"The ritual and immersion of watching a movie in a cinema cannot be replaced online. As a film director, I still hope that the audience will go into the cinema to watch it. You'd better not watch it on your mobile phone. You'd better not watch that." Three minutes of introduction. I feel really speechless.” On the evening of November 11, Zhang Yimou ’s complaint about the short movie commentary video became a hot search topic.
Zhang Yimou’s words have once again brought the conflicting topic of film and television dramas and short commentary videos back into the public eye. In 2021, mixed-cut short videos such as "Little Handsome and Little Beautiful" have triggered copyright wars. Multiple industry associations, video platforms, film and television companies, artists, etc. jointly issued the "Joint Statement on the Protection of Film and Television Copyright", calling on short video platforms Promote compliance management of copyrighted content and clean up unauthorized content.
Now Zhang Yimou has spoken out about this again. Judging from expressions such as "sense of ritual" and "sense of immersion", it seems that he has launched a "criticism" of short movie commentary videos from an artistic perspective. He hopes that people can watch and appreciate movies in a traditional way, follow the movie lens to experience the ingenuity of the movie itself, and respect the artistic nature of the movie.
This feeling is understandable. As an art form, the sense of story and aesthetics of movies are hidden in the details, but the short commentary video is an abbreviation and refinement, which cannot completely replace the experience of watching the movie itself. It's like people can quickly understand the outline of the story of " A Dream of Red Mansions ", but I'm afraid no one will regard this quick understanding as real reading. The same goes for movies. If you don’t look at the lens language, atmosphere, and suspense setting, but just for excitement, of course it is not “watching a movie” in the traditional sense.
But one thing that cannot be ignored is that movies are also a consumer product. People are willing to go to the cinema or watch a short commentary video, depending on how well it satisfies the needs of the audience. If the slow, layer-by-layer narrative mode in
movies cannot provide a richer aesthetic experience and is considered by the audience to be unworthy of the ticket price, then the story summary may very well be the "full value" of a movie. In this context, I am afraid there is no way to stop people from going to the cinema and choosing short videos - this is essentially a method of "art criticism", in which people independently pick out the parts of them that are valuable to them.
Judging from the current volume of short videos, even though this product category is dissatisfied by many people in the film and television industry, as long as there are no legal issues such as copyright, they want to completely drive out products such as short video editing and commentary from the market. , seems unlikely.
What needs to be made clear is that different forms of expression are not an either-or relationship that replaces each other. It’s like we can’t say that literature ceased to exist once film and television dramas came out, or that painting ceased to exist once cameras came out. On the contrary, the impact of this iteration is precisely the moment when art "reconstructs itself" - art must reconstruct its own unique value.
A more realistic attitude is to accept the challenge of short narration videos, use this as motivation to improve the artistic expression ability of the work, and use advanced audio-visual experience to make people feel that going to the cinema is "worthwhile" rather than "too long" and "just to make up for the plot" .
In fact, movies and short videos can also build a cooperative relationship. As some netizens said, many viewers "didn't know there was such a movie" or "went to see the original film" after watching the short video. Just like buying a novel after watching a movie, short videos, if used properly, may also become an assist in promoting film and television dramas.
In fact, we can also see that more and more movies are beginning to try short video promotions, and through large-scale promotion on short video platforms, they can guide audiences back to the big screen. This may be a "compromise", but isn't it a new symbiotic relationship?
The "Xiao Mei and Xiao Shuai" style short video is certainly lacking from an artistic point of view. It is ultimately a companion to film and television dramas and does not have complete subjectivity. But in the eyes of the audience, they are "equal", and the choices are not necessarily "mutually exclusive".Film and television creators may also wish to face up to the changes in the industry, explore possible ways to get along with each other under the new situation, and find new evolutionary paths for the art category.
