When the 62-year-old French-Vietnamese director Chen Yingxiong appeared at the Golden Goblet Award Jury Chairman’s Master Class, the audience was already filled with filmmakers, media and students from all over the world.
As the chairman of the Golden Goblet Award Jury of the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival, Chen Yingxiong expressed his mood at the beginning of the festival by saying "it is an honor to spend time discussing movies." He doesn't usually watch movies, but because of the Shanghai International Film Festival, he "focused on watching movies with colleagues, filmmakers, and friends, and had intensive discussions," and experienced a special movie time.
As early as 1988, Chen Yingxiong started his career as a director with the short film "Nan Xiong's Wife". In his more than thirty years of directing career, he has used Eastern quiet and soft lens language to show the Vietnam of his childhood.
In 1992, Chen Yingxiong's first feature film "The Taste of Green Papaya" won the Cannes Golden Camera Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The second feature film "Tricycle Driver" starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai won the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. In 2010, the Japanese film "Norwegian Wood" adapted from Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name premiered in the competition section of the Venice Film Festival. In 2023, Chen Yingxiong's latest work "Fondue" won the Best Director Award at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.
From Tony Leung, Juliette Binoche to Audrey Tautou, Chen Yingxiong has worked with powerful actors from different countries. From adapting Haruki Murakami's novel "Norwegian Wood" to adapting French writer Alice Feeney's novel "Love is Eternal", he has also adapted literary works to the big screen several times.
In the master class, Chen Yingxiong said frankly that learning is a necessary lesson for a director, "Until the last moment, I was learning new things and understanding new things. In the dialogue with the audience, I constantly discovered what I had done. , this is what I hope the next movie can do. "
"Vietnam Trilogy" under the connotation of oriental aesthetics
The humid and hot tropical rainforest, the continuous rain, the silent woman with wet hair, and diseases, War and nightmares constitute the classic elements of Chen Yingxiong’s early films.
In Chen Yingxiong’s movies, Vietnam is both a cruel reality and an implicit poetry. In his debut film "The Taste of Green Papaya", the oriental-style pure love of a Vietnamese girl entrusts the director's memory of his childhood in Vietnam.
Chen Yingxiong was born in Da Nang, Vietnam in 1962. He only lived in his birthplace until he was 5 years old, when he and his parents escaped the war and went to Laos. When Saigon fell in 1975, he fled to France with his family. With a background in philosophy, he became obsessed with movies after seeing Robert Bresson's film "The Prison Break". He went to the Académie Louis Lumière to study photography, and has since embarked on the path of directing.
He recalled that when he decided to be a director, he established a set of self-training methods. Every time he watched a movie, he would bring an envelope with a pencil and a note inside. After watching the movie, he will write down his impressions of the movie in the simplest language, and evaluate it immediately regardless of its advantages or disadvantages.
After writing the note, he will throw it away and keep what he expressed on the note in his heart and mind, becoming a muscle memory that will last forever. "These words are the foundation of you as a director. If you can't express it, It doesn't exist. In daily life, every time you feel or experience something, you have to find a way to express it in words. This is your sensitivity to film art, and it is also the daily literacy training of filmmakers. "
He likes to repeat it. Watch old movies and replay the clips in your head, analyzing all the details. Sometimes he will analyze the sound, sometimes he will recall the picture, "Especially those great film masterpieces, you can completely use this method to learn."
Chen Yingxiong's movies often have a quiet and weird atmosphere, and the music, performance and photography are completely integrated. Tiancheng, all of this is due to his early self-training, which he calls his sixth sense, "Film shooting is a race against time. It requires good decision-making ability and quick decision-making. You can only use your sixth sense and years of accumulation." Of course, you also need to rely on your film knowledge.In the process of making a movie, you must sort out and refine your knowledge system to achieve your own style. "
In the "Vietnam Trilogy", "The Taste of Green Papaya", "Tricycle Driver" and "The Taste of Summer", Chen Yingxiong photographed Vietnam in the post-war and post-colonial period. Although he did not directly express the cruelty of the war, he It conveys the traces of the lives of girls, tricycle drivers, and the working class under the influence of long history. Those displaced people and their quiet and melancholy mental outlook are exactly the dark social reality of post-war Vietnam.
Chen Yingxiong said frankly that he has " "Double culture". When he settled in France at the age of 12, he was exposed to cultures and influences from all over the world. In this sense, he was not only influenced by the dual cultures of Vietnam and France.
"The first ten years of his life were a time of acquisition. Knowledge is also a period when one's own perceptual definition is formed. " He said that he has a preference in film creation, expressing subtle sensitivity in a slow-paced way, allowing the audience to feel many details instead of strong dramatic conflicts. He calls this expression his "small universe" "Even if some people may find it boring, it is precisely his own way of observing and understanding the world, "a way with Eastern aesthetic connotations. "
Movies are not meant to imitate life.
Although he has filmed many themes, from Vietnamese, English, Japanese to French, and constantly jumped between literary adaptations and realistic themes, Chen Yingxiong's movies have always maintained his film aesthetics - —Rich and vivid sound, light, shadow and lens, as well as the unhurried oriental elegance
In the film "Fondue" which won the Best Director Award in the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Chen Yingxiong opened the film in the first half hour. Using the texture of an oil painting, the calm and slow cooking process is captured. In the shot, a piece of onion is chopped, a pot of cream is slowly poured out, and a pot of soup is steaming. Accompanying these shots are human footsteps. The minimalist pictures, the clinking of pots and pans, the sound of burning stoves, and the chirping of birds outside the window, convey a delicate and profound undercurrent of a French gourmet and his life at the end of the 19th century. The love story between private chefs and the ingenious details of daily cooking seem both sacred and everyday, highly sensory.
When talking about the use of film language, Chen Yingxiong said frankly that he is very concerned about the connection and switching of different scenes, "When When you move from one shot to another, that is the meaning of your existence as a filmmaker and director. If you don't focus on this, you are nothing but expressing a theme. "
's exquisite film aesthetics in his shots are thoughtfully considered, "When you make a movie, you don't want to imitate life, or simply show what happens in life. Personal experience will bring personal emotions, and you have to express this emotion into a language when making a movie. "
Since "The Taste of Green Papaya", he has been shooting food in movies, conveying the emotions of the characters by magnifying the details of food processing in ordinary Vietnamese families.
When mentioning the source of inspiration for "French Pot", Chen Yingxiong said , he has been looking for themes related to food over the years, exploring them from both professional and artistic perspectives, until he read the chapter about the French gourmet Dodin in Marcel Rouf's 1924 novel "The Epic of Passion". I thought I could make a movie like this to show food, love and friendship.
Chen Yingxiong's movie has a rich way of switching between shots. Sometimes there is strong contrast, sometimes it is very harmonious and natural. The previous shot is far, the next shot is close; The camera is silent, and the next shot is noisy. “Contrast can arouse excitement, give the audience something to be excited about, capture their interest and attention, and make the images more vital. "In the same way, harmonious switching can bring a sense of flow, "Harmony does not mean that this is a close-up, and the next scene must be a close-up, but that there is contrast and consistency, maintaining a fluid and continuous existence. "
When making a movie, he rarely prepares in advance. Instead, he integrates the script into his brain, decides what shots to shoot on the fly, and improvises.In "Fondue", he used an iPhone to shoot it first, so he knew how the camera moved and how the actors moved around the kitchen. At the end of the movie, there is an amazing long shot, and Chen Yingxiong admitted that it was influenced by the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi.
According to Chen Yingxiong, film is a universal language, and filmmakers should make good use of this language to convey different cultures and open minds. He found that many film festivals are increasingly focusing on the theme of the film when selecting films. Focusing too much on the theme will ignore the quality of the film itself. This trend worries him.
He said frankly that movies are not simply about telling a story. Audiences in different cultural contexts can gain emotional resonance from the same movie and achieve ideological sublimation, which is the charm of film art. This is also Chen Yingxiong’s belief in movies.
(This article comes from China Business News)
