Two months ago, mankind's first real-life space film " challenges " written by Baku Bakuradze was released in Russia. Its groundbreaking grand narrative and the zero-distance sense of breaking the conventional science fiction film opened up a new world A new era of space movies.
Two months later, Bakuradze came to the Shanghai International Film Festival with a very quiet and simple personal video, using documentary footage to tell the story of the friendship between two frustrated middle-aged men: Living in Tbilisi, Georgia Levan lives in a dilapidated hut all day, while Jivi, who lives in Moscow, is a director who has encountered creative bottlenecks. The two old classmates found each other through the Internet. Their lives have changed since then, and Levan begins to open up. , Jiwei decided to return to his hometown...
's works put real life into image expression, reproducing the separation and reunion of life.
"A movie about movies": The boundaries of narrative are blurred
At the press conference of "Snow in the Yard", director Bakura Radze said that this is indeed a true story. Among them, the role of "Director" was played by himself, and "The Tramp" was also played by Levan himself. One of the important reasons for filming this film was that after Baku contacted his old classmate Levan, he hoped to help him. However, due to Levan's unwillingness to accept his financial gift, Baku invited Levan to write the outline of the script for "Snow in the Yard" and invited him to play the leading role.
Therefore, the text of "Snow in the Courtyard" is so life-like, and therefore we can't help but feel a sincere expression after watching the movie.
This kind of "movies about movies" narratives are not uncommon, from early films such as "The Great Swallow" (1901) or "Uncle Josh at the Movies" (1902), to avant-garde films such as "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) ), the author's film period such as "I Know Her a Little or Two" (1967); contemporary films such as "阮令宇" (1992), "Big Buddha Plush" (2017), "Good Luck and Good Luck" (2020), "Yong'an" "Tales of Town" (2021), etc., have their presentation and development in almost every period of film history. As it develops, its "reflexivity" or self-reference gradually points not only to the medium of representation (film), but also to reality itself, and the boundary between the story world and the real world is gradually and completely broken.
And Baku’s movies may be better at narratives that break the “boundaries of reality”. He records and reproduces the writing of the script, records the process of searching for the script and deciding to return home, accumulating texts like snow, and finally extracts the narrative from literariness and drama, forming an extension of a realistic dialogue without an ending.
In a large number of "running accounts" like video chats, the scripts were stacked up layer by layer, and the images of the two characters were clumsily collected like materials:
Among them, Lewandowski was forced to abandon his former career as an athlete. For half of my life, I took psychotropic drugs because of injuries and illnesses, because psychotropic drugs made my body obese, I couldn’t work because of my obesity, I lost my family because I couldn’t work, and because of financial reasons, I was depressed and lived by stealing. All of this was accommodated in Lewandowski's shared document written to Baku is verbose and concise;
Baku's process of finding new creative inspiration is also integrated into his journey back home. Real life experience generates shooting materials, and the creative behavior is always consistent with Life is closely related. His emotions of returning home are intertwined with the narrative of online chats with old friends. On top of the basic reality projection, he constructs a higher level of thinking perspective, overlooking reality, examining his longings and the unrequited feelings. native land.
"A movie about reality": The aesthetics of the lens of long silence
The first question at the press conference was why the film chose to have no soundtrack throughout. The director's answer was sincere and simple: "The first is that I can't handle the music; the second is the truth It is true that life cannot always be paved and sublimated by music. "
's pursuit of authenticity in sound is consistent with Baku's concept of lens setting.The perspective of an empty mirror, like a surveillance camera, objectively observes the lives of the people at the bottom of the courtyard from a distance; the in-car lens, like a driving recorder, follows the bumpy driving of the vehicle and projects what the driver sees onto the screen. ; Shots of video chats shot directly as a screen within a screen, giving viewers a second-person sense.
This series of shots reminds us of our own lives for no reason, and seems to cross space and walk into their lives. The perspective of high respect for the true life, the light and shadow in line with the brightness of natural colors, and the sound scratching against the ears, Ba Ku's shots are personal and simple, supplementing the life narrative. Under the strong creative thinking of "authenticity", they reflect a simple and unpretentious aesthetic style, and also assist the "landing" of the narrative.
As the audience and director stand in front of Lewandowski via a contactless link, a long shot watches him lumber up the stairs, turning back to call to Jesse, the old hound, to follow him; he slowly walks through the streets, talking with The crowd met and parted, getting farther and farther away from the camera; he and old Jesse were lying on the sunny hillside grass, and the young hound Xiaojie xi ran around. The camera watched them in the distance, creating a contrast between movement and stillness. ...
We vaguely feel that it is a Tarkovsky-style poetic shot that is "based on reality and out of emotion for reality". The causal logic and drama are weakened in the shot. "The reasoning process of poetry is better than that of traditional drama." Closer to the development laws of thought, and closer to life itself. "
Those empty streets, damaged and mottled walls, cramped roofs, and thin beds, Baku silently stared at Levan's life, which he was no longer familiar with. His hometown also looked back at him silently. The lens is simple, but there is a strong subjective power slowly seeping into people's hearts.
When the director added that because the actors are non-professionals, medium shots, panoramic shots and long shots can better allow them to perform their ordinary lives, this emotion towards reality became more apparent.
"A Movie About Life": The core of separation and reunion
In the movie, old Jesse died quietly without any emotional catharsis. Levan's friends accompanied him to take the dog to the sunny hillside grassland, dig a hole and bury it. Old Jesse. It all ended like this, Lewandowski just casually asked in his script: "Does little Jesse know that Jesse will not live with us anymore."
The word "diaspora" in Western philology has its roots in Greek. "diasperien" generally refers to people who have left their hometown and live in different places. Due to various political and religious factors, these people who were forced to leave their homes traveled across the ocean to live in strange foreign lands with their sorrow and pain, dreams and hopes. Just like Moses in "Exodus", he lived as an eternal exile. In the artistic conception, it is never possible to escape.
In the development of the film, the director seemed to have set up several plots to convey clues that the old friends would reunite, but in the end they never met; the camera repeatedly showed the elderly Jesse sleeping motionless, but in the end they did not. Confronting its demise; Levan's thief nephew, who lives with him, is finally able to travel to Amsterdam, where Levan borrows wine and bread from a shop, as well as a stolen pack of good-brand cigarettes, but ends up not filming their farewell.
There is no deliberate metaphor, no excellent lens creation, and no exquisite narrative text. Poverty, disease, and death are as ordinary as smoking, taking medicine, and walking the dog. In a special divided space, the separation of life becomes inevitable, and the hometown becomes A hotbed of written memories, reunion becomes a luxury.
The emotion of distance and the feedback of memory make the film finally calmly reveal the extremely complex and shy emotions of hometown, whether it is exile outside or spiritual self-exile inside, between hometown and foreign land, in the "surroundings" The visual expression of the wandering between "sexuality" and "in-betweenness" finally releases the resonance of collective grief from the details of individual lives. Director
vaguely expressed hope for this resonance. He picked up a newborn kitten while driving; he also vaguely expressed relief, "Are the car lights broken? The car lights are not broken, it's because the human eyes are getting old." You can turn on the high beam and ignore oncoming traffic.”
The story stopped suddenly and calmly in the middle of the journey, like a documentary that will never have an ending. People see life in the occasional dry laughter, and see the two individual destinies of hometown and foreign land in trivial words. At the moment when the ending song suddenly sounds, I feel that the flowing self-consciousness finally pours into my own feet. The stories of others have become my own stories. The courtyard that will never disappear in the snow and the people who will eventually pass away have become metaphors for the life that cannot be expressed directly. When sharing after the screening, the director
said that the name of the movie came from the fact that it started to snow in the filming location.
Author: Qi Qing and Duan Xintong
Text: Qi Qing and Duan Xintong Editor: Guo Chaohao Editor: Shaoling
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