From I am not Pan Jinlian to Lucifer to see the wonderful use of circular structure in movies.

Why did I make "I am not Pan Jinlian" into a circular frame? All kinds of media have asked Xiaogang Feng the same question. His answer is different every time. He once euphemistically expressed how the audience understood "anything will do", and he also broke the oath of "I want to make it into a circle". He also cleverly bypassed the topic: "I forgot if you didn't say it was round."

In fact, the reason for making the film round is very simple. The story of Pan Jinlian has original novels, and the film Pan Jinlian should be self-contained. Of course, we should be loyal to the original and be higher than the original, so that the film can maximize the truth and absurdity between the characters and the story.

First, I want to distinguish it from Zhang Yimou's The Story of Autumn Chrysanthemum.

Director Zhang Yimou filmed The Story of Autumn Chrysanthemum, but on the surface, the theme is similar. A very realistic movie accurately reflects the current social situation in China, but the whole movie makes you feel absurd. Formally, the popular recording scheme now is to carry the camera on your shoulder and follow the actors casually.

Xiaogang Feng watched the film Mommy by Canadian director Dolan, and used a square frame of 1: 1 to show the depressed living space of teenagers. When the plot developed to the happiest stage of the whole film, the hero slowly "opened" the picture with his own hands on the flying bicycle, which caused a sensation in Cannes Film Festival. He was also inspired by this.

In the end, Xiaogang Feng chose the round frame, perhaps to remind the audience spoiled by widescreen that the real story is not a fairy tale or fable, but a reality that happens around us. The circle is to clarify the neutral role played by the audience in this film-the audience is both the perspective of God (knowing everything) and the perspective of passers-by (witnessing everything), neither in it nor in it.

The smaller the picture, the less the content, and the audience will unconsciously pay more attention and focus on the story that happened between the squares. At the same time, it adds a sense of exquisiteness to the film.

Second, the circular frame is visually more China.

The composition in the picture can often describe the shape of the object from the aspects of rhythm, rhythm, gathering and scattering, density and amplitude.

Circular composition usually means that the subject in the picture is round. Visually, it gives people the aesthetic feeling of rotation, movement and contraction, and produces a strong centripetal force. Therefore, circular composition often appears in Chinese paintings. If the application of painting alone is not enough to explain the problem, then the round fan that appeared as early as the Shang Dynasty actually applied the circular composition to life.

The literati paintings in ancient China are all round, and the round frame is very Chinese, which will make Li Xuelian's story more Chinese visually. In order to make the content in the circular composition more full and have the charm of China, the crew chose to shoot in the ancient town in the south. In this way, the film and the color matching in the later period make the classical painting style more intense.

In terms of structure, Pan Jinlian in Song Dynasty and Li Xuelian in modern times overlap each other through the sense of pictures, which is also quite interesting.

Xiaogang Feng thinks, "China will use the word Fiona Fang to describe the rules, so I think it is particularly good to express this story with the transformation of Fiona Fang. China has been a human society for thousands of years. This circle is to make everything go smoothly, unlike the law, which has strong constraints and rules and hard lines. The story of Li Xuelian is the story of the transition period of China society from a human society to a society ruled by law. "

The composition of villages and cities (round and square) is essentially the impression of different places.

As Li Xuelian went to Beijing, the painting became a square showing the "rules" of the power center.

After discussing the circular composition of Chinese style, let's talk about the film being released on 20 14 and 10. It's earlier than I am not Pan Jinlian, but it tastes very different. This is the first feature film with cyclic composition.

First, the story content and presentation are closely combined.

This is the last film of director Gerst van den Berg's trilogy on religious themes. In order to go deep into the unknown, the film adopts the new technology of circular lens, which was specially developed for this film in cooperation with Brussels University.

Polishing the lens by physical methods produces a 360-degree reflecting/refracting optical conical reflecting lens, which is euphemistically called "Tondoscope", just like an iris image, which completely transforms the director's concept of a closed paradise into an image.

Second, the inheritance and expression of western aesthetics.

Speaking of this concept of closed heaven, the first thing that comes to mind is the ceiling painting of the church. The circular composition shows a magnificent scene and multi-dimensional perspective space. Moreover, the form is more suitable for the core value of the church itself, and it also makes the church more romantic in a more serious background.

Then enter the Renaissance circular relief (tondo, a common style of indoor decorative painting). The tools used by the painter in painting are the main source of inspiration for this kind of lens.

According to the director, he imagined the appearance of God before his creation, so he only used a circle to express it. This way has philosophical thinking, linking the micro universe with the macro universe. When we look at the world from the perspective of heaven, it should be like a planet. At the same time, it is also a way to see the world through a microscope, and you can experience the molecular structure of the world.

Unlike Lucifer's shooting with a full round frame, I'm not Pan Jinlian, but the late round frame shooting. Even if it is a round frame, the picture is still complete, while Lucifer is more like a box being forcibly cut into a round frame, and some people often appear outside the picture. As an art film, this echoes the philosophical point of view that the director wants to express.

No matter how the form of the film changes, first of all, the content is the main line, and all changes should be better combined with the content, and the two should be expressed interactively. Second, cultural accumulation will eventually affect you, even your works. In addition, these two films are mainly circles.

I also have several films with very different composition methods. From the earliest 1.33: 1, such as Griffith's The Birth of a Country 19 15. For Anderson, a "late obsessive-compulsive disorder patient" who is addicted to composition and painting, the progressive "The Grand Budapest Hotel" begins with a little girl opening a novel in front of a statue of a writer, and then the writer appears and begins to introduce the character Zero, and then tells his story with Gustav from scratch ... and also uses paintings of various proportions.