Seeking Xiao Wu's film criticism

In the second Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Competition, Jia, who won the Excellence Award for "The Hill Comes Home", met a photographer studying abroad who would be his royal servant in the future. They had a good talk and agreed to co-produce a feature film. Later, Jia, who returned to his hometown of Fenyang, witnessed the great changes in this small town where he grew up and the sophistication of his childhood playmates. He wrote a play called Xiao Wu, the son of Jin's buddy, Hu Mei Midea (later renamed Xiao Wu). As the first feature film of his youth experimental film group, the film became famous in the international film circle after its completion. That year, Jia was 28. As the representative of the "sixth generation" of China films, Xiao Wu directed by Jia follows the unique style of this kind of young directors-strong documentary and micro-personalized expression of China. Jia, who gave up and couldn't distinguish the macro, official and mainstream social facts, projected his time on the little people around him, even the marginal people, reflecting a group of people who wandered between good and evil and whose identities were vague. Faced with the contradiction between primitive morality and new ideas, the protagonist in Xiao Wu consciously asks for money because of poverty. Unconscious desire to become the backbone of the story is the kind of sincere buddy loyalty rooted in philistinism, so he committed crimes against the wind at the wedding of young playmate Jin, trying to realize the promise of giving him a pound of money at the wedding banquet, but Jin, who is "law-abiding", did not appreciate it. Xiao Wu's revolution is obviously multi-level and all-round. Technically, Jia abandoned the academic requirements of the film academy for the recording department, and did the opposite, mixing a lot of live noise in the background sound of the film, thus creating a realistic feeling. This practice cost nearly 30% of his entire film budget, and Jia dismissed the sound engineer from the original college because of his ruthlessness. Even a group of film critics in the French Film Handbook praised Xiao Wu when they saw this outrageous innovative technique, and even compared it to their ancestor Jean-Luc Godard, and finally added, "Of course, he is smarter than Godard." In terms of connotation, Jia also pushed the sixth generation wave to the first peak. On the one hand, Jia's films are always full of strong attachment to his native land. On the other hand, the resistance and anxiety brought by the attachment to the so-called modernization process has become another theme of Xiao Wu. For a small town like Xiaowu, which is about to be legalized, under the influence of ideology, ancient and ancient illegal acts are pronounced in the street, and a good friend like Jin, a businessman who makes huge profits by new illegal means, even if he is newly married, will be reported by local TV stations with great fanfare. In such an unpredictable real world, lonely Xiaowu will definitely die, and the love he longs for will eventually come to nothing. However, there is no doubt that director Jia sympathizes with the protagonist. He just portrayed Liang Xiaowu's experience as a frustrated young man and quietly presented it in the film. At the end of the film, Xiaowu was handcuffed to the street and there were countless onlookers. A subjective shot of deliberately helping the onlookers meet the people watching the movie. The numbness and helplessness we glimpsed in our eyes was Xiaowu's state of mind at that time. This wonderful design became a classic, and the new tape recorder sold backstage played the popular music at that time: Farewell My Concubine sung by Tu Honggang. The lyrics of "Hate Can't Shake Away All Heartaches" fully show Jia's attitude towards the characters: a dying Warring States hero and an unemployed thief who were mistakenly arrested died at the lowest point of their lives, but the traditional morality and the constraints of good and evil have no effect on them. They are tragic heroes who stand firm in the long river of history, because they are branded with such a vivid brand.