Introduction: Brother Zhan let me tell you, I'm sorry.
Hong Kong, in many film and television works, is characterized by a series of buildings, noisy rivers and lakes, streets and other postmodern spatial landscape structures as a bright, culturally diverse, inclusive and modern city. These visual impressions constitute the audience's cultural memory of Hong Kong films for a long time. However, the film "Wisdom Teeth" completely avoids these traditional visual conventions to completely reveal the back of Hong Kong's neon lights, and the director uses a criminal, muddy and terrifying urban underclass to open up Hong Kong, which is not well known to the audience vertically, or it is not only a complete resistance to Hong Kong but also to the mainstream vision of urban modernity. “
As for the nature of cinematic space, Benjamin saw it as 'a refuge for elements to escape (wander) the gaze'. For him, space should not only conform to the habitation, the material, the appearance, but also the qualities of transparency, universality and transientness, as well as fictional qualities that can herald great social and political liberation. "Inside the film vision, space often becomes a moving green screen that unfolds visual stimuli, transmits a lot of information and is often unintentionally forgotten, and space, as one of the most important dimensions of the film, its flat stage and time symbols are only the most priority perceptual molecules that enter the human senses, and the entire creeping environment and the whole connected together are the drawing boards of the director's original artistic conception. At this point, the film "Wisdom Teeth" uses the black and white picture effect, integrates the visual installation and environment in the space itself into a three-dimensional graphic with a deep visual feeling, presents a Darwinian underlying society to the audience under the suspenseful and thrilling mystery narrative, and creates a series of raw sensory experiences.
First, the black narrative - the pain of society and human nature
As one of the classic genres of Hong Kong films, police films have a very skillful genre model on the screen, most of them contain moving brotherhood, thrilling theft scenes and passionate gun battles, etc., but the film "Wisdom Teeth" has made a completely anti-genre treatment on this subject, in a way, the film is more like a black narrative full of fatalism.
The story mainly revolves between Zhan Ge, Ren Kai and Wang Tao. The film begins with flashbacks, and the end of the story is placed in the opening scene to explain. This setting creates two layers of effect, one is to set off the atmosphere of suspense in the opening scene, and the whole story unfolds layer by layer, reflecting a habitual suspense mode. Another layer is that when the audience watches the whole film, it begins to feel that all sin and redemption form a never-ending cycle in the context of Hong Kong, a society with huge class differences, and a repressed sense of fatalism is emphasized.
The film's spatial background is set in the hidden dark corners of Hong Kong, and the elevated train that whistles through the film at the beginning of the film is like a dangling steel knife that cuts this magical space into two sides, and the director shows the audience the social bottom under the viaduct carrying the dreams of the upper class. In such a narrative environment, the focus of this film's story is not to peel away the fog of the truth of the killing, but in the process of intertwining order and evil, law enforcement and authority, sin and pure sin in a dark and opaque marginal field. These fields are represented as a collection of dirty and chaotic lines of "junkyards and prisons", where the typicality of Hong Kong has been greatly weakened or even subverted, and these heterogeneous spaces make the chasing forces of police and bandits in the narrative constantly shift. Because this is the environment that the "criminals" are most familiar with, when the police cannot surround them on the public avenues under the whole world, the situation of the police here will become the object of "predation" at any time. These twists and turns of geographical features make this police chase a cat and mouse game, and also always show that these low-level living spaces are a cruel Darwinian society, and those who do not have pistols and strength are like Wang Tao, always playing the role of the escape game.
The film is also full of a large number of symbols to show this, those low-browed Buddha statues, wandering wild cats, scope-like iron doors, etc., danger as if the eyes in the dark are always watching everyone with their backs to it, where no one can get mercy because of faith. The film shows the audience another side of the bustling city, or this is the other side of modern society, and in other words, the side where human resentment lies. The brighter the city lights, the darker it is, the darker it is, the soil that breeds evil, the garbage dump of mainstream society, and the dark forest of the people at the bottom. Social authority, represented by justice, may not really work in a deep and muddy environment. Ren Kai's knocked-out wisdom teeth symbolize the pain of a modern sexual order. Those who should be just and legitimate may not be able to solve the darkness and degeneration of society, and when they are in this order, they are slowly on the path of alienation, so this tooth must also be broken by pure perversion and heterogeneity. Mainstream society, social authority, ruling order, only by truly entering it, understanding it, and governing itself by its way can it be truly grasped, and the death of Zhan Ge is a testament to the huge price paid for not knowing much about this environment and group.
Second, visual installation - natural and artificial scenery
Jean-Louis Baudry defined the basic concept of "cinematic installation" in Cinema: The Ideological Effect of the Basic Cinematographic Installation, including: 1. the technical effects created by the camera, lighting, negatives and projectors; 2. the viewing environment composed of dark cinemas, fixed sitting postures, bright screens, etc.; 3. Fictional stories reproduced with various techniques; 4. Film texts that adapt to the conscious and subconscious activities of the viewer and make the viewer into the subject of desire. From a visual point of view, the installation design of the film in terms of technical effects has formed an excellent cater to other aspects, and the visual way to achieve this fictional dream effect is mainly reflected in the composition, set and tone.
The film uses black and white tones to present not only emphasizing the black theme of the text, but also greatly simplifying the color and spatial layers in terms of lens performance. These many elements that make up the picture appearance are reduced to a variety of interlaced thick and thin lines, and in the scheduling of the shot, the director also pays attention to the placement of this linear visual installation into the composition, such as the wire stretched at a high place, the dense doors and windows of the building and the arched line, the viaduct that runs through or overlaps, etc., these lines cut the blank part of the screen in pieces, highlighting the narrowness of the action space to create a suffocating, crowded, messy and other depressing sensory experience.
In addition, the film also makes extensive use of the German Expressionist set style, such as the sloping corridor, the murderous maniac's prosthetic limbs, and the indoor space composed of garbage to create Junji Ito's horror comic sense in black and white. Extending from the technical effect to the outside, this black and white effect is actually connected with the dark theater and the bright screen and other viewing environments into a special whole, so that the audience is also immersed in this fictional dream effect, and finally completes the transformation of the viewer and the desire subject with the narrative characteristics of suspense and horror.
epilogue:
Wisdom teeth are called "wisdom teeth" in medicine because they often grow in stages that reflect the rapid development of human consciousness such as puberty, and because this structure is incompatible with the original oral structure, it will cause unbearable pain. The pain of wisdom teeth in the film is not only the growth that Ren Kai harvested from youth to maturity in the work of moving towards the police, but also a redemption that Zhan Ge got rid of in hate and love, reason and emotion. Wang Tao, on the other hand, eventually survived as a predatory "mouse", which symbolizes a kind of feminine power and is also a glimmer of hope for the power of social order and legal system in the fate of rotation.