◎The secretary with the round head
The real art never comes from self-confidence, you should thank you for your many doubts.
- TV series " Fuzzy "
Last month, the series "Fuzzy scattered" directed by French director Olivier Assayas was serialized on HBO. The series was remake of the original movie "Fuzzy scattered" directed in 1996.
movie "The Blunder" tells the story of the various situations that happened in and out of the play when the outdated director Vidal (played by Jean-Pierre Leode) remakes the 1915 French silent film "Vampire" in the 1915. The title of the film "Irma Vep" is both the name of the heroine in the silent film, Irma Vep, and a recombination of the word "Vampire". Therefore, we can understand the movie version of "The Misty" as an attempt to reconstruct "The Vampire". The drama version of "The Blind" goes further, telling the story of director Vidal (played by Fanshang Makaine)'s remake of the movie "The Blind", thus forming a kind of "play in the play" multiple structure from the beginning. As the story develops, this structure further evolves, forming a more complex pattern.
drama version of "The Bluff" is not a simple "remake". The duration is the most direct reflection - the 99 minutes of the original work has been expanded to the current eight episodes, with a total of more than 7 hours (interestingly, this length is exactly close to the 417 minutes of the original "Vampire"), so at least in terms of capacity, the drama version is as much as four times that of the movie version; not only that, the cast of the two versions is also completely different, and the two protagonists have undergone qualitative changes, which is worth discussing in more detail; the most fundamental thing is that the two versions of "The Bluff" have changed from a movie to a TV series, and the nature has changed. If the movie version of "The Damage" is a chaotic and charming review of the times, it is a willful and low-cost independent production, then the drama version, under the joint production of HBO and A24, presents a semi-commercial, half-authorical and half-philosophical state of semi-commercial, half-beautiful and half-law. It takes care of a larger audience, and is also more complex, and can better meet Asayas's perception of the current development of the film and television industry.
From this perspective, whether for movie lovers or TV series fans, "The Misty Tribulation" is a work that cannot be ignored this year or even at the moment. The move to remake the
yuan TV series
itself means nostalgia. The emergence of "The Blind" in the US drama market is undoubtedly closely related to the nostalgia trend of American dramas, especially considering that the nostalgia drama " Strange Things " in the 1980s almost set off the climax of American dramas since the epidemic. "The Blind" such a TV series looking back at the beginning of the last century can be said to have come into being.
However, if "The Misty" is placed in the genealogy of American dramas, you will find that it is very different from most realistic melodramas. These dramas are usually more genre-oriented and more keen on expressing imminent reality and implanting social issues. Especially in recent years, this trend has been significantly strengthened under the political reality of the United States. As a work directed by a French director, "The Blundering" is obviously "not in the Five Elements". It adopts a post-set method (meta-) focusing on the process of film/TV series creation itself, forming a "meta-TV series".
In fact, although the statement of Yuan TV dramas is rarely mentioned, Yuan movies are not rare in the field of film creation. At a time when the film industry is in crisis, this subtype appears more frequently in our vision. The reason is that the dilemma faced by the filmmaking process itself can provide the conflicts necessary for general film plays, so shooting the filming process itself has become a "life-saving straw" that creators have always been able to grasp in times of crisis.
Generally speaking, the creative dilemma can be internal or external, spiritual or material, while the movie and drama version of "The Blunder" try to combine two dilemma: on the one hand, it is the challenge of external factors such as investors, actors, and teams, and on the other hand, it is the anxiety and anxiety that the creator, that is, the director, himself, is the inner anxiety and anxiety about the work. The two types of challenges reached their peak around the fifth episode of the play: German actor Gottfield (played by Russ Edinger) almost hanged to death in order to get pleasure, while at the same time the director suspected that his original intention of creation disappeared, and the entire crew was on the verge of collapse.
Before I really saw the drama version of "The Misty Tribulation", the author's expectations for it were very low, because whether it was "meta" or "remake", it made people have some bad premonitions - a director began to constantly return to his own experience and go back to the past, which is very likely a sign of aging and somehow indicates the lack of creativity. What makes things worse is the choice of the protagonist: American actor Alicia Vikander , who can replace Maggie Cheung (not to mention whether this character might have been written for another actress in the play, Kristen Stewart )? The reason why
has this question is not because of the comparison of acting skills, but because of the nationality of this face: it is no exaggeration to say that the movie version of "The Misty Tribulation" was established largely because the protagonist was Maggie Cheung from Hong Kong, China, the wife of Assayas at the time. A face from the East, whose dual identity determines the duality of the movie: a love letter dedicated to Maggie Cheung himself, and it is also a cultural reflection on oriental movies , especially Hong Kong movies. It was Maggie Cheung's arrival that stirred up the French and even European films that were originally like a stagnant pool of water at the end of the 20th century (at least for Assayas): the East invaded the West, the sound invaded silent, the color invaded black and white, the TV invaded movies, the movie invaded life, the close-up invaded deep focus, until the end of the film, the geometric figures even invaded the face, and the hand-painted patterns invaded frames of film carved by light and shadow.
As a film critic of "Movie Manual", Asayas' exploration of Oriental films in the 1980s and 1990s undoubtedly allowed him to find a brand new world (with the 1984 manual special issue "Produced in Hong Kong" as the peak). Maggie Cheung is just one of the representatives. In Asayas' own words, "(Maggie Cheung) is a Polaroid photo that shows the vitality of Hong Kong movies", and behind her are a series of exciting names such as Tsui Hark , Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke. It is also because of this that when the drama version strips Maggie Cheung's face, it means that everything after the face is stripped away, and it is easy to slip into a more personal, retreating to the West, and lacking the meaning of film history.
characters and clones
Fortunately, things are not as bad as I thought. At least after watching the entire play, the above-mentioned preconceived impression of the drama version of "The Blind Tribulation" has basically disappeared. After all, Asayas is not a contestant who fools the public and himself; he did not consider the "Maggie Cheung's question", but tried to answer it from all levels and finally gave a brand new work; he also urged us not to look at this work from the old perspective, as Fansang Makaine, who plays director Vidal in the film, said, this seems to be a "completely different work."
Due to the increase in shooting time and funds, Asayas has more time and room to create characters, which has also brought many interesting characters to his drama version of "The Misty", and the multi-line narrative has been unfolded. The appearance of characters like Gottfried also fills the fun and comedy effects. Apart from the color role, the most important thing is Vidal and Mira (played by Alicia Vikander), the heroine who plays Irma Vipp. Both characters appear to be directly misappropriated from the movie version, but in fact they are very different.
first talk about the director.Compared with Jean-Pierre Leod in the original version, the popular comedian Fanshang Makine, who has brought different feelings to "The Misty Tribulation" in recent years: the former is neurotic and even a little crazy, while the latter is more inclined to comedy, especially the contrast of holding the director's power but often having to break the teeth and swallow it into the stomach, which is not available in the original version. More importantly, Leod's directorial role is closer to fiction, and there is a certain distance between him and Asayas himself, and Makine is the incarnation of Asayas's no objection: on the one hand, the movie "The Misty Calamity" directed by Vidal, played by Makine, was actually filmed by Asayas. On the other hand, Vidal's ex-wife "Jade Lee" whom Vidal is always in the film, clearly pointed to Maggie Cheung. From this perspective, the movie version of "The Misty" is more like approaching Assayas himself from an abstract and fictional level, while the TV version is largely specific to Assayas himself, so that some dialogues can correspond to Assayas himself without any obstacles.
It should be pointed out here that although Assayas fitted the drama version of "The Mira" to himself so directly, the heroine Mira cannot simply project it to Maggie Cheung in real life; he chose to magically let the three characters share the functions of Maggie Cheung in the original movie, including Mira of Vikander (whose name "Mira" corresponds to "Maggie"), Cynthia of Fara of (whose surname "Keng" corresponds to "Cheung") and Li Yu of Wu Junmei (whose name "Maggie" directly corresponds to "Maggie"). The three respectively extract Maggie Cheung's identities at different levels, such as occupation, country and family (there can also be other interpretation methods), making the play present a complexity and speciality different from the past.
For Asayas, Maggie Cheung obviously cannot and does not need to be replaced. Mira's separate dialogue with Li Yu, Mira and Cynthia in the play also fully reflects the various identity exchanges in Maggie Cheung. For example, a conversation between Mira and Li Yu directly explains the director's motivation to replace Chinese actors with American actors, as well as his doubts about the so-called "cultural appropriation" behind this. Vidal of Makine (that is, Assayas) believes that Maggie Cheung grew up in the UK and Mira was born in Swedish . Both of them are not the products of a single culture. Therefore, such a replacement is not only not the "cultural appropriation" that appears on the surface, but has a deeper consistency, and is a reflection on the position of film actors in the industry. In this sense, the drama version of "The Misty Tribulation" is certainly a public love letter written by Asayas to Maggie Cheung (although he knows that Maggie Cheung may not read it at all), and he is deeply in love with the two of them and their work past, but at the same time it is an abstract refinement and thinking about Maggie Cheung.
Love is wrapped by thinking, or in turn, thinking is immersed in love. The drama version of "The Damage" is still rich in layers, but things change and everything goes away. Assayas also truly "farewell" with Maggie Cheung in memory, and then came up with new tricks.
Film and TV Myth
should think about and solve more than just the "Maggie Cheung problem". In the final analysis, the most important explanation for the drama version of "The Blind Tribulation" is why it is necessary to make the drama version of "The Blind Tribulation"? Is it just for money?
Generally speaking, there are only a few reasons why the director remakes his own works. From a market perspective, the original works have usually been highly recognized by the market and are worthy of remakes with better and newer technologies, so as to gain the recognition of the latest wave of audiences in the market. From a creative perspective, most creators were dissatisfied with the original work, or regretted it under the creative conditions at that time, and believed that it was worth further improvement, expansion and extension. A good remake usually deals with issues that were not involved in the previous era, making the new work more directly related to the present.
has indeed made a good attempt to address the latter issue. If the question that the creator at the end of the 20th century, especially Asayas, who also has the identity of a film critic, must respond to is the question of digital to film and the East to the West, then this time he will respond to the current film/TV industry.In fact, due to the large increase in space, Asayas finally had the opportunity to start the discussion with pleasure. These discussions were distributed scattered in many corners of the play, making those parts that had no plot and seemed to be cut-scene should attract more attention from the nature of the fantasy. For example, at the crew gathering at the beginning of the third episode, several characters started a discussion about the series, which even brought up a "serial history": the initial series function was similar to a novel, and they were adapted from classic classics, and their initial state was not "art", but full of commercial colors, which seems to be no different from the current TV series market dominated by streaming media. Paragraphs similar to
seem to be intended to break our prejudice against "big data series", but they seem not that simple; they do not want to convey a clear attitude, but are closer to a discussion posture, a unique posture that a cultivator and film critic director has. This posture is vividly displayed in the fifth episode of the drama: several crew members attacked the director, believing that a passage in his remake of "Vampire" was inducing rape or sexual harassment - undoubtedly responding to the feminist wave in today's society, which also became the fuse of the film's biggest crisis and led to Vidal's response: adding a commentary and behind the scenes of "Vampire". Through these paragraphs, the initial "play in play" has been expanded again, and the richer and geometrically expanded history of film and television drama production has gradually emerged before the audience. The evolution of the leading relationship, the questioning of creative freedom, etc. have all brought the drama to a breadth that the film version has never reached.
is obvious, Asayas deliberately created some controversial moments in the play. It seems that for him, the biggest problem with film and television creation is that creators are becoming more and more good at preaching, but these creators and creations themselves are "not bad enough": "The movies at that time were all for bad guys and bad girls, just like rock music to them," Gotfield said. In the declaration after its completion, Gotfield, who was like the Baccarat God, asked everyone: "Why do we still have to make movies now? Where is the spirit of adventure? Where is the chaos?" This is probably also the heartfelt question of Asayas, who was once chaotic. It is in this sense that we can understand that Asayas said in an interview that "whenever the movie is facing a crisis, it should be remade "The Damage"", which reminds people of what Chekhov said in his letter to Suvorin, "If the artist believed by the masses dares to declare that he has seen all kinds of things but does not understand anything, then this statement alone is a huge understanding in the field of thought, which is a big step forward."
Everyone knows that the movie is facing a crisis at the moment, but no one can explain clearly what the crisis is. "The Blind" shows us all aspects of the film and television crisis, but also refuses to give an answer. Perhaps doubt itself has enough meaning, and the process of exploring answers to history also contains solutions to the problem?
Just a few days ago, the greatest chaos maker in the history of movies and also the chaos itself, Jean-Luc Godard, chose to be euthanized and passed away. We can say that the most precious legacy of Godard is that it breaks all the old customs of film creation, but what he left behind is not a theoretical and systematic film aesthetic, but more of the courage and chaos after breaking all the courage and courage - " Chinese Girl ", " Passion of the Passion ", " Book of Images ", the whole world. As Godard did, whether it was the film version of the 1990s or the current TV version, "The Damage" was always an attempt to express the chaos world, although it was not perfect - because perfection might mean the end.
