Reflections on the Revolution of 1911

1, Thinker, Narrator-Orientation of the Director of Historical Documentary

Historical documentaries are not easy to shoot.

First of all, history gives people the impression that it is serious, cold and rational. Because the years are long and the dust is deep, its branches are covered and its expression is submerged. Moreover, because of its huge volume and complicated branches and vines, the hurried descendants don't have much time to read, so they can only ignore its details, cut off its branches and vines, filter out its feelings, and leave only the trunk and meridians, so history becomes dull.

Secondly, because of the lack of information. In modern times, there are only a few photos and video materials to rely on. In more distant times, there are only piles of old paper.

So, how can we make a historical documentary not only boring, but also beautiful? First of all, the creators of historical documentaries should be thinkers with certain ideological depth and political maturity.

From the perspective of world history, the Revolution of 1911 shows the influence of the changes in the modern world political and economic structure on China society, and the role played by the game of political forces of various factions in China, the power struggle of the upper dynasty and political disputes in the historical process of China. It can be said that historical events are criss-crossed and complicated. How to better grasp the systematicness and integrity of history, how to make the narrative from the surface to the inside, how to simplify the complex, and how to eliminate the false from the true in the details, which requires the founder to have objective but not moderate, enthusiastic but not extreme, mature and not conservative political concepts and attitudes. For example, the description and evaluation of Sun Yat-sen, Kang Liang, Yuan Shikai, Cixi and Li Hongzhang in The Great Xinhai can fully reflect this attitude. It can be said that without the relative maturity of political thought, it is difficult to make historical documentary works with certain depth and weight.

Secondly, the creators of historical documentaries must also have superb narrative ability, which is usually called story structure ability. The same event can be described as mediocrity or even tasteless, and it can also be described as ups and downs and passionate. At this point, the Great Xinhai can be said to have spent a lot of thought. It mobilizes all means of sound and painting, trying to dig out the contradictions and dramatic tension hidden in the course of events in the complicated and confusing historical appearance. For example, it shows in detail Sun Yat-sen's thrilling suffering experience in London and its influence on his revolutionary cause; For another example, it shows how Yuan Shikai indulged in the North-South peace talks, fiddled with the current situation, and how the revolutionary party lost power step by step. Through the full expression of the details of these important events, the cold and dusty history will be turned into hot stories, and the audience will be unconsciously "tempted" to complete the reading and judgment of history while enjoying the stories.

Among the few documentary creative teams in China, the creative team of "The Great Xinhai" should be regarded as one of the teams with the most solid script creation skills and the strongest storytelling ability. This is due to the director Han Jing's skill in shooting feature films for many years, and also to his continuous writing experience for many years. In recent years, Han Jing's team has created and filmed TV series such as You Are Happy, The Runner-up Beauty, The Life and Death Puzzle, as well as digital films and drama films such as Pigeon, Beautiful Fable and Good Will Hunting, and published fairy tales and documentary literature works such as Two Fools, Assassin's Order, Beiyang Rebellion and Good Will Hunting. It is precisely because of the rich experience in feature film creation that the documentary has a stronger popularity.

2. Scene reappearance-one of the important expressive means of historical documentary.

TV documentary is a TV art form with real life as the creative material, real people as the performance object, artistic processing, truth as the essence, and truth as the cause of people's thinking.

The core of documentary is truth, but in fact, absolute truth does not exist. What has happened, even if people and things were there at that time, is not absolutely true as long as you show what happened in one second in the next. What's more, more true stories have already become a long river of history, and even become legends and ballads.

So, how to capture and express these truths that once existed but have disappeared?

In addition to using original pictures, original sounds, video materials and pictures of former residences, sites and relics, performing by professional or non-professional actors has become an important means of expression in the creation of historical documentaries. "Scene Reproduction" can be traced back to "Nanuk in the North" filmed by Flahadi, the father of documentary, in 1923. This documentary describes the story of the Eskimo Nanuk family struggling to survive in the cold environment. Many scenes were shot in the form of feature films. For example, the igloo where Eskimos live is specially built according to the needs of shooting, and the scene of hunting seals is also organized to shoot. But the characters and living conditions reflected in the film are real.

In recent years, the concept of "plot" has been implanted in overseas documentaries such as Discovery Channel and BBC, and the method of "scene reproduction" has been widely used in historical documentaries. The most famous is the documentary "Epic of Human Evolution" filmed by French director Maratel, which is very sensational in France, Britain and Germany. Malatray then filmed the companion piece Homo sapiens, which together with the actors recreated the life of Homo sapiens 400,000 years ago. Homo sapiens broke the ratings record when it was broadcast in France.

At present, with the advent of documentaries such as League of Assassins, Northern Warlords and Pursuit of Mystery. Shooted by Han Jing documentary team, especially League of Assassins won the top ten documentary works in China in 2009, and "scene reappearance" has increasingly become one of the powerful forms of documentary. The audience is obviously not satisfied with the "historical review" composed of "empty shots" The reappearance of the scene not only enriches the visual style of the documentary, but also expands the performance field of the documentary, which is helpful for the documentary to go deep into the untraceable era and people's inner world, which undoubtedly greatly enriches the performance space of the documentary.

3. The real core, the shell of the film-a bold breakthrough in expression.

The Great Xinhai not only uses a lot of "scene reappearance" in expression techniques, but also has bold breakthroughs and extreme performance.

First of all, some important historical figures are shaped by professional actors. After consulting a large number of historical materials, directors, artists and stylists screened out the candidates with the basic characteristics of historical figures from thousands of actors and made special shapes to make them closer to real historical figures in appearance. After the stylist finished modeling the actors, he repeatedly compared and revised the photos of historical figures, and finally fixed the makeup.

In order to create a strong historical atmosphere unique to historical documentaries, the lighting engineer darkened the faces of the characters in every shot of The Great Xinhai. Through light modeling, emphasizing the outline of the characters while ignoring the details of the five senses, the images of these historical figures have changed from similarity to spirituality, leaving more imagination space for the audience.

Xinhai is a TV documentary, but it was shot by the focal plane. According to the spatial relationship of different scenes and the focal length of characters, the photographer uses a full set of German Zeiss focal planes to shoot. The poetic language of the film forms a unique relationship between reality and reality, which makes the lens have a good sense of hierarchy when expressing historical space, gives the documentary a strong and mysterious tone, and is closer to some historical scenes in the atmosphere, because history always makes people feel vague and mysterious.

The Great Xinhai paid attention to the expressive force of color, and gave different colors to different performance objects and different political groups. The late Qing Dynasty is one of the important contents of The Great Xinhai. Generally speaking, gray represents decline, decline and withering, and the last dynasty seems to be gray. Actually, it's not. Luxury is decadent to the extreme, and the sunshine at dusk is the most gorgeous. Therefore, the Great Xinhai boldly endowed the late Qing Dynasty with gorgeous gold, and used gold to express its ultimate glitz and decline. Daxinhai, a revolutionary party, gave it a blues, with light blue and light gray, which is the color of waking up in the morning, as if everything is in ruins and everything is possible!

Those old photos, those historical images, all come from the deepest memories of the years. It is old, dim and even damaged by time, but it has unquestionable authenticity. Therefore, in the Great Xinhai, they were endowed with vicissitudes of khaki tones. The flashback images that often appear in movies are short and piled up, like fleeting glimpses, more like bare stones protruding in the torrent of the river of time. The color of flashback is also blue, but it is deeper, calmer, thoughtful and questioning.

The Great Xinhai also emphasizes the symbolic significance of the picture. For example, Sun Yat-sen wrote a letter to Li Hongzhang, who was too busy celebrating Cixi's 60th birthday to care about the words of an obscure right-hand man. What appeared on the screen was that Li Hongzhang abandoned the letter in several cases in the middle of the night and slowly came to the window. At this time, a graceful Kunqu opera was faintly heard, and the thick night outside the window highlighted the illusion of crowing. Suddenly, a deafening explosion sounded, and in a flash, the illusion suddenly broke and fell apart like a magic mirror. Followed by the rumble of the Sino-Japanese War. This set of carefully designed pictures is very symbolic, symbolizing that the late Qing government was in danger without knowing it, and was still singing and dancing, indicating the historical end of China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.

When expressing the core plot of Wuchang Uprising, the Great Xinhai took fire as a symbol, the revolutionary army held high the banner of righteousness and broke through the city gate, and flames appeared in every shot. This element symbolizes that the Revolution of 1911 was a great revolution of blood and fire, and the birth of a democratic country must go through the baptism of blood and the experience of fire.

Speaking of zhang xun restoration, the Great Xinhai is marked by shadows. A group of braid soldiers rushed into the Forbidden City. The camera avoided reality and focused on the shadow on the wall, the mottled figure on the ground and the ghostly figure in the fire ... symbolizing that the royalist forces' counterattack against the Republic of China was as absurd, distorted and inappropriate as ghost reappearance.

Because of the symbolic meaning of the picture, Xinhai has gone far beyond the general "scene reproduction" in form, giving the documentary a more shocking audio-visual experience and a broader speculative space.