She is the only female director to win the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Oscar for Best Director. Her film "The Power of a Dog" is a masterpiece.
The film "The Power of a Dog" directed by New Zealand female director Jane Campion , who has filmed " Piano Lesson " and Chen Kaige 's "The Power of a Dog" won the 94th Academy Award for Best Director. The director who won the Palme d'Or at the 46th Cannes Film Festival for "Farewell My Concubine " once again won the approval of filmmakers.
As a female director, Campion has always been good at controlling emotions. She filmed the emotions between men and women and between men in "Dog Power" with great detail and restraint. The film is full of interpretations from different angles, slowly leading us into a tragic moment in a gentle narrative.
Unique female perspective:
Film theorist Laura Mulvey proposed that most movies in the past were filled with the so-called "male gaze". The concept of "gaze" here can be borrowed from Foucault "Gaze" "Theory to help understand that "gazing" is not an action that can be reduced to "looking", but an abstract process. Foucault believes that gaze symbolizes power and is the oppression of power, while Laura believes that the "male gaze" existing in movies regards herself as the subject of viewing and places women as objects. In the process of catering to male imagination, female images are Objectification into the male spectacle.
And this kind of "male gaze" thinking not only affects women in movies, but also affects men in movies, that is, taking pictures of men's well-developed muscles and strong bodies. This is a typical male mindset. Ways to guess women’s preferences.
Ever since, in Campion's film "The Power of Dogs", this kind of breaking of the "male gaze" has a double meaning, not only because she is using a unique female perspective to film a delicate emotional story, She abandons the oppressive power of the male gaze. At the same time, the men she photographs from this female perspective also acquire a temperament that is different from that of men in general concepts.
In the movie, we can see that Campion is fascinated by the observation of details, which is a typical female observation angle. A foreign cultural researcher once used movie examples to demonstrate the difference in gaze between men and women. She gave an example of a typical male gaze scene, which is when Guy Gadot saw Chris Pie in "Wonder Woman" In the shot of with his muscular upper body exposed, Guy Gadot showed a moment of infatuation. The inner world of women is completely externalized into an obsession with male bodies, which is obviously framed by male imagination. Female thinking.
She gave an example of another typical female gaze shot, which is the emotion Anne Hathaway has for James McAvoy in "Becoming Jane Austen". First, the camera focuses on Hathaway gazing at James. The hand of , this kind of emotion starting from the details is closer to the inner world of women.
"The Power of Dogs" is full of such detailed shots, which is why the overall tone of the movie is so soothing. Whether it is the observation of the details of the characters' bodies or the close-ups of objects that project emotions, they all reveal a unique A female perspective, grasping inner emotions as a whole.
For example, in a scene in the movie where the protagonist Phil shows his lust, he takes out a sweat towel and silently wipes his body, then covers his face with it and sniffs it repeatedly. The director pushes the camera until he can clearly see the male muscle movements, and uses The non-nudity method explains what it means to use details to deduce the character's heart. It is quite consistent with the scene in the movie "Call Me By Your Name" where Tiancha expresses his lust in the form of apricot.
Obtain "embodied feeling" from images:
Phenomenology Film theorist Sobchak believes that film is the subject of viewing and feeling. She proposed the "embodied quality of film" and gave an example of Campion's " There is a blurry and unidentifiable shot at the beginning of "Piano Lesson". Only when the next shot is shot back, we know that it is the heroine touching her eyes, but Sobchak believes that we are not without difficulty in identifying the first blur. lens, we already understand through our own experience that it is the touch of fingers. So she said: "Our experience of a film is not through our eyes. We use our entire body to see, understand and feel the film."
We can also detect this kind of image in "The Power of Dogs" The sense of embodiment, when the characters touch the hemp rope again and again, and rub their faces with sweat towels, we use our own bodies to watch, understand and feel. This is why "The Power of Dogs" can make people so immersed in such a world. It's hard to extricate yourself from the slow narrative.
The contrast between the character image and the heart:
It is futile to struggle with the complete narrative of "The Power of Dogs". The reason why Campion disrupts the main line is to let us focus on the emotions of the characters, or the living conditions of the characters, instead of Get rid of too much entanglement in narrative speech.
In "The Piano Lesson", the two male characters exist as opposites, while in "The Power of a Dog", the two characters in the movie: Phil and Peter have a contrasting relationship.
phil is rough on the surface, bohemian like a western cowboy, while peter is a "sissy" on the surface, in the words of contemporary stereotype , and looks very feminine.
In the heart of the character, Phil is actually very lonely. He can only gain a sense of existence by constantly attacking Peter and Peter's mother in a joking way. His lover Henry, who has passed away but has been absent in the movie, has become his old friend. The world can also be said to be the wasteland in his heart. Peter's heart is very strong. From the fact that he can dissect a rabbit with an expressionless face, it is foreshadowing that he quietly completes the plan to kill Phil in the end.
Such character images and inner contrasts create an obsession with self-subjectivity. Both people are immersed in an inner world that cannot let go of the past, and even have a self-destructive tendency. The process of watching the
movie "Dog Power" is not as exciting as watching an Hollywood action movie. It is more of an inner cleansing that you feel during the immersive viewing.
