I had some special feelings when I watched the documentary "Fireworks World". When I watched it for the first time in 2020, and when I watched it again in 2024, this special feeling was still there, but when I watched it again this time, I was even more emotional.
At the 2020 Pingyao Film Festival, "Fireworks World" was the opening film and was screened in an open-air cinema. While watching it, I thought about how it would be evaluated, "Isn't this just a collection of short videos?" "This is blasphemy to the movie" "The director did not show creativity and initiative" "Stealing the labor of working people" "Fruit". Later, these reviews really appeared, and there were even more harsh reviews, and various one-stars without hesitation.
But I always feel that it is not a simple collection of short videos, it is selective and creative, and more importantly, it has conceptual clues running through it. This concept is not only the existence concept of the short video platform, but also the creative concept of director Sun Hong. Later, a conversation with Director Sun during the live broadcast confirmed my opinion. She has been doing research on folk images.
The first issue of the dialogue program "Thirteen Invitations" produced by Xu Zhiyuan put forward a statement: "95%". In that program, Xu Zhiyuan had a conversation with Ma Dong. Ma Dong said that only about 5% of people in the world have the desire to accumulate knowledge and understand the past, while the remaining 95% of people are just living. The short video platform is actually a tool for the 95% of people to create spiritual lives. They have no right to speak, no stage, or even a window. They are always silent. They must do their best and reach a certain level before they can watch. and the qualifications to be seen. Now, with smartphones, they surface and they can do cultural practices. Why is
practice so important? Because art has to be done, songs have to be sung, dances have to be danced, and it’s not enough to just go through it in your head. All industries have to be done. The short video platform provides a relatively low threshold for practice. As more people practice it, it becomes something with its own new attributes and life, even beyond the original thoughts and wishes of its creator. Today’s Kuaishou , is a Tower of Babel made up of ordinary people. It is also CCTV7. It can be a travel magazine, a music channel, or a music channel. In short, it has all the functions of the past media. .
"Fireworks in the World" is a staged summary of this practice. So the director describes the characters in the film this way: "They are the majority in number, but they are the minority in attention." At the beginning of the movie, data is given that Chinese people produce 30 million short videos every day, and this film is made from 260 Selected from billions of short videos, numbers are given at the end of the film. This film uses 887 Kuaishou short videos, with a total of 509 film co-creators. Then there is a list of IDs of these co-creators, screen after screen. Give those creators the respect they deserve.
The director of "Fireworks World" faced short video materials that were regarded as garbage, and the form of "vertical screen big movie". This form is actually a bit incredible. At first, the creative team "pay more attention to how to Make full use of the information space on the big screen to reduce the loss of information; during the exploration process, they gradually discovered new image rhetoric."
This kind of exploration is undoubtedly creative, even including its rhythm and music. Sex, where it is fast and where it is slow, requires both complex design and a state of freedom of movement. The labor involved is definitely not simple accumulation or simple screening. The short video platform is originally based on human consciousness and unconsciousness. After so many people participate, both its conscious and unconscious levels are too huge and complex to be easily understood. It is necessary to find a set of rules among them. My own logic is actually very difficult. As long as it is done at a certain level and from a certain angle, it is already very good.
"Fireworks in the World" has already achieved this on a certain level or angle. Especially after being put on hold for more than three years before being released, it has been given a new meaning by time and current events.With the help of this movie, and with a new rhythm, emotion, and idea, I re-watched the short videos I was familiar with, those hand-made objects, the pastoral life of the young man in western Hunan, and the wild geese. The gliders who fly together, the guys who move bricks on the construction site, the group of truck drivers, the one-year drivers of tower crane drivers, a breath of life brought by this rhythm, this kind of emotions and ideas, this kind of torrent-like speed of life, Arrives crystal clear.
When watching "Fireworks World", "Flowers" was being broadcast. I think it is actually more "Flowers" than "Flowers" because it comes from countless co-creators, and their creations eliminate the problems that professional creators may have. Even if they are pretentious or disguised by professional creators (selection is a kind of re-creation), their attitude towards life still rushes in and hits you and me who are also living in front of the screen.
If you see it, it exists. If you see it, it is worth it. In the past few years, we have experienced countless moments, touching, happy, thrilling, painful, and embarrassing, but life is like this, like a big river, flowing through everything without looking back. But there are some fragmented, trivial, and unrecognized times that, like flowers, have left brilliant moments in our lives.
