First, alienation, drama-truth and illusion.
Before he died, Dandong joked that it was strange that I could say that I would be beheaded, but I could not say that I was beheaded. Tense prevents expression, grammar is reasonable and logic is correct, but all this will be absurd. At the beginning of "Golden Age", we saw a close-up of Tang Wei on the black and white screen. She read her birth and death dates with a straight face. At that moment, we were in an absurd position. Who are we seeing, Xiao Hong, or Xiao Hong's ghost, or no one at all?
The biggest difference of "Golden Age" is the documentary on the one hand; Everyone Xiao Hong knew all her life stood up. They were interviewed by aerial photography in front of the camera, and they described Xiao Hong in their eyes and memories with memories. However, if that's all, "Golden Age" is just ordinary; On the other hand, these interviews are not only absurd and illusory in feasibility, but the film further pushes this illusion into a chaotic and contradictory situation. I remembered Jia's "Twenty-four Cities" in the form of a "story book". Actors face the camera and break the fourth wall, but their purpose is to cover up the truth; In the Golden Age, some people look like "reporters" and happen to be there, while more people will only remind you that such a documentary does not exist.
They talk about what will happen in the future in front of the screen, saying that one day in the future, I will run to save people, and one day in the future, I will die. From here on, our story is over. This is not surprising on the stage of drama. We have long been accustomed to the actor jumping out of the specific plot and telling the audience directly-Brecht initiated alienation and spread this technique horribly to every corner of the drama stage, but these constitute the ultimate absurdity of the golden age-in documentaries and calm shots, time goes back, everyone seems to be alive and everyone seems to be dead; We seem to be watching a real documentary, and even saw old Duanmu Hongliang and Xiao Jun being interviewed; But at the same time, we all know that all this does not exist, unless there is a god who gathers all these souls in the overhead time and space and launches a memorial service for Xiao Hong.
When all the characters are on the stage, we don't consider their truth at all. We may believe that only when they are all dead can they exist in the form of a stage-they are first literary and illusory, and then they come from the outside world; However, from the first moment of the film's birth, from the moment when the first audience watched the speeding train screaming and fleeing everywhere, it was decided that seeing was believing. The imprisonment of thought ends the possibility that images can produce thorns, and logic and truth become inviolable laws. The only way to dance in chains on the law is to blur the audience's ability to distinguish between truth and story.
Therefore, when we tried to ridicule the "weird" separation of "Golden Age" with the wonderful performance of Shimonoseki, the president of "House of Cards", we forgot that Xu Anhua didn't tell a story at all. President Shimonoseki summed up his own means with monologues to keep the audience's attention and understanding in the rhythm of high-speed breath-holding stories; Xiao Hong's friends, one by one, passed by like ghosts. When they spoke to us calmly with the news footage of the documentary, we only felt ridiculous-because what we saw was not a documentary or a performance; It is a reference to the text and the shadow of the visualized "quotation marks".
A reference to the text. This seems to be an academic vocabulary that should not appear here. However, in the golden age, many times it should not appear in cinemas, or even be regarded as movies.
Second, the image text, anti-film grammar: academic papers
"Golden Age" is worthy of criticism. The three major film festivals are collectively aphasia, the box office is fiasco, and the marketers are incompetent. But when I finished this sentence, I was not happy or angry, but full of admiration and sympathy. It is impossible to say that Xu Anhua can't make a movie; Unfortunately, this is also an ideological convention. We can understand it as a master. People who do movies and stories well do their experiments. Their subversion is reasonable and valuable, but those who have not proved their story expression ability are not qualified.
However, despite this understanding, the courage of Xu Anhua and Li Wei is still admirable; Maybe it's not admiration, because it's pure idealism and suicide for the purpose of performance; When you hire a film actor with a cost of 60 million yuan or more, instead of making a film, you hand in an academic paper in the form of video 177 minutes. Moreover, this is not a paper that follows the rules, but a deformed deconstruction text.
In other words, the Golden Age is not as good as Tiny Age 3: The Golden Age.
What is a text? There are countless forms of words, and words are everywhere around us. Text is not only words, but also can be used as text without the carrier of words. The Golden Age is such an image text. It's not a movie, not even a play. It is a kind of literary research that can clearly see the ideas of chapters, a kind of fabric and cross-game where historical facts gather together, and a real jumping and flowing text. Actors who only recite Xiao Hong's original text ignore the fact that they are blinded by the so-called "emotion" and kidnapped by "implication", but they can't see the existence form of the text as an independent individual-only when the actors read these words with their heads empty can the charm of the text be displayed. In other words, The Golden Age is simply Deleuze's anti-Oedipus. Is that Roland? Barthes Z is Foucault's unfinished history of sexual experience-in short, it is an anti-traditional, deconstructive, extremely serious and sincere academic research text.
The golden age is anti-film grammar. Hollywood has set up a wonderful narrative myth model for movies all over the world. This model has a long history, that is, the Iliad, which is the most basic and profound pursuit of the story. I don't believe that Xu Anhua and Li Yong don't understand the basic introductory course for film writers. What I see is stubbornness, not emotional stubbornness, but academic stubbornness: the simplest example, Xiao Hong died in Hong Kong, left after quarreling in the movie, was bombarded in the hospital bed, insisted on signing on the operating table, was transferred to the hospital for the first time, and came back with only soup. There have been countless thrilling plots here. Choosing any plot trigger point to complete the ending of Xiao Hong's death is like an epic-however, Xu Anhua and I chose history-Xiao Hong died alone when she was transferred to another hospital for the third time. No story, no bedding. She died suddenly, without an orgasm, tired and bored, especially when the ending was well known to the audience, which lasted for three hours. Judging from the movie, she should have died long ago. It is simply anti-film, clumsy and stupid behavior until now-but history is like this, and academics are not drama.
Not only that. We relish the turning point and change of Xiao Hong's life. When we expect Xu Anhua to give us a film-like interpretation with great interest, for example, the rift between Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun in Shanghai is actually that Blanc and Luo Feng appear on the screen and tell the audience with the tone of studying the history of literature. There is no record here, and we have no way of knowing. -at this point, we can no longer imagine that "Golden Age" is a film, it is simply a literary history; When those "interviewees" appear on the screen, they are essentially equivalent to a "quotation mark", a "footnote" and a data reference extracted from nowhere. The key point is that it is not a documentary, and those writers who are "quoted" have never said these words at all. All this is a kind of self-frolicking, which belongs to the author himself and the text. This frolic, in a scene about the reason why Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun broke up, completely filled the text with a subversive dramatic reproduction technique. Duanmu Hongliang's words, Xiao Jun's words, and Xiao Hong's words, three contradictory scenes are rubbed together, and they don't care about contrast, contradiction, logic, existence, paradox and self-resolution.
This is an academic research text in picture format. Perhaps the name should be "oral history research on Xiao Hong's life". From a deconstructionist scholar. What he is best at in his life is to blur all the meanings with words and then lose consciousness. But what about the audience? But what about the movie audience? They were all abandoned. We can't accuse our market and audience of abandoning the golden age, but the golden age actively abandoned their audience. Young artists have left, and academic youths have come in-by the way, those traditional academic youths and old people have also left. I only want those who are "irresponsible", "over-interpreted" and "show themselves instead of studying the author himself"
Third, what era, whose golden age?
Our question is, as an academic research text, what are you talking about? I'm afraid that movie marketers have racked their brains for this problem, so much so that they actually put a "free" style copy on the movie poster, almost like selling real estate, smiling at the world.
"This is my golden age!" This is Wang Er and Chen Qingyang.
"Isn't this my golden age?" This is Xiaohong.
However, we always think that marketers think so, people who watch movies think so, and people who don't watch movies think so; But Xiao Hong is different from Wang Er. Xiao Hong is always hesitant and always passive; But this passivity is based on a strong sense of self-centeredness-in this sense, Japan's short time is her "golden age", and the so-called "golden age" has never come to all writers of that era.
This is the biggest paradox of this film-when we came to the cinema, cultural researchers came to the cinema, and they all agreed with the mythical model constructed by the marketing side from the bottom of their hearts: the Republic of China, a golden age of freedom, independence, intellectual pride and strong cultural atmosphere. But is this what Xu Anhua said? No, in essence, she used an extremely feminine perspective and reached a strange agreement with the official ideology: that "golden age", at least in Xiao Hong's life, rarely came, or perhaps never came. The political inclination of this film is both red and professional. It is incredible that it is the work of a Hong Kong director. The political turmoil of Ding Ling, Xiao Jun and Hu Feng has been completely ignored or even beautified, but these omissions are not forced, just because they are not the focus; The focus is on Xiao Hong, and it is always Xiao Hong who has no inclination.
When your purpose and pursuit are simple, it is often the most difficult time to satisfy. Xiao Hong said, I just want a good environment and enough time to write something well. She never realized this dream in her life. In this sense, Xu Anhua blurs the narrative necessity of Xiao Hong's identity as a writer and only gives her textual meaning. On the whole structure, Xiao Hong is a symbol of being trapped by the times and giving up halfway before her dream is realized. It belongs to him, to thousands of writers in Qian Qian, and to the "golden age" in our hearts. It is ethereal and invisible-all this need not be known until the end of the film. As early as the middle of the film, Lu Xun played by Wang hit the nail on the head.
Mr. Lu Xun said in the movie, smoking a cigarette, that we are facing the deepest despair and tormenting the soldiers all the time.
However, Xiao Hong is not a soldier at all, and there is no despair of Lu Xun. She said that she didn't know anything about politics or war, and she could only write, as long as there was a stable writing environment-maybe that's why Xu Anhua chose her. The film also took pains to say that even at the end of the film, three extremely poor documentary interviews were used (these three poor, "true documentary" clips seriously damaged the excellent documentary style of the whole film) to emphasize this point-the only person who did not write literature on the theme of anti-Japanese national salvation during the Anti-Japanese War, with an anti-era biography of Hulan River, eventually surpassed the times and became the opposite of Xiao Jun and Duanmu Hongliang.
The value of Xiao Hong is that she is anti-times. What a sentimental and sensitive person she is. Time means nothing to her. She only exists for writing and her words, that's all. The so-called "golden age" is not just the existence of Xiao Hong, but all writers. Those writers who are trapped by the times, forced by the times, or actively choose the times are just utopias in their hearts.
In the final analysis, when the wise man said that Xiao Hong's story had nothing to shoot, and Xiao Hong was qualified to represent that era, we might forget that I'm afraid that Xu Anhua and Li Wei chose the name Xiao Hong and the "golden age", firstly because Xiao Hong did not represent that era, and secondly, that era would not be "gold" anyway, but just a ruthless god who devoured life-of course. For me, she did a lot, but she didn't do it well; It's hard, maybe it will never be done well; But at least one thing, what she did was not what the audience expected, so no matter what she did, she would not satisfy the audience.
Among all my regrets about the golden age, the biggest regret is that I didn't see the Hulan River in my mind. For an academic text like Golden Age, the significance of Hulan River lies not in its desolate and trembling beauty, but in its untimely light of human nature and its significance of subverting the history of literature.
But do we remember the end of Hulan River Biography? Record here, as the end of the article, don't have any feelings and presuppositions, let's read this passage quietly.
"In the small town of Hulan River, my grandfather once lived, and now he is buried.
When I was born, my grandfather was over sixty years old. When I was four or five years old, my grandfather was almost seventy. Before I was twenty, my grandfather was seventy or eighty years old. Grandfather died as soon as he was over eighty.
……
These are unimaginable.
I heard that my second uncle passed away.
The old cook is not young even if he is alive.
I don't know what happened to my neighbor.
As for the mill official in the mill, I have no idea what happened so far.
There is no beautiful story I wrote on it, because it is full of memories of my childhood, which I can't forget. It's hard to forget them, so I wrote them here. "