Jiang Wen's attitude: The direction of pursuing "truth" is one or two

If acting in the real world is to cover up, then acting in a movie is exposing.

Lead Writer /Pu Shi

<h1>One</h1>

WatchIng Jiang Wen's classic "The Devil Is Coming", the symbols in it are both familiar and strange. A self-sufficient village, passively facing the outside world, needs to decide where to take the next step, but does not know which direction to go, quarreling and indecision. The film is full of symbolic metaphors. Ma Dasan buried no one, ran into the house and collided head-on with the third sister-in-law, so he went to the bed to drill into the quilt, and after drilling, he lay on the bed and looked at the fish and the little sixth son. The eyes of the fish and the little sixth son were very bright, like the stars in the sky, and Ma Dasan wanted to take the little sixth son and the "seventh master" out of the village. Who is the Seventh Master? It is a disabled old man who glids on the bed-making track, shouting "I will pinch the two dead with one hand, plan the pit and bury it", and is also the only person among the villagers who dares to take responsibility, of course, mentally. The three pairs of eyes that looked at each other were impressive. In the clip of director Jiang Wen in "New York, I Love You", the last photo that appears also has such a pair of squinting eyes, like his personal signature.

Jiang Wen's six films deal with history. He said that from the back to the front, many times it is "after-the-horse cannon", "has happened, backwards think that it may be the reason, and it is not the same thing as what actually happened." Yesterday's day can not be left behind, the past can not be traced, what is the actual situation? He looked with his own eyes. He set up a primitive state in a village in Jixian County, Hebei Province, a closed village that could not be reached by any news from the outside world. The people of the village are not influenced by any historical stereotypes, do not know the Japanese, and are neither afraid nor hateful of them. They live in a community where life forms a small closed loop, and no outsider has ever come, just as our collective consciousness is set up in a state of first contact with the Japanese. Is it possible for them to change the direction of history? The symbology in the film is both familiar and unfamiliar to me, and it has opened up the distance in time to understand. For example, Hanaya Kosaburo was almost assimilated by the villagers' kindness of "you have me, I have you", and hung the rune he carried with him on ma Dasan's chicken. It was the only time that the kind Ma Dasan was really angry, shouting "I want our lives" and beating up The Flower House. This village is actually Jiang Wen's hometown. He was born in Tangshan City, and shortly after his birth, his mother sent him to his grandmother's house in the countryside. His grandfather was sent back to his hometown at that time, and Jiang Wen grew up in his grandmother's house until he was 10 years old. He knows very well how people there think, what the atmosphere is like, "I have a say in my hometown."

Jiang Wen told me that he had also tried to think from the perspective of "nationalism", but found that "that is not very true". In fact, "nationalism" has not been born and existed in the past from the culture of Chinese itself. He said that he was born in China and grew up in China, "can only think from the inside of the Chinese, than this higher perspective, after all, limited." He said he learned to understand what the Japanese thought and why they did it, but it was still Chinese thinking, just as Marx's Capital and The Communist Manifesto were the works of the Germans, and the people who wrote the Bible grew up on the Sinai Peninsula, "they were the people there, and they wrote that kind of work." The perspective of "I" is ingrained in Jiang Wen, who does not pretend or try to make himself someone else.

"I" is one of the themes that run through Jiang Wen's films. Ma Dasan was knocked on the door late at night by a mysterious "me", holding a gun to his head, and took over the flower house and the translator Dong Hanchen. "I" does not appear, becomes a metaphorical symbol, and participates in many classic lines. For example, when villagers asked "who is 'I'" and "I am afraid of this 'I'", Dong Hanchen translated "who is 'I'" as another important point of view of "who are they". The search for "I" is also visualized in the process of Ma Xiaojun seeing himself in the mirror, Zhang Mazi's transformation from a semi-conscious figure to a conscious person, Ma Zhaori's true color starring, and the three fathers and Guan Qiaohong all standing confused on the roof after leaving Li Tianzhong, who does not know where to go. In the search for "me", history presents itself as a kind of "truth". There is an inexpressible connection between these characters in the movie: Zhang Muzhi follows the train and rides to Pudong, the horse leaves by train from above, Li Tiantian returns to Beiping from San Francisco by train; on the poster of "Evil Does Not Pressure the Righteous", Li Natural makes a "six" posture, which is the symbol of "Little Six Sons" in "Let the Bullets Fly".

Jiang Wen liked Martin Scorsese's film "Confinement Island". It is the same as Ma Dasan's fear of "me", its "truth" points to the subconscious depths of the self, and the deepest fear is the fear of the self. Jiang Wen said that there is no need to set up the closure of either the village or the island, which is actually the state of the human being itself, "we are all enclosed in our own brains." Globalization and easier communication cannot break this closure either: "Our understanding of the world resides in our own minds, and we are born enclosed in our own shells."

Misreading of people and people has become the norm, and it is difficult to understand. Jiang Wen still continues to understand his father and mother, and this understanding, which he says will take a lifetime to complete. In Jiang Wen's films, most of the language and behavior between the characters have the perspective of translation. In a classic line in Let the Bullets Fly, Zhang Muzhi asked Lao Tang to you translate for me, and the emotions are very complicated. The film also has an English subtitle, which translates to "A Western Legend." On the English poster, a white goose feather fluttering in the wind holds up a golden bullet. Jiang Wen once said that he studied Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama at the Central Academy of Drama, and his films have the shadow of Western drama, but these themselves form part of modern Chinese thinking. In China's more than 100 years of history of learning from the West and gradually modernizing from the East, "the West has had a great influence on China, and Marxism is also a product of Germany." Translation has played a particularly crucial role in history."

The "anchor" of translation is in the self. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-old Jiang Wen studied in Chinese opera, and learned from the introduction of art that once the work leaves the creator and faces the admirer, it has already produced its own life, and "how the appreciator treats it has nothing to do with the creator." The viewer's understanding is often out of reach, but this is also its charm. In his view, it is meaningless for the author to agree with the viewer, and misreading is universal and interesting. "What everyone sees in the film can reflect a part of himself." The "truth" is also closely entangled with the "I" self. Misreading can be dangerous, but it can also be wonderful. Love is based on misreading, "two people have to feel that they are different from each other, and they have love."

<h1>Two</h1>

Jiang Wen said that what he asked for was true and did not like to be false. He believes that artistic performance is to "expose oneself." He satirizes mannerisms, petty bourgeoisie, and all self-wrapping logic. The filming of Evil Doesn't Pressure Right sounds like a theatrical experiment that makes things happen naturally in the movie, but the story takes place not in 2018, but in 1937.

According to the script step by step, in the stylized way of "today know tomorrow", it is not Jiang Wen's film work. In real life, the past cannot be traced, the coming days are still waiting, down the river of time, today do not know what will happen tomorrow. The real situation is not a combination of succession, but more like Borges's "Garden of Forks in the Path", where there are infinite possibilities at each fork in the road, and only one of them will eventually happen. Jiang Wen's work is done by imitating such a model. He often "puts the people in the play into the same situation as the outsiders", the crew often does not know whether they can shoot tomorrow, in a state of waiting, and the people in the play do not know whether they can succeed in the play. In the last scene of "Evil Does Not Pressure the Right", Li Tiantian and Lan Qingfeng's ending scene, until the night to be filmed the next day, the screenwriter and director did not know where the two should go. It was past 3 p.m. and we said", and the next day there was only one ending that could only be that of all the possibilities. This is both life and drama, creating a delicate place between life and drama. The original skeleton of the script is the "bridge pier", with a head, a tail, eight piers, and the starting point, end point and process are roughly known. But there are many paths, just as life is made up of countless details at forks in time. It was not until the "human drama is not divided" that it became a naturally occurring life in the past time and space of 1937.

Jiang Wen's films are not only made for the audience to see, but also record the life and growth of the actors. He said that when actors put their inner world and time there for the role, he filmed their role and life together. Looking back years later, for the actor, this is not only a performance, but also his own growth process and inner exposure, this growth and exposure occurs under the drive of the role, and the film thus becomes a period of personal significance. In "Evil Does Not Pressure Righteousness", Peng Yuyan eventually became Li Tiantian. The scene where he runs naked on the roof is very natural for him, "Everyone says naked upper body, I say yes, the director says take it off, I say yes." In the movie story that the audience sees, there is another layer of story, which is the story of the people in the movie, and some of them are unforgettable. This is the "N stories" of "Evil Does Not Pressure The Right": the audience sees a movie and story from the perspective of the viewer, and inside the film is the reality of each actor's own growth and change. He photographed not only Li Tiantian, Guan Qiaohong and Zhu Qianlong, but also Peng Yuyan, Zhou Yun and Liao Fan. Zhou Yun has been starring from "The Sun Also Rises", Liao Fan in "Let the Bullets Fly" also appeared in "One Step Away" and "Evil Does Not Pressure justice", and Ken Sawada, who played Nemoto Ichiro, also played the Japanese army captain Inoyoshi Sazuka, these echoing roles have built a life channel for the actors themselves. In this sense, his films have continuity, and six films are also one movie. Jiang Wen himself also grew and changed in the movie by entering the inner world of the character, and people saw his growing tenderness in "Evil Does Not Pressure justice". For him, cinema is life itself, more real than the real world.

So in which direction is the truth? Does it exist? Wang Tianwang in "One Step Away" stays in a direction that deviates from the truth, and Ma Zaori believes that the truth cannot be deviated from for the sake of immediate interests. In "Let the Bullets Fly", Mazi, who planted mines, shouted "go east" from the mountain, thinking "Shanxi is in the east", wanting to save Lao Tang, Lao Tang's carriage still drove to the explosion point, Zhang Muzhi turned around and killed him - the three people saw different directions. In "Evil Does Not Pressure the Righteous", Li Tiantian took a train into Beiping, and met Lan Qingfeng in front of the courtyard of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Street with Hendler, Lan Qingfeng said to fight vinegar, Hendler said that the shops were not all in the other direction, and Lan Qingfeng said that he was "dumplings wrapped in vinegar". In the Pamela case involved in the film, the police chief did not deal with the criminal according to the logic of catching the real murderer; if he wanted to add to the guilt, the Japanese also used this method to name the rickshaw driver as a traitor, shoot the rickshaw driver, follow up the media reports, and fabricate the "truth". False and real, true and false when false is true, where is the truth? But the war waged by the Japanese was real. Jiang Wen deliberately made the height of the Japanese troops entering the city and the proportion of guns in line with the historically accurate size.

Inside or outside the movie, which is closer to the "truth"? One Step Away explores this issue. It was shot according to the film history business card "Yan Ruisheng". In Shanghai at that time, a murder case was followed up by a series of full-time reports, Yan Ruisheng had not yet been arrested, the stage play of the same name had been staged, and later it was quickly adapted into a movie, becoming a film commercial spectacle. "One Step Away" is actually a remake of "Yan Ruisheng". The stage in the film and the film in the film construct multiple spaces nested in layers, and the characters in the film are not only the objects of viewing by the viewers, but also watch other characters in the film themselves, and even watch themselves in the movie, and the film sometimes becomes a reality. Ma Zaori finally starred in Ma Zouri, turning the innermost layer of film space into reality and showing the bottom line of life. In "Evil Does Not Pressure the Right", Lan Qingfeng and Li Natural "take a selfie", and Lan Qingfeng says that Li Natural "closed his eyes", which is both a humor that breaks and reverses the boundary between reality and the movie, but also a satire on the illusion on the photo.

Jiang Wen told me that he was against the current "entertainment to death" and did not like the so-called petty bourgeoisie's mannerisms. During the promotion period of "Evil Does Not Pressure the Righteous", he participated in a talent show. He told the participants that one of the most memorable moments of their lives might have been just a part of promoting business for others, and that they only served as a setboard. In the era of mass entertainment, real life is full of pretentious acting, entertainment has become the mainstream discourse, everywhere is "show", even democratic politics is the same, Trump is the vote obtained by the show. Jiang Wen said that under Trump's reality show, there is a real intention, that is, his political ambitions.

The film industry is full of the smell of capital, but Jiang Wen said that this is not what he thinks "should be", nor can it change the essence of film. The real world is full of "acting", and the performances of characters and actors in movies have become real. In "Let the Bullets Fly", Zhang Mazi fell into the grass and played the role of a bandit, but in the film, he gradually changed from an unconscious character to a conscious character. Peng Yuyan said that he was acting in "Evil Does Not Pressure the Right", "Qiao Hong stood opposite me, and her concentration made me fully believe that that moment was completely entered by the atmosphere, light, and lines, inseparable, and did not know what he had done", thus slowly entering a state of "unconsciousness", as if being summoned by a force to find more things in him, so that he "willingly and nakedly handed over his inner things and roles". The characters in the film have their own self-consciousness process, and the actors create artistic reality in a focused state, which is what Jiang Wen can pursue. The more he and his team invested in the production of movies with large capital, the more they followed the publicity method of large-scale commercial marketing to promote the film, the more they formed a certain paradox with his film pursuit, and only the truth of the art in the film can become a question and rebellion against the absurdity of reality. As for success, it is another story of heroes who make or break.