Among the Hollywood genre films, there is a unique genre - musicals, and this "Jazz Spring and Autumn" belongs to an alternative musical. Different from traditional musicals such as "Song in the Rain" and "The Sound of Music", "Jazz Spring and Autumn" is more like a semi-autobiographical story presented by the director with songs and dances. It is different from the song and dance that represents joy in the usual sense. It takes pain as the main body and obscurely shows a brilliant Broadway director who is addicted to sex, tobacco, and alcohol in an unrestrained and corrupt life, and is finally defeated by heart disease. , and the perfect work of art in his heart also disappeared with him on the cold operating table with the song "Goodbye My Love".
1. Depression and Lightness
Musical films are a combination of drama and film, and the combination of montage and theatrical stage together endows musicals with dazzling charm. The most dramatic scene in the film is the scene where Ji Dean and everyone read the script. When everyone knew the content of the script, their first reaction was to burst into laughter. But the director deliberately left only Ji Dean's subjective voice. This is a very creative and very obvious audio-visual performance of the individual spirit. The noisy and cheerful environment is in stark contrast to Ji Dean's serious and silent expression. He is like a soul detached from the body, out of tune with the world, and the depression and melancholy in his heart cannot be resolved.
The singing and dancing that should have been cheerful, but took the operating table as the object, heralded the coming of death, and the repressed state of matter and the cheerful soul together created the grandest thought rehearsal. This is Ji Dean's most satisfying work - "Hospital Rhapsody". The song and dance are divided into five parts, namely "anger, denial, negotiation, depression, acceptance", and this is exactly what Ji Dean was after learning about his illness. psychological process. Before the performance, the audience under the stage lit the candles in their hands together. Hundreds of candles were beating. The warm yellow lights contrasted sharply with the icy mirror stage presented next, which was the fierce collision of life and death. The stage gradually lights up, and under the splendid colorful lights, it is the director's most abstract presentation of the flashy world. The lyrics are Ji Dean's farewell to the world, but the tune is cheerful, making the viewers have a complex emotion that coexists with depression and lightness. The director's quick-cut editing of character close-ups, close-ups, and panoramic shots forms a perfect combination of lighting, choreography, music and performance, which can be called the most perfect song and dance performance in the whole film. After the performance, Ji Dean hugged his wife, daughter and lover off the stage, but the face of the girl in white flashed by, a kind of death repression instantly pulled the audience back to reality from the cheerful atmosphere, and had to face him directly Frigid remains. The director has coexisted the two emotions of repression and lightness in the film from beginning to end, reminding us of the inevitability of Ji Dean's death.
The dream and reality
As a film that focuses on the psychology of characters, we can interpret it with the two theories contained in Freud's psychoanalysis. First, the unconscious theory divides human consciousness into subconscious, preconscious, and conscious. The fragmentary pictures interspersed in the film are just the shuttle of the protagonist's consciousness, and the hazy and dreamy pictures even render a kind of dream-like psychology. The dialogue with the beautiful girl in white is interspersed throughout the film. From the initial inability to see the girl's face, it becomes clearer and clearer, symbolizing the approaching death step by step. The seemingly innocent girl is actually the director's metaphor for death. Secondly, in the theory of dream interpretation, people's dreams are divided into two levels, namely surface meaning and deep meaning. In reality, he is a talented director who is persistent in his work; in dreams, he is more willing to reveal his true thoughts; in the dialogue with death, his character image is fuller - a man who is unfaithful to marriage and Love does not believe, very promiscuous degenerate. And these are only the superficial meanings conveyed by the dream, and the projection from the dream to the reality in the deep meaning is the key. The director's innuendo to the family and society through the protagonist's moral concept and style of doing things is undoubtedly revealed through the details. There are countless beauties around him, but he doesn't believe in love. After a failed marriage, he still goes his own way. This behavior seems absurd, but it is actually a search for himself. He tried to find his own voice in reality to prove his specialness, but it turned out that he never found it. His self can only be conveyed through dreams. There is no escape in a socialist society.
The film repeatedly appeared a close-up quick-cut scene, showing his daily life after getting up every day. Dropping eye drops, taking medicine, listening to music, and finally saying to the mirror, "It's a good show, everyone." These fragmented and repeated scenes interspersed in the film extend the narrative time to a certain extent, and the audience feels him even more. The tedious and dull daily life also shows that he is a director who loves his work very much. This scene in the film appears five times in total, but at the end, the editing speed becomes slower and slower, so that in the last time, he coughed so violently that he could not speak a complete sentence in front of the mirror. Through such repetition of the lens, the deteriorating condition of his body is reflected, and it also lays the groundwork for the tragedy at the end.
The most brilliant part of the director is that the use of stream-of-consciousness techniques blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality. The psychology of the characters is expressed through dreams. Song and dance also exist as part of the psychology of the characters.
3. Death and Sex
In the film directed by Gideon, a comedian speaks on stage constantly, and the topic of speech always revolves around death and sex. The dream feeling caused by the quick cuts and the voice-over is accompanied by the hazy picture, acting as his psychological role to speak to the audience, achieving another dream that is achieved in imagination. "I can see into your thoughts, and what you are thinking about is the fear of your own mediocrity." Such a sentence once again enriched Ji Dean's psychological dynamics, a person who is always looking for his own existence. Although Ji Dean is a talented and well-known Broadway director, he is extremely domineering and romantic. He is always lacking about "faithfulness", but he is very familiar with "sex". A sense of distrust of marriage and humanity has always lingered in his heart, and even the "love" he said when saving his girlfriend was only because he thought it was helpful to him at the moment. It was precisely because of his unrestrainedness that even after being sick, he still held parties in the hospital, smoked and drank, and flirted with female nurses, which led to his death. In fact, in the first half of the film, the director used a set of quick cuts to flash such an ending.
In Nietzsche's Dionysian spirit, Dionysian art has the pain and revelry of destroying the principle of individualization and returning to the original matrix, while the despair and joy brought by death and sex are also homogenous. It makes us realize that everything that exists must be prepared for an extremely painful decline, but a metaphysical consolation makes us really become primitive creatures in a short moment, and feel the unstoppable desire for survival and happiness. This is the The ecstasy out of life that sex brings. Therefore, Ji Dean tries to use the pleasure brought by sex to find the meaning of his own existence and obtain the redemption of his life.
As a semi-autobiographical musical, this is the director's expression of his own psychological analysis and personal spirit by using singing and dancing. The seemingly contradictory elements are actually interrelated. The brisk stage makes repressed emotions nowhere to hide, dreams lay the groundwork for the process of reality, and uncontrolled sex promotes the ending of death. Combined with the use of stream of consciousness techniques and the skillful capture of singing and dancing scenes, the reality and dreams are formed. Perfect blend. The director turned the operating table into a stage, showing a wonderful performance. The stage has become Ji Dean's most ideal cemetery, and the film is also the director's ideal home.
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