What are the touching moments in Four Springs?

The story of a family in the mountainous area of Guizhou, China for four years.

It's the deepest secret of life and death.

Some movies, you will sit quietly in the cinema and watch them, showing great concern for the characters and being deeply attracted by their daily life. Four Springs is such a film.

This is a film made by one person. Lu Qingyi, a graphic photographer, did not study movies systematically. He took photos, recorded, scripted and edited by hanging watercress, but the emotional power contained in the film can make people completely forget the technical flaws. At present, the film Douban scored 9.2 points. Recently, it broke through from 1309 and was selected as the competition unit of the first youth film festival on 20 12, with 438+08.

This is the age of five people. The director aimed the camera at his hometown and town, at his parents who never blushed when they sang all the year round, and at the nature and customs in the mountains.

If you take out four spring clips separately, it looks not much different from other home videos. However, these pure and simple records, after time superposition and rendering, convey profound and true meaning of life. This is the same as the touching truth of the drama Youth shot by 12.

Where did the four springs originate? Lu Qingyi said that he published a blog named "My Mom" on the Internet on 20 12, and wrote "My Dad" a year later. Two articles with sincere feelings have become online explosions: "At that time, I thought, why don't I make some videos?" Later, he was moved by a sentence directed by Hou Xiaoxian: "He said, if you want to make a movie, just do it, and you will have experience after filming. I made up my mind at that time. "

From then on, Lu Qingyi, who worked as a football player, singer, advertising company and photographer, began to teach herself how to make movies. During the four years from 20 13 to 20 16, Lu Qingyi, a director working in Beijing, insisted on doing one thing every year when he came home from vacation, that is, holding a camera and recording everything about his parents with video. Year after year, the cumulative duration of materials exceeds 250 hours.

In Lu Qingyi's lens, an ordinary old couple in a remote mountainous county in Guizhou province, trivial but poetic life fragments leap to the screen: cooking, sewing clothes, going up the mountain to collect medicine and taking blood pressure, just like the daily life of ordinary old people in China.

But the old couple's life is more optimistic and versatile: as a retired teacher, my father is not only proficient in erhu, accordion, flute and violin, but also teaches himself to edit music and videos with a computer. My mother, a singer when she was young, can sing and dance well and can sing at any time. She is lively and humorous. "Yes!" It's a mantra that she blurted out when she was happy.

Four Springs not only records the ordinary, simple and interesting life of the Lujia couple horizontally, but also shows the changes of time vertically. In addition to the emotional moments when many old couples get along, there are also their feelings about past experiences and their sentimentality about their later years.

My parents get older every day, and my father will look at the old photos in the light and feel that "the years are long, time flies, and many people are gone." When my mother married my father, she would blame "not looking at me, only looking at the glass" and say, "We must be healthy."

Like the Japanese documentary Fruit of Life, the sudden death of a loved one in the film is shocking and sad, and it also shows the profound proposition of life change vertically: the daughter died of illness, the white-haired man sent the black-haired man, and the happy mother lost her smile for a long time in the camera.

What's rare is that Lu Qingyi showed amazing restraint in the selection and editing of this passage. The plain record contains real and profound emotions, which made the audience look at these characters and watch them do what they should do in grief: the hearse started, buried, greeted the spirits and went home, kowtowed and knelt down.

The film also fully recorded the funeral songs sung for the dead:

"Living in the dust, raising children is hard.

That's it, mother and son.

Tears wash people in this life.

See if you speak clearly. Listen carefully and cry. "

After the emotional climax of the whole film, the mother who is still immersed in sadness will talk to her son. If the old couple are gone, "you will be lonely in such a big house."

However, at the beginning of the new year, the mother in the camera once again recovered her optimism, and her father laughed at the "new toy" WeChat. Such ordinary people will not be the target of media reports, but in them, we can see determination and resilience, which is the source of hope.

Swallows nesting at the door also indicate the cyclical theme of the movie "End of Life, End of Hope": Mother Swallow took the swallows out to see the world and came back. The children wandered in the outside world and returned to their parents. Here, the director quietly completed a metaphor of "returning to his native land", pointing out where the wandering soul in the big city should go.

From this, it is associated with the simple structure of "Four Springs", but it coincides with the theme of the movie "Winter goes to spring, and life and death come again" intentionally or unintentionally. And this true feeling of the passage of time will inevitably lead the audience to live in the position of the protagonist for a period of time, witness some dramatic turning points in life, and follow the protagonist to transcend and see through life and death.

Nowadays, movies are usually composed of special effects scenes or jokes, but this movie is composed of a family's life and how they transcend the inevitable pain in life, nothing else.

Interestingly, in addition to the role of time changes, media images also played an important role in this "beyond pain" process: after the death of my daughter, my father has been watching family videos since 1997, and Siquan also edited these videos into a whole film.

Among these media, the energetic daughter is still alive: the media is the material system in which the "human image" can be formed and spread, but in essence, the shadow is projection, reproduction and reproduction, and the media constitutes the ontology of the image, which is closely combined with emotion and the image becomes the object/world itself. We use this to think about "what is an image" and "what is the use of an image".

Video and photos, these modern media, have become a mirror to see human beings themselves. "Four Springs" is to connect these fragmented information into a complete story.

Yes, some viewers say that Four Springs is a very personal documentary, but they see themselves from other people's stories, just like a mirror. The reason is that this film is thoughtful and makes people feel warm. "Other people's parents filled my own heart!"

Therefore, this film goes beyond the level of ordinary private home videos. Many viewers don't want to see documentaries. I never understood why. In my opinion, real life can also be exciting. A good documentary is more attractive, entertaining and inspiring than a drama-life seems hopeless, but it will be saved because of hope and sometimes even because of victory.

In retrospect, this film recorded such a simple and ordinary thing, but it successfully set off the fragility and preciousness of life in a difficult life and became one of the few movies that can make people shed tears of happiness and sadness for a long time.

It makes us think about the world around us from a new angle, and makes us feel that we are exposed to life itself.