is only an integral part of this propaganda short film, a screw, which is integrated into the whole without real attention, but a symbol created and needed.
However, the appearance of Zhang Jiusheng completely destroys this hidden rule, causing the girl in the originally vague "one second" to regain her meaning as an individual. The reason for this subversion comes from the kinship of kinship, a natural factor, which is kinship.
This dialectic of the individual is to some extent a rather brilliant and contradictory part of Zhang Yimou's films. From "Alive" to "My Father and Mother", and "Homecoming" in this century, even "Shadow" exudes this theme. Zhang Yimou is very concerned about this issue, and his repeated returns and discussions also reveal his humanistic concerns – and the concerns of almost the entire fifth generation of directors.
In "One Second", Zhang Yimou repeatedly shows the rough and harsh environment of the endless and wind-blowing plateau under the camera, creating a tense and desolate atmosphere for the audience. Hannah Arendt uses the term "desert" to describe a state of worldlessness, a state in which one loses the ability to share the world with others. And the story of Zhang Jiusheng and Liu Girl's daughter also takes place in this yellow sand that may be regarded as a metaphor.
Stills from the Heroes and Children movie.
When the film appeared in the popular "Heroes and Children" movie in the 1960s and 1970s, we were actually placed in two different narrative and conceptual logics at the same time: that is, how individuals can choose in the face of higher, more macro ideals. Comparing "Heroes and Children" with "One Second", we will find the difference, in "Heroes and Children", Wang Wenqing found out early in the morning that Wang Fang was his daughter who he had no choice but to abandon eighteen years ago, but for the sake of revolution, he did not recognize his daughter. In "One Second", Zhang Jiusheng tried his best to see his daughter, even threatening to kill.
Behind these two different logics lurks the most anxious contradiction in modernity, that is, the liberation and freedom of the individual, in what way?
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the conceptual flow of "private" and "public"</h1>
For the modern West, the "individual" began to appear in the Renaissance, and then became the basis of all research in the Enlightenment, whether philosophical, or artistic, literary, economic, social, etc. From the medieval gaze of god to those who live on earth. When man broke free from the bondage of God and began to stand on his own feet in the world, the rational faculties found in the enlightenment philosophers became the most powerful weapon to guide and help individuals to live, think, and create. "I think, therefore I am" has become the most core trait of the modern individual.
The confidence that the demystification of medieval theology led to the conviction that reason could be used to design and build earthly paradises. The "City of God" and the "Earthly City", which were once strictly separated by St. Augustine, were gradually ignored in human reason after the Enlightenment; and with the development of scientific and technological rationality such as science and technology, the social changes set off by the Industrial Revolution made human beings firmly believe in the possibility of creating a heavenly society and world for individuals.
How can this be achieved? The divergence in this answer has become the most typical two paths in the modern world revolution: one emphasizes the basic rights and interests of the individual, the construction of the state and society through the social contract, and the protection of the individuals living in it and the right to pursue happiness; the other way is to emphasize a certain holistic plan, that is, only through the transformation of society as a whole can we truly liberate individuals and guarantee their freedom and rights.
The history of Zhang Yimou's encounter with the fifth generation of directors is born under the logic of the second way, that is, in order to create a fair, free, and open society and country, it is necessary to completely sweep away all old things and reconstruct new cities and new worlds on its ruins. It is also under this typical enlightenment logic that both Lu Yanzhi in "The Return" and Zhang Jiusheng and Liu Girl in "One Second" are required to give up their "selfish desires" for this more lofty and great future and dream, and participate in the promotion of this torrent.
And Wang Cheng, Wang Fang and the political commissar in "Heroes and Children" also actively and enthusiastically participated in it, and in the end, the family tragedy of Wang Wenqing and Wang Fang was resolved painlessly in the face of higher ideals. But this logic encounters crises and obstacles in "One Second", which will reveal some of the shadows in the fate of the wind and whistle, or the encounters and stories of individuals who are obscured and cannot be seen and known.
"Public and Private in China", by Yuzo Mizoguchi, Translator: Zheng Jing, Edition: Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, February 2011
In Yuzo Mizoguchi's book Public and Private in China, the author points out that the traditional Chinese concept of "public and private" is different from that of the West and Japan, but its influence on modern China in this related concept is still very strong. As a kind of "public formed by the joint assembly of private", on the one hand, it is inclusive because of its ability to coordinate, and is understood as "fair and just"; on the other hand, when it is regarded as a standard of "fairness and justice", "private" as the antithesis of its theory will be denigrated, and both its morality and politics will penetrate into the negative connotation. The story of "One Second" has become an outlier outside the mainstream narrative with typical selfishness, and thus has been hit.
Zhang Yimou chose to use the "father-daughter" relationship to show the two-sided power of this "private affair". In order to see his daughter at a glance, Zhang Jiusheng, as a father, did not hesitate to undermine the demands and orders from the "gong", thus directly challenging and threatening the authority of the latter. As the most basic space in traditional Chinese political and daily ethical life, the family carries "private feelings" to some extent, although we also know that the concept of "public and private" originated from the family from the very beginning, that is, the family is public, and the parties that make up the family are private. For the sake of the family, it is also necessary to suppress the selfishness of all parties.
However, with the decline of the modern traditional family after the late Qing Dynasty and the spread of the Western nuclear family model in China, the family as "private" began to be separated from, or even separated, from the "public" of the state or society. The biological blood relationship that makes up the modern nuclear family has also become the initial state of some kind of "private", so when faced with a daughter, a brother or his own son, Zhang Jiusheng, Liu Girl and Fan Jingcai will not hesitate to bypass various "public" rules and regulations and prohibitions to protect each other.
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<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > in a conflict with fate</h1>
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" how can individuals get rid of helplessness and helplessness >? </h1>
It is in such family stories that Zhang Yimou seems to believe that what is regarded as "private" is actually more like a natural emotional outpouring of some kind of human nature. It is in this "nature" that the future shaped and imagined by external machines becomes more dehumanized, and the situation that Kant once feared appeared: that man is no longer an end, but a tool. When the Frankfurt School began to reflect after World War II on what had caused such a catastrophe to modern Europe, they discovered the madness of reason and technology caused by the dark object of instrumental reason.
Instrumental reason, which emphasizes practicality and purpose in essence, is inextricably linked to the overall scheme of the modern revolution, namely, that the goals set need to be machine-like and clearly implemented, and that any other actor, the environment ("man triumphs over heaven") and the conditions ("how bold man is, how prolific the land") must be required to sacrifice their characteristics in order to serve this purpose, to become a minute and a second in the magnificent film of "historical necessity". In history and process designed by instrumental reason, individuals are called public, and for reasons for a higher future they are required to renounce selfishness, creativity, and agency and actively become the thousands of nameless people who make up the collective.
In the news broadcast of "One Second", Zhang Jiusheng's daughter and countless young people like her are dedicated to themselves in the voice of such an era, just like the fifth generation of directors. It's just that the latter is slightly luckier and lives to the point where "times have changed", but Zhang Jiusheng's daughter is drowned in such a torrent, leaving only a dismal image in the news broadcast.
Nor does this happen to girls alone. When Fan Film had to play a movie for him because of the threat of Zhang Jiusheng, he learned about the misfortune of the other party's children in the chat and gained a brief resonance, and then he secretly let the security department arrest people, and finally he cut the negative of Zhang Jiusheng's daughter for that second and gave it to him... What Fan film embodies is the real and vivid humanity- neither angel nor devil, but many forms caused by necessity or helplessness in various circumstances. It is like the rich and noble life of the clumsy boy shown by Zhang Yimou in "Alive", who secretly survived in the turbulent and strange era, and obtained some temporary happiness and ease.
But whether it is the tragedy of Zhang Jiusheng and his daughter, or the misfortune of Liu's daughter, or even the accident of Fan Zhen's son, this should not be the case.
In the mighty newscast, her daughter only has "one second"; in the tide of history and fate, they seem to be just "one second", and no screener like Fan Film can repeat this second repeatedly through editing. This seems to be the final tragedy of the individual, that is, the creator himself is ultimately fleeting and often obscurely like the film's final film negative, engulfed in yellow sand and no longer visible.
The Hidden Worries of Modernity: Authentic Ideals That Need to Be Saved, by Charles Taylor, translated by Cheng Lian, Nanjing University Press, October 2020.
However, zhang Yimou seems to be trying to confront the misfortune of the individual disappearing again in the narrative of the later era. If we look at the behavior of Zhang Jiusheng and Liu Niu on another level, we may also find that even in such a harsh environment, they still insist on what they think is right and needs to be done—even though the causes of these things are beyond their control—thus writing and creating their own narratives in the grand narrative.
In Charles Taylor's The Hidden Concerns of Modernity, he calls this self-determining freedom, that is, we are free when we decide that something is relevant to me, not by external influences. The choices and decisions made by Zhang Jiusheng and Liu's daughter under the affection of their daughters also imply that they are free, and even in the era of closed and overwhelming, the individual's "one second" can still become a decisive moment, beyond external constraints. Isn't Zhang Yimou using the film to re-show and tell these countless "one seconds"?
Perhaps, as Hannah Arendt said at the end of The Promise of Politics, "It is precisely because we suffer in the desert that we remain human and intact." The danger is that we become real desert dwellers, feeling as comfortable in the desert as staying at home." In the desert of "One Second", whether it is Zhang Jiusheng, Liu Girl or Fan Film, they are all suffering from pain and misfortune, which is why they are full of passion for life, and only in this way - Arendt said - "we believe that he can arouse the courage from the root of action in himself and use it to become a person who acts." Because only individuals who act can change the desert and make it a world where people can connect, communicate and act together, and only in this way can we jointly change our helplessness and helplessness as "one second" in the torrent of the times.
The content of this article is exclusive and original. Author: Shigegi; Editor: Walk Away; Proofreader: Wang Xin. Without the written authorization of the Beijing News, it shall not be reproduced, and welcome to forward to the circle of friends.