Brief introduction of lei nai

If the first film was 1935, this year's 8 1 year-old Lei Nai has been on the road of film art for nearly 70 years. His famous feature film "Love in Hiroshima" was completed at the age of 37, and his masterpiece "Everyone will sing this song in his later years" was completed in 1997, and won the best film. This is his 17 film. He is 75 years old this year. Rene and his collaborators use old songs that are familiar to the French people to run through complex plots and many characters, show the intricate relationships and subtle emotions between people in today's French society, and gain insight into the secrets of characters. The appearance of this novel and unique film shows people that the artistic imagination of the old man Lei Nai has not dried up, but has become more and more vigorous.

Most of Lei Nai's films focus on people's memories and express their inner anxiety through visible videos, which may explain why he often uses narrative strategies and related expression techniques of time and space inversion in his creation, and sometimes reveals some mysticism. In an interview with the French magazine Studio, I once asked him, "Have you always considered yourself a mysterious atheist?" Benevolence replied, "I stole this sentence from a humorous German philosopher. This definition is very good. We obviously feel that there is something beyond us. We are constantly faced with complex problems, such as the composition of nature, the habits of insects and the reproduction of life ... who is in charge of all this? After all, life is just a transition to other places, not a bad thing. It may be necessary for us to invent all the machines that enable us to travel in space. These machines are part of the plan. When I think about all this, I become a mystic ... If I don't believe in the existence of a ghostly God, I don't believe in God or Jesus Christ, I'm not sure that all the manifestations of life are pure coincidences. " 1922 On June 3rd, alain resnais was born into a middle-class family in the small town of Vana in Brittany, and his father was a pharmacist. Lei Nai likes reading comics since he was a child and is fascinated by movies. He frequents a cinema called Rabbit Forest. 1935, when Renai 13, he got an 8 mm camera as a birthday gift from his parents. His first film, Fang Thomas, was a three-minute silent short film based on a popular novel at that time, starring children in Vanna. In the same year, he also made a short film called The Adventures of Guy. Although it was not finished, it showed young kindness and strong interest in movies.

Lei Nai was sickly from childhood and lived with illness all his life, which may be the reason why he failed to finish his studies normally and later made a few movies. He recalled: "I have had asthma attacks every night since I was five years old ... Sometimes this attack lasts for three days, so I have to give up my studies and sit in an armchair all day." I can't even lie down, which is unbearable. " Due to physical reasons, Lei Nai didn't even take the high school graduation exam. /kloc-When he was 0/4 years old, he left his hometown and came to the capital Paris, mainly because of asthma, because compared with Brittany, Paris is not so humid and asthma is not easy to attack. Another reason why Renai came to Paris is that leaving home is also important for his recovery. As a result of growing up in a Catholic family, Ren 'ai can't help but feel depressed: "The family is full of the atmosphere that Catholicism is too serious and has a very clear view on the films shown in Paris. When I came to the capital to meet people in the entertainment circle, I felt a wonderful sense of freedom. This is a world where people with different opinions can fully express themselves. They are curious about everything and are constantly looking for new things ... Yes, I like this circle. "

When talking about his boyhood dream, Lei Nai once said: "I want to be a writer and an actor, but I feel that my talent is not enough, or more importantly, I don't know how to be a good actor, not a bad actor. This is a terrible worry. After all, I took a pronunciation class and studied under Rene Simon ... sometimes I got it right, and then suddenly I didn't do well. In such a chaotic state, I felt exhausted and soon gave up the idea of becoming an actor. So, I went to a bookstore in busy street as a trainee clerk. I thought at that time that I could open a small bookstore soon. At the same time, I can also shoot 16 mm movies in my spare time, which makes me very satisfied. " When he was a buddy in a bookstore, a film editor told him that the Paris Higher Film Academy was about to be established and advised him not to be buried in the bookstore.

From 65438 to 0944, Lei Nai entered the newly born Paris Higher Film Academy to study editing. Shortly after entering school, he dropped out of school because he was disappointed that his teaching was too theoretical. Later, a producer that Renai knew when he was a editing assistant agreed to let him make several short films. From 1946, Lei Nai filmed a series of documentaries to show the life of the painter and his paintings. For example, Van Gogh (1948) reconstructed the painter's life by film through reasonable arrangement of his works, and guernica (1950) showed Picasso's experience in creating famous paintings such as guernica, just like a report about the Spanish civil war, Sculpture Will Die (1953).

This kind of film made by Renai was called film d'art in France at that time, which can be literally translated as "art film" in Chinese. Because this kind of film takes painting as the performance object, it can also be translated as "painting film", and because this kind of film belongs to the category of documentary, it can also be translated as "painting documentary". This kind of documentary has three purposes: to make biographies or tell stories for painters, to shoot poetic films and to update painting criticism methods. Besides, Lei Nai also made some other documentaries, such as Memory of the World (1956) and Song of Styrene (1958). During this period, Lei Nai also participated in the creation of other directors' films as an editor, especially the creation of Short Point Village (1954), which is the first work of female directors Agnès Varda, known as the "mother of the new wave". The unique artistic conception of this film, such as the interaction between consciousness, passion and the real world, directly inspired Lei Nai's creative inspiration. 1955, Renai completed the filming of the documentary "Night and Fog", which accused Nazi concentration camps of terrorist atrocities during World War II, and has always been recognized as a masterpiece of documentary. A film critic wrote: "No description or picture can faithfully reproduce the true dimension of those terrorist events: endless and constant fear. In order to do this, we need to find mattresses to hide food scraps, blankets to compete with people, repeated shouts and curses, orders in various tones, and scenes in which the SS suddenly appeared for spot checks or just to play tricks on prisoners. We can only show you the empty shelves and shadows of the brick barracks, and those who are scared to sleep. However, benevolence successfully demonstrated the cruel scene at that time through unique techniques.

First of all, separate the past from the present (that is, the time when the atrocities occurred and the time when Ren 'ai filmed). The black-and-white documentary filmed by Renai during the liberation of concentration camps by France and allied forces shows the cruel past, while the color film he filmed shows the current face of the same place: the peaceful scene of daily life is quite warm and lovely, and it is difficult to recognize the traces left by the horror of the past. These colorful fragments are like reminiscences of the past in tourist maps and postcards, and do not reflect too much historical truth. However, compared with those cruel pictures in the past, the audience will inevitably ask: Is this green grass so lush because of the nourishment of those particularly fertile fertilizers left over from the past?

Secondly, cross splicing is used to strengthen the contrast between the two periods. The lens that shows the past is often to connect some static photos together and shake them with the camera to emphasize some details; When shooting the current scene, the camera moves continuously. The past is stagnant and dead; It's fluid now, and it's not finalized yet. We know very little about the past and the present. When Lei Nai quickly switches from the past to the present, critics often ask some questions, indicating that we have little memory of the past and little understanding of today: "Who can know everything? Isn't it futile to ask us to try our best to recall the past? What practical things have these concentration camps left behind? Are the people who built the concentration camp dismissive of this issue, and is it difficult for people who are tortured here to understand? " This question seems to be one of the few statements that may be accepted, because you can answer it in any way.

Third, arouse the audience's thinking through enlightening explanations. When the commentary lists appalling atrocities, the director arranges these experiences one by one through editing, just as the Nazis carefully recorded these events in the black and white movies we saw. In order to keep the records in order, these Nazis labeled their victims with gold stars, patterns, red triangles or the first letters of "night" and "fog" in German (the abbreviation NN in German means people with unknown names), and even the society of concentration camps was closely organized into a hierarchical society with obvious signs: the prisoners were at the bottom (this column was divided into many details, such as victims) and then the prisoners who managed the prisoners; At the top are SS officers; At the top is the commander of the SS.

However, this hierarchical system divided by careful language was completely destroyed in the film. What we see are piles of mutilated, littered and naked bodies, and we can't tell the age and sex of the deceased. Listen to the same answer from those who act as managers at this level: "This is not my responsibility!" " "The prisoner in charge of the prisoner said;" This is not my responsibility! "The Nazi officer said;" This is not my responsibility! "all the parties say so ... the narrator of the film is the only one who raises objections, which can be meaningfully expressed as such a question:" So who is responsible? "1959, Lei Nai completed the filming of Love in Hiroshima, which is also the first feature film. The story happened overnight in Hiroshima, Japan. The heroine "She" is a French actress who came to Japan to shoot a film about peace. The hero "He" is a Japanese architect. They just met the day before and both have happy families, but they soon fell in love. At his home, the actress told him about her first love. It was during World War II that she fell in love with a German soldier in her hometown of Naville, but the German soldier was killed on the day of the liberation of Naville. She was shaved off her head because she fell in love with a German soldier, suffered humiliation and was once insane. Later, she went to Paris, which was the day when Hiroshima was bombed by atomic bombs. After breaking up with him, "she" returned to the hotel. Because she couldn't stand loneliness and loneliness, she came to the street again and met "he" wandering in the street. He begged her to stay, but she couldn't forget her home in Paris. Finally, the two said goodbye to each other and affectionately called each other symbolic names. She said, "Hiroshima!" He: "Naville!"

The film completely abandons the traditional story and linear narrative structure, breaks the boundaries of time and space and the external description of the plot through a lot of flashbacks and voiceovers, interweaves the descriptions of the past and the present, experiences and experiences, and shows the nightmare brought by the war in the discussion of memory and forgetting, experience and time. The film's expression of the past is not limited to the memory of the past, but deeply embedded in the present, forming a metaphorical structure, and the blending of the past and the present constitutes the time theme of the film. The love between two protagonists with happy families is obviously not understood as love in the general sense, but as a symbol. Naville girl's personal experience can't be compared with the shocking catastrophe in Hiroshima. However, Renai deliberately linked the two worlds with great disparity and emphasized the cruelty of war with unique contrast. Two events in different places are linked by time clues ("she" is the day when "he" suffered a disaster in Japan after liberation from France), thus further breaking the spatial boundary between events and becoming an eternal memory of mankind.

In expressing the inner stream of consciousness of the characters, Love in Hiroshima can be said to be an excellent film. Margaret Dura, a famous woman writer of French New Fiction School, provides a solid story for the film, and the "flash cut" technique created by Ren 'ai (that is, a very short flashback) successfully shows the instantaneous flow of characters' consciousness. The heroine's memory of the past completely disrupts the time sequence, showing great randomness and jumping. This film is also a successful attempt to combine literature and film perfectly. The beautiful off-screen commentary and lyrical tone have brought a strong literary color to the film. In addition, Lei Nai's discussion on the theme of memory and forgetting in this film has also become the theme of a series of important films. 1959, the film won the International Film Critics Association Award of Cannes Film Festival (for some reason, it did not participate in the competition for the Palme d 'Or Award) and the French Merleay Award, 196 1 year, and won the Best Foreign Language Film Award of the New York Film Critics Association. 196 1 year, Renai collaborated with Allen Rob-Gerye, another famous writer of the New Fiction School, to complete another masterpiece, which was published in Marienbad last year. The film tells the story of a large group of guests gathered in a baroque luxury building. One of them, Mr. X, told a lady named A that they met in a place called Marionbad last year. At that time, Ms. A promised Mr. X to leave her husband M and elope with him. Now that a year has passed, Mr. X is unwilling to wait any longer and persuades Ms. A to leave with him. At first, Ms. A couldn't remember such a past anyway, and refused to admit that she had contact with X. Later, under X's repeated persuasion, she finally abandoned M and left with X.

Another film about the relationship between memory and forgetting, another film without traditional coherent plot, goes further than Love in Hiroshima. The identity of the characters and the location of the story in this film are extremely unclear. It seems that Lei Nai is discussing the relationship between reality and fantasy in the film and other philosophical issues: reality and fantasy, truth and falsehood. The traditional boundary between present and past has all disappeared, and everything is so vague and full of contradictions. X has never made it clear whether the agreement with A in Marionbad last year was a real memory or a pure imagination, and A has never made it clear that it really happened. The meeting place mentioned by X is constantly changing: in Sildbad for a while, in Kars for a while, and maybe even in this guest room. The relationship between a and m is not clear. This man may be A's husband, her lover or friend, or even her brother. In addition, the luxury building in the film is also a maze. The film seems to show that there is no clear boundary between fantasy and reality, past and present, memory and imagination, and these things can be easily converted to each other, but human language or thought can become a reality: that is, X finally persuaded A to leave with him.

Let's listen to Lei Nai's explanation: "A man mentioned the past to a woman, and the woman denied what he said, and then seemed to agree. Maybe, there is no recognition. The story of this film can be retelled in a few sentences. This retelling sounds really stupid. In fact, this is a movie based on visual images. Everything in the film is not specific. We can't tell what happened today, yesterday or a year ago, and we can't tell which thought belongs to which person. Reality and emotion, everything is suspected, everything is unknowable, whether it is real things or dream scenes ... all this seems to be pure experiments or experiments. I thought that when we made this film, it was the time when French films should involve the Algerian war. However, I once asked myself, wasn't the repressed and closed atmosphere in Marion Budd's film last year closely related to these contradictions? Classical movies cannot convey the true rhythm of modern life. In one day, you can do a hundred different things-such as going to work, going to the movies and holding group meetings. Modern life is incoherent, and everyone can feel it. Painting and literature have shown this feature. Why can't we reflect this discontinuity in the film and stick to the traditional single-line structure? " In Love in Hiroshima and Marion Budd's Last Year, the present and the future, memory and fantasy, reality and illusion are intertwined with the protagonist's psychological activities, which are confusing and difficult to solve. Therefore, these two films are regarded as the pinnacle of stream-of-consciousness films (the latter won the Golden Lion Award at Venice Film Festival on 196 1). It is precisely because of the extensive and profound influence of these two films in the French film industry and even the world film industry that Lei Nai is recognized as one of the most outstanding modern directors, which has had an important impact on the development of modern film art. The most important contribution can be said that a large number of flashbacks and expressions intertwined with the past and the present have become the basic vocabulary of film art.

Although there are not many works by Lei Nai, each one is innovative and most of them are excellent. The theme of muriel (1963) involves the Algerian war. The narrative is interspersed with the past (the period of resistance) and present (the period of capitalist prosperity) of the French port city of boulogne, and the protagonist muriel has never appeared on the screen. The end of the war (1966) is a neat and perfect masterpiece. The protagonist is an elderly Spanish revolutionary who runs back and forth between France and Spain in order to overthrow the government of General Franco. The theme of the influence of the past on the present once again occupies an important position in this film, but this time Ray is completely realistic. Other films of Kindness include: I Love You, I Love You (1968), Staviski (1974), Destiny (1977), My American Uncle (1978). I want to go home (1989), smoking/non-smoking (1993), and everyone can sing this song (1997). Among them, My American Uncle is praised for explaining human behavior from a biological point of view, and Destiny describes the conflict between the inner world and the outer world when the writer creates novels.

From beginning to end, Lei Nai is concerned about time and its influence on people's ability to control their own lives. He is very good at combining reality with facts and things that have changed their form in memory by using the unique means of expression in movies. Compared with any other modern film director's works, Lei Nai's film narrative method not only tells the story directly, but also has more elements inherent in the film form to learn from. American film theorist Lee R. Bobuk summed up the elements of Ren 'ai film as: 1, the theme of time-the influence of the past on the present. 2. The use of famous writers (Dura, Rob-Gerye, Sampron) created a complex script with more Gao Wenxue value. 3. Simple plot clues combined with complex theme exploration. 4, highly dependent on visual image, less dependent on clear dialogue. 5, firmly grasp the rhythm and speed. 6. The extremely successful use of subconscious flashbacks, especially to create visual contrast.

(Originally published in China Screen, No.5, 2003)