On April 25, 2021, local time, Los Angeles, USA, the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony. Best Art Direction: "Mank" (ic photo/photo)
"Mank", produced by Netflix and directed by David Finch, actually received ten nominations for this year's Oscars, and I am afraid that David Finch himself was a bit unexpected. To be sure, "Manke" is closer to last year's Netflix blockbuster "The Irishman," and while fate is not as good as the latter's countless nominations, it still won two technical awards for best cinematography and best art direction — but personally, "Mank" itself is the best distance from the Hollywood it mocks.
Because "Manke", also known as Herman J. Mankiewicz, the protagonist of this film, is a traitor to Hollywood. His co-production with Orson Wells, Citizen Kane, has not only become one of the best classics in the history of film in the world— because its way of expression in Hollywood divides old and new films, but also because it challenges many unspoken rules of Hollywood and even the United States in the 1940s, alluding to the reality of media tycoons interfering in politics, and becoming a legend of filmmakers holding on to their conscience.
"Manke" excavates the reason why Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the script of "Citizen Kane", and has presented the fierce struggle at the time of writing, as well as the dispute between Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Wells, which has become an unsolved case. The biggest clown behind this is Hollywood itself, presented as the super-cheeky Louis B. Mayer , the head of MGM Pictures, rather than William Randolph Hearst, alluded to by Citizen Kane.
The paradox lies in this, it is this Mayer, who is famous for manipulating and exploiting filmmakers, who initiated the establishment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and funded the establishment of the Academy Awards - if this year's Oscars favor "Mank", is it the Oscar's atonement for the exclusion of left-wing filmmakers such as Herman J. Mankiewicz? Or is it the ultimate Hollywood trick?
Manke and Meyer are the most prominent opponents of this film. One of the best long shots is of Meyer taking the Mank brothers through the MGM Studios while proudly revealing mgm's secrets.
Meyer: "What makes me cry?" Emotions. Where do these lusts come from? Here, here, here (he points to his head, heart and penis) makes the audience emotional. That's the real magic of movies, don't let other people change your mind, it's a business where the buyer spends money to buy memories, and what he buys still belongs to the person who sells it. ”
In Meyer's eyes, the media can dictate everything. The climax of the film's flashback line was the defeat of the left-wing writer Upton Sinclair Jr. — whose defeat was largely due to the misleading voters of meyer's pseudo-documentaries using film resources — a post-truth politics that had become commonplace in 21st-century America, which was still very fresh and very torturous in the 1940s. The director of the pseudo-documentary, Shirley, committed suicide because of guilt, while Manke, because of Shirley's death, decided to write "Citizen Kane" for innuendo, and resolutely signed his real name.
This kind of thing called conscience is now rare in Hollywood, and if it exists, it has been renamed "political correctness"; but "Mank" presents the identity of conscience leading Mank beyond a drunken genius, a laughing and angry cynic, and a parasite of Hollywood industry. The dark thread of the film is Citizen Kane's own questioning of capitalist values, and David Finch's exploration of "what cinema is"—albeit a superficial one.
But this conscientious man, in the eyes of Meyer and his patron Hurst, was nothing more than a monkey-like courtier. After being offended by Manke, Hearst tells him a parable of a monkey: a well-dressed monkey who is served and dressed, carries a music box around his neck every day, and follows the monkey man who plays the accordion to the street to sell art, thinking that only by turning the music box on his chest, the monkey keeper has food, not the other way around. This sour and shameless fable requires generations of filmmakers from Mank, Orson Wells, to David Finch, to say no to him.
The insistence on filming and release of Citizen Kane (fending off Hearst's intimidation and bribery) was a turning point, (just as its artistic experiment was a turning point in American cinema). Knowing that he would be accused and slandered by the big capitalists, Manke insisted on signing his name, just like the ancient soldiers who reported the daimyo before the duel, which was a sign of dignity and determination: I declared war on you in such a dignified way. The rigoletto thus became a knight, even don Quixote, a knight.
The moving thing about the film is that it does not stop at the heroism and idealism mentioned above. Manke is a Kafka-like character, as the movie ends with, when he confides in a friend, "I seem to be more and more like a mouse, trapped in a cage I've built by myself, and as long as the cage looks like there's a little gap in it that I can escape, I'll fix it in time." "This was the work of Kafka's starving artists, and this tragedy was the inevitable fate of being a Jewish intellectual, left-wing playwright in the 1940s.
Moreover, his confrontation with Hearst also conceals his devotion to Hearst's lover, Marion davies; his defense of the right of attribution is also out of his confidence in creating a masterpiece that will surely be remembered in history. All of this fleshed out the character of Manke as a character recreated by the Finch father and son (the husband of David Finch and the late Jack Finch) from the dust of annihilation, not just the historical Herman J. Mankiewicz.
These are the valuable things about Mank. As for its role as a film, there is still something to be discussed in form, that is, its ambition to restore the era of Citizen Kane. There is no doubt that "Mank" is far more ambitious than "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", which also involves the ugly side of the American film industry, and macro shows all aspects of the era that made "Citizen Kane". But if you compare "Roma", which is also a black-and-white film, Manke's experiment of color digital to black and white can be described as a failure, whether it is lighting, mirror movement and detail, it is not comparable to the former's carving, so it can not be compared with the famous "Citizen Kane" itself with exquisite scenes, and it cannot become an artistic revolution. Giving it Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction instead of Best Screenplay, I find it ironic.
Liao Weitang