Stills from "Arajan Color". Photo/Courtesy of respondents
"Ara ginger color": Tibetan movies are not only scenery, but also people
Reporter/Li Xing
This article was first published in China News Weekly, Issue 876
In a tea house in Chengdu, through the introduction of a friend, the Tibetan Rong Zhong'erjia met Song Taijia. During the banquet, he told a story about the Tibetan pilgrimage.
In the 1980s, an old man on a pilgrimage to Lhasa with a long head, in order to travel lightly, he spent dozens of yuan to buy a small donkey to carry the bag. After three spring and summer seasons, part-time work and hospitalization, he and the donkey who grew up on the road finally arrived in Lhasa.
At the end of the pilgrimage, the donkey became a problem. He could not walk back to his hometown with a donkey for three more years, the bus did not allow the donkey to get on the bus, it was not realistic to rent a car to transport the donkey back, he had no money.
Finally, the old man fostered the donkey in a family in Lhasa, thinking of a chance to take the donkey home again. No thoughts, a parting is a farewell.
This is a true story. The old man is a primary school teacher in Rong Zhong'erjia, and he wants to pass the exam from a private teacher to a public teacher, but he has not been able to pass. He couldn't do farm work, he wasn't married, and he was miserable all the time. Listening to the old man talk about this heart disease since childhood, Rong Zhong'erjia was worried about the teacher's story for decades.
He also told this story to his friends many times. Why not make it into a movie? A lot of people suggest that. Therefore, he consulted with the director Wan Ma Tse-dan and also found Tashi Dawa to write the first draft of the script accordingly.
Shotaka was interested in the story and read the first script, but he was not interested in the subject of pilgrimage. After a month of retreat, he wrote another version of the script.
Waking up one day in a dream, Oma, when she was seriously ill, concealed her current husband's insistence on embarking on a long journey to Lhasa. On the way, the terminally ill Oma tells her current husband a secret that has bothered her for years: She promised her deceased ex-husband that she would take his ashes on a pilgrimage to Lhasa.
In the face of his wife's dream of sharing the same bed, the current husband still chose to take the discordant stepson and the donkey he met halfway to complete the pilgrimage together, and gradually eliminated the estrangement with the stepson during the journey and reached reconciliation.
At this point, the script retains the road type of pilgrimage, but the core becomes an exploration of human emotions and family relationships.
At this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, the jury led by Jiang Wen presented "Ara Jiang Se" with two awards, best screenplay and jury, becoming the biggest winner at the film festival.
"The film is candid and profound, brave and uncompromising, depicting the complexity of human relationships and also portraying hope and redemption in moments of life's ultimate problems." Every trip is about finding yourself, and the road itself is more important than the destination. If man sacrifices his desires, his ego, then he can sustain his journey of ascension. We would like to present this award to those who invited us on a journey through the human spirit. The award speech reads.
In the film, the audience can see the most iconic prostrations, mysterious rituals, and beautiful scenery in Tibetan films, but it is by no means another Kailash. Song Taiga does not like the Tibetan elements of the "trafficking" label, and he only focuses on the common emotions of human beings in different environments. From the previous director's works "The Sun is Always on the Left" and "River" to today's "Arajan Color", this is not the case.
"Everyone lives in this worldly place, and who can be separated from family feelings, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, and eat and drink Lazarus." Since you can't do without it, you will encounter these life-and-death partings, love and hate encountered in the movie. In the past, many films about Tibet have focused on labeling Tibet, and people are particularly rare, but I think people are particularly important. Song Taijia told China News Weekly.
"The pilgrimage itself is not
What I want to express in this movie."
On the first night of the launch of "Ara Ginger Color", Song Taijia almost had a sleepless night. He knew that the actor's performance was at the heart of the play, and once the performance leaked, the play was over.
After the first day of filming, he was worried about the performance link, the content of this scene: the current husband and wife from the hospital after the examination, riding home on a motorcycle.
The current husband is played by Su Ren Rong Zhong'er Jia, and the wife is played by professional actor Nyima Song Song. Because the lines are a kind of Jiarong dialect that he is not familiar with, he can only rely on the way of marking pinyin to memorize by rote, often taking care of the lines and forgetting the expression, and having an expression and not grasping the rhythm. Jingbei is a close-up of the male and female protagonists, and it is a long shot with lines and expressions, and Rong Zhong'erjia in the foreground seems to be a bit busy.
After a whole day of filming, the crew was a little exhausted. In the evening, Matsutaga replayed the camera for Rong Zhong'erjia, pointing out that his performance traces were too heavy and had not yet entered the heart of the characters.
This reminds Yung Ofl A of the scene in 1994 when he went into the studio to record his first album. "After recording, I went outside to listen to the song I had just sung, and I felt that my voice was very strange. It was the same feeling as my first acting. He said.
Rong Zhong'erjia returned to the room and recalled the living environment and emotional state of the male protagonist told him by the director. Thinking of their wives, they will also blush and quarrel with each other for the little things in life, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar. The next day's remake, Rong Zhong'erjia seemed to have changed a person, and had become the male number one that Song Taijia imagined when he wrote the script.
At first, Matsutaga did not expect to let Rong Zhong'erjia play the role. Rong Zhong'erjia also recommended some Tibetan actors, and the director was not satisfied. In the director's imagination, the current husband is a character who is both good and evil. With more contact with Rong Zhong'erjia, the director began to consciously create characters with his temperament.
In Tibetan areas, there are very few people who have studied acting, so when choosing a rare actor, the director's intuition is very important. The role of the stepson in the film is also one of the protagonists, and Matsutaka visits and screens thousands of people at the local primary school in his hometown. At first, there was no progress, but later in the corner of a classroom, he saw the coldness in Sai Zhaojia's eyes, "It feels very appropriate, that is intuition, and it is fate." ”
Later, he became the son in the film, and the true color and good "acting skills" put a lot of pressure on Rong Zhong'erjia and the heroine. The most repetitive scene, filmed 17 times, the person who played the doctor in the movie is Rong Zhong'erjia's real-life cousin, the director temporarily found a glasses for him, asking him to play with Rong Zhong'erjia when the eyes should be glimpsed from the top of the glasses. Because it is too familiar, Rong Zhong'erjia is always laughing. In desperation, the director let him rest, adjusted his mood before finally finishing filming.
Because it is a road movie, and in order to take care of the coherence of the actors' emotions, the film chose to shoot in complete chronological order, from Aba in Sichuan to Qinghai and Tibet, the altitude is rising along the way, and some members of the crew have some altitude sickness. The most troublesome thing is that because there are seasonal changes in the movie, for a month, the crew temporarily disbanded, and waited until the leaves fell and the winter snow gathered again.
The film originally ended with the "father and son" arriving in Lhasa to complete the pilgrimage, but the end seen in the theater stopped at three kilometers away from Lhasa: the father changed his son's new clothes, trimmed his hair, and waited for an auspicious day to enter Lhasa.
"Because the pilgrimage itself is not the purpose I want to express in this film, but just to express the complexity of human beings through the pilgrimage." And it is precisely three kilometers from Lhasa that I have finished what I want to talk about. So I chose to end in that place, and now it looks like a very good ending. Song Taijia told China News Weekly.
"Natural, restrained expression is the right one"
On the night of the movie, Rong Zhong'erjia drank too much.
Rong Zhong'erjia's son is two months younger than the son in the play. When filming, because of the guilt of the "son" in the play, he had the idea of bringing the "son" in the play to their home more than once.
He thought that he was often on business trips, and it was difficult to return home, and it was a variety of friends to gather and socialize. When he returns home late, his son is often asleep, and when he wakes up the next day, he has already gone to school. Lying on the bed in the hotel, "a feeling of loneliness that has never been felt before, spontaneously emerged." I really don't know if my son needs his father's company to grow up, or if my father needs my son's company to grow old. I couldn't tell if it was my son or me who was poor. Rong Zhong'erjia said to director Song Taijia.
Family, father and son feelings, Matsutaga has a unique experience, of course, written emotionally. His childhood was sunny, but he was always interested in the topic of "death", and he used to talk about death when he painted.
In the year of The Birth of Sontaga's son, his father died. According to the Tibetan understanding of death, it should be relieved that he was only in his twenties at the time, his practice was not enough, and he still had some fear in the face of death.
He carried the camera on his back, disappeared for a month, went to many funeral platforms to take pictures, and sometimes slept next to the funeral platform at night, as if he was looking for the sustenance of life. "I don't know why I want to go."
One day, he went to Seda, where there were many burial platforms, and the sun was about to set, and he walked along the sky burial platform and saw an old lady crouching on a stone in the corner, with a cane in her hand. When he raised his camera to take pictures, the old lady laughed and said to him in Tibetan, "Don't shoot, the old lady is not good looking now, she was okay when she was young, now she is old like this, she is going there soon, you see." She pointed to the burial platform above and said again, "I'll report right away, boy." ”
Song Taiga's tears burst out of his eyes, and he later used this scene in the first film, "The Sun is Always on the Left", which is about a young man who accidentally crushed his mother and did not let go after the pilgrimage to Lhasa, until he saw the old lady on the burial platform.
His father once told him a story, and he also told it to the members of the crew: When the Buddha was preaching, there was a woman's child who died, she was very miserable, and after seeing the Buddha, she said that you must find a way to save my child, and the Buddha said that there was no problem. He asked the woman to find a kind of grass, which had to grow in a family without the death of her family, and the woman began to knock on the door to find it, but in the process she slowly realized that this grass did not exist.
Tibetans believe in equality in life. When he was a child, Matsutaga took the frog home in a hat and was beaten up by his mother. "She thought I was going to abuse the animal and kill it. Finally she asked me to take my hat and release the frog with me. Another time, he and a few partners competed to kick the ant nest, to see who kicked far, and was taught by his mother, "If our house is overturned, how will you feel?" Plants are also, such as grass can not be easily pulled, by my mother to see, she will pull my hair and ask me if it hurts. ”
"Arajan Color" director Song Taiga Photo /Courtesy of the interviewee
When filming "The Sun Is Always on the Left", he jumped into the shackles of his own setting: one shot at a time, with a strong sense of form, which may be related to his previous photography and art. By the time of "Arajan", he was much freer, giving the photographer more room to play.
As the concept matured, he thought that making a fuss about form was a particularly childish thing. "I don't think it's a very new thing, as if the power of internal emotions is not enough and needs to be presented through externalized things, but in fact, natural and restrained expression is the right one."
Go with the flow, whether it's with life or death. He quotes the Tibetan concept of "Middle View": impartiality, right in the middle, not controlled by emotions, maintaining a centrifugal mind, but not completely swallowed up by centrifugation and taken to the ditch. "There are ditches everywhere, vaguely able to figure it out, vaguely unable to understand that feeling, that is, there is a state of half-drunkenness and half-awakening, but at the same time there is a sensual thing." That's where I was when I was writing Arajan. ”
"They don't know the people of this land"
During the roadshow of "Arajan", an audience member asked why in the Tibetan culture of healing the heart, what we see in your film is the plight of people.
In this regard, Song Taijia's answer is: No matter which ethnic group, they are first of all a person with a sense of truth, and secondly, the influence of culture. People should not be labeled by national culture.
He saw some strange hometowns in Tibetan films made by many people, which were particularly mysterious and symbolized: monasteries, prostrations, pilgrimages, snowy mountains, blue skies, lakes, grasslands, cattle and sheep. Even in the movie, it should be life costumes, but wearing dancing costumes, "It feels like using stage costumes to shoot Tibetan life, eating meat is not cut with a large knife, drinking wine with sea bowls, just to show its roughness and boldness." They don't know the people of this land. ”
So, more than once, his films have touched on the common emotional dilemmas of human beings, not just limited to a certain people.
Song Tai Jia communicates with many Lhasa contemporary artists, who have gone to many foreign touring exhibitions, but most of them are set up as a separate platform for them. "Just like a boxer, you said that the international tournament set up another stage for Tibet, and as a contemporary art, the so-called Tibet participated in the international ring, and there was another one there. I said I would never attend an event like this because it meant that the platform didn't treat you like a boxer, which was the biggest insult to boxers. Song Taijia told China News Weekly.
Born in Tongde County, Qinghai, Song Taijia began as a photographer with Wan Ma Tse-dan on "Quiet Mana Stone" and "In Search of Zhimei Gengden", and their films have often won awards at home and abroad.
This sparked enthusiasm among young Tibetans for the film and television industry. The year before, when he returned to his hometown, he learned from the county that nearly a hundred young people had applied for the film and television major.
Starting from the previous year, he launched the "Dome Award" script writing contest for Tibetan themes, inviting Tibetan celebrities such as Wan Ma Tsedan, Debenga, and Long Renqing to serve as judges. Nearly 100 Tibetan-themed scripts have been registered in the script contest just held this year, and some of the scripts selected from them have entered the preparatory stage. In order to facilitate students to study animated films, he also sent students to Japan to study, and introduced animation talents from Japan to the creative base of Tongde County.
Song Taiga often discussed with friends why "Arajan Color" insisted on performing in the local dialect? It is to respect the expression habits of the locals, even though only a few hundred thousand people speak the language. "As the first generation of Tibetan filmmakers, Wan Ma Tse-dan and I feel a responsibility to do our part for young people. Let the young people of our nation come and photograph the stories of our own people, because we have not only natural landscapes, but also human landscapes. Song Taijia told China News Weekly.
Cover image source: Interviewee
Text: Reporter/Li Xing
Editor on duty: Luo Xiaolan