The professional knowledge of film and television art used in Mancevski's film "The Storm Comes" ~ such as the use of long shots, composition and montage in the film.

1895 On the day when the film was born, the Lumiere brothers didn't realize what changes the film would bring to human life. Today, movies have promoted and completely changed the way and mode of our contact with the world. Its infinite free time and space has become the best medium for us to pursue a perfect spiritual life. The real freedom of time and space of the film is the creativity of the film itself-editing, which allows us to walk freely in time and space, and time no longer flies.

Time never dies, and the circle no longer exists. This is a recurring sentence in the movie Dawn in Shanghai. Just like the meaning of this sentence, the structure of the film is also "time never dies, and the circle is no longer." It's really amazing that director Mancevski skillfully sets up the mixing, but we find that this is not the director's affectation, but after in-depth thinking and real emotional input. First straighten out the plot of Shanghai Dawn, and then analyze how the film achieves the ultimate unity of content and form through editing.

The whole film is divided into three sections:

The first paragraph: text. Outside an ancient monastery in Macedonia, a young priest Cory and an old priest were picking tomatoes in the sun. The old priest said, "It's going to rain …" A young Albanian Muslim woman, Sang Milla, was escaping from a group of gangsters led by Mitt, and a young priest, Cory, hid her. Mitt and his men broke into the church, looking for St. Milla. They camped outside the church. Overnight, Corey and Sang Milla became lovers. Corey decided to take Sang Milla to London to find his uncle who was a photographer. When they escaped from the church, they met St. Milla's family on the way. The family blamed St. Milla for getting into trouble, forced St. Milla to stay and drove Cory away. Sang Milla wanted to go with his lover, and was shot and killed by his brother. Before he died, Sang Milla asked Corey not to say sorry with gestures.

The second paragraph: face. In London, Anne is a female photo editor of a photography agency. The doctor told Annie that she was pregnant. The choice she faced was whether to go back to her estranged husband Nick or leave Nick to find her lover Alexander. In the studio, Anne received a phone call from Macedonia. A young man wants to visit his uncle, who is a photographer. She saw a photo of a Macedonian girl lying in a pool of blood after being shot. Alexander is a photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize. He left his hometown of Macedonia and came here a few years ago. Now that he has made a decision to go back to his hometown, he wants Annie to go with him. Anne hesitated, and Alexander left impatiently alone. In the restaurant, Anne told her husband Nick that she was pregnant and she wanted to divorce him. Nick begged Anne to give him some time, and the contradiction between them would be solved. At the same time, a foreigner quarreled with the waiter and was driven away. A few minutes later, he came back and shot at the person who was eating. Annie survived and Nick was killed beyond recognition.

The third paragraph: photos. Alexander returned to his hometown of Macedonia. Villagers of different nationalities have become hostile to each other. The first person who met him was a young minority. Anne is in London and hopes to get in touch with Alexander by telephone. Alexander went to visit his first love, Muslim woman Hannah, and Sang Milla was Hannah's daughter. Hannah asked Alexander to save San Milla, where he was despised by Christians in the village. Alexander's cousin was killed by St. Milla while trying to rape St. Milla, and Mitre and his gang kidnapped St. Milla. Hannah came to Alexander at night and begged him to protect San Milla. Alexander found the sheep shed where Sang Milla was imprisoned and tried to take Sang Milla away. Alexander's relatives shot and killed him. Anne hurried to witness Alexander's death, and the rainstorm had fallen. Sang Milla fled the village and ran to an ancient monastery. Beyond the mountain, in the sun, the young priest Cory and the old priest are picking tomatoes in the sun. The old priest said, "It's going to rain ...".

The ingenious narrative structure makes this film very attractive. At the end of the film, the scene of Father Corey communicating with the elders is played back intact, and the plot structure of the film returns to the starting point from the end. From the narrative point of view, this is flashback, but it breaks the general flashback rule, that is, it does not guide a related person in the play to recall the past, but makes the story cycle. It was not until the end of the film that the audience realized that the three not-so-close story paragraphs were actually interlocking. This is a creative application of film editing means. Only by finding the right editing point and putting a film at the end, the story paragraph becomes a circle.

Of course, this cycle of the film is not a closed circle, and the starting point and ending point are not simple repetition or coincidence, just as the circle in the film is not a circle, but a coincidence and sublimation in a sense. The director emphasized this point intentionally or unintentionally in the final editing of the film, and he didn't want the audience to get a complete experience passively. The beginning of the first film "Language" coincides with the end of the third film "Photos". This story describes that Anne arrived in Macedonia and just witnessed the shooting of her lover Alexander Koch. In the second "Face", Anne used a magnifying glass to examine the photo of Albanian girl Sang Milla's body. According to the context logic, the photo should not have been taken. The living have long died, the dead are still alive, and there was a brief confusion in time, but this does not affect your judgment of reality. It's just that the time is in doubt or enlarged, but it's not the traditional way of shooting from multiple angles and then enlarging the time.

Some people may question the rationality of editing, and it is this "rationality" that restricts our creative film editing. Proust, who has infinite reverence for time, reproduces time according to his own memory, while director Mancevski is obviously not satisfied with the traditional reorganization of time and space. What he wants to capture is the possibility of coexistence of time. You can start with any story and put three stories together, but you can't make the three stories form an inevitable connection and get consistent results.

There are many puzzling details in the film: why did the photographer show the photo of his lover Anne to the officer of the peacekeeping force on his way home, saying that she was dead? Anne witnessed the photographer's funeral Where does she start? Also, does Corey think that the photographer's uncle who took refuge in London died to protect the Albanian girl, Alexander? Because he said he would go back to his nephew's christening. Anne got a call from a relative in Macedonia who claimed to be a photographer in London. Is it Macedonian or London? Do we have to find the connection between them? Directors deliberately and seriously give up self-defense and do not seek a complete "narrative". In fact, those vague parts are exactly what director Mancevski tried to surpass through editing.

What is certain here is that the film Dawn in Shanghai is definitely not a traditional film made according to the concept of "three unifications". After three times of "three unifications", this film has produced a miracle: the original three paragraphs can be completely independent, but the combination of the three paragraphs, the repeated repetition, analogy and mutual echo of the three paragraphs have truly liberated the narrative and made our single thinking break away from the existing concept chain of time and space. It is the precise and open connection between these three paragraphs that makes the whole film present such a complicated and polysemous form.

The great difference between traditional narrative theory and modern narrative theory is that the latter provides the distinction between story and narrative. The narrative mechanism of Dawn in Shanghai is based on an ambitious attempt to break the coherence, compactness and self-integration of time and space. This is the most constructive embodiment of post-modernism, which eliminates authority and center, but does not shy away from caring for the present situation of human existence.

In fact, the details of the film also subtly echo the narrative mechanism of the post-modern theme. For example, in the second paragraph, the film first shows us a bathroom glass that can't see people's faces clearly, and we can only hear a woman crying. Next, the film shows us the busy work of the heroine and the chaotic streets of London, including pop songs and alarms everywhere. When we saw the long street view of London from the taxi window covering two lovers who were making out, it just showed a typical post-industrial human living condition: people without food and clothing still could not hide their inner confusion and panic. London is a peaceful place, but the gunfire still comes from Oxford Street. The weather forecast keeps reporting that it will rain in London recently, and Alexander with rheumatoid arthritis feels bone pain. In the third paragraph, Alexander questioned "no choice" and advertised it as "objective and true" video art. He gave up his career with an attitude of atonement, forgot his Pulitzer Prize and looked forward to returning to his hometown to wash his mind. At the end of this paragraph, the camera photographed Alexander, and blood gushed from the bullet hole in his chest, and the rainstorm finally came. The careful setting of all these details will undoubtedly make the unconventional editing of the whole movie more reasonable, so that we will no longer mistakenly think that the editing of the movie is a mistake or an irreparable movie.

Dawn in Shanghai belongs to the kind of movie that will linger in your mind. Like a never-ending movie, back and forth. The film goes to the end and back to the beginning, in which all the suspense is on the rocks in Macedonia or on the street walls in London. Still the same sentence: time never dies, and the circle is no longer.

The film's ingenious narration and breakthrough to tradition are all in the editing of paragraphs and shots. This is undoubtedly a feast of film editing, which makes you unforgettable and amazed.