"I agree that human life is a process of always searching for meaning and purpose," Wen Shipei said. In his short film "Killing Time", human society has just reached the opposite point. Life has no "process" and "purpose", and people actively turn to "illusion".
Author: Lan Er
Editor: Prince of
Format: Wang Wei
Science fiction works seem to be stories about the future, but in fact they are all about contemporary times, Wen Shipei said. In the "After Tomorrow" theme of the short film label " Big World Gacha Machine " jointly created by
B station and Bad Monkey Pictures, the directors tried to present their deductions for some fragments of future society. Wen Shipei's piece of the puzzle "Killing Time" particularly highlights the possible alienation of human society and life in the context of highly developed science and technology.
"When social production is undertaken by intelligent machines, human beings are liberated from labor, have no worries about food and clothing, and feel like they are in paradise" - this setting can be seen in many science fiction stories, leading to an uneasy future. The most typical one Panic is the subversion of human rule by machines. In Wen Shipei's deduction, the crisis did not originate from the outside, but came from within.
terrible nothingness.
"I agree that human life is a process of always searching for meaning and purpose. In the real society, working, buying a house, raising a family, etc. have specific purposes and meanings that build our lives." Wen Shipei said.
What cannot be avoided is that the world is not ideal: people in reality are too buried in various "purposes". Instead, it becomes a burden, a "meaningless" life, and something people hope to escape from. status; therefore, "wealth freedom" and "early retirement" once became the yardstick for a successful life.
But in the near future world imagined by Wen Shipei, people have collectively grasped a seemingly ideal destiny, but it has not become better. Another hopeless state is emerging. There are no "key processes" in life, and there are no more things to worry about. They take the initiative to invest in "illusion". The only thing they can do is to kill time in the virtual world.
This seemingly easy and interesting game life has its paradoxes everywhere: for example, the way to kill time in the virtual world is to choose or be assigned a certain task - in reality, people want to escape from concreteness, but they Pursue in the virtual; for example, the absurdity of the male protagonist played by Zhang Yu - in this fictional space, in this space where no one will really die, he is a killer, hundreds of Killing each other and meeting each other again a thousand times is all in vain.
The saddest thing here is that just as many ordinary people tend to blindly follow reality and repeat their lives, in this near future, people are equally numb to their own living status drowning in illusion. Wen Shipei embodied this kind of numbness. In the film, we can see that people who actively enter the virtual world and upload their brains to the computer have their real limbs in the state of puppets, with no sense of "master control" and no sense of being in the world. The security of "heaven".
So in this numbness, Wen Shipei began to ask, what is the way to resist nothingness?
What the film provides Zhang Yu is "love", but it does not seem to take love as the absolute answer; it uses the special intimacy of love, perhaps more emphasis on real and vivid life experience, to point out the point. Awaken people how to break away from illusion and live a real life.
When the creator sets up a divergent imaginative world view, the boundaries of his imagination are no longer controlled.. In the film, Wen Shipei set the time and space background for the story in 2046, a time point that is within reach. The people in the story are us now. We will switch from the real world to the virtual world - since it is our active choice. , which means we can also choose to leave again. But just imagine, if a group of people's spirits have been operating in this virtual world since their birth, can reality and virtuality still be distinguished and captured? Wouldn't such a life be more desolate? And this kind of divergence makes people shaken by the reality of our world, and truly fall into the panic of nothingness. It is really scary to think about science fiction.
In this series of short films of "Big World Gashapon Machine", the audience commented that "Killing Time" is "brave". Courage lies in the metaphor of incorporating reality into imagination, and in the rich charm of images.
In Wen Shipei's feeling, short films provide a unique freedom and have more room for change on the whole; and obviously, in his short film, the diversity of image presentation is prominently reflected . In the film
, there is a very personal, more than 2-minute long kissing scene between the hero and heroine. With the atmosphere of a stage play and the state of dancing, the short love between the two characters, acquaintance, love and each other are fully performed. Test and hurt each other until the end. Wen Shipei said that this was the first scene shot in the entire film. In this unusual physical performance, the entire filming team completed the running-in. "Everyone has seen the general appearance of the film. It will be a relatively new one." Something flying."
With this as a starting point, the film incorporates many rich integrations of language, form, and techniques. For example, in the presentation of space style, the virtual world focuses on cyberspace style and animation elements, which are rich and restless; while the real world focuses on cold and hard tones, empty and cold - this contrast also confirms the withering of reality. Another example is the spiritual communication space built for the hero and heroine in the film, a pure white paradise, where a thought can conjure up everything you want to achieve, such as food, drinks, and a band, but it is full of a fragile sense of collapse, which seems to remind you of this kind of life. eccentric. During the two people's love affair, four sets of images on the same screen appeared on the screen at the same time. At first glance, they were showing the intimate interaction during the love process, and the dialogue clues of the characters seemed to reveal that this was really two people. The parallel appearance of people meeting each other in reincarnation. Therefore, in such a diverse design, the film itself also has a greater space for speculation and discussion.
"Of course, no matter what the settings, techniques or special effects of 'flying' are, the most important thing is to conform to the expression," Wen Shipei emphasized.
He has a clear sense of reality connection about constructing this image world in his imagination.
"What is the living environment like in this future world? We set it up so that each of them lives in a neat and uniform small box space - just like our current mobile phone, it is a square box, and so do we We rely on this space to live. The space setting will have a "prison feel" . In each single space, we hope that it is small and a relatively cramped environment, and that the corners of the entire space can be seen in one shot. We can see the top of it and see its depressing influence on people. "
In Wen Shipei's view, this has a strong resonance with people's lives today."In the past three years of the epidemic, everyone has gradually become accustomed to isolation, to being alone, and to virtual connections. This is a bit like the state of isolation between people described in the movie. People are in their own space one by one. All links to the outside world can be completed inside. This is isolation in a sense, but now it is restricted by the epidemic, and in an extreme future, isolation is an active choice.
《Big World Gacha. Under the four themes of "After Tomorrow", "Before Growing Up", "Above Love" and "Under Youth", "Machine" opens up a creative multiverse for young directors, tolerates diverse expressions, and encourages cutting-edge styles. The label's "13+N" short films are launched one after another on station B every Thursday, allowing young directors and young audiences to go both ways. They can not only see the various possibilities of young directors, but also bring rich and multi-dimensional new films to the public. Imaging experience.
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