1994 was a magical year in the world film history, with many excellent works shining in the film history. Around that year, China’s film moderns, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine won the only Palme d ‘Or in China, Zhang Yimou’s Alive won the Best Actor, and Jiang Wen’s first novel Sunny Days won the national box office championship. The three men are not independent figures, but they are great masters among directors. However, in the past two years, the market performance of the three masters’ works is average, as if there is always a red line that can’t be crossed. Zhang Yimou’s Shadow and Jiang Wen’s Evil Doesn’t Suppress Righteousness are hovering around 600 million, and Chen Kaige’s The Legend of the Demon Cat is about 500 million. Now, when the box office of big movies starts at 1 billion, the box office performance of the masters is really not bright enough. Objectively speaking, these three films are also excellent in quality among domestic films. Why are they not popular in the market?
All three masters have it.
Extraordinary artistic originality
It is thankless to compare these three people. We only analyze their most distinctive artistic features.
Cultural reflection has always been the label of Chen Kaige. A good family origin, at the same time, has experienced the pressure of the times and system, which makes Chen Kaige teenagers mature and like to think about the advantages and disadvantages of China’s traditional culture and reflect on historical lies. The Yellow Land shows the individual’s numbness under the loess culture for thousands of years. king of the children, Grand Parade, Singing while Walking and Jing Ke Stabbing the King of Qin are all full of reflections on the ills of the times, collectivism and even nationality. He was obsessed with cleanliness and finally reached the peak in the epic narrative of Farewell My Concubine. But when Chen Kaige wants to wake up from the introspection and torture of traditional culture and focus on the present, it is not very harmonious — — The Promise became the greatest shame of the master, the artistic level of The Orphan of Zhao was lower than expected, Search failed to grasp the essence of realism, and The Taoist Down the Mountain made it worse. You can’t say that Chen Kaige didn’t think, but his thinking is difficult to have a dialogue with the audience.
Zhang Yimou is best at color control. From the beginning of "Yellow Land", it shows amazing control over pictures and colors. "Red Sorghum" is the first film directed by him. In this film, there is a strong tension between the grand narrative of history and the exaggerated folk imagination, and the image style is very wild. This wanton and enthusiastic color obsession has been maintained until now. In the early days, Zhang Yimou was very "rustic" and liked to shoot rural subjects. He was deeply influenced by neo-realism. In "story of qiu ju" and "None Less", the cultural consciousness and responsibility of the fifth generation were very obvious in him. However, Zhang Yimou’s second identity is the initiator of domestic blockbusters. Hero has laid the basic paradigm of blockbusters, but he has also been accused of artistic depravity since then. The Golden Flower in the City, The Surprise of Three Guns and The Great Wall have come all the way, and the box office is very high, but the artistic exploration has stopped.
Jiang Wen is a very special existence. As the "Kusturica of China", he is the wildest director of China, but he has not been burdened with the shackles of reflection on the cultural consciousness of his home country. On the contrary, he always looks at history with a playful attitude, and is a true descendant of Dionysian spirit. Sunny Days beautifies the turbulent times with filters, focusing on human freedom and nature in history. The absurd black humor in The Devil Comes is basically unmatched in China, but who can say that this is not true history? In The Sun Also Rises, there are even more madness. The train tracks give birth, crazy mothers climb trees, and cobblestone rooms by the river. Metaphors are everywhere, reflecting the absurdity of the times through the absurdity of individual life. Jiang Wen’s greatest feature is that he is unconstrained style, and he is good at "drama", and the most serious history can also be teased. One Step Away and Evil Doesn’t Suppress Righteousness like to take the historical background as the stage, so that the forces of all parties can take turns to go into battle, the conflict is fierce, and the larger foe is broken. Finally, the sunset is left and the hero disappears.
It can be said that the artistic originality of the three masters has become the most fundamental guarantee for them to achieve the status of rivers and lakes, but will this originality diminish with the passage of time and can the audience feel it every time? No one can guarantee these.
What have the three masters met now?
The most important keyword in China movies in recent years is fast. Movies are commodities, not lofty arts. Generation division is gone, and the generation division directed by China will end in the sixth generation forever. On the one hand, the sixth generation of artistic features are doomed to be unable to become the mainstream of the market and to shoulder the great responsibility; On the other hand, the new generation of directors can’t divide by generations, and the threshold of directors has long been so low that everyone seems to be able to do it. Zhang Yimou has been dissatisfied with this. These new generation directors no longer have unified academic characteristics and a unified sense of cultural mission. Their first task is to win the market, that is, to win the hearts of the audience, so they need to do everything they can to prove their ability to investors and gain a foothold in the market. In this environment, the Zhang Yimou people may not be able to cope with the fist and fist kung fu.
For example, there are comedies, which have always been the most popular in the market. Under the background of the gradual decline of Hong Kong comedies, domestic comedies are experiencing explosive development. It seems that Bo Huang, Xú Zhēng and Wang Baoqiang are all comedies’ successors. It is precisely this kind of film that Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Jiang Wen are not good at, because comedy needs genes. Jiang Wen is the best of the three masters. As long as he does comedy seriously, it will be powerful, and the opposite is Waterloo. The sense of comedy in Let the Bullets Fly is natural, close to history and very modern, with great influence; What impressed me the most in Evil Doesn’t Suppress Righteousness is "Zhu Yuanzhang’s Portrait" and "Chiang Kai-shek’s Diary". Although they have their own personal interests, they are not inferior. Zhang Yimou also did the urban comedy "Let’s Talk Well", but he just played with tickets. As the name of the Buddhist master became more and more popular, he became less and less diligent in comedy. Chen Kaige basically doesn’t make comedies, because he is too serious and deep. Maybe comedies don’t fit his position.
There are also war movies. Wolf Warriors 2 is an insurmountable box office champion in domestic movies. Unfortunately, none of these three masters have any real war films. Others are detective mystery films, youth campus films and tomb raiding magic films, among which the best ones have higher box office than the three directors, but can you say that the three directors are inferior to them in artistic cultivation and directing skills? On the contrary, if the three masters did not make serious mistakes, their quality was basically guaranteed. For example, Chen Kaige’s "The Legend of the Demon Cat" has a grand historical narrative pattern. Through a peek at the literary truth, it shows the spirit of the prosperous Tang Dynasty and the lie logic that is kept secret, which is an accurate restoration of the traditional meaning. Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, a traditional landscape painting style, presents China’s traditional cultural symbols and traditional artistic conception to the extreme, which is unmatched in domestic films. Jiang Wen’s "Evil Doesn’t Suppress Righteousness" adapted the original text with a single theme of revenge into a distinctive hodgepodge of the Republic of China, and the complex historical metaphor clues and imaginative imagination were integrated, which others really couldn’t shoot. At this time, the master was the master.
Is that because they don’t like the box office? In fact, none of the three directors dare to say that they never consider the market. On the contrary, I think they have been actively embracing the market now. When Zhang Yimou filmed "The Great Wall", he said bluntly that he wanted to make a popcorn movie. Chen Kaige also filmed Search, an adaptation of an online novel, trying to get close to the audience. Jiang Wen’s "One Step Away" and "Evil Doesn’t Suppress Righteousness" try to give up the overly artistic narrative style, but the market effect is not ideal. The reason is that the changes of the times have brought about changes in popular culture, market needs and audience aesthetics are changing. The question is: can the masters still accurately touch the audience’s high points now?
Box office is not everything.
Movies still need masters.
Benjamin mentioned the concept of "halo" in "Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" — — That kind of authenticity, uniqueness, sacredness and sense of distance. Halo can be a specific feature of a work or a unique atmosphere of an era. In the era of large-scale mechanical reproduction of art, the halo of traditional classic works of art is gradually disappearing. Why is it so difficult to have the masterpieces of the former European masters now? Do we still need masters in this era?
This year is recognized as a small year of film and television, and the explosion of film and television is mostly due to the pursuit of the so-called "cool", upgrading and fighting monsters, and being pleased with the enmity, invincible and countless fans. The pursuit of flat narrative is a trend of world film and television, especially represented by Hollywood blockbusters, which is invincible all over the world. This is understandable. In fact, this is an inevitable trend of the development of popular culture. As Wang Yichuan, a scholar, said in The Myth of Zhang Yimou: The End and Its Significance: When the film art no longer takes poetic enlightenment as its own responsibility, but takes commercial success as its basic goal, the enlightenment culture will have to taste the bitter fruit of defeat. The end of Zhang Yimou myth indicates that the enlightenment myth and personality myth of intellectuals came to an end in 1980s, and reveals the inevitability of the transformation of enlightenment culture into mass culture.
As a popular culture, movies have been subdivided in the current China film environment, and there are still boundaries between art films and commercial films. The perfect combination of business and art is every director’s dream, but such works are rare all over the world, and the Palme d ‘Or works at Cannes Film Festival can’t bring you huge box office. However, this does not mean that the film art must be flat. Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Jiang Wen’s artistic originality may not be at its peak, but the works they create with their heart will immediately make waves like boulders as long as they pass through the market. Once again, "Evil does not suppress righteousness" strongly publicizes the Dionysian spirit full of hormonal narrative passion, and "The Legend of the Demon Cat" reveals the deep core of traditional culture. Although these two films failed to achieve the box office results of commercial blockbusters in the same period, they will eventually be proved by history.
After more than ten years of marketization, China’s films have developed rapidly in industry, and commercialization has been immersed in China’s films. However, the film market has cooled down this year, indicating that industrialization cannot solve all problems, and the market needs good works. On the one hand, good works need the accumulation of industry, on the other hand, the accumulation and inheritance of art are inevitable. Every era needs Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Jiang Wen of every era. In fact, China’s film art exploration has not stopped. More new generation art film directors, such as Bi Gan and Xin Yukun, are also emerging, bringing hope to domestic films. The times need masters of art, but they need different artistic originality continuously.
It is said that Zhang Yimou’s first film "Red Sorghum" will be released again this year. How many people will go to see this Jiang Wen’s fifth-generation masterpiece, which really brought China movies to the world? This can be regarded as a test of the China film market, as well as the film audience. (Hu Xiang)
