【Horizon】
Explore China's unique film and television language
——Zhou Bing, a famous documentary filmmaker who visited Gansu and went out
Zhou Bing
New Gansu Gansu Daily reporter Wang Li
"I have lived in Lanzhou for more than ten years, received the call of my hometown, was particularly happy and happy, and was willing to go back to Gansu to do something, which is an emotional wish." Zhou Bing said.
In May 2019, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the creation of the classic Chinese dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain", the documentary film "Flower Rain Across the Silk Road" directed by Zhou Bing began filming at the same time.
Zhou Bing, born in 1968, is a famous Documentary Filmmaker in China, a doctor of Chinese art history at the School of History of Nankai University, and the artistic director of Zhou Bing's Director Studio of Central New Film Group. In 1991, after graduating from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute majoring in television editing and directing, he worked for Lanzhou Television Station, and entered CCTV in October 1993, and in the following 20 years, he successively served as the director of the "Children of the Orient" column of CCTV, the producer of the special program group of "Oriental Time and Space", participated in the establishment of the "Oriental Time and Space Chronicle" column, and served as the director of the special program department of the Central New Film Group. In 2007, he began to try the marketization of documentaries.
Zhou Bing has been elected as the chinese documentary director of the year three times, and has created hundreds of supervising documentaries, such as "The Forbidden City", "When the Louvre Meets the Forbidden City", "Dunhuang", "Lower Nanyang", "The Bund", "Millennium Chinese Medicine" and other representative works have been broadcast on China Central Television, the US National Geographic Channel and the History Channel and many other media.
Gansu is the place where Zhou Bing grew up, the hometown where his emotions are related, and the starting point for him to embark on the road of media. In the interview, he said that for the daily delicacies such as beef noodles and gray beans that we are accustomed to, it is also very important in his life. As Xu Chenghua, assistant choreographer of the 1979 version of the dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain" and chief choreographer of the 2008 version, said, "When you get off the plane, you can feel the taste of the land and be particularly excited", and Zhou Bing is the same. In his second year of high school, Zhou Bing, as a member of the student news agency, often followed Wang Xiaoping, who was a reporter for Lanzhou Television station at the time and is now the chairman of the Lanzhou Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature, and under the influence of Wang Xiaoping, he finally embarked on the road of media.
This time, he received an invitation from his hometown to create a documentary film "Flower Rain Across the Silk Road", which Zhou Bing believes is a kind of fate. He is no stranger to the dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain", when the play was first performed, he was still in the third grade of primary school in Lanzhou; when he was a teenager, he often heard people talk about this stage art work, and he watched it several times when he grew up; in 2007, when he created the documentary "Dunhuang", the eighth episode of "Dancing Dream Dunhuang" was dedicated to Tang Dynasty music and dance, including the production of the dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain" and its impact on the country and even the world; for more than ten years, he was associated with Xu Qi, choreographer of the dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain", actor Shi Min, and so on. In the few days of filming in Lanzhou, Zhou Bing's team interviewed more than 20 creators and cast members of "Silk Road Flower Rain", reviewing the causes and consequences of the drama and the road of inheritance and innovation in the form of oral history, in order to leave a precious archival material for the cultural history of our province while making a documentary.
In the film, Zhou Bing's team will use 90 minutes of screen space, using documentary and freehand innovative images, to make the first in the field of documentary, using artistic techniques to build a four-fold space of time, life, stage and creation, connecting the Silk Road civilization, Dunhuang cultural background space, the living background space of art creators and the artistic expression space on the stage, and cleverly outlining the artistic creation space in the minds of the "Silk Road Flower Rain" creative team, so that people can't see the artistic creation process at all. It becomes a vivid picture and a fascinating story, so as to maximize the audience's curiosity and desire to explore, so that the world can focus on the fertile cultural field of Gansu.
Zhou Bing was tired and enjoyed, and he was confident of presenting a good work.
>>> talk to Zhou Bing
The image restores the artist's inner world
Reporter: The main feature of the documentary film "Flower Rain Across the Silk Road" is to build a quadruple space, how did this idea come about? What are you prepared to start with for a virtual reconstruction of your creative space?
Zhou Bing: It is the collective creativity of our creative team. We don't do a simple presentation of stage art, but a reorganization of film and television art, but how this four-fold space constitutes a documentary film is quite challenging for me. I want to focus on two aspects, one is the creator's spiritual space and psychological space; the other is the stage space, such as the classic dance sections such as the rebound pipa and neon feather dance in "Silk Road Flower Rain", to make some visually delicate presentations, so that the audience can be moved by this art again in the cinema. I am still quite confident, and when I made the documentary "Mei Lanfang 1930" in 1998, I also made this attempt, and it was also recognized in the documentary academic community. Now that 21 years have passed, I want to upgrade this form of film and television language expression.
"Reproduction" is not a problem for me, I have more than 20 years of accumulation and experience, and the greater challenge is how to show the inner world of the main creators. The first step is to do a lot of oral history interviews, let them tell the story of their creative experience and their inner emotions in front of the camera, and in the process, extract the real words from the interviews and turn them into visions. For example, the son of choreographer Liu Shaoxiong recalled that when he was a child, he saw his father get up in the middle of the night and compare dance movements on the ground. There was a psychological process, Liu Shaoxiong was lying down, what really appeared in his heart, he couldn't help it; there were also the first batch of creative personnel who came back from Dunhuang, Liu Shaoxiong, Xu Qi, Yan Jianzhong, Zhang Jufang, etc., they were rehearsing in a very simple rehearsal hall at that time, and there were many ideas in their hearts, and I wanted to find clues in a large number of oral interviews. I hope to use this opportunity to bring another new way of film and television expression to Chinese documentaries, that is, the montage and editing of psychological portrayal and stage reproduction, the interaction between real space and spiritual space.
An innovative exploration of documentaries
Reporter: You have always been at the forefront of documentary production and committed to documentary innovation, and "scene reproduction" is considered to be a major breakthrough in your documentary creation method. Please take the work as an example to introduce what innovative explorations have been made in the creation of documentaries.
Zhou Bing: Innovation is what I have been pursuing. We've been leading the way in the industry for 20 years, creating one first after another in documentary innovation.
The earliest attempt at "scene reproduction" was Xu Huan, the director of "Oriental Time and Space", who made a realistic theme work. I practiced with the teacher's time in "Oriental Time and Space", and in 1995, I did it under the teacher's advocacy and arrangement. Personally, I think that what ultimately drove this thing was a lot of the work I did later. When I was about 30 years old, the newborn calf was not afraid of tigers, and mixed various methods such as feature films, advertisements, MTV, animation special effects, and documentary dictation, literature, and documentaries, and new creative methods emerged. In the 1998 documentary "Mei Lanfang 1930", the creativity made the national documentary academia recognize the technique of "scene reproduction"; later, the "Oriental Time and Space" series "Memory" made "scene reproduction" basically recognized by the Chinese documentary community. In 2005, the documentary "Forbidden City" also used this technique. In the past one or two decades, "scene reproduction" has been used on a large scale.
Reporter: The creativity of "The Forbidden City" to make painting move is still very popular.
Zhou Bing: I love to learn the latest technology and love to watch all kinds of paintings. In Beijing, the information is quite open, and some international cutting-edge information is known. In 2003, an American artist introduced me to a new technology in the world that could move classical painting, but at that time, the technology was still very primitive and original. I think the Forbidden City didn't have a lot of paintings, so I found a very famous animation company at that time, provided them with high-definition pictures, asked them if they could make the picture move, such as people walking by, birds flying by, they said yes, and finally it was done, this technology has nothing to do with documentaries and film and television. My idea was simple, I just thought that still pictures were not good. The most complicated thing we did was to "move" the scene of the emperor's wedding.
Reporter: Since then, the documentary "Dunhuang" has also used a lot of "scene reproduction", and the biggest feature is the restoration of the inner world of the characters.
Zhou Bing: After filming "The Forbidden City", I had a reflection, it was too big, I was not close to the audience, and I had a sense of distance. So when filming "Dunhuang", how to attract the audience in the time span of more than 1700 years, I found the diaries of many people, including Stein, Chang Shuhong and many other people who wrote letters that year, and turned it into the first person. I think these things will definitely make the audience emotionally connected.
And the first documentary film I made, "The Bund Affair," used actors, stars, lines, and dialogue, which was a big breakthrough, and we didn't dare to use lines before.
"Scenario reproduction" is not fictional history
Reporter: Documentaries emphasize reality, and when making extensive use of "scene reproduction", how do you grasp the boundary between reality and fiction?
Zhou Bing: The border does not actually exist. I think people are confused about a concept, like what is the boundary of the documentary? Documentaries convey a true message. There is a very simple division in the world, fiction and non-fiction, fiction is a movie, but the technology and method of film, we can use it. I'm just using this technique, not inventing a historical scenario.
Reporter: Doesn't it violate the rules of realism by typicalizing the characters?
Zhou Bing: Not violated. Because I think I can have a deduction and perception of the characters, which is originally a very interesting aspect of Chinese art. For example, if I shoot Chang Shuhong or Mei Lanfang, I want to find something I understand to be artistic, which is originally true, do you say this subjective? Because I am an objective person, I did not make up facts, I just said that in the process of creation, his emotions are real.
Try to combine oriental aesthetics with film and television technology
Reporter: Please talk about your documentary creation concept, "using images to spread Chinese culture and create an oriental aesthetic method recognized by the world."
Zhou Bing: This is what I conceived of more than a decade ago. At that time, I was doing news in the "Oriental Time and Space" column of CCTV, and I found that I liked history and culture the most, and I especially liked ancient Chinese culture. I am a very happy person, in my 30s, I decided to use documentaries to spread history, culture, art, the goal is set, so far I have not changed much. Later, I thought, I have to put forward my inner goals and ideas, the first half of the sentence was put forward by me in my 30s, and the second half of the sentence was put forward by me in my 40s. In the world's film and television language system, Hollywood, European, and Japanese films have vocabulary. I personally think that China has not yet matured its own film and television vocabulary, and I wonder if I can do one thing in this life, whether the Chinese aesthetic and the Oriental aesthetic can be grafted into the language of film and television technology, so that the whole world, at least let Chinese say, this is our Chinese aesthetic, China's interesting things.
Reporter: The "Oriental Aesthetic Way" is very abstract, how is it reflected in your works?
Zhou Bing: Why am I so excited to shoot "Flower Rain Across the Silk Road", because "Silk Road Flower Rain" extracts aesthetic elements, shapes and movements from Dunhuang murals and sculptures, and transforms them into stage art - Dunhuang Dance, which is unique to China. I am also like this now, from ancient Chinese paintings, poetry, especially Song and Yuan landscape paintings to find aesthetic propositions, colors, composition, and finally grafted into modern film and television technology, to complete the production of works. Zhang Yimou's film "Shadow" is already doing this. If I were to make Dunhuang again, I would probably shoot it in the way I advocated.
Stills from "Mei Lanfang 1930"
I didn't expect Lanzhou people to love to watch documentaries so much
Reporter: In terms of the marketization of documentaries, what is your feeling?
Zhou Bing: I started to think that it would be better to go to the market, but in fact it is not so, it is very difficult to go to the market, many people may give up, I am a very shaft, do not give up, of course, there are some give up. We also do some money-making projects, like making commercials, and then raising documentaries. After the age of forty or fifty, my requirements for myself are to become a director with a real world expression vocabulary, to do something on the basis of human emotions and the most common artistic expression of human beings.
Reporter: Please talk about the "Love Documentary" project.
Zhou Bing: "Love Documentaries" is a new media platform launched by us in 2014 to promote and support the younger generation of documentary creation. After operating for a few years, do some offline activities. Later, he did a public welfare screening of "Love Documentary" at Lanzhou Bai'an Concept Cinema. At first I didn't have confidence, this time I was particularly happy, I didn't expect to do so well, Lanzhou has so many people like to watch. We also organize some high-quality documentaries in China to screen and help invite the country's top documentary filmmakers to give lectures. In the future, we will also do documentary screening activities in some colleges and universities in the province, hoping to help young people.
Reporter: Will the "Love Documentary" screening event be an attempt to enter the theater?
Zhou Bing: Making some documentaries with good stories into the theater line is a very important direction for my next step. I am still trying to make some cultural and creative products, trying to turn documentary materials into books, audio and other products.
Never wear your curiosity away
Reporter: For the majority of practitioners, how to make an excellent documentary, what suggestions do you have?
Zhou Bing: First, the most important thing is to love, have love, and do everything easily. Second, we must have professionalism, which is the spirit of craftsmanship that is now advocated. At that time, we were trained by our predecessors in "Oriental Time and Space" to improve the processing of every picture, shot, and technology, and the details determined success or failure. Third, keep learning, learn openly, learn from different kinds of art, and learn as long as it inspires you.
The growth of a young man must not be ashamed to ask. I am particularly grateful that I have interviewed more than 100 Chinese culture and art giants in "Children of the Orient", although it has been a short contact of one or two, two or three times, but this kind of edification has invisibly established a coordinate for my heart. Also optimistic about the art works, a variety of the world's top works of art, never erase your curiosity, to the world full of exploration, curiosity.
Reporter: What should we pay attention to in the specific operation?
Zhou Bing: Unity of knowledge and action, not afraid of suffering, not afraid of tiredness, to do, to practice. To grind on the shooting site and in the machine room, to work non-stop, experience failure, experience is sharpened.