Author: Huang Jin
Recently, the French "Film Handbook" announced the top ten movies in 2020, and the Chinese film "Spring River Plumbing" was among them. The film premiered at the closing ceremony of Critics Week at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival, and is now online to let more audiences notice the film. Starting from the mother's birthday feast and ending with the funeral, the film condenses the realistic picture of contemporary Chinese society with the changes in the life of a riverside family.
Presentation of eastern family ethics
Home is the basic structure of society, and it is also an important carrier for narrative art to express reality and reflect customs and customs. The family structure in "Spring River Plumbing" typically reflects the kinship relationship of Chinese and shows a strong ethical and cultural characteristic. The elderly mother suffered a stroke at the birthday party, the problem of supporting the mother was highlighted, and the lives of the four brothers slowly emerged like a long scroll painting.
The narrative structure of the film has the characteristics of typical Oriental family ethics films, that is, to seek a new balance after the crisis, disintegration and conflict of family relations. In essence, this is the embodiment of Chinese cyclical philosophical view—yin and yang, life and death, and clutch all go back and forth in endless opposition and unity. The closed interpretation of a family and a life in "Spring River Plumbing" penetrates many contradictions and opposites in daily reality, and finally emphasizes the law of life and social development with the transformation of antagonistic relationships. In this small town family history, subtle contradictions in life can be seen everywhere, and naked realities such as marriage, pension, and buying a house permeate the narrative of the film, reflecting the huge gap between ideals and reality.
In the face of the contradictions of real life, the film abandons a unified and coherent linear narrative and adopts a scattered narrative with the characteristics of traditional Chinese poetic aesthetics. The film is divided into four paragraphs of summer, autumn, winter and spring, there is no obvious narrative logic connection between the paragraphs, with events and people's emotional flow through the connection, the life of the four brothers as four balanced and intersecting clues, distributed in the four seasonal paragraphs, the audience fills themselves from the fragments of the narrative, and experiences the family affection of the family members that penetrate them.
In addition to downplaying the plot, the film enriches the narrative with many details. For example, although the grandmother was delirious after she fell ill, when faced with the marriage and love choice of her granddaughter Gu Xi, she earnestly admonished that "people should be with the people they like for a lifetime", but turned around and mistakenly recognized Gu Xi as her parents. The real details not only create a distinct character image, but also enhance the appeal of the film.
A contemporary transformation of traditional poetic aesthetics
The film uses long shots of scattered perspective when showing the style of the small town. Scattered perspective is the observation and appreciation method of traditional Chinese painting, this way does not have a clear focus, any angle can become the center, the view point of view of the position where the viewer is in a bird's eye view can jump freely, and form a vision that cares about the overall situation in the free wandering of time. The long shots of scattered perspective in "Spring River Plumbing" retain the integrity of time and space, on the one hand, showing the scenery of Jiangnan and creating a quiet aesthetic style of Jiangnan films; on the other hand, enabling the audience to break the shackles of visual limitations and form a poetic time and space where reality and imagination coexist.
Jiang Yi and Gu Xi in a section by the river, that is, using a long horizontal lens to move step by step. With the slow movement of the camera, the scenery and people on the banks of the Fuchun River come into view one by one, and the warm exchange between the two young people and the lush flowing river scenery respond to each other, highlighting the poetry of daily life and the vitality of youth and freedom. After the eldest son and daughter-in-law release and pray by the river, the long lens moves over the trees and buildings along the river, and then follows the fishing boat to the distance, where the city is lined with high-rise buildings, forming a structural confrontation with the quiet river surface, and a high density of information and emotional expression is realized in one shot.
Many of the film's picture compositions reflect the reference to the traditional painting aesthetics. Chinese painting emphasizes "three inches vertically, when the height of a thousand inches, horizontal ink several feet, the body of a hundred miles." "The picture is not only a realistic portrayal, but also a combination of objective and subjective, a combination of scenery and emotion, and an emphasis on the creation of an artistic conception in addition to composition and strokes." Many shots in the film capture the most iconic seasonal scenes of the Fuchun River, such as fishing boats in heavy snow and birdsong in the forest stream in spring. When showing these scenery with Jiangnan characteristics, the film emphasizes the composition structure on the one hand, presenting a picture with the beauty of the virtual reality of ink painting; on the other hand, it integrates the picture with the emotions of the characters, and the rendering of the environment is closely integrated with the emotional expression of the characters. When Gu Xi and Teacher Jiang privately decided to live their lives without their relatives present to bless them, the picture appeared in the snow fishing boat, showing a sense of loneliness in which thousands of mountain birds flew and thousands of people disappeared. When spring arrives and the family mourns after the death of grandma, the camera moves through a green mountain forest, implying the transformation of family life and the easing of tension between relatives.
"Spring River Plumbing" is not only a realistic picture of contemporary Chinese society, but also shows the poetic aesthetics of the Chinese film tradition. Life full of human fireworks is under the poetic expression of the director, which produces a more open and poly-meaning realist feeling. At the moment of the rapid development of film technology, film still needs to show film as the standard of art with strong humanistic care, and the vicissitudes of reality and rough life always contain poetic highlights. "Spring River Plumbing" is a warm realist practice, flashing with poetic brilliance with traditional aesthetic styles, which foreshadows a possibility of national aesthetics in Chinese cinema.
(The author is a lecturer at Beijing Information Science and Technology University)
Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel