This article is written by The Bakery Hou Mai
In recent years, Japanese movies with good reputations are very interesting, and a few keywords are used to describe them as hot blood, secondary two, novelty, and croaking.
There's Camera Don't Stop! Such a bloody and interesting work, there are the amazing long shots of "Ice Cream and the Sound of Rain" and the novel expression of blurred reality and drama, there are also "Passion Tricks" that make people stunned and have to admire the high-energy adaptation of the original manga image, and "From Miyamoto to You" is a social animal explosion that bounces back to your brain.
The new generation of Japanese directors have been amazed again and again with their creative enthusiasm for the expression of images, and these highly saturated audio-visuals not only make the audience enjoy but also represent the spiritual transmission of Japanese directors in the new era.
Director Yuan Ziwen also presented his new "manifesto" "Red Postbox on Escher Street" at this node, although Yuan Ziwen is not a new face but his consistent bold and crazy style, so that his video works are not inferior to the innovation of young directors.
Speaking of director Yuan Ziwen, this is an elusive director, and it is difficult to define the boundaries of Yuan Ziwen's films, although he has his own stable film style and authorial ideas, but he can shock the audience again and again.
Yuan Ziwen is bloody, and he has no scruples about showing violence and sex in movies.
Yuan Ziwen is also a secondary two, and the characters in his movies all have the blood or ghosts of comic book characters.
The films made by such a director with various contradictory characteristics and conflicts are naturally mixed, so it is difficult to define Yuan Ziwen.
In recent years, Yuan Ziwen has also maintained a certain creative output, last year brought to the audience "Shouting in the Forest of No Love", in which Yuan Ziwen played his classic signboard over and over again to pay tribute to himself, and in the movie, you can see the shadow of many of Yuan Ziwen's past works, such as "The Exposure of Love", "Cold Tropical Fish" and so on.
This year's new film, "The Red Mailbox on Escher Street," is closer to a "manifesto" style film like "Anti-Erotic," and Yuan Ziwen once again uses film to show his attitude in tearing up the film and rebelling against the film.
The story of the film is simple, a director's new film is about to start shooting, the actress chooses to collect from the ordinary people, the only condition for registration is one: it must be mailed to the crew through a physical letter. Coincidentally, the red mailbox connects all the characters together and also takes care of the title.
The film is like prose in a circle of characters related to the film, and one character and one chapter are finally fused into a complete event. There is a kind of director who has a fanatical love for movies, they follow the greatest power in the movie, and express this respect in the movie wantonly, such a director has a different kind of love for the movie like a saint, and Yuan Ziwen is such a director.
The film itself seems to be a story about film shooting, but Yuan Ziwen unconventionally removes the protagonist, and the story completely tears the film apart, so that the script writing, performance and even shooting return to a primitive mental state. The film's director is to make a film called "Masquerade", and he himself is also caught in the Bergmanian spiritual dilemma, such a tribute to the history of the film coincidence abounds in the film, including the reference to the creation of "Casablanca" and some of the visible elements of Shuji Terayama's film are The Love of The Book Saints of the Film.
In 2015, Er Dongsheng filmed "I Am a Passerby" to tell the story of a group of performers, bringing the real story of small people to the big screen. And Yuan Ziwen's film is also a film belonging to the group actors, each actress and their story are independent, there is no absolute center, they only surround the film to be shot and a red mailbox as a connection point. Er Dongsheng's shooting focuses on social groups, while Yuan Ziwen focuses on the film itself, reconstructing the film in a decentralized film, and Yuan Ziwen's imagery is more intense.
The three elements that stand out in the film: women, imagery, and the boundaries between the real and the false are also worth talking about.
The first is the women in the movie, the women in the yuan ziwen movie have always been full of personality and impressed the audience, and this work takes the selection of actresses as the starting point to show the group portraits of different women. The women presented in the film all have their own directions and representations, including ordinary women like passers-by, girls who are persistent in acting in the second grade, wives who have lost their husbands and are deeply sad, girls who are molested by their fathers and are a little crazy, and female fans who are enthusiastic about the director in the movie.
The complicated female story constitutes an ancillary chapters outside the film, Yuan Ziwen tears the film apart and divides the power of the film from the protagonist to each group actor, the film has the story of the film (the process of making the film), and they also have their stories, so the absolute equal division of Yuan Ziwen wants to express the spiritual core that runs through the entire film: freedom. An idealistic freedom from the inside of the film to the outside.
At the image level, the garden is also different from the past, through the idyllic and feminine scenery to set off the atmosphere of freedom, flowers and trees these natural details truly constitute our world.
There is also an interesting setting in the film, the road to the selection area is being built, every actor has to pass through this road but everyone chooses the way different, which is also an expression of the freedom of the film, breaking through those obstacles and the form of freedom is different.
At the story level, the director in the film can not make the film according to his own ideas in the end, but under the threat of the capital, he still chooses a famous actress and a related household, which is also the film's exposition of the blockage of freedom.
And the search for truth and falsehood is also an inquiry into freedom. The film itself is a play-within-a-play, and the selection of the play and the development of the respective story are intertwined to break up the characteristics of the film's storytelling.
In one of the chapters of the film belongs to the director and the director's girlfriend, the director's ideas and even the script seem to be completed by the girlfriend, until the final film reveals that the girlfriend is actually dead, and what assists the director in completing the film is a ghostly inner projection. The boundary between true and false has always existed in the film, and even in the end of the rampage, the camera is stopped by the traffic police, and the film is terminated, which completely confuses the boundary between reality and the film.
Yuan Ziwen expresses his love for movies and the admiration of freedom in this way, providing another perspective to look at movies, do we want to tear up movies to redefine it?
Is it to define free film like Dougmar 95, or to let the freedom to express oneself never stop, the camera does not stop! Movies don't stop! Where is the freedom of cinema?
(Image from the Internet, copyright belongs to the original author)