The ultimate in the ultimate proposition?

Chadrick 2022-01-28 08:28:12

#The ultimate proposition of the ultimate?

- "A Journey Through Time" by Malik

Every director with a philosophical and academic background seems to be tireless in exploring the ultimate proposition, just like the director of an action movie wants to try thousands of giants fighting with various hot and cold weapons on a large scale. This kind of documentary often brings the latest photography technology and the most shocking pictures, hoping to drive the audience in front of the screen to praise them together.

In Venice in September, Time Travel was more or less one of the things that drew people to the small and peaceful island of Lido, Malik said: "It's been in my head for thirty years, my greatest One of the dreams". He seems to have been immersed in it for a long time, and has been collecting materials and preparing for shooting - as early as 1979, a feature film called "Q" with a lot of metaphors and discussion time was conceived, but unfortunately it did not continue; but the framing Some of the Australian Aboriginal hunting scenes were used in "Journey in Time"; and the film's knowledge base began earlier in the 1970s. He interviewed some of the top scientists in the field and made a lot of notes. In 2003, he urged the director of photography, Paul Atkins, to go to the erupting Hawaiian submarine volcano and use an IMAX camera to record the surging lava. Because it was too close, one of the handheld's boots was too close. melted into the soil.

In the end, the documentary about time and the universe was made into two versions: a 40-minute IMAX version, narrated by Brad Pitt; and a 90-minute regular version, narrated by Cate Blanchett. Douglas Trumbull, who worked on visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, served as visual consultant; and Don Glass, who worked on The Matrix trilogy, served as special effects supervisor. The latter revealed Malik's stubborn insistence on making each shot appear to be by a different artist, a paranoid aesthetic that insists the two stay in the studio for months at a time, fiddling with various chemistries. Drugs, tried dangerous combinations, and recorded them with high-speed cameras; some star shifts before the formation of the solar system were all overturned after trying CG animation production, and they were filmed sweatingly with artificial models and lighting and smoke effects. The effect can be called The pinnacle of studio lighting. So this American documentary masterpiece, which has been delayed since 2013, the first thing to climb out of the quagmire of the production company's lawsuit is to go to Europe to show off the visual effects.

So we see scalding magma being rapidly cooled into rock on the ocean floor, a swarm of translucent sea crabs bobbing on the tides to the chants of Gregorian chants; wild earth crowded with large reptiles destroyed by meteorites, the first The total-finned fish that only climbed onto the land is just about to move, while other planktons are swaying in the colorful light; after a lightning, the primitive man who uses fire for the first time has a surprised and smug expression; the cosmic explosion and the combination of sperm and eggs are edited Together, it seems to imply some common truths.

"Mother, am I not your child? Why did you leave me, mother?" - Cate Blanchett's slightly desolate voice, like a prayer, like a confession. Every time these words appear, people can't help but be excited for a while - "You wake me up, the endless river, the mother of all things, with you, all things wait..." The beggar walking on the street, the Russian country wedding, put Chinese children with kites, Cambodian sacrificial ceremonies... These "found videos" shot in the street are interspersed in many ways, echoing the overall delicate and gorgeous picture - like their rough reflections, but also as if they are inductive The visual concept of sexuality is refuted one by one.

However, we can still glimpse the embarrassment that the Philosopher-Director backed by "National Geographic" has repeatedly pondered: Although people often shrug and say "No way, this is Malik", it is actually frustrating. Yes, Malik did not continue to be Malik this time—these National Geographic-style landscape and portrait photography, with their overly sophisticated composition and aesthetics, eroded the compassion and generosity brought by the poetic text; it should have been Malik The most good at interweaving theories, the complex and repeated dialectical process has been replaced by the evolutionary calculus of the visual stacking of images. Those early mammals modeled in 3D, the primitive man with dentures and grinning at the camera, showed a gorgeousness. cheapness; and if you get to its spiritual core, it's nothing more than a reinterpretation of the clichés of evolution. Looking at these stacks, we are forced to accept a truth - most of the time, science is not poetry, and it is far from it. When scientificity covers poetry, the information conveyed is so close to the daily viewing experience of human beings. As if you were sitting in front of the Nature Channel drinking a beer and watching a lion hunt an antelope, there was no surprise; everything, perfect as it was, was still within the viewer's imagination.

What's more, this unknowing surrender (or limited talent) makes the whole film immersed in the shadow of a mass media of consumerism; when the film expresses the impact of the meteorite on the earth, life is ruined; in "Find the Video" The reference is clearly to the chaos in the Middle East; in the end, in order to express the stability and spread of civilization, the vulgar little girl ran towards the green tree and was taken out... However, Malik was always sought after, and people lined up at the Venice Film Festival. The long line, in the film screening, like it or not, almost everyone watched to the end, and there was a long round of applause, like a group of children in a planetarium (Pitt's shorter version is indeed used for popular science); "Journey of Time" was huge, and another documentary "Thread" at the film festival, also known as "visual symphonic poetry", was more silent and calm, and people kept leaving the screening room, and there was applause after the end.

Throughout the past, documentaries on grand propositions have seemed to be equivalent to a grand range of material—from Godfrey Reggio’s “Life Trilogy” to Jan Altis-Bertrand’s From Ron Frick's "Tian Di Xuan Huang" and "Reincarnation" to Kevin MacDonald's "A Day in the Life" with YouTube, all of them have become more and more intense on the way of building materials around the world. If it is said that in the 1980s and 1990s, when human beings gradually began to reflect on the adverse consequences of economic overdevelopment on the environment, wars, and the crisis of urbanization, in that era of trying to re-face nature and origin, this method still carried A certain avant-garde color and vigilance; then, even in a third-tier city in China, the propaganda films start to list faces and group portraits without exception, and use time-lapse photography to build a contemporary group style - this kind of vision with God's perspective, using Compassionate but harmless to humans and animals, the expression of ambiguous attitude shows enough vagueness and embarrassment.

From "Life Trilogy" to "Journey of Time", from a slam in the 1980s to today's visual journey of spiritual meditation, in the past three decades, whether it is experimental, creative power and ambition, from the form When it comes to the content, it makes people feel more and more "no species". Although it has a lot to do with the creator and his thinking process, it also induces people to think uncomfortably about the fading temperament of the times. Repeatedly consuming the spirit of mankind for many years? What is it that makes people neglect thinking and introspection in recent decades? In an era when everyone can see the world through the Internet, do we still need to pursue the ultimate proposition, do we replace those plausible discussions, those distant worries with empty meditation and empty experience ? Do you need to turn yourself on or off?

——2016.9 in Lido Island

View more about Voyage of Time: Life's Journey reviews

Extended Reading
  • Noelia 2022-04-19 09:03:04

    Well, I cut down the scenes with no one to 60 minutes and said that I can’t pretend to be the BBC. Maybe the score can be higher.

  • Layne 2022-04-21 09:03:39

    There is absolutely no difference between the way Master Ma makes a documentary and a feature film.

Voyage of Time: Life's Journey quotes

  • [repeated line]

    Narrator: Mother.

  • Narrator: [opening lines] Mother. You walked with me then. In the silence. Before there was a world. Before night or day. Alone in the stillness. Where nothing was.