Jin Changping photography

-Symbolic experiment and decadent aesthetics of Temple Hill in Ji Shu.

Speaking of Ji Shu Temple Hill, it is easy to think of Italian director pier paolo pasolini. Indeed, the two directors have something in common in many ways. Ji Shu Temple Hill, 1935 was born in Aomori Prefecture and graduated from the Chinese Department of Waseda University. The fact that he was born in Aomori Prefecture is very important to him, and it is involved in many of his films, which also shows the autobiographical characteristics of his films. He preferred poetry and haiku since childhood, and won many national poetry awards in his youth. In addition, he is an excellent commentator on horse betting and boxing matches. Like pappas, he is also a film screenwriter, a poet director and a first-class film and painting artist. Pasolini's film "Salo: Sodoma 120 Days" has a far-reaching influence among domestic fans. Similarly, Shanghai Foreign Prostitute edited by this company is also the most popular. The similarity between these two films lies in that they both show a group of people who revel wantonly under the ideological root of "keeping human desires and destroying justice". Their works are still considered to be ahead of the times, and there are not many bosom friends.

As a director, Ji Shu Sishan has only five feature films in his life, but he has countless unknown experimental short films, stage plays and screenwriters for many films. Under the different mental habits of Italians and Japanese, pasolini will joke with inappropriate humor, although this kind of banter makes people laugh, while Ji Shu Sishan's films are serious. In his films, there is no banter from beginning to end, but a strong sense of compassion. Ji Shu Sishan's films are not so much exploring new fields as exploring "original ecology" or paying tribute to the irreversible image of the past. Hughes' films are like an altar, cold, strange, silent and desolate, hanging on the ashes of the external space-time and inner world forgotten and burned in memory.

The first feature film directed by Ji Shu Sishan is "Throwing Books into the Street" (shot at 197 1, hereinafter referred to as "Throwing"). The name of this movie is like a movie about youth and street sports, which expresses much more than intuition. On 1970, Ji Shu Sishan acted as a screenwriter for the film "Useless Man". Masahiro Shinoda, director of the film, together with Oshima and Yoshishige Yoshida, initiated the new wave movement of Japanese films, which is called the "Three Masters of the New Wave". New wave movies often pay attention to the spiritual world of young people and the sports of students. The Story of Cruel Youth by Takeshima is one of the representative works of this movement. It can be seen that Ji Shu Sishan's films are also influenced by the new wave movement, focusing on the pain and confusion of youth memories, and mixing personal feelings with the factors of the times and regions. Throwing depicts a young man who is unwilling to the status quo and eager for excitement, but feels that life has nothing but nothingness, so he falls into a mental crisis.

Japan's postwar scars and turbulent politics were the mother of its growth, and at the same time it was suddenly flooded.

The influence of western culture. In this film, we saw groups of young people wandering in the street.

Hippies dressed in strange clothes take turns smoking marijuana, peace brand cigarettes are scattered all over the place, and the shadow of war is scattered in every corner of the world. Perhaps it is the first time to direct a film, and Hughes is not confident enough about his camera expression, so there are long poems, monologues and philosophical sermons in the film, and words and words strengthen the intention of the film.

Pastoral Sacrifice to the Dead is his childhood memory in Aomori Prefecture, his hometown. The film is divided into two parts: the first part is a movie being shown on the set, with misplaced memories of the past, a teenager imprisoned by his mother, attracted by the circus, and eloped with his neighbor's young woman; In the second half, the teenagers came from the past time and space and told the real past. The young woman didn't arrive as scheduled, and the circus was still absurd. Memories and truth, like moving copy paper, always have some irreparable differences.

Apart from his own screenwriter, the transplantation and deduction of avant-garde novels is an important feature of Ji Shu Sishan's few films, so there are both "author films" and "writer films" in his works. Shanghai Exotic Prostitute House is adapted from the novel A Niang's Story by French woman writer Paulina Reagan, and her last work Goodbye, Box Boat transplanted the famous Latin American magical realistic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Japanese background. To be exact, Hughes extracted the soul and skeleton of these novels, but attached their rich cultural bodies to the skeleton, which made these writers' films more or less compatible with multiple cultural factors.

Shot in 198 1, this film named Shanghai is actually set in Hong Kong in the early 20th century, and it is also the only film he shot outside Japan. O, a French girl who silently succumbed to Steven because of her love, followed her to a place called "Shanghai Alien Prostitution Hall" in Hong Kong on 1920 and started her career of selling herself. Steven delights in abuse, observes O's reception, handcuffs her, watches himself make love with his old lover, and watches O's reaction. Finally, he killed the boy who was budding with O and attempted suicide. Finally, when O was declared free, she felt so ethereal. Hughes repeatedly abstracted the plot full of bold and avant-garde colors and deliberately fragmented it. So what we can see in our eyes is like the human body and continuous dynamics expressed by simple machinery in the works of modern artist Duchamp, and we can't find a complete and continuous plot. The star of this film (Steven's actor) is klaus kinski, a famous German "devil actor" at that time. This pair of shocking directors-actor partners, pushed the film to a climax.

This is a gorgeous tragedy that can't be more gorgeous. The tragedy is so thorough. No one is happy in this bizarre world. Prostitutes are suffering from one memory after another. Johns ask prostitutes to provide all kinds of strange services, but they are still unhappy. Anyway, like that young boy, she still smiled. This smiling face was immediately drowned by tragedy.

Personally, I think "On" is the most commercial film directed by Ji Shu Terayama. Ji Shu Sishan's films are characterized by strong personal effects, but this feature is not prominent in On. However, the smooth handling makes the film too advanced and does not become an erotic film, but it is still far from the artistic height.

The plot of Ji Shu Sishan's film is absurd, and the visual subversion of drag prostitutes (disguised as women) is still superficial, which is not enough to express his intention. His purpose is to completely subvert the plot with its absurdity. He is not shallow and reckless, but after some deliberation, he shows indifference and coldness to those scenes that move and amaze us. What we usually call something "beautiful" is often a weak emotional tendency to show that it makes us feel comfortable. However, the "beauty" of Ji Shu Temple Mountain is not the kind of beauty that makes us feel comfortable, but a carefully shaped aesthetics, a pure artistic aesthetics and a decadent aesthetics that goes deep into the bone marrow. This kind of decadence and subversion has something in common with Dadaism aesthetics, but it is more profound than the latter.

For example, in On, Xiaoyu, a Japanese prostitute, has a hobby, that is, she goes to school on the ground, and as a frequent visitor of an officer whipped by a prostitute, she barks. As the man turned faster and faster on the ground, Jed's memory cut into his face from one point. When she was a child, her father was too poor to buy a toy dog. So I went to school and squatted on the ground as a dog to coax my daughter, who picked up a whip and whipped her father like a dog. When my father turns faster and faster on the ground, the audience can feel a strong sense of dizziness. The psychological effect that the director wants to achieve is that this kind of father's love for his daughter is not touching or disgusting, but a stronger unspeakable distress. A strange experimental scene based on realistic fiction, he removed the characteristics of "human" to a completely deconstructed decadent aesthetics. This kind of deconstruction is intolerable to the spiritual world of ordinary people. If the audience thinks this scene is real, he will feel strong fear and feel that reality should not be deconstructed in this way, revealing a cruel face. If he doesn't think this is reality, he feels the difference between the movie plot and reality, but he can't seem to find that difference. For example, at the end of the film, a masked man in black holds the head of a revolutionary teenager and declares O's freedom. The plot is so absurd that only expressionism remains. This bold and avant-garde plot assumption makes people stand on end. This kind of stimulation is not instantaneous, but arouses a cold feeling in the heart, which makes us consciously enter the emotions that the heroine O can feel (specifically, the director's personalized world).

If there is a complete story in On that can be accepted by most audiences, then 1983' s Labyrinth of Grassland (hereinafter referred to as Grassland) is an out-and-out experimental film. This film is about a handball song sung by a teenager looking for his dead mother at various stages. It looks like a split mirror composed of performance art. The elements in the film are like nightmares and nonsense, and there is a strange fear everywhere: long, overwhelming red silk, mysterious girls dancing, a group of inexplicable ghosts, and the mother's head is smashed into handball, which makes people dumbfounded and unbelievable.

Goodbye, Box Boat is the last flower in Ji Shu Sishan's life, which was completed one year after Hughes' (1984) died. The story happened in a village, and time was removed, and it became an ark: the souls of the villagers stayed in the village after death; Married cousins live a loving and asexual life because of their father's chastity belt; Finally, time returned to the village, the villagers moved to other places, and the village disappeared from history, leaving only traces in family photos. The loneliness at the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude pervades Hughes' films. This is a novel that is difficult to be adapted into a film. Only a film poet like Hughes can complete it. Unfortunately, before the film was finished, the master became a stranger.

Although the plot of Hughes' film seems chaotic, there is always a symbol as the clue of the whole film. In Tian, the time tool is the clue of film attachment, and so is the rectangular box of O's childhood in Shang. This square symbol surrounds the circular symbol inside, just like a pair of shackles, which makes her lose her freedom and become silent, but at the same time there is nowhere to escape. Therefore, Ji Shu's symbolic aesthetics is one of the most important features of his films. In his films, symbols and plots are equally important, and even the latter is more important than the former.

Processing skills of image and sound elements

The organization of picture and sound elements in Ji Shu Sishan's films is as complicated as its plot. Ji Shu Sishan's films are always accompanied by harsh and short background sounds under the soothing local music. After watching several of his films, I found that my ears became sensitive and I began to capture subtle and short sounds in the air, which I had never heard before. In order to make the film artistic in both form and spirit, Hughes is not careless in dealing with the sound. Whether it is a beautiful and exquisite Japanese folk song or when my sister is gang-raped by a football player and my brother is helpless outside the door, the background sound uses a chorus that seems to be shouting rather than shouting. And the strange sound of monsters dancing in the grass are all in line with the plot and impressive. Similarly, through several films of Hughes, we can find his preference for color and composition. He sometimes manipulated the lens to express the objective world as soft and natural as oil painting, sometimes used ukiyo-e to express vivid pictures, sometimes grayed and browned the pictures, and sometimes used some surreal objects to express the world refracted from the heart. The long shots with meditation characteristics and the fast shots with quick jumps are constantly overlapping.

For any existing substance, it is unique as the main body, but the substance seen through each eye is different. It's hard to say what is true. Maybe the world we see, hear and touch is not real. Only the object projected into our hearts is the material that is truly loyal to ourselves. Most people project from a similar angle, but Hughes chose another angle and expressed this feeling on the screen. He always puts a color filter on the lens, or emphasizes the impact of the lens with overexposure or underexposure. Therefore, in his paintings, red sun and sky often appear, purple earth and rivers, and even some black and white or taupe tones still use composition and images to increase visual impact. Many picture elements in Ji Shu Sishan's films are very similar to his photographic works.

Green and purple are used to distinguish different emotional colors in Throw. When teenagers witness and endure the oppression and helplessness of reality, the camera becomes desperate and dazzling bright green; When teenagers dream of their own ideals and fantasize about flying in the sky, the lens becomes extremely soft and beautiful purple. Two colors constitute two ports of youth emotion, and this technique of using psychological activities to cast a color filter on the external scene is also used in the popular youth movie Everything in Zhou Lili. On is his most brilliant film, beautiful and enchanting. Hughes put a lot of thought into clothes. Both Steven's Chinese gown and the clothes of men employed in brothels really make people feel the absurdity of this "heterogeneous" brothel. As a single body, the costume of this film can still be regarded as a kind of "avant-garde art"; The lens of memory illusion in Tian is always covered with red or green filters to distinguish different emotions; In the acrobatic troupe scene, the whole picture is divided into four parts: purple, green, yellow and blue to reveal that "memory is just an acrobatic troupe with heavy makeup"

Poetry, symbol, metaphor

To understand Ji Shu Sishan's films, it is necessary to define him as a poet. His semi-autobiographical feature film Pasturing the Dead (filmed at 1974, hereinafter referred to as Tian) is a successful poetic film. Imagine 15-year-old boy's self sitting side by side with his adult self 20 years later, entangled in the real past and the recalled past. Hughes transformed his poetry into another art form, combining poetry and film to explore the truth of time. Images such as clocks and wall clocks that often appear in Tian are actually poetic carriers. The director wants to find a real and unique time, which is the time when the wall clock that his mother is trying to guard rings. However, the truth of time is always distorted by each individual's experience, showing their own differences. This is the time displayed by everyone's watch in the circus that teenagers yearn for. The concept of time in physics research and the concept of time contained in poetry meet here. "If you travel through just visiting for a hundred years and assassinate your grandmother, do you exist?" .

Not only in this movie, but also in every one of his movies. In his films, fantasy and misplaced reality intersect, and poetry, symbols and plots are intertwined. It can be seen that every shot of him already contains the feelings of the inner world. It is not difficult to copy an external world, just like a documentary, but the external world is only a part of our existing space, and it is difficult to show a person's inner world. Poetry connects the inner world with the outer world. The difficulty lies in how to present this poem on the screen. As a famous young poet and later director, Ji Shu Temple Hill knows how to control the subtle relationship between the camera and poetry.

In addition to poetry, Hughes also likes to use symbols as metaphors. Portraits hanging on the wall and strange spells painted on white cloth are painted as white faces; Watches and ringing wall clocks in the field, as well as the blood of young women's lovers oozing from white cloth, are like a Japanese flag. Inflatable women in acrobatic troupe need to twitch with a pump, which is also a hint of potential sexual desire. Finally, a finger points to the opposite direction of people's travel and the opposite direction of "passing away"; The name "O" in "Shang" itself is a symbol, symbolizing a hole, an infinitely expanding inclusive space, and similar to the box in which O remembers his father imprisoning himself. These are abstract images, including the bird-shaped ring worn by O and various forms of sexual assault tools; In the grass, there are handball, long red brocade and so on. In the throwing competition, when my brother came home with his injured sister, a man passed them with an dissected pig's body on his back. In On, the washed-up actress lost control of her memory and killed herself and her guests. At this time, a piano floated on the river outside the window, which was meaningful.

The legend of the national ghost is also one of the symbols often used in Ji Shu Temple Mountain. The woman in red with long hair in ancient costume and the portrait hanging on the wall remind people of the legendary image of Snow Girl and River Boy in Japan. The imprisoned woman in Wild Grass has the shadow of the legend of Snow Girl for thousands of generations. The use of these folk symbols is full of ethnic customs and philosophical meaning, which is enough for domestic audiences to re-examine these images and increase the psychological mystery of foreign audiences. It is not only a folk legend of ghosts and gods, but also an important part of contemporary western culture in movies. Throwing brings together many popular cultures: posters, rock music, hippies and so on. The film is about Japan's reflection on the nation, and the collision of two cultures makes Japan unable to stay out of it and feel anxious.

At the beginning of this article, it is mentioned that Ji Shu Sishan's films are still on the altar. The film poet, sensitive and enthusiastic about the original scenery, wrote this emotion into his films. Pastoral, grassland, snow-capped mountains, abandoned railways, past events and pianos are intertwined in this external world. For the inner world, he is also committed to deep excavation. At first glance, none of his films can escape the seeds of love. The ambiguous feelings between mother and son in Grass and Field, and O lost his father who drew a chalk box for him in Top, and turned to Steven, who was much older than himself, to complete his sense of belonging under the control of power. Isn't the complex of loving father, loving mother and even loving son reflected in Freud's orpheus complex and Oedipus complex? Freud used id, ego and superego to form a person's conscious world. In several films, Grass especially explored the potential will world called "superego" and showed it in the form of images, which is not easy. Superego is a world that can be explored forever. Therefore, this kind of film is very experimental.

But it is clear that Ji Shu Temple Mountain has a deeper meaning. We can see several scenes of sex in movies, often in despair and struggle. For example, in Throwing, my sister was gang-raped, in Tian and Cao, a young woman had sex with a teenager, and in A Shang, she was raped by Steven and received guests. Even though O laughed with a revolutionary teenager, the teenager was killed. Sex was originally a happy bait provided by God for human reproduction, but here, there is no happiness at all. If sex loses its mission, everything will be in jeopardy. In his films, sex is not only a metaphor by various symbols, but also a bigger metaphor. Hughes' films can't be called art films, but they are more advanced in the flood of Japanese AV products, if we just try our best to play tricks to release sensory stimulation. "Sexual instinct" and "life instinct" (also called "death instinct") are two major contents of life. Hughes weaves life, death and sex into his works, which is also an important theme of many Japanese masters. Many Japanese directors of his time, such as Shohei Imamura and Oshima, also used to use images to reflect on their views on life and death and sex, which constituted their national characteristics. There is a detail in "Throwing". A man peddles "buying useless old men and women". Behind him are several old people who are tied numb. This cruel elimination of the old and the weak due to limited resources is easily reminiscent of Shohei Imamura's The Test of the Mountain Festival. This island country with blocked waters, a hegemonic nation deliberately expanding, has produced such a group of compassionate masters, reflecting on the individual's sense of "life (death)" and "sex" and caring for the fate of the whole nation through individual care.

Then, as a film poet, he failed to forge his own life. 1983, Hughes died of liver cancer in Japan at the age of 47. In the next few years, several of his films were released at home and abroad. It is hard to say whether his abnormal death is related to his movies. Perhaps it was the excavation of human despair and the memory of the original ecology that led him to the origin and destination of all things prematurely. A generation of grandmasters finally got an irresistible terminal illness. Fortunately, a movie let us know the eternal altar he left behind.