The professional knowledge of film and television art used in Mancevski's film "The Storm is Coming" ~ such as the use of long shots, composition and montage in the film.

On the day when the film was born in p>1895, the Lumiere brothers didn't realize what changes the film would bring to human life. Up to now, the film has promoted and completely changed the way and mode of our contact with the world. Its infinite and free time and space has become the best medium for us to pursue a perfect spiritual life. The real freedom of film in time and space is the creativity of film itself-editing, which allows us to walk freely in time and space, and time is no longer fleeting.

time never dies, and the circle no longer exists. This is a recurring sentence in the film shanghai dawn. Just like the meaning of this sentence, the structure of the film is also "Time does not die, and the circle is no longer". It is really amazing that the director Manchevsky skillfully sets up the mix, but we find that this is not the director's affectation, but after deep thinking and real emotional input. Let's straighten out the story of shanghai dawn first, and then we will analyze how the film achieves the ultimate unity of content and form through editing.

The whole film is divided into three paragraphs:

The first paragraph: words. Outside an ancient monastery in Macedonia, a young priest Corey and an old priest were picking tomatoes in the sun. The old priest said, "It's going to rain …". A young Albanian Muslim woman, Sang Milla, is escaping from a group of gangsters led by Mitre, and a young priest, Corey, hides her. Mitre and his men broke into the church and searched for San Milla. They camped outside the church. Overnight, Corey and Sang Milla became lovers. Corey decided to take Sang Milla to London to find his uncle as a photographer. When they both escaped from the church, they met San Milla's family on the road. The family blamed San Milla for getting into trouble, forced San Milla to stay and drove Corey away. Sang Milla wanted to go with her lover and was shot dead by her brother. Before she died, Sang Milla asked Corey not to say sorry with her hand gesture.

the second paragraph: faces. In London, Anne is a pictorial female editor of a photography agency. The doctor told Annie that she was pregnant. She was faced with the choice of going back to her estranged husband Nick or leaving Nick to find her lover Alexander. In the studio, Anne received a phone call from Macedonia. A young man wanted to see his uncle who was a photographer. She saw a photo of a Macedonian girl lying in a pool of blood after being shot. Alexander is a photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize. He left his hometown of Macedonia and came here a few years ago. Now he has made a decision to return to his hometown, and he wants Annie to go with him. Anne hesitated, and Alexander left impatiently alone. In the restaurant, Anne told her husband Nick that she was pregnant and she was going to divorce him. Nick begged Anne to give him some time, and the contradiction between them would be solved. At the same time, a foreigner quarreled with the waiter and was driven away. A few minutes later, he came back and shot people who were eating. Annie survived, and Nick was killed beyond recognition.

the third paragraph: photos. Macedonia, Alexander returned to his hometown village. Villagers of different nationalities are already in mutual hostility. The first person to meet him was a young ethnic group under Mitre. And Anne is in London, hoping to get in touch with Alexander by phone. Alexander went to visit Hannah, a Muslim woman who was his first lover, and Sang Milla was Hannah's daughter. Hannah asked Alexander to save Sang Milla, where he was despised by Christians in the village. Alexander's cousin was killed by San Milla when he tried to rape San Milla, and Mitre and his gang kidnapped San Milla. Hannah came to Alexander at night and begged him to protect Sang Milla. Alexander found the sheep shed where Sang Milla was imprisoned and tried to take Sang Milla away. A relative of Alexander shot and killed him. Anne hurried to witness Alexander's death, and the rainstorm had fallen. Sang Milla escaped from the village and ran towards an ancient monastery. Beyond the mountain, in the sun, the young priest Corey and the old priest are picking tomatoes in the sun. The old priest said, "It's going to rain ...".

The ingenious narrative structure makes this film extremely charming. At the end of the film, the scene of Father Corey communicating with the elder priest is replayed intact, and the plot structure of the film returns to the starting point from the end. From the narrative point of view, this is flashback, but it breaks the general flashback rule, that is, it does not lead a related person in the play to recall the past, but makes a cycle of the story. It was not until the end of the film that the audience realized that the three not-so-close story paragraphs were actually interlocking. This is a creative application of film editing means. Only by finding an appropriate editing point and putting a film at the end, the story paragraph becomes a circle.

Of course, this cycle in the film is not a closed circle, and the starting point and the ending point are not simple repetition or coincidence, just as the circle in the film is not a circle, but a coincidence and sublimation in a sense. The director emphasized this point intentionally or unintentionally in the final clip of the film, and he didn't want the audience to passively get a complete experience. The beginning of the first part of the film "Language" is just connected with the end of the third part "Photos". This story describes Anne's rush to Macedonia and just witnessed her lover Alexander Koch being shot. In the second part "Face", Anne uses a magnifying glass to examine the photo of the body of the Albanian girl Sang Milla who should not have been shot according to the context logic. The living have died long ago, but the dead are still alive, and there has been a brief confusion in time, but this does not affect your judgment of reality. It's just that time is hung up with doubts, or enlarged, but it's not the traditional way of taking shots from multiple angles and then magnifying time.

Some people may question the rationality of editing, and it is precisely this "rationality" that restricts our creative film editing. Proust, who has infinite reverence for time, reproduces time according to his own memory, while the director Manchevsky is obviously dissatisfied with reorganizing time and space traditionally. What he wants to capture is the possibility of the coexistence of time. You can start with any story by collating three stories together, but you can't make the three stories form an inevitable connection and get consistent results.

There are many puzzling details in the film: On the way home, why did the photographer show the photo of his lover Anne to the officers of the peacekeeping force and say that she was dead? Annie witnessed the photographer's funeral. Where did she start? Also, does Cory think that the photographer uncle who took refuge in London is Alexander who died to protect Albanian girls? Because he himself said that he would go back to attend his nephew's baptism ceremony. Anne received a phone call from a Macedonian relative who claimed to be a photographer in London. Is it from Macedonia or London? Do we have to find the connection between them? Directors deliberately and seriously give up self-justification and don't seek a complete "narrative". In fact, those vague parts are exactly what director Manchevsky tries to surpass through editing.

What is certain here is that the film shanghai dawn is definitely not a traditional film made according to the concept of "three unifications". After three uses of "three unifications" in this film, it has produced a miracle: the original three paragraphs can be completely independent, and the combination of the three paragraphs, the repetition, analogy and mutual echo of the three paragraphs have truly liberated the narrative and made our single thinking from the existing chain of time and space concepts. It is such a precise and open connection between the three paragraphs that makes the whole film present such a complicated and polysemous form.

The major difference between traditional narrative theory and modern narrative theory is that the latter provides the distinction between story and narrative. The narrative mechanism of shanghai dawn is ambitiously based on trying to break the coherence, tightness and self-integration of time and space. This is the embodiment of the most constructive significance of post-modernism, which eliminates authority and center, but does not shy away from caring for the present situation of human existence.

In fact, the details of the film also subtly echo the postmodern theme of the narrative mechanism. For example, in the second paragraph, the film first presents us with a bathroom glass that can't see people's faces clearly, and we can only hear a woman crying. Next, the film shows us the heroine's busy work and the chaotic streets of London, including pop songs and alarms that can be heard everywhere. When we see the long street view of London reflected on the taxi window covering two lovers who are making out, it just presents a typical post-industrial human survival situation: people who have no food and clothing can still not hide their inner confusion and panic. London is a peaceful place, but gunfire still comes from Oxford Street. The weather forecast keeps reporting that it will rain in London recently, and Alexander, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, feels bone pain. In the third paragraph, Alexander questioned the "no choice" and advertised as "objective and true" video art. He gave up his career with the attitude of atonement, forgot his Pulitzer Prize, and expected to return to his hometown to wash his mind. At the end of this paragraph, the camera shot down Alexander, and the blood streamed out of the bullet hole in his chest, and the rainstorm finally came. The careful setting of all these details undoubtedly makes the non-traditional editing of the whole film more reasonable, so that we no longer misunderstand that the editing of the film is a mistake or an irreparable film.

"shanghai dawn" belongs to the kind of film that will linger in your mind. It is like a film that will never stop going back and forth. The film comes to its end and goes back to its beginning. All the suspense lies in the same sentence on Macedonian rocks or on the street walls of London: Time never dies, and the circle no longer exists.

The film's exquisite narration and breakthrough in tradition are all in the editing of paragraphs and shots. This is undoubtedly a feast of film editing, which makes you unforgettable and amazed.