Pilot: What is behind the gorgeous narrative chapter?

In February, 2020, the 92nd Academy Awards were announced, but the Irish who got nine nominations got nothing in the end. However, this film "The Irishman", known as "The Unpopular Movie of the Year", brought martin scorsese back to public view. As an internationally renowned director, almost every work of Scorsese is a classic. However, due to his unique creative technique, he focused more on marginal figures, which led to most of his works becoming niche films. The movie Aviator, which was released in 2004, is one of them.

The film Aviator is a feature film directed by martin scorsese and starring famous Hollywood actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett and kate beckinsale. The film was released in America on February 25th, 2004. In the same year, the film won the Best Director of the 77th Academy Awards in Scorsese and the Best Director of the 62nd Golden Globe Awards in American Film and Television, and won many weighty awards internationally. It has been more than ten years since the film was released, but the score of Douban is still maintained at 8. 1, which shows its classics.

The story of the film is very simple, mainly telling the legendary experience of American billionaire howard hughes. The director takes Hughes' early life and love of flying career as the main line, dreams as the breakthrough point, and narrates from two clues: career and marriage, thus describing his struggle history and the romance of many legendary actresses in Hollywood.

For this film, the theme of "chasing dreams" is obvious, including its name "Flyer", which shows the hero's ambition to soar in the sky. But beyond the dream theme, I also saw the directing skills of American ace director martin scorsese. As one of martin scorsese's representative works, this film is hidden among his many excellent works and has become an unpopular film with high rating. So today, we might as well explore the charm of the film "The Flyer" from another angle, combined with martin scorsese's creative techniques and ideas. Therefore, I will interpret the deeper meaning and thinking of this film from four angles: creative technique, visual art, theme connotation and value embodiment.

0 1. Create characters who are deeply troubled by the spirit, see the big from the small, accumulate emotional outbursts in a loosely stacked narrative rhythm, echo from beginning to end, and strengthen the contradictions of characters.

Throughout Scorsese's films, the protagonists in the works may come from different social classes, but without exception, they are not marginal figures who are deeply troubled by the spirit. The director adopts the narrative technique of going deep into the secret world of characters, focusing on all kinds of characters with mental problems, thus revealing the living conditions of modern people. So is the movie "The Flyer". For this part, I will elaborate from the following two points:

First of all, from the psychological point of view, it reflects the real problems and shows the causes of the protagonist's psychological hidden dangers.

The movie "Aviator" begins with a narrative. The little boy Hughes is standing in the bathtub, and his mother bathes him. Mother repeatedly told Hughes that cholera broke out outside and it was not safe. Under the guidance of his mother, Hughes closed his inner world. He refused to contact with the outside world, and has been hiding in the house and burying his head in mechanical disassembly and research. The childhood experience laid a psychological hidden danger for Hughes.

As an adult, Hughes is in high spirits, but the detailed description of his cleanliness runs through the whole movie, including that he keeps washing his hands, won't let the waiter open the bottle for him and won't shake hands with others. Under the arrangement of Scorsese's plot, the audience can understand that Hughes' neurosis hides a lonely and fearful heart, which narrows the distance between the audience and the role and attracts the audience's attention.

In the introduction to psychoanalysis, Freud said:

"Movies are like a cultural form directly corresponding to psychoanalysis. Movies have enabled human beings to expand their horizons of observing the outside world, thus gaining a more macroscopic understanding of themselves and the outside society. "

The movie "The Voyager" shows its humanistic care function to the extreme: Hughes suffered from insecurity all his life because of his mother's childhood, and he can only appease himself through compulsive behavior. Although his family is rich, his spiritual home, like every ordinary person in modern society, faces great challenges. In the film, the director shows the mental state of modern people from the perspective of Hughes' psychological problems. Hughes' irrational behavior in the film can sound a siren in the viewer's mind, make the viewer reflect on his daily behavior and pay attention to the needs of the spiritual world.

Secondly, the loose accumulation of narrative rhythm strengthens the contradiction of characters' personalities, and a large number of loose events accumulate emotional outbursts.

The films directed by Scorsese prefer loose narrative rhythm and form a complete narrative chain with narrative blocks. Each episode has its own theme, independent of each other, and finally pieced together into a complete story.

For example, the film "Aviator" starts with the causes of Hughes' psychological hidden dangers, and then cuts into his adult filming experience. Hughes' filming has experienced three twists and turns, and each scene has conflicts and cracks. The director does not connect the plots with causality, but makes each plot have its own centripetal nature. After that, Hughes turned from filming to developing aircraft and acquiring airlines. And each fragment is constantly listed, accumulated and connected in series into a complete narrative chain.

In my opinion, taking the experience of film actor Hughes as an example, it is precisely because of the psychological hidden dangers buried in my childhood that I yearn for strength and perfection in my life and career, and I have repeated setbacks and conflicts. And every conflict gradually aggravated his inner insecurity, leading to his neurosis becoming more and more serious. With the accumulation of a large number of loose events, director Scorsese gradually pushes the characters to extreme environments and creates their emotional outbursts.

Generally speaking, there is a logical relationship behind the loose plot of the film, and the scattered fragments constantly accumulate emotions and promote the emotional outbreak of the characters. This continuous accumulation and gradual narrative technique can truly present the inner world of the characters to the audience, so that the audience can understand the mental state of the characters with the plot, thus narrowing the distance between them and generating strong emotional touches.

02. Skillfully use subjective shots and close-ups to analyze characters, and reflect their inner world with colors, thus revealing their mental state.

Scorsese's superb directing ability made howard hughes's role in the film Aviator popular. He is good at expanding the film language, showing the inner world of the protagonist with unique visual language and portraying vivid characters.

① Lens language: express the inner world of the characters with subjective lenses, and highlight the mental state of the characters with close-ups.

Later in the film, Hughes' neurosis became more and more serious, even leading to delusions and hallucinations. Once, when Hughes was discussing his work with employees, the director used a subjective lens to show Hughes' perspective. Through the lens, you can see a sneaky figure staring at Hughes with white gloves, and then it becomes more and more intense, and a group of people wearing white gloves intervene. At this time, through the close-up, we can see the anxiety and tension on Hughes' face.

However, as soon as the picture changes, we can see that Hughes is asking employees if Noah's suspicious person is his employee. The employee looked in Hughes' direction, but the picture immediately switched to Noah's close-up and communication with nearby employees, instead of the suspicious characters in Hughes' eyes. This is enough to prove that those suspicious people only exist in Hughes' imagination from beginning to end, indicating that their mental state has reached the brink of collapse.

Here, the director uses a combination of subjective shots and close-ups to present Hughes' mental state. He showed Hughes' imaginary world through subjective lens and explained his inner anxiety. Then he used the close-up of the supporting role to help present the real world, highlighting the absurdity of the imaginary world, and then used the close-up of the protagonist to intuitively express his inner fears and anxieties. In this way, the audience can follow the camera to experience the inner feelings of the characters and feel their struggle and helplessness.

② Color rendering: The gradual change of color is used to describe the aggravation of the protagonist's mental illness.

Scorsese regards color as an adverb of degree, and through the gradual change of color, he gradually sets off the spiritual outlook of the hero. At the beginning of the film, at the peak of Hughes' career, the film set off his positive mental state with cheerful and bright colors:

When Hughes filmed "Angel of Hell" at his own expense, the plane used bright red, indicating the aggressive personality of men; After the successful filming of Hellscream, Hughes checked the samples in the movie room. The red velvet sofa showed the man's persistence and sureness in his career. When the first test flight was successful, his girlfriend's body and family layout were mainly scarlet, indicating that the man was in high spirits; However, as Hughes' neurosis became more and more serious, the red color of the film gradually turned dark:

The second test flight failed, and the dark red flame and dark blood wrapped around the man, suggesting that his mental state was gradually declining; When he broke up with his girlfriend who had been in love for many years, he burned all his clothes, and the deep and exaggerated fireworks blurred his expression, just like his complicated mood; When he was seriously ill and completely closed himself, the director used dark red and dark blue alternately, indicating that male obsessive-compulsive disorder had reached the most serious level. Scorsese skillfully uses the depth and area of color to render the mental state of the characters. Unconventional colors exaggerate the process of disintegration and collapse of the inner world of the characters, which is very expressive. This kind of treatment can make the transformation of movie characters traceable, guide the audience to immerse themselves in the inner world of the characters, narrow the distance between them and arouse the audience's thinking.

03. Pursuing dreams is Scorsese's eternal narrative motif and the source of his narrative structure. As the spiritual core, it constructs a logical narrative framework.

Surpassing oneself and pursuing dreams have always been the narrative motif of all Scorsese's works. The film Voyager inherits Scorsese's consistent narrative theme. The director describes Hughes' legendary life with a big production and creates a character who constantly meets the challenge of fate, just to interpret the core theme of chasing dreams.

Scorsese himself once said,

"I have been looking for a theme that runs through my films, and now I understand that this theme is an outsider's struggle for recognition."

Take the movie Aviator as an example. As an adult, Hughes inherited a large inheritance from his parents. He could have lived in peace, but he chose to put all his eggs in one basket and make a movie at his own expense. The film spends a lot of time talking about the challenges Hughes encountered in filming, which seems to have nothing to do with the title of the film "The Flyer". But through Hughes' words, we will understand the significance of the director's arrangement.

Hughes once said to the media public relations manager:

"I have to make a name for myself by this movie, or I have to go back to Houston to be a drilling tool for life."

This sentence just reveals the source of all Hughes' actions, that is, he wants to gain a foothold in dreaming Hollywood. As an outsider in DreamWorks Hollywood, Hughes tried his best to shoot epic war movies to gain recognition, so as to fully realize and experience his dream of flying freely, which is exactly the theme of chasing dreams that Scorsese wants to express.

This film echoes Hughes' childhood dream plan from beginning to end:

Fly the fastest plane in the world, make the biggest movie in the world and become the richest man in the world. During Hughes' life, he filmed air combat movies, participated in the design and test flight of aircraft, and acquired TWA, which turned the losses around. These things seem chaotic and irrelevant, but they are all related to "flying" and correspond to Hughes' three dreams respectively. Generally speaking, Hughes' dream-chasing spirit is the core theme of the film, and at the same time, as the spiritual core of the film, it is closely related to Hughes' life and constructs a logical narrative framework for the film.

04. The anti-traditional hero image is closer to life, which deeply exposes the common faults of modern people and guides the audience to think rationally in the process of watching movies.

In addition to the unique shooting techniques and the eternal theme of chasing dreams, I think the value embodiment of Scorsese's films is also worthy of our in-depth study. With the rapid development of economy, people's spiritual home is also facing severe challenges. The movie "Voyager" not only shows the theme of chasing dreams, but also reflects the protagonist's suffering psychology, which deeply exposes the common problems of modern people and has certain value significance.

First, social value: the anti-hero image is close to life and thought-provoking.

Hughes, the hero of the movie Aviator, has a rich family and has made great achievements in the film industry and aviation industry. It stands to reason that this is a noble figure. However, under Scorsese's lens, we can see that Hughes, who is deeply neurotic, is just an ordinary person tortured by illness.

Unlike the traditional hero image in Hollywood, Hughes is not perfect. He has fatal flaws and a fragile side. This anti-hero image is closer to life, thus narrowing the distance between the audience and the protagonist and promoting the audience's sense of identity.

In my opinion, the gradual deepening of Hughes' neurosis is actually a true portrayal of modern people gradually losing themselves in a complicated world. Scorsese used gorgeous chapters to peel off the process of the protagonist's spiritual alienation layer by layer, so that the audience could reflect Hughes' mental state and life experience in their real life during the process of watching movies, so as to realize their spiritual troubles and reflect on themselves.

Second, the ornamental value: reveal the inner world of the protagonist, grasp the emotions of the audience, and cause * * *.

Scorsese pays attention to the deconstruction of the hero's spiritual world and the audience's participation in his creation. While providing a visual feast for the audience, it also shocked and touched the hearts of the audience and injected ornamental value and aesthetic value into their works.

For example, in the movie "The Traveler", the director did not deliberately describe the contradiction between Hughes and Hepburn family, but presented fragmented fragments to show Hughes' incompatibility with this big family. Including the plot of Hepburn molesting her ex-husband, the bloody scene of cutting raw beef, and the Hepburn family's contempt for money. Finally Hughes blurted out, "You don't care about money because you are not short of money." This sentence broke the seemingly harmonious atmosphere before the scene and made the atmosphere dignified.

Under the arrangement of the director's lens, the audience can easily hear Hughes's words. After a series of shots and scenes, combined with Hughes' incisive comments, the audience can feel the tension and opposition between the two. Scorsese is good at expressing his thoughts through accumulated visual impact and arousing strong emotions of the audience, which is undoubtedly not a highlight of his works.

Write it at the end

The film Aviator is a classic film with far-reaching significance, which shows the legendary life of howard hughes, a tycoon in the 20th century, who pursued his dreams. In my opinion, in addition to the distinct theme of chasing dreams, its ups and downs, implied visual design and profound social connotation are all worthy of our careful taste and in-depth study.

The director presented the audience with a magnificent blueprint of fate, deeply explored the fragile and lonely inner world of the protagonist, urged the audience to think about life with movies, and led the audience to complete a self-redemption in the film, which is a classic of martin scorsese's film directing.