What are the shaping and artistic characteristics of the Three Gorges figures?

First, the Three Gorges narrative analysis of good people

1. Narrative theme: changing China.

The central theme of Jia's films is change, not only for the good people in the Three Gorges, but also from the platform to the world. Jia has been paying attention to the changes of ordinary people's life and emotional style in the process of modernization. In The Three Gorges Good Man, this change is more direct: hometown is disappearing, and the relationship between marriage, neighborhood and relatives is also changing. Jia said, "I have spared no effort to describe the changing China. Because, whether it is the accelerated development of China's economy or the rapid development of social life, this spiritual change is ultimately a problem of the modernization of our country. " The Three Gorges Project has attracted the attention of the whole country, and the impact of the demolition of the Three Gorges has exceeded the local area. Therefore, Jia viewed the demolition process of the Three Gorges from the perspective of two outsiders in Shaanxi. This is a disappearing reality, which is a profound feature of China's present situation: all kinds of demolition may be the price of development and have a unique transition in the reverse process of modernization. Demolition is not a natural process, but it is not a process that can be stopped by individual resistance. Demolition has thus penetrated into the lives of the most ordinary people. In the film, Jia's attitude towards this change is still to face, respect and reflect on reality objectively. His eyes are a little reluctant to part with Fengjie ancient town, but helpless sadness and deep homesickness have replaced the edge of criticism. For example, in the film, the motorcycle driver pointed to the vast river and lazily said to Han Sanming, "The boat that was parked there, my home is there, and it has long since disappeared." Han Sanming said, "Do you know that you brought me (Ma Yaomei's hometown) when there was a flood?" The young man replied angrily, "I didn't call it flooding." Another example is Mark's classic lines to Han Sanming: "The present society is not suitable for us, although it is too nostalgic for us", and "The city that has worked for many years will be demolished in two years". Our life is undergoing drastic and rapid changes, with more and more money, more and more openness and development, but is life better? Are you getting better? This is exactly what Jia put forward and thought about.

2。 Narrative background: small county, big world.

Jia is good at expressing the life world of small counties. In Jia's previous works, he paid attention to the changes in his hometown towns during the social transformation in China in 1980s and 1990s. As a witness to the great changes in life in his hometown, a small-town man who was born in the 1970s and couldn't extricate himself from the whirlpool of traditional culture in modern culture, he expressed valuable reflections with his own works. Almost all of his early works were shot in Fenyang, Shanxi, which combined the local customs of a region with the works themselves and created a unique aesthetic style. As a result, "County Image" has become Jia's label and an alternative narrative text in China's film history. This is closely related to the director's own birth in a small county. Jia said: "The most important thing that the town brings me is a kind of cultural self-confidence, which is the biggest nutrition I have learned from the county. This gives me courage wherever I go. " Starting from the "world", Jia walked out of Shaanxi. Although he moved the scene to a metropolis like Beijing, what we see in the film is still the life of a small county. So are the good people in the Three Gorges. It is not so much a reflection of people's life in the Three Gorges area as a mirror image of a county. Fengjie, a typical old county town in the south, shows the panorama of China society: the contradiction between demolition, human trafficking, underworld, land-lost people and land-expropriated government. Obviously, these social problems are not just cases in Shanxi, Sichuan or Chongqing.

The county seat of China is the intersection of urban and rural areas. It has both the factors of modernity and the tradition of local culture. The change of its social form most intensively reflects the true features of China's modernization process in the past two decades, and is the most vivid embodiment of China's social transformation. Jia's films not only depict the typical image of a small county in China: gloomy, noisy, lifeless, full of rubbish and ruins, exaggerated small business scenes, etc. At the same time, it also deeply understands the living conditions of people in this county: the life of ephemera of small people-a special life in which homeless people are marginalized. For example, Han Sanming met a group of migrant workers in the Three Gorges, Shen Hong met a little girl looking for a job on the road, and Mark, who was exploited and died young, and so on. They drifted feebly in the tide of changing times.

3。 Focus: small people and vulnerable groups.

Good people in the Three Gorges depict a group of the most common images of immigrants. Even Han Sanming and Shen Hong are ordinary miners and nurses. Paying attention to the bottom people and eight marginal objects living in small towns are the consistent characteristics of Jia's works: the thief in Xiaowu, the song and dance troupe actor in Platform, the socially troubled youth in Ren Xiaoyao and so on. Jia is not the only director who aims his camera at the people at the bottom. Jia's characteristic is that he really gives these ordinary people a sense of life and youth, talks with them on an equal footing in the soul, reveals their true state to the maximum extent, and shows a great respect, without looking down or general sympathy. Jia said, "Anyway, I want to explore and show the progressive forces among the people through it." Different from previous works, the protagonist of the Three Gorges Good Man has a new change in his personality, which is reflected in the behavior of Han Sanming and Shen Hong. They have the courage to take the initiative to end their fate, and they are all prepared to bear the consequences psychologically or materially, instead of being blindly pushed around by the changes of life like the characters in Platform or World.

Second, the image artistic style of The Three Gorges Good Man

The New York Times film critics commented that Jia was "like a postmodernist with classical wisdom" and skillfully summarized the rich aesthetic features of The Three Gorges Good Man. From this film, we can see fuller details and more typical characterization, while composition, color processing and characterization all have a sense of silence like classical oil painting. Including the use of surrealism in movies, adding some life-oriented humor and comedy elements. Together, these things form a very profound charm, which is worth appreciating again and again. However, Jia is still Jia. Compared with the fifth-generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige who like to try different styles, he has a single style of self-pursuit: a single camera way, a single narrative way, a single image style, and even a single actor. It can be said that he is constantly expounding his film language and has never changed his style according to the needs of the market. The good man of Three Gorges still continues his characteristics in Xiao Wu and Platform: documentary is greater than story, and authenticity is greater than plot.

1. Neo-realism and "sound" aesthetics.

Giovanni Chivaltini, a famous Italian screenwriter, summed up the previous research results and put forward six principles of neo-realism creation: replacing fictional stories with daily life events, not providing answers to the audience, opposing the separation of directors and editors, not needing professional actors, everyone being a hero and adopting the language of life. Jia's works are deeply influenced by Neo-realism and director Taiwan Province, and basically take "six principles" as the creative concept. "My camera can't lie" is almost the cultural symbol of Jia's films. He used a lot of long shots, non-professional actors and dialects in his shooting. The Three Gorges Good Man is still used to long shots. There are many middle shots and close shots of fixed seats, but few close-ups. Basically, there is no push and pull of the lens and the movement of the seat, only a few slow shots. He used this silent, stagnant, slow and dignified image language to reflect the fact that his hometown is being disintegrated, demolished and submerged. This kind of lens language can bring great emotional tension to the audience.

In Jia's realism, a very important narrative element is voice. Zhang Ke's understanding of screen voice is very unique, and various voices are important tools for him to restore the flavor of the times and expand the narrative space. From Xiaowu to Good Man in Three Gorges, you can hear a lot of noises from daily life in every film: the noise of vehicles, the roar of various machines, the hawking in the market, the sound of radio and television, etc., which are densely distributed in every moment of the film and never stop. Noisy and crowded, especially filled with the sound of cars and motorcycles, is the real feature of most small towns in China. Jia never deliberately filters the noise in these natural environments, just as he hardly beautifies the shooting scenes. In The Good Man Under the Roots, we can see that all kinds of voices carry rich narrative functions: the sound of tools knocking on stones, the sound of rivers running, the whistle of the dock during the demolition process, and the specific sound background intertwined, showing the changes of people. At the same time, the clever use of pop songs in the film also left a deep impression on people, such as expressing the parting feelings of immigrants through the old song "Dry Wine If No Sale"; The song "Mice Love Rice" sung by local children aroused Han Sanming's yearning for his wife. The wet heart in the ballroom coincides with Shen Hong's mood. In reality, pop songs have indeed become the emotional destination of ordinary people, and they need this destination. In Jia's other films, many popular songs that conform to the trend of the times are also used. Platform and Ren Xiaoyao directly use the names of pop songs. In addition, TV is also a common means for Jia to restore space. In the Three Gorges, we can see a feature film about the relocation of Three Gorges immigrants, a TV series "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and so on. These clips enrich the ambiguity of the film when the native species is almost unintentional.

2. Surrealism and poetic narration.

After The Good Man of Three Gorges was released, the audience discussed most about the use of several surreal techniques: "UFO" connected Han Sanming and Shen Hong looking up at the sky; In the bright morning color, Shen Hong stood on the balcony after a night of suffering, and the giant monument behind him suddenly rose to the sky like a rocket; After Mark's death, the camera moved from Han Sanming's portrait to Liu, Guan and Zhang. They were dressed in traditional costumes and sat around the table texting. At the end of the picture, a tightrope walker appeared in the background. In fact, anyone who is familiar with Jia's works can see that it is not the first time for him to use these fresh elements. In his last work "The World", there was a flash performance of surrealism, although "The World" and "The Three Gorges Good Man" also maintained the basic elements of neo-realism: documentary, live shooting, long shots, unprofessional actors, dialects and so on. These mysterious pictures are vivid representations of the characters in the film (in fact, the director himself). He not only gives people a sense of beauty and impact, but more importantly, he profoundly expresses the unreality, mystery and uncertainty of the real world and the loneliness of the director in a strange time and space. It is these peculiar scenes that further endow the film with a meaningful poetry.

Poetic, which is another outstanding feature of The Three Gorges Good Man that distinguishes it from Jia's previous films. He used the simplest lens, the simplest characters, the ruins one after another, and the endless noise to make the audience feel a sad beauty. The English name of the film was translated into Still Life, and Jia explained, "I broke into this disappearing city with my camera. One day, I broke into an empty room and saw dusty objects on my master's desk. It seems that I suddenly discovered the secret of still life, the perennial furnishings, the dusty objects on the table, the wine bottles on the windowsill and the decorations on the wall all have a sad poetry. Still life represents a reality that we ignore. Although it left a deep trace of time, it remained silent and kept the secret of life. " But these still lives are in the Three Gorges all the year round. The Three Gorges is changing, houses and streets are flooded, people leave their homes and are scattered all over China, but they seem to be divorced from reality, just like those silent immigrants, just like those migrant workers who are silent all day. Jia deeply stared at these simple things and simple people, and paid a precious and warm tribute to these forgotten and even disappearing things.