◎Li Ning After watching the movie "The Romantic Generation", I felt quite complicated. As a loyal fan of Jia Zhangke's movies, I can still clearly remember the tremor in my heart when I first watched "Xiao Wu" and "Platform". Those honest images and plain faces contain a delicate

◎Li Ning

After watching the movie " Romantic Generation ", I felt quite complicated. As a loyal fan of Jia Zhangke's movies, I can still clearly remember the tremor in my heart when I first watched "Xiao Wu" and "Platform". Those simple images and plain faces contain a delicate perception of reality and a rough poetic flavor. Before this, it seemed difficult to see such vivid, concrete and silent little characters in domestic films that were accustomed to grand narratives.

As a summary creation of an artistic career, "The Romantic Generation" still attempts to describe the fate of individuals under the torrent of the times. Those old materials can indeed occasionally evoke the familiarity and fascination with Jia-style images, but overall they seem to have lost their It captures the authentic emotional power of early Jia Zhangke’s films.

is not a new video experiment.

From a formal point of view, "The Romantic Generation" is quite a kind of video experiment. Most of the footage in the film was taken from materials Jia Zhangke had accumulated over the years, and even directly borrowed several clips from old works. Only about 1/3 of the film was newly created. The film uses Qiaoqiao and Bin Ge, two characters who appeared in many of Jia Zhangke's old works, as the main line. It mixes, collages, and patches old images to structure the changes of the times that span more than 20 years. The quality of these materials varies, the plot is rough, and the reality is ambiguous, which shows the director's free and easy creative state.

Jia Zhangke has always been quite aware of the language of images. His works such as " Twenty-Four Cities " continue to explore the boundaries of images through the blurring of documentary and fiction. The creative idea of ​​"The Romantic Generation" originated around 2001. At that time, it was named "The Man with a Digital Camera", which was intended to pay tribute to Soviet director Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Digital Camera." In the film, Jia Zhangke used the lens instead of his eyes to impromptuly capture simple faces on the streets and randomly record those boring life moments in public places.

Movies created from found footage are often called "foundfootage films" and are not uncommon in art history. For example, in 2011, American artist Christian Marclay cut out footage of clocks/time from thousands of movies, and finally edited it into "The Clock", which continuously shows the 24-hour process. The uniqueness of this work is that the image time can be synchronized with the real time during the projection. From the perspective of narrating messy materials, "The Romantic Generation" is easily reminiscent of "Dragonfly Eyes" created by artist Xu Bing a few years ago. This work edits a large amount of surveillance video material into a film with a rough plot, giving reality a fictional character. Compared with these extreme works, the imaging experiments of "The Romantic Generation" are not new and can hardly be called unique.

Jia's aesthetics retells "nostalgia"

Although the form is loose and messy, the film can satisfy the cinephilia of many viewers. This is a typical cinephile film, overlapping and intertwining many iconic Jia's aesthetic elements such as county scenery, non-professional actors, realistic techniques, and marginal perspectives. In a trance, you can see "Ren Xiaoyao", "The Good Man of Three Gorges", " , "Children of Jianghu, " and many other old works. Coupled with the blessing of the soul Zhao Tao, it is like a concentrated display of Jia Zhangke's film aesthetics.

Another layer of nostalgia in "The Romantic Generation" is reflected in its strong sense of nostalgia. From the early "Hometown Trilogy" to "The World", "The Good Man of Three Gorges" and "Legend of the Sea", "nostalgia" is the theme word throughout Jia Zhangke's films. Especially starting from "Old Friends in Mountains and Rivers" and "Children of Rivers and Lakes", Jia Zhangke seems to have entered a new stage of nostalgia, frequently looking back on his life and expressing his feelings in stories about leaving home/returning home. In "The Romantic Generation", Brother Bin and Qiaoqiao successively left their hometown to venture into a wider world. They grew up separately like duckweeds. After experiencing the torments of reality, they finally reunited in their hometown. This is the life trajectory of Jia Zhangke, a young man from Fenyang, from a small place to the big world. It is also the physical and mental journey of the next generation as the wave of the times envelops the next generation.

It is worth mentioning that the materials in the film, which were shot at the beginning of the new century, successfully teased people's nostalgic heartstrings with their rough image quality and old scenery.This kind of nostalgia is not only a fascination with the past, but more precisely a "strange familiarity" that is both familiar and strange, both intimate and terrifying. Those old dance halls, parks, buildings, etc. have inspired people's deep memory scenes and loneliness and melancholy. To a certain extent, they echo the trend of y2k (a fashion style in recent years, whose iconic elements include Op images, bright Millennium nostalgia trend represented by candy color, laser gradient, metal or PVC gloss, etc.), Chinese dream core, etc.

Superficial Reflection

The nostalgia in "The Romance Generation" is so strong, it demonstrates Jia Zhangke's ambition to write a biography for a generation, but it also exposes his increasingly obvious creative dilemma in recent years: the distance between the tiny individual and the real reality is getting further and further away. In the "romantic generation", there is only an empty "generation" and a lack of vivid "people".

The excellence of Jia Zhangke's early films lies in his delicate and keen ability to grasp reality. But this ability is increasingly being replaced by a variety of symbols. The scattered materials in "The Romance Generation" can only be connected together by constantly relying on various era hits, slogans, news broadcasts, and social events. Even when showing the passage of time, the film lazily uses straightforward images of trains flying by. The film attempts to pick up some well-known memory carriers in the long period of time and turn them into stitches of the times. From Ye Qianwen , Cui Jian to the Universal Youth Hotel and Wutiao People, from the county space to the scenery of the Yangtze River, the more skillfully and frequently these symbols are used, the more they expose the disconnect between text and reality, the self-repetition and the The tendency to simplify reality.

"The Romantic Generation" is filled with a kind of sentimentality and melancholy of the vastness of time, but the generation of this emotion relies not only on the mobilization of various symbols, but more importantly, the stimulation of time itself. If there is anything worthy of praise in "The Merry Generation", it is that those messy old images really allow time to reveal its majestic face. Time is revealed in the faces of Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin for more than twenty years, in the iteration of media technology from wide format and low image quality to narrow format and high definition image quality, and in the changes in urban scenery. It is the materials themselves, not the technique of the film, that make us feel that time is the measure of all things, and that he is the greatest and coldest lyricist.

It is undeniable that we can also experience Jia Zhangke's unique thinking about social reality from the film. From the flamboyant and dancing young body to the sluggish and sickly middle-aged body, the change of wide and narrow frame, the speechless Qiaoqiao shouting "ha" after integrating into the group at the end of the film, etc., these all create an interesting space for imagination. But such sporadic fragments cannot conceal the emptiness of the entire film. The most obvious one is the last paragraph: When writing about contemporary life, creators seem to be unable to find a way to enter the lives of ordinary people. They can only express some of the strangeness of the short video industry by revealing the strange current situation of the short video industry and showing the dialogue between people and robots. Superficial reflection. However, the film’s mixed editing method of diversified music and fragmented images to stimulate emotions is not a typical form of expression in the short video era?

During the promotion process, "The Merry Generation" carried the slogan "It's all over, no looking back", but the movie just indulges in the past. Excessive nostalgia, to a certain extent, means escaping from the present. Interestingly, the movie " Good Things ", which was released on the same day as "The Merry Generation", not only paid a friendly tribute to Jia Zhangke, but also satirized the middle-aged man in the film with the line "Reminiscing about the past is the beginning of greasiness" . If we use this line to review "The Romantic Generation", it seems quite appropriate. The two films have completely different reputations and box office performances, which once again proves that the future of film belongs to young people. And those creators who are successful and famous might as well be more sincere and less perfunctory.

◎Li Ning

After watching the movie " Romantic Generation ", I felt quite complicated. As a loyal fan of Jia Zhangke's movies, I can still clearly remember the tremor in my heart when I first watched "Xiao Wu" and "Platform". Those simple images and plain faces contain a delicate perception of reality and a rough poetic flavor. Before this, it seemed difficult to see such vivid, concrete and silent little characters in domestic films that were accustomed to grand narratives.

As a summary creation of an artistic career, "The Romantic Generation" still attempts to describe the fate of individuals under the torrent of the times. Those old materials can indeed occasionally evoke the familiarity and fascination with Jia-style images, but overall they seem to have lost their It captures the authentic emotional power of early Jia Zhangke’s films.

is not a new video experiment.

From a formal point of view, "The Romantic Generation" is quite a kind of video experiment. Most of the footage in the film was taken from materials Jia Zhangke had accumulated over the years, and even directly borrowed several clips from old works. Only about 1/3 of the film was newly created. The film uses Qiaoqiao and Bin Ge, two characters who appeared in many of Jia Zhangke's old works, as the main line. It mixes, collages, and patches old images to structure the changes of the times that span more than 20 years. The quality of these materials varies, the plot is rough, and the reality is ambiguous, which shows the director's free and easy creative state.

Jia Zhangke has always been quite aware of the language of images. His works such as " Twenty-Four Cities " continue to explore the boundaries of images through the blurring of documentary and fiction. The creative idea of ​​"The Romantic Generation" originated around 2001. At that time, it was named "The Man with a Digital Camera", which was intended to pay tribute to Soviet director Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Digital Camera." In the film, Jia Zhangke used the lens instead of his eyes to impromptuly capture simple faces on the streets and randomly record those boring life moments in public places.

Movies created from found footage are often called "foundfootage films" and are not uncommon in art history. For example, in 2011, American artist Christian Marclay cut out footage of clocks/time from thousands of movies, and finally edited it into "The Clock", which continuously shows the 24-hour process. The uniqueness of this work is that the image time can be synchronized with the real time during the projection. From the perspective of narrating messy materials, "The Romantic Generation" is easily reminiscent of "Dragonfly Eyes" created by artist Xu Bing a few years ago. This work edits a large amount of surveillance video material into a film with a rough plot, giving reality a fictional character. Compared with these extreme works, the imaging experiments of "The Romantic Generation" are not new and can hardly be called unique.

Jia's aesthetics retells "nostalgia"

Although the form is loose and messy, the film can satisfy the cinephilia of many viewers. This is a typical cinephile film, overlapping and intertwining many iconic Jia's aesthetic elements such as county scenery, non-professional actors, realistic techniques, and marginal perspectives. In a trance, you can see "Ren Xiaoyao", "The Good Man of Three Gorges", " , "Children of Jianghu, " and many other old works. Coupled with the blessing of the soul Zhao Tao, it is like a concentrated display of Jia Zhangke's film aesthetics.

Another layer of nostalgia in "The Romantic Generation" is reflected in its strong sense of nostalgia. From the early "Hometown Trilogy" to "The World", "The Good Man of Three Gorges" and "Legend of the Sea", "nostalgia" is the theme word throughout Jia Zhangke's films. Especially starting from "Old Friends in Mountains and Rivers" and "Children of Rivers and Lakes", Jia Zhangke seems to have entered a new stage of nostalgia, frequently looking back on his life and expressing his feelings in stories about leaving home/returning home. In "The Romantic Generation", Brother Bin and Qiaoqiao successively left their hometown to venture into a wider world. They grew up separately like duckweeds. After experiencing the torments of reality, they finally reunited in their hometown. This is the life trajectory of Jia Zhangke, a young man from Fenyang, from a small place to the big world. It is also the physical and mental journey of the next generation as the wave of the times envelops the next generation.

It is worth mentioning that the materials in the film, which were shot at the beginning of the new century, successfully teased people's nostalgic heartstrings with their rough image quality and old scenery.This kind of nostalgia is not only a fascination with the past, but more precisely a "strange familiarity" that is both familiar and strange, both intimate and terrifying. Those old dance halls, parks, buildings, etc. have inspired people's deep memory scenes and loneliness and melancholy. To a certain extent, they echo the trend of y2k (a fashion style in recent years, whose iconic elements include Op images, bright Millennium nostalgia trend represented by candy color, laser gradient, metal or PVC gloss, etc.), Chinese dream core, etc.

Superficial Reflection

The nostalgia in "The Romance Generation" is so strong, it demonstrates Jia Zhangke's ambition to write a biography for a generation, but it also exposes his increasingly obvious creative dilemma in recent years: the distance between the tiny individual and the real reality is getting further and further away. In the "romantic generation", there is only an empty "generation" and a lack of vivid "people".

The excellence of Jia Zhangke's early films lies in his delicate and keen ability to grasp reality. But this ability is increasingly being replaced by a variety of symbols. The scattered materials in "The Romance Generation" can only be connected together by constantly relying on various era hits, slogans, news broadcasts, and social events. Even when showing the passage of time, the film lazily uses straightforward images of trains flying by. The film attempts to pick up some well-known memory carriers in the long period of time and turn them into stitches of the times. From Ye Qianwen , Cui Jian to the Universal Youth Hotel and Wutiao People, from the county space to the scenery of the Yangtze River, the more skillfully and frequently these symbols are used, the more they expose the disconnect between text and reality, the self-repetition and the The tendency to simplify reality.

"The Romantic Generation" is filled with a kind of sentimentality and melancholy of the vastness of time, but the generation of this emotion relies not only on the mobilization of various symbols, but more importantly, the stimulation of time itself. If there is anything worthy of praise in "The Merry Generation", it is that those messy old images really allow time to reveal its majestic face. Time is revealed in the faces of Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin for more than twenty years, in the iteration of media technology from wide format and low image quality to narrow format and high definition image quality, and in the changes in urban scenery. It is the materials themselves, not the technique of the film, that make us feel that time is the measure of all things, and that he is the greatest and coldest lyricist.

It is undeniable that we can also experience Jia Zhangke's unique thinking about social reality from the film. From the flamboyant and dancing young body to the sluggish and sickly middle-aged body, the change of wide and narrow frame, the speechless Qiaoqiao shouting "ha" after integrating into the group at the end of the film, etc., these all create an interesting space for imagination. But such sporadic fragments cannot conceal the emptiness of the entire film. The most obvious one is the last paragraph: When writing about contemporary life, creators seem to be unable to find a way to enter the lives of ordinary people. They can only express some of the strangeness of the short video industry by revealing the strange current situation of the short video industry and showing the dialogue between people and robots. Superficial reflection. However, the film’s mixed editing method of diversified music and fragmented images to stimulate emotions is not a typical form of expression in the short video era?

During the promotion process, "The Merry Generation" carried the slogan "It's all over, no looking back", but the movie just indulges in the past. Excessive nostalgia, to a certain extent, means escaping from the present. Interestingly, the movie " Good Things ", which was released on the same day as "The Merry Generation", not only paid a friendly tribute to Jia Zhangke, but also satirized the middle-aged man in the film with the line "Reminiscing about the past is the beginning of greasiness" . If we use this line to review "The Romantic Generation", it seems quite appropriate. The two films have completely different reputations and box office performances, which once again proves that the future of film belongs to young people. And those creators who are successful and famous might as well be more sincere and less perfunctory.