Movie viewing notes——"The Embalmer"

The title of the movie "The Embalmer" is unfamiliar and even a bit resistant, but the core of the film contains delicate warmth. The director tried his best to mobilize the means of photographic modeling, film and television light processing, film and television photography composition, etc., and intertwined various techniques to cast the film, making the overall tone gentle and delicate. At the same time, in addition to creating soft and delicate scenes, the movie also has my thoughts on the relationship between "human beings and death" that always occupy my nerves. The film tells the story of the gatekeepers of death. Those outside the gate do not understand death, while those inside hope to meet again one day.

This article mainly analyzes the technical characteristics of "The Embalmer" from three aspects of film and television photography. At the same time, music is also an important tool in the film. The cello is the beginning of the protagonist's enlightenment in life and the key to finding the meaning of life and love. Finally, the cello carries the understanding of life. On the other hand, the simple story structure of the movie eliminates complex suspense, allowing the audience to focus on the scenes in the camera and look for the emotional symbols of the protagonist.

The film uses a narrative approach at the beginning to quickly explain the career change of the male protagonist Daigo Kobayashi from cellist to mortician. The image on the screen is not only a "mechanical representation" of the subject, but more importantly, how to express the subject. The story structure of the film is simple, so in terms of character creation, the character's personality and psychological change process are shown as much as possible through changes in performance, light and tone. The overall color saturation of the movie is low, the brightness of the color is weak, and the overall color tone is soft. At the beginning of the film, Dawu had to sell his cello and return to his hometown due to the poor management of the band and the pressure to make a living. There is a scene in the film where Dawu confesses to his wife the fact that he is unemployed. The tone and brightness of the scene are extremely low. Although it is in daytime, the curtains in the environment are used to create a dim atmosphere, hinting at Dawu's desperate life and loss of goals. Life. In the process of Dawu's job search and first contact with the undertaker, he was disappointed with life and resisted the undertaker, until finally his wife accepted his job and she forgave her father's cheating. Dawu regains his understanding of death and love. As the characters become more cheerful, the film increases the overall brightness of the environment at the end. When Dawu performed the coffin ceremony for his dead father, sunlight filtered through the windows on the side of the room. The male protagonist re-understood his father's love while facing death.

On the other hand, the director captured the appearance of Dawu playing the cello. The film reproduces this process many times. This appearance undergoes the reproduction function from "normal to exaggerated and finally to deformation". For the first time, when Dawu found a job as an embalmer but was extremely resistant, he played the music taught by his father when he was a child, which conveyed the inner contradiction of the character. The second time, people around him and even his wife disapproved of Dawu's work as an embalmer. On Christmas Day, after Dawu finished playing the cello in the company, the three of them fell into deep thought, as if thinking about their own lives. At this time, the cello is no longer just a representation of Dawu's personal emotions. On the Christmas Eve of reunion, the three people in the company recalled people they usually dare not think of through the same music, and the scope of emotional reproduction expanded. The third time, after understanding the job of an embalmer, Dawu gradually began to accept the job and truly began to understand death. At this time, the film arranges for the protagonist to play the cello by the river, during which the different families of the deceased that Dawu met at work are continuously added through cross-cutting. Dawu witnessed different joys and sorrows, and came into contact with death again and again. At this time, the performance of the cello is no longer the expression of the emotions of the characters in the film, but the understanding after witnessing death. The fourth time, Dawu's cello was played for his own child. At this time, the sound of the cello was played for new life after the couple reshaped their understanding of death.

The overall light processing in the movie adopts a soft light design. Therefore, the use of hard light in several places throughout the film plays an important role in character creation. While Dawu was having an inner struggle with the work of the embalmer, Dawu sat alone at the top of the stairs. The director used an upward shot and lit the character from the side. The overall difference between light and dark is obvious, which is inconsistent with the soft tone of the film. The characters are given a hard light, which outlines the obvious lines of the characters. It highlights Dawu's complicated heart at this moment, his fear of the undertaker or death. Later, Dawu used the cello to resolve his inner conflicting feelings. At this time, the overall lighting brightness of the picture is almost unchanged, and only the light of the finger part is brightened, so that the audience is not affected by the picture but concentrates on listening to the music, and becomes emotionally involved with the protagonist's entangled heart.

Although the overall lighting tone of the film is soft, the director still made subtle brightness processing based on the inner changes of the protagonist. After Dawu accepted the career of an embalmer, he went through a process from being misunderstood to being understood. So when the mother-in-law who ran the bathhouse passed away, and my wife and friends witnessed the entire process of Dawu performing the coffin ceremony as an undertaker, they no longer feared death and began to understand Dawu's work. Therefore, the overall brightness of the film has been slightly increased since then, and the background has also been changed when setting up the scene. It is mostly daytime, which contrasts with the dim room at the beginning and the release of octopuses at night. For example, in the scene where Daigo's wife receives news of her father's death, cherry blossoms, sunshine and petals are an important part of the background environment. The falling cherry blossoms are both beautiful and convey a warm atmosphere, implying that Dawu's work has been understood at this time, and he has not abandoned the cello on the road of life. The brightening of the background is closely related to the protagonist's mood. Dawu has found the meaning of life and the direction of work.

In terms of film and television photography composition, what attracts me most about the entire film is the color configuration. What impressed me most was the scene where Dawu was misunderstood by his wife because of work and went to talk to the president. The entire room of the president was filled with green plants. The large area of ??vibrant green seemed incompatible with the death-related profession of an embalmer. But in my opinion, the director may want to use color to induce contrast, thereby implying that life and death are actually closely related, and the light of life must be inseparable from the shadow of death. Why do we need to fear or even hate death?

On the other hand, the large blocks of color in the scene create a strong visual impact. Since the entire film is dominated by low-saturated colors, once the president's room appears in the shot, it will quickly grab the audience's attention and make people think about what will happen in such a room. The impact of life and death contained in the color also implies the subsequent plot of the film; the wife will understand Dawu's work.

After the director resolved the misunderstanding between his wife and Dawu, the only clue left in the story was the protagonist's unforgiveness for his childhood father's cheating. When Dawu and his wife tell the story of the stone, the film begins to unravel the last knot of the protagonist's heart. Here, the director arranged a special silhouette long shot. Dawu and his wife are standing by the winding river. The sparkling water in the lens is collaged with the two people in dark clothes. The characters form silhouettes in the picture, creating a unique mise-en-scène.

The plot of "The Embalmer" is not complicated. The film revolves around the protagonist Dawu's unraveling of his own knot. Precisely because the dramatic conflicts in the film are relatively mild, the director always seems to constantly remind the audience of the theme of "life and death" that runs throughout the film. Several meaningful "death symbols" are arranged in the film, leading the audience to think deeply about the contradictions in the film step by step. At the beginning, Dawu and his wife released the octopus in the dark night, but who knew that the octopus was already dead. This is the first time that a film has raised the theme of death to the audience. Although the octopus returned to the water, it lost its life. At that time, the male protagonist may just feel a little sad and regretful. For the second time, a slaughtered chicken appeared in the film, and as soon as the male protagonist saw it, he was reminded of the unsightly corpses in the daytime. At this time, death brings fear and terror to Dawu and the audience at the same time. Until the third time, the male protagonist saw the crucian carp in the river and swam desperately in order to return to the place of birth without fear of death. "Even if they die, they must return to the place where they were born." At this time, Dawu also led the audience to rethink the meaning of death.

Likewise, the question that comes to my mind is why fish defy death? It knows that if it swims past this stone, it can only die and return to where it wants to go, but why does every fish risk its life one after another? The film even uses a close-up to describe a fish that is swimming desperately across the stone, but next to it is another fish that has crossed the stone and died and was sent back to the other side of the stone by the backward flow of water.

Until, when the mother-in-law who ran the bathroom was being cremated, the words of the funeral parlor grandpa awakened the connection between the two. Just like the line in the film, "Death is actually a door. It does not mean the end of life, but passes through him and enters another stage." The crucian carp struggling to swim across the stone seems to have told the audience this line.

Perhaps, this stone is also a stone in people's hearts. We step over stones, pass through death, and recall the love and warmth of our lives before we die. Once you cross the stone, people no longer fear death. If you walk into death, you hope to see you again.

Although the film is always full of symbols of death, it continues to impact me about life, love and family affection. In "The Embalmer", perhaps the process of Dawu carrying the coffin is a bit overly sensational, but it is the most heartwarming death, making the death of everyone in the story tender.

This also made me reflect on the fact that in my usual classes, I only learned how to use film and television photography, light, and composition correctly, but ignored that the real lens is used to express movies. Although the composition and tone of some movies may make people feel that they are using too much force, is this also done intentionally by the director, hoping to weaken the themes that are originally taboo for the audience, so as to make people willing to contact the themes that they subconsciously avoid.

"The Embalmer" talks about "death", but it attracts me to think about death; it talks about parting, but I don't feel sad about parting. A line in the film, "Have a good journey and we will see you later," can well interpret the aesthetic emotion of the Japanese character Sadness, which is also an obvious Japanese movie style. The pain of death is constantly placed in new hopes. Therefore, the characters in the film hope to meet again after saying goodbye. Death cannot take away the love between people.