The influence of Zhang Ailing's novels on movies?

The Film Tendency of Zhang Ailing's Novels

abstract

With her unique visual perception, film literacy and sensitivity to language and writing, Zhang Ailing not only embodies the artistic narrative characteristics of the novel, but also gives full play to the advantages of spatial artistic modeling, forming a unique film-oriented text in the history of modern literature. The application of camera, time and space, montage and other film techniques in Zhang Ailing's novels shows the vanguard of her novels in artistic form.

Keywords: Zhang Ailing's novels and movies

As the most popular art form in the 20th century, movies are closely related to modern novels. As Liu Mingjiu said: "Breaking the traditional rules that different genres have different aesthetic principles, artistic laws and techniques, and introducing the modeling method of space art into the temporal art category of novels, the artistic phenomena of painting and film and television have appeared in modern novels." In Zhang Ailing's novels, there is a literary spirit that tries to communicate with film art, such as lens, time and space, montage and so on. In On Zhang Ailing's Novels, Fu Lei also mentioned the use of "abridgement", which he regarded as "cinematic technique" and "ingenious tone technique".

First, the lens in the novel.

In Zhang Ailing's novels, we can see her skillful brushwork, capturing the scenes in the film from time to time, leading readers to jump from one shot to another, following it into the characters' hearts, allowing readers to observe the characters' environment in time and capture the activities of their inner world.

The use of various lenses in Zhang Ailing's novels can be said to be everywhere. In HongLuan Jubilee, the wedding scene is displayed with a panoramic lens like the overhead lens: "The whole door full of flowers is a glass ball with colorful flower patterns in the center. The guests are all flies crawling carefully along the sphere and can't climb in. " This kind of lens can narrow the subject matter, cause psychological collapse through excessive spatial deformation, and show the depression, panic and resignation of the characters. It is an abstract perspective with only the main structure, and the whole overhead scene fully expresses the extreme depression that modern urbanites do not get this sense of stability from marriage. In Heart Sutra, the fierce conflict between Xu Fengyi and Han Xiao is described with a close-up scanning lens: "across the floor, across the floor mat of lemon yellow and pearl gray Fang Gezi, across the sleeping civet cat, spittoon, a handful of cigarette ash, messy morning paper ... her broken home!" This kind of lens fully shows the messy scene in the room, implies the family's thinking about the causes of the conflict, and deepens the impression of the evil consequences of "incestuous love". "Flower Xie" depicts Zheng Chuanchang's father in a close-up: "Mr. Zheng looks like the standard young gentleman in Shanghai who drinks delicious food and smokes cigarettes in the advertisement. He has round eyes, big eyes and corners of the mouth. When he puts on shorts, he becomes a little boy taking baby pills. Plus a moustache, he represents an old man who can make up for it immediately. He can be a white-bearded Santa Claus. " This kind of lens is not only narrative, but also has profound meanings such as contrast and symbolic irony, which expresses the strong irony of subverting patriarchy.

Not only that, Zhang Ailing often uses various lenses together. The golden lock is perfect for the camera and can be read as a movie script. The novel begins with an empty lens "the moon", and the narrator's voice-over emphasizes the time span of the novel and increases the desolation of the novel. As the camera moves, the moonlight falls on a maid who sleeps in the next room. Her whispers with another maid gave us some information about the second daughter-in-law of the Chiang family. Then, their whispers were interrupted by the cautious old mammy, and people fell asleep. The moon gradually fades out, rosy clouds greet the arrival of the sun, and the mysterious night gives way to a more real day. Amid the cries of street vendors, the Chiang family began a new day's life. When the daughter-in-law and daughter greeted the old lady, they inherited the topic discussed by the servants last night, and then Cao, the hero of the novel, appeared. As soon as she appeared, she slandered her sister-in-law, molested her sister-in-law, and sneered at her brother and sister-in-law. The author uses several dramatic scenes to show people the protagonist's vulgar, provocative, trouble-making, painful and depressed life state. Several typical life fragments in one day summarize her life in the Chiang family for more than ten years, and it is not difficult to see the great role of focal plane in the novel.

Second, the time and space in the novel.

The analysis of the artistic composition of Zhang Ailing's novels seems to be endless. In the theoretical noise of different opinions, the space-time consciousness closely related to modern novels has gradually entered the researchers' field of vision. Some scholars pointed out that "she adhered to her unique sense of time and space, the narrative resources of Chinese and foreign novels, and the concepts and techniques of western modern art, and constructed a brand-new novel time and space schema, which also opened up a new look for the time and space art of China's modern novels". This contribution of Zhang Ailing's novels broke through the traditional time and space and edited her own film time and space.

There is a saying in The Golden Lock: "The wind came in through the window ... Qiao Qi put his hand on the mirror. The bamboo curtain and a pair of gold and green landscape screens reflected in the mirror are still rippling back and forth in the wind. I feel seasick after looking for it for a long time. When I look again, the bamboo curtain has faded, the golden green landscape has become a portrait of her husband, and Byakki Smoker is ten years old. " Here, the author uses the "virtual focus" lens commonly used in movies, that is, after the previous lens begins to blur, the next lens begins to be clear. Cao Qiaoqi stared at the "bamboo curtain" and "golden landscape" in the mirror, and his sight gradually blurred-the focal length became empty. Clear sight after "focusing"-clear focal length. In a blink of an eye, the landscape became a portrait of her husband. After "focusing", the line of sight is clear again-the focal length is clear. Her husband's portrait became her own image again. Zhang Ailing vividly expressed Cao's ten-year depression and loneliness with Hollywood-style scissors and smooth splicing. This simple way of time-space transfer leads to the dying and deformed life of the protagonist, which greatly simplifies the length of the text.

In "Love in a Fallen City", although Liu Yuan and tassel stand against the wall, they seem to be on both sides of the wall, which makes people unpredictable. This implies that love between them is impossible. This wall, like a piece of time and space in the movie, divides them into two worlds. Fu Lei said in On Zhang Ailing's Novels: "A delicate and embarrassing situation is always the best skill of the author. When people with completely different times, classes, educational background and interests get along together, all ambiguous scenes are conveyed more cordially than her. It is so natural and interesting for all kinds of psychology to explore, rub, attack and avoid each other, as if it were as light, chic and intimate as changing partners in a posture in classical dance. " Zhang Ailing went deep into the characters' inner emotional world with exquisite and rich brushwork, so Liu Yuan said, "This wall somehow reminds me of that sentence at the end of time. ..... One day our civilization was completely destroyed, and everything was finished-burned out, bombed out, collapsed, and perhaps this wall was left. This wall, in addition to the function of "slicing" in time and space, was "burned out, bombed out and collapsed, and perhaps this wall is left". This is obviously a movie. Moreover, the real time and space is transformed into Liu Yuan's sad and illusory psychological time and space through "slow motion", leaving only this "endless" high wall on the vast land, leaving endless space for readers.

Third, the montage in the novel

Montage is the form of film, and it is also one of the most important narrative and expressive means of film art. As a skill, it means editing and combining, that is, according to the development of the story, many scattered and different shots are artistically edited and combined, so that they can produce coherence, echo, suspense, contrast, hint, association, contrast and different rhythms through the complementary relationship between the pictures, forming an organic, natural, smooth and harmonious one. When talking about editing in film aesthetics, balaz said: "Once the upper and lower shots are connected, the extremely rich meanings hidden in each shot are emitted like electric sparks." The use of film montage in Zhang Ailing's novels is not only rich, but also ingenious, without axe marks.

In The Golden Lock, Cao has a strong passion for it. She longed for it, but fate made her face her husband's dead pork body all day. The novel says, "Qiao Qi stood in the room, holding his arms, watching two maids carry the box back to its original place. The old story comes up again: the fragrant sesame oil shop near Shizi Street, the black greasy counter, the wooden spoon in the sesame sauce bucket ... Through the rows of copper hooks hanging on the pork, she saw Lu Chao in the butcher shop. Lu Chao rushed to call her Miss Cao. Qiaojie seldom screams, so she patted the hook on the back, and countless empty hooks swung over and tapped his eyes. Lu Chao took a piece of lard from the hook and threw it at the meat case. A warm wind came over her face and smelled of dead bodies ... She frowned. Her husband fell asleep in bed, the lifeless corpse ... "Zhang Ailing used montage to push the characters from reality to the past and back to reality from the past, and used the film" flashback "technique to enter and fade out the conscious world of the characters through the unique film vision of subjective and objective lenses, and cut in between subjective and objective viewpoints, thus making readers enter the depths of Cao's soul. Her thoughts consciously or unconsciously returned to the past life experience of sesame oil shop, and this consciousness flashed and entered the subconscious. The subconscious pork is wonderfully connected with her husband's body through montage, so that readers can feel the sadness of her life.

In the second incense of agarwood crumbs, Roger and Luxi held a wedding in the church, and their dream came true: "This dream of his last life slowly came to him;" Wrapped in silvery white yarn, walking towards him in clouds and fog. Walking through the rose-colored window, she became rosy; Walking through the blue window, her face turned blue; Walking through the golden window, she and her hair burst into flames. ..... "Roger's wedding happiness is reflected in fantastic colors. After the marriage, Xixi ran away because she couldn't stand the normal love between husband and wife, but she still remembered Roger: "She picked a dark blue morning glory and spat at the flower heart. She remembers that when she came out of church yesterday, in the car, he looked at her like that. She blew into his eyes and closed them. Roger's eyes are blue-although few people notice this fact, they are not very blue, that is, they can often be imagined as the color of this morning glory when they are emotional. "Here, the morning glory is transformed into Roger's eyes, and the real thing in front of him is associated with the virtual image in his heart. This montage technique is also very wonderful in the film.

The cinematic tendency of a novel should be based on the premise of not losing its independent artistic ontology, otherwise it is not called a novel. Although the characters in Zhang Ailing's novels have great visual charm, they have not affected the in-depth exploration of people's inner world. She described "psychological perception as a photographic image of things". The film techniques in Zhang Ailing's novels, such as lens, time and space, montage and so on, have not weakened the literariness of the novel at all, but moved towards aesthetic compound in the fusion with film techniques, creating a mature modern novel paradigm under the influence of film art.

References:

[1] Liu Mingjiu. Preface from Modernism to Postmodernism [M]. China Social Sciences Press,1994,3.

[2] Fu Lei. On Zhang Ailing's Novels [A]. Complete Works of Zhang Ailing (Volume IV) [M]. Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, 1992490.

[3] Xuanzang. The relationship between the creation of time and space in Zhang Ailing's novels and Chinese and foreign cultures [M]. Journal of Fujian Normal University, 2004, 64.

[4] Fu Lei. On Zhang Ailing's Novels [A]. Sixty years of Zhang Ailing's comments [C]. China Overseas Chinese Publishing House, 200 1, 65.

[5] Bela Balazs. Film aesthetics [M]. China Film Publishing House, 1979, 1 18.

[6] Leo Oufan Lee. Ungrateful-Zhang Ailing and the film [A]. Sixty years of Zhang Ailing's comments [C]. China Overseas Chinese Publishing House, 200 1, 360.