Film prose

Like many film terms, the concept of "prose film type" mainly comes from France for the simple reason that French art films are called "art and prose", which means "art and prose". In the United States, "prose films" are generally classified as "art films". Generally speaking, few films will be automatically labeled as "prose films", and few directors will use this word as the film title, because "prose films" is a highly vague film category or type, which is difficult to define.

The first sentence of "prose film" is: I am neither a documentary nor a feature film. This is the result of the encounter between modernist art and film in the1920s, and the language and expression of the film become more and more complicated. As long as all films except feature films and documentaries are "prose films". "Prose film" comes from the complexity of a kind of thinking activity, which also determines that this category is vague and ambiguous, and often appears in helpless sentences at the end of film critics' vocabulary.

Movie master hans richter, a German pioneer, was the first person to publicly put forward this concept in an article. 1940, hans richter published an article "film essay, a new form of film". In this article, Richter, like Eisenstein, thinks about how to visualize abstract ideas. He thinks that this kind of movies should be different from ordinary documentaries, that is, "making the invisible visible". In this sense, Richter believes that "prose should have an equal relationship with movies, because in literature, the word' prose' refers to dealing with difficult topics in an understandable form." 1948, Alexandre Astruc also described the freedom of camera as a writing tool in prose in his famous article "On Camera and Pen". Later, when Bazin commented on Chris Ma Erkai's Letter from Sybil, he called the film "an incredible documentary".

From richter to Bazin, early critics thought that "prose films" mainly came from documentaries, and the inspiration of these films may come from social events. When the loyalty of recording reality interferes with the director's ideological expression, the form of "prose" appears. Jean vigo's impression of Nice (? Propos de Nice) is an excellent example. It is no longer a documentary in Evans' sense, but "passionate lyric prose" (germain Drucker's evaluation of this film).

The representative figures of prose films, such as Chris Ma Erkai, alain resnais and other directors, all moved from documentaries to freer forms of expression, and they all used "prose" to describe their works on different occasions. I never thought John van der Cook was a documentary director. He is a film critic. If alain resnais's Night and Fog, which shocked Europe, is a documentary, then Toute la moire du Monde, which just came out on DVD, is a typical "prose film". In the documentary, the director is the servant of reality, so in the prose film, reality becomes a thorough and true "material". Curie Deborah's "Societé du spé ctacle" is such a "prose film". The legendary western region and sweet love and romance in the picture may be the director's scorn and disdain.