Wang Meng, Liang Hong, Liang Xiaosheng, Li Er, Xu Zechen, Ouyang Jianghe... The reason why so many literary celebrities can come to the scene is because Jia Zhangke's newly released documentary "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" has filmed several big writers. Divided into 18 chapters, the film tells the story of China since 1949 through four generations of writers Ma Feng (deceased, recalled by his daughter), Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong. The film will be released on September 19.
In May 2019, dozens of writers came to Jiajiazhuang in Fenyang, Shanxi Province, to talk about countryside and the city, literature and reality. "Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" takes this as a prelude, symphonically telling the story of China since 1949 in 18 chapters. Born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, three writers, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong, became the most important narrators of the film, and together with the daughter of the late writer Ma Feng, they re-looked at the individual and family in the midst of social change, becoming a 70-year history of the Chinese psyche.
Talking about the origin of filming the film, Jia Zhangke said that he was born in Fenyang, Jiangxi, and basically lived in Beijing after coming to Beijing to study film, and occasionally returned to his hometown to make movies. In 2015, he suddenly wanted to have more time to live in his hometown, so he returned to Jiajiazhuang in Fenyang, where he lived and wrote. "After being in the village for a long time, there are two things that have inspired me particularly deeply, one is the countryside and the other is literature."
"Urbanization is now so fast, a large number of people leave the village and enter the city, but China's five-thousand-year-long rural life actually determines many of our ways of thinking." Many of the problems in our cities are actually related to the countryside, and when we think about the city, we must think about the countryside. But in the medium of cinema, the focus of public concern is not on the countryside, so I hope that through a film, the rural experience Chinese the past few decades will be filmed. Jia Zhangke said.
Literature is another major theme of Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue. Jia Jiazhuang, where Jia Zhangke lived, was once the place where the writer Ma Feng wrote, which made Jia Zhangke think that the writer could be used as the narrator. "Many writers come from the countryside, and in the past, the children of peasant families became writers through writing, and they observed the countryside for a long time and wrote to express the countryside. The film tells the story of some of the most important years of the writers' upbringing in a relay fashion, connecting the individual experiences from 1949 to the present. Jia Zhangke believes that in the end, the film is not only about the countryside and literature, but also a kind of spiritual history, so that everyone can see "how the Chinese has come step by step."
As the only female writer in the film, Liang Hong told a very bumpy and bitter life story about her father, mother, sister and other relatives, during which shed tears several times and choked up aphasia. She revealed that at that time, she participated in the film interview for the first time in Jiajiazhuang, Fenyang, and it was also the first time she met Jia Zhangke, and saw that Jia Dao took a stack of particularly thick interview materials, which made her feel very surprised, and the content of the chat was also around her childhood and youth. "When I suddenly go back to my childhood, back to a certain memory of mine, I feel that everyone's memory contains a part of the era, a form of life under the times." 」 She also joked that during the interview, she was completely unguarded against Jia Zhangke, said a lot of sincere words, and did not expect to cut it all into the movie.
Jia Zhangke's works have always been considered art films with a small audience, and they have never had a box office hit in many years. In the interactive session after the screening, film scholar Dai Jinhua said that "this film has a certain viewing threshold", allowing the host to quickly "save the scene", lian lian said that young audiences can also get a fresh and unique viewing experience. In this regard, Jia Zhangke responded: "For the director, we all want the audience, but this audience is not general. For the director, shoot what I shoot, for the audience, free choice, depending on what you love, it's okay. ”
As for whether there is a threshold for this work of "Chief Jia Ke", perhaps the post-screening feelings of the 86-year-old writer Wang Meng can be used as a reference. He said: "I'm older, I usually snooze when I watch a movie, and I don't snooze from beginning to end in this movie. Other movies rely on excitement, on stunts, on stars, [this movie] doesn't rely on that. ”
Source Beijing Daily Client | Reporter Yuan Yun'er
Edited by Jin Liwei
Process Editor Wu Yue