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Book cover of "I Know a Few Things About Movies"

As the youngest of the seven arts, film is the most accepted by the public. You rarely see someone who never watches a movie, but how to appreciate a movie is a science.

In his new book "I Know a Few Things About Movies", director Jia Zhangke shared his "film learning experience" and told the public about his views on movies.For example, in the following text, he said that theory seems to be something empty, but it is the deepest core of a director; documentaries seem to be shot only based on reality, but they are a very free form.

01

Theory is the deepest nourishment

For many people, whether a movie is good or not is a very intuitive feeling. However, in this world, people's life experience and sensitivity are different. If you can master some basic movie rules, it will be helpful to accept movies of different styles, especially those that are unfamiliar to your own experience.

Until now, I feel that my personal creations have always benefited from the nourishment of theory.When we were studying in the 1990s, the Beijing Film Academy, where I was, Class of 1993, accepted students from all majors, including many creative majors such as directing, photography, and fine arts, and the teaching focused on creative practice.

I studied film theory. At that time, there was a popular view among my classmates that learning theory was useless and that theory was too distant and boring for creation. In fact, I couldn't tell the difference at that time. For me, because I had just come into contact with film and my major was film theory, I had to study what I should learn, and then study some courses in other majors.

The curriculum of the Beijing Film Academy is very scientific. We had many public courses in our freshman and sophomore years, including film photography, which we studied for two years. Our teachers included Mu Deyuan and Zhao Fei. We also had professional courses in film recording and acting.

For students in our theory class, these courses are more theoretical, but for example, in photography class, we also learn everything from taking black and white photos to developing photos. At that time, there was also darkroom technology, and we had to learn darkroom, from taking photos to developing them ourselves, and getting in touch with film, and slowly mastering the basic principles of film.

Film is a practical subject with a technical threshold, so what role can theory play? At that time, I really didn’t know. It was not as obvious and immediate as learning professional technology.

For example, in the directing class, what is an axis? What is a jump axis? After taking this class, you can really learn something specific, and you will often face this problem when you are creating. The same is true for photography. Learn the principles of film and master the characteristics of different lenses. After you have this knowledge, you can use it immediately in practice and verify it.

But theory is an empty thing, and it is often difficult to find application in practice, so people feel that theory is dispensable.However, as I got deeper into my film work, I later felt that if film technology is the basis for ensuring the material presentation of a film and can be compared to the creator’s “hardware”, then theory is the creator’s “software”.

Film theory first brings up two levels of questions. The first is the understanding and knowledge of film as an art medium. Simply put, what is film? The second is how to understand the world and how to understand people? I think the latter may be more important.

02

"If you want to change a person's fate, what methods are there?"

Regarding the first point, the theory of media cognition, I would like to give an example of film narrative. When we were studying, the film drama theory was initially very biased towards the Russian style, that is, the Soviet script writing method. Because at that time, the head teacher of our drama class was Mr. Wang Di, who had studied in the Soviet Union, so he paid great attention to the literary nature of the script: the script must be publishable, the script must be readable, it must not only support the filming work, but also be readable by people, it must be a literary work.

Later, when we were sophomores and juniors, we started to set up courses on American scriptwriting methods. I remember two fat American teachers came to give us short-term script training. Their teaching methods and ideas were completely different. They did not require the script to be a literary work, but required it to be more like a "construction blueprint." In the first class, the American teacher asked the students a question:"If you want to change a person's fate, what methods do you think are there?"Of course he meant in the script, and we didn't know how to answer for a moment.

Because there was a popular saying at that time that "knowledge changes destiny", I jokingly answered: knowledge. This was actually a little funny, and my classmates were all laughing at me. The teacher said to me: "You are talking too generally. The script needs specific actions to support it. For example, if you let your character leave home to go to school in another city, it may change his fate; for example, if you let the character move, he will change; for example, if he gets sick, he will change." He gave many examples, which were completely different ideas for creating scripts.

The creative systems of the Soviet Union and the United States are both highly theoretical. When you compare these two systems, when you master these two different theories, it is not necessarily necessary to choose one and abandon the other, but rather, these two methods will be integrated into a method that belongs to you.

I remember that in the Soviet-style script writing theory, there was never any discussion of narrative tracking, because Soviet scripts since the Thaw period were very lyrical and poetic, and basically did not emphasize narrative efficiency. But American script writing theory is first and foremost about tracking. What is tracking? From the first minute of watching the movie, what is the driving force that keeps the audience watching for 90 minutes? What is attracting them? Is it the suspenseful, progressive plot, or the atmosphere? What causes this tracking?

A lot of my script writing is based on the Soviet style, because I think the wording of the script is very important. It is a basis for work. It is not just for publication or reading by readers, but you have to use relatively vivid and accurate words so that all your colleagues, including actors and photographers, can understand the film atmosphere you want to create.

However, I feel that I am deeply influenced by the narrative tracking in American film theory. This kind of narrative tracking does require you to have a set of methods inside, whether it is to establish it or break it, it will make the narrative self-growing, at least there will be a sense of progression.

I was very dissatisfied with the first draft of my second film, Platform, and I don’t know why. I felt that many details of my memories and imaginations were written accurately, but the overall writing was always lacking in strength. I didn’t know where the problem was. Later, I suddenly remembered the issue of “tracking” in American drama theory, and I found that the script at that time was indeed lacking in tracking.

Movie "Platform"

The first draft of "Platform" is a bit like Russian nesting dolls in the middle of the narrative. It looks very rich, but when you uncover one, it is exactly the same as the first. And when you uncover another, it is exactly the same as the second. And when you uncover another, it is exactly the same as the third. They all have the same appearance, but the size changes from large to small.

Afterwards, I sawIn fact, many movies have a common problem in narrative: lack of momentum, lack of progression, and constant repetition, just like Russian dolls.

I call this lack of progressiveness in the drama the "Russian doll" problem. At this time, when you need to make a judgment, theory becomes very important. The so-called theory is the summary of the creative experience of predecessors. Theory is not a creed. It does not mean that theory requires narrative tracking, and your film must have narrative tracking. You can rebel against it, but you have to understand this thing, you have to understand what the normality and convention of creation are.

When you become a narrative rebel and want to rebel against it, you should have a clear understanding and know what you are rebelling against. This is not random, it is not a random rebellion. This is a small guide for theoretical understanding in creation, which provides creators with a reference for making judgments.

I think that whether as a screenwriter or as a director, especially as a director, most of the time you are doing judgmental work, that is, making decisions. From the same five props, which one do you choose? To the big things like choosing actors, choosing narrative methods, choosing plots, and setting characters, all these things require judgment all the time. When making judgments, I think part of it is based on intuition, but more often, it often requires theoretical support.

Later, I had the opportunity to meet many colleagues, and I found that directors who can maintain a relatively high level of creation and maintain vigorous creativity for a long time often have their own set of film theories. For example, the late director Abbas can be said to be a film theorist; like Olivier Assayas, he is not only a film theorist, but also a film historian.

Take Martin Scorsese. In 2002, I visited his studio while he was editing Gangs of New York. He showed me some clips and said that he had been reading Eisenstein's films and his theoretical books in order to edit these scenes. I think there is a big gap between Martin Scorsese's film language and Eisenstein's montage-style language. But when he makes a decision, he can go back to film history and the directors who inspired him, and find his current position and the basis for his decision in the theories of these directors.

03

Movies are a perspective on the world

All of the above are from the perspective of specific creative skills. The second point is from a larger perspective.We face a complex world, and movies are about explaining how we see this world.We must create with our own perspectives and methods of looking at the world. These perspectives and methods come from a larger philosophical level and from our basic humanistic qualities.

The formation of these humanistic qualities may be comprehensive. For example, have you been exposed to some feminist theories? Do you have your own judgment and understanding on gender issues? Have you been exposed to the methods of new historicism? What do you value when rewriting history?

Since the New Historicism, we have attached importance to individual cases and details, which will be reflected in how you mobilize your film to reflect the world you want to reflect. For example, when we were in school, postmodern theory became popular, and we would see whether the thinking in a movie was based on a certain postmodern spirit. If the way the whole society looks at problems is already in a stage of deconstruction, if you are still constructing a closed, God-like perspective, your way of looking at the world may appear conservative.

Learning modern theories brings us closer to the forefront of human understanding and problem solving. So some movies are modern movies as soon as they are released; some movies are pre-modern movies as soon as they are released.It's just an old movie. It may have been produced in January 2020, but to be absolute, it may be a very outdated movie.

Why is it outdated? Because its perspective on the world is old and outdated.How to maintain a fresh perspective depends on our grasp of some theories about human thinking about the latest developments in the world. These theories must become our "software".

An enlarger used in darkroom technology, which can directly control every step of the image production process

By learning these theories, we become modern people, we have a modern spirit, and our films can have a modern spirit. If you stay in the cognition of the world thirty or forty years ago, for example, "black or white", this is the cognitive model of the past. If you still understand the world in a "black or white" way today, then obviously, the part of your spirit that can be shared by contemporary people will be relatively outdated. So I think fundamentally, theory is a kind of self-construction to some extent.

When you keep absorbing theories and become a person with a contemporary spirit, you can basically ensure that your film is contemporary. You can shoot ancient times, the future, or the present, but if you want the film to be permeated with the contemporary spirit, you need to be a contemporary person. Otherwise, even if you get a very contemporary original novel, you may adapt it to lack novelty.

For example, The Orphan of Zhao. I have read many stories and adapted scripts of The Orphan of Zhao since the 1990s, in various versions. It is the same story, but different versions have different focuses. I remember one of the novels that I particularly liked. Because it raised a question: Should hatred be inherited? I think it is very novel. An ancient Chinese opera story, in a rewritten novel, raises a new question: Should we inherit this hatred? Should we inherit this blood debt? How much does it have to do with individuals? I think this is a relatively new way of thinking.

The same ancient story can have such a new angle. Some adaptations are no different from the Yuan Zaju hundreds of years ago, still telling stories of loyal ministers and good generals, so why do we have to tell them again today? This shows that the writer's own system is still an outdated system.

This brings us back to the theme of this lecture - the new and old of movies. So, I think theory will help us become filmmakers with a modern spirit, or audiences with a modern spirit. We need to inherit the methods of understanding the world of our predecessors and form a contemporary perspective.

04

Aren’t documentaries movies?

If we use literature to compare movies, most genre films can be compared to novels, some movies can be compared to prose or poetry, and documentaries can be compared to non-fiction literature. As the earliest film form in the world, documentaries have always occupied a very important position in film art.

Documentary "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue"

Recently, people often ask, "Director Jia, you have made another documentary, "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue", so when will you make a movie for us?" This makes me very confused. Why do we contrast documentaries with movies? Isn't documentary a type of movie? I understand that the movies these friends are talking about are fictional works, which are usually called feature films, but non-fiction documentaries are of course also movies, and they are the earliest form of movies.

When film was first invented, directors created two traditions. The Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train” and “The Factory Gate” marked the beginning of the film documentary tradition, which is the first tradition.

"The Factory Gate" was filmed in 1895. The camera is facing the gate of the Lumiere factory. People can see female workers wearing dresses and soft-brimmed hats with feathers on them, walking into the factory in groups of three or five, talking and laughing.

In "The Arrival of a Train", we can see the platform of the train station, where men, women, old and young are waiting for the arrival of the train, and the train is approaching the platform from a distance. The Lumière brothers were pioneers of outdoor real-life shooting, and "The Arrival of a Train" is the most typical work: the camera is set up on the platform, facing the train track extending in the distance. There is no one on the platform, and in the depth of the field, a train is coming towards them. The locomotive drives out of the frame and stops on the platform on the left side. Passengers get on and off the train. Among them, a girl hesitates in front of the camera and shows a natural and shy expression. The train leaves the platform and drives out of the frame.

The movie "Train Arrives at the Station"

In this film, objects and characters are sometimes far and sometimes near, and the visual changes in different shot sizes form a scene arrangement with depth, which is what we call a "long shot" today.

Georges Méliès's films were born out of magic theaters. Méliès was a magic lover, and he bought the theater founded by magician Robert Houtin in Paris at the time. He also became a magic "director", and his magic shows not only had unique magic props he invented, but also scripts.

On December 28, 1895, when the Lumière brothers showed their film to the world for the first time, they invited many Parisian celebrities, including Méliès, who was a magician at the time. Méliès was immediately fascinated by this new thing called film, and he believed that film was a higher level of magic than magic.

Méliès planned to buy the Lumière film equipment. After the screening, he found Lumière's father, Antoine Lumière, and offered to buy the camera and projector, but was rejected by the Lumière father and son. However, this did not prevent him from continuing his dream of making movies. He began to "abandon magic and follow the film" and embarked on the road of film.

Inspired by the photo studios at the time, Méliès converted his own garden and factory into the world's earliest photography studio. In the studio, in 1902, Méliès filmed a group of astronomers taking a cannonball to explore the moon based on Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon and Wells' novel The First Man in the Moon. This film, A Trip to the Moon, is considered a pioneer of science fiction films.

Méliès's films pioneered another tradition of film, that of fictional narrative. He invented various film stunts and used film to shoot fictional scenes of life that had already been processed on stage.

05

Finding the unknown in the known

In many film schools in Europe and America, documentary is a basic course for every student, just as documentary is the earliest form of film. In fact, documentary tests a creator's high level of creative consciousness and sensitivity.

Because when you decide to shoot a documentary, what you want to shoot has an unknown and accidental situation, and the director has to make the first response to this situation. This response is both a response to the content and a response to the form. In other words, the director has to make two decisions at the same time, one is to decide "what to shoot", and the other is to decide "how to shoot". "What to shoot" is a question of content, and "how to shoot" is a question of method, a question of film language.

Because the subjects the director faces are uncertain and accidental, on the documentary shooting site, the director must be aware of what is happening at the first moment and at the same time judge which method is appropriate to capture and express what is happening.

Generally speaking, when we are conceiving a documentary, we will have a general theme before shooting. Under this theme, the director must have his own predictions and judgments about the direction of events and characters.

At the beginning, the director may want to shoot a public institution, such as American director Wiseman's "Hospital" or "Book Edge: The New York Public Library". As a space, we can expect many things to happen in the hospital and the New York Public Library, but no one knows what will happen specifically.

Documentary: Book Connection: The New York Public Library

We may want to shoot a police station. If we have a shooting period of two or three months, we will certainly encounter various emergencies in this police station, but what are these emergencies and who are the people involved in these incidents? No one can know.

Sometimes, we can also shoot a large space, as big as a city or even a country. For example, Wang Bing's Tiexi District is a traditional industrial area in Shenyang. In 1972, Antonioni directed China, which is a huge film. He took a camera and went to Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Henan and other places, if I remember correctly, to meet strangers in this country and capture China during the "Cultural Revolution" - a country that is still very mysterious to Westerners.

Documentaries can also be pre-set as certain events. For example, the film Four Hundred Million People, shot by Dutch director Ivens in China in 1938, was shot during World War II when China was in the stage of the War of Resistance against Japan. Director Ivens brought a camera to shoot such an international event.

The same director may also just shoot a certain kind of weather. For example, his representative short film "Rain" does not have fixed characters and dramatic plots. It simply shoots the scenes of a city before, during and after the rain, forming a poetic and abstract record.

In the 1960s, farmers in Sanrizuka, a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, protested against the seizure of farmland for the construction of Narita Airport. Ogawa Shinsuke and his crew moved into Sanrizuka and began filming the documentary series "Sanrizuka" which lasted for 11 years. In 1967, he filmed another documentary titled "Current Situation Report: Record of Haneda Struggle" about the resistance against the construction of Tokyo Haneda Airport.

We can also film a person. This specific person may be a laid-off female worker, a doctor, or a lawyer. Their profession itself may attract the director, but apart from such a profession, what information about their life is unknown.

Therefore, first of all, documentaries have a broad content space. More importantly, during the filming process, how the director sensitively captures everything in front of the camera, that is,Do you have a pair of observant eyes and a keen sense of capture to capture the events and plots in front of you?

At the same time, it also involves the question of how to shoot. Do you keep a fixed camera position and observe quietly, or follow the person as he moves? In this instant reaction, you also have to consider the distance and angle between the light at the scene and the person being photographed, the composition of the image colors, etc.

06

Documentary is a fairly free form

When shooting a documentary, you actually face two roles: one is people, and the other is space.People are always moving around in space. You have to first deal with the people and shoot the stories happening to them. You also have to shoot the space they are in, so we are faced with these two subjects being photographed.

First observe the characteristics of the person, then feel his temperament. The space is actually the same. The space itself has its own characteristics. The space itself requires you to feel it and communicate with it. Therefore, Director Antonioni said that every time he arrives at a space, he must be silent for three minutes. He wants to communicate with this space. He imagines any space he wants to shoot as having life and breath, and he must accept this breath.

Therefore, the importance of documentary to film art lies in the fact that it has been expanding our understanding of the unknown world and promoting our exploration of the possibilities of film.

During the documentary filming process, the director is also completing the structural work. What kind of surrounding characters does he need to follow? What kind of space does he need to follow the characters into? During the filming process, the director's overall grasp includes structural work, just like when a composer writes music, he needs to think about how to form polyphonic relationships and how different instruments produce chord relationships.

The texture and chords of a documentary are sampled from reality during the filming process. What you shoot and what you can capture construct the breadth of the entire film, determining whether the vision is broad and the angles are diverse.

After the film was completed, the director, faced with a vast amount of material, once again made choices about specific plots and shots, and ultimately established the structure of the documentary.I think the flexibility of making documentaries lies in the fact that you can enrich it and let it grow during the filming process.

Documentary can be said to be the most free. Documentary certainly takes authenticity as its most basic ethics and values, but documentary is ultimately a work of art. When filming, the director can actively intervene or pre-set actions to form a true record. This should not be prohibited by documentaries, but a very important means of expression. So there is no question of whether these methods can be used, only whether they are used well.

For example, in the 1961 film Chronicle of a Summer by French director Jean Rouch, he walked the streets of France with a camera and asked people the same question: Are you happy? This question was set by the director in advance, but filming people's reactions and answers to these questions is a true record.

Documentary "Summer Chronicles"

In China, there was a program in which a reporter asked people from different social classes the same question: Are you happy? Later, a joke that everyone knows was born. A farmer said to the reporter: Comrade reporter, my last name is not Fu, but Zeng.

The question raised is presupposed and hypothetical, and can be said to be a kind of fiction, but different people have real reactions to this question. This method is called the method of real movies. It contains a situation set by the director subjectively, and the record produced by this subjective situation is real. For example, Ju Anqi's 2001 film "The Wind in Beijing Is Strong" also asked the same question to different people to capture their first-hand, subconscious real reactions.

I remember a German movie about a state-owned factory in East Germany that closed down after the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe. The movie mainly filmed the stories of several female workers who had worked in this state-owned factory, and the scenes in the movie were mainly scenes of their current lives. But at the end of the movie, the director took them to the factory where they had worked, which had now become a parking lot.

The three female workers were very melancholy after being brought into this real environment by the director. Finally, they slowly turned off the lights in the parking lot, which was also the lights in the workshop where they used to work, one by one, and the screen went dark. This ending was the director's subjective way of bringing the characters into a scene that might cause emotional fluctuations, but after the female workers entered this situation, their reactions were touching and real.

So, documentary is actually a very free form.Mode.Ultimately, documentaries should still be considered from an aesthetic perspective. Directors should not only pursue inner truth, but should also consider the aesthetic sense of reality.