This is a participatory documentary on the subject of slums. It records the experience of director Zena in the red light district of Kolkata. Zena relied on teaching photography to children born in brothels to save them from becoming sex workers. Like other participatory documentaries, the narrator of the story itself becomes a character with a point of view. The director plays the role of a "reporter" and a catalyst in the film. She hides behind the camera and enters the screen world at any time as needed. This form of recording can be traced back to the real cinema movement in France.
Reality films, as they are literally, require direct filming of what actually happened, without pre-writing a script, and rejecting fiction. The production team of a real movie generally has only two or three people, and the technical equipment is also very simple. Different from the "direct film" in the United States of the same period, the latter sought to avoid interfering with the process of events, and the real film gave the audience the impression that the director was not a bystander. The interviews and dialogues of the characters are also similar to the director's role in this film.
Although real film tolerates technical imperfections, it still has its own unique art form requirements.
1. Handheld Cameras and the "Principle of Proximity"
The hand-held camera is a superficial feature of real film that makes the cameraman's presence easy to see, but also gives the viewer a sense of experience. First of all, the slight shaking caused by the shoulder shooting throughout the whole film gives the camera a real life-like "breathing feeling", thereby shortening the distance between the audience and the film; secondly, many dialogue scenes in this film are made of The roll movement is done instead of editing, preserving spatial coherence and rhythm.
The first thing that hand-held photography has to overcome is that the audience realizes that the camera is shaking, and therefore cannot integrate into the situation of the characters' lives. This requires some action shots that dominate the frame or fill the frame, such as walking feet and writing hands. In order to achieve this effect, it is often necessary to be very close to the person when shooting, which is the "closeness principle". The film is mainly "close" to the faces of the characters. In this film, director Zena has shown great potential to accurately capture the demeanor. She is good at showing the deep and rich spiritual world behind her eyes (although she seems to have never filmed it later), which is a high test of reflexes and decisiveness for a documentary like this. It is rare for the medium. Although the movement of the face is simple, blinking the eyes and pursing the mouth, it can convey the undercurrent of the character's heart, which is often more moving than the movement of the scenery. We can get a glimpse of the director's perfection just from the eyes of this Dutch girl. She is a passerby who appeared when Aggie introduced her work to tourists at the Armstrong Photography Exhibition. We did not see the photo itself, but the charm and wonder of the photo It was completely interpreted by her with focused eyes.
Another practice of "close to the principle" is to follow the camera. In a set of long follow-focus shots introducing the environment of the girl Kiki’s brothel, the camera simulates the perspective of a tourist, retreating from the brothel to a gloomy and dilapidated corridor, following the back of the heroine, and traversing the rooms along the narrow and crowded stairs. . It uses the abundant indoor natural light lighting on the floor to present massive information to the audience, which belongs to the general movie narrative logic. Although the camera shakes a lot, but because it is aimed at relatively full and obvious movements, and it can interact and contact with the characters, the film has a more pleasant and relaxed emotional atmosphere; the connection between the field and the field can be deliberately out of focus. Wipe and change, it looks natural and flexible. One of the greatest strengths of the hand-held photography shown here is that it has a free-deformed charm, and the viewer ignores the roughness of the quality of the footage.
This film uses a clever transition strategy in order to naturally splicing together the fragmented materials captured every day: focus from the virtual to the real, then watch the action, and finally rely on a pull-back zoom to the distant view to explain the environment ( Such as the following shot of the record unlocking). Due to the unclear information, the virtual focus can give the audience a space to come out of the previous scene experience; start shooting from the "hand" where the action occurs, maintaining the characteristics of continuous and smooth motion of the film, and the action is first and then the environment is explained, then Arouse the audience's subconscious surprise and interest.
2. Looking for the perspective of regional characteristics
An excellent documentary should try to find an angle to make the time and space of the event recognizable. This is also one of the basic signs to distinguish great movies from second- and third-rate movies in real-life themes. The angle found in this film is color and music.
Indians have been a beauty-loving nation since ancient times, especially for strong and bright colors. Even in the red-light district of Kolkata, which is known for its filth and poor image management, people still wear colorful clothes, and the walls are painted in bright blues and yellows, even as small as furniture and clay pots. In order to accentuate the regional color of the film, the director deliberately used a camera with extremely high saturation. This also has the effect of making the picture more eye-catching and making the distressed and humble room expressive. Because of these flamboyant colors, the audience remembered the different home environments of several children, such as the earth-brown walls of Aji's house and the crimson light of the stairs of Baby's house.
The sound system of this film is rich and complex, mostly using natural sounds, but the background music played by native Indian musical instruments also left a deep impression on the audience. Every time Indian folk music appears, it serves to create a different emotional atmosphere and fit different spatial characteristics.
When introducing several protagonists and children at the beginning of the film, in order to set off their innocent and optimistic childishness, Karnataka percussion and string music are used, which are characterized by fast pronunciation, fickle rhythm, and uneven pitch. A joyous mood also makes people feel absurd, as if the red light streets are full of outsiders who don't understand magical reality. This kind of music is very suitable for use between narrow stairs, corridors and buildings. The short and fast sounds do not have a wide extension space like the long ones. It fits the narrow characteristics of these places and can also echo the footsteps of the characters.
There is also a kind of background music composed of long notes of sitar and female vocals. Long notes can make people feel attentive and can sustain a kind of emotion, just like Japanese Noh music with constant resentment. On the way back after the children watched the sunset from the beach, the camera used this piece of music when the camera followed a girl watching the women who were standing on the street selling spring. With the cold and hard picture tone and time-lapse slow-motion projection, it seemed to convey a kind of The long-lasting sense of unfortunate fate also lays the tone for the crisis that the children will face next.
3. The dramatic conflict of daily life
A real film requires the director to detect events in time, accurately predict the emergence of dramatic conflicts, and requires the film crew to act swiftly and act decisively. The classical Western narrative theory says that as long as there is an action, there will be a reaction, and if there is an action, there will be a reaction. When the hand hits the table, the table hits the hand. If you look at the surrounding world with this kind of vision of discovering storms and waves in plainness, contradictions are actually not difficult to find. In documentaries, often a conflict does not need to be resolved immediately after it arises, because the director's task is to record the true continuation of the time.
For example, the foot shot of the child below is of the girl Kiki's younger brother. Because of her mother's sex work, she cannot take care of the child, so she has to put the child's feet on the threshold to prevent him from tampering. The next shot is of Kiki on the balcony Looking down, this feeling of being restrained in action and anxiously waiting for the adult to return is a trivial contradiction, and the director just noticed it. And this contradiction doesn't need to be resolved, it's just to elicit Kiki's unsound family background.
Another example is when the girl Ma Ji was fortunate enough to be sent to a girls' boarding school, the director recorded her grandmother's reaction after hearing the news. Grandma said she wouldn't let Maggie go on Thursday, because it was the day her mother died, and she felt guilty and ominous whenever she did something big on Thursday. The emotional tension in this case was actually less than in the previous case, because the grandmother was quickly and easily persuaded. But it is not only a small resistance to the protagonist's pursuit of a better life, but also conveys more humanistic and social information, allowing the audience to see the big from the small. It turns out that the life of Indians is generally filled with this kind of superstitious obsession, which is also a side view. A great opportunity to shape the image of the protagonist.
4. Unexpected actions and incidents
Documentary filming should remain alert to inadvertently moving moments. Sometimes a sudden insertion of something in the filming should be recorded instinctively, judging whether to continue filming. If you feel that you have not caught it and let it go, it is a simple "accidental action". But if the action is filmed until it ends, it's a self-contained "accident." And it's often the photographer's fault.
For example, the buddy who is sitting in the car on the road and smiling at the camera was originally going to shoot director Zena and the parents of the child to discuss sending the child to school, but the photographer walked across the road ahead of himself, and put this Passers-by's "stunning glance" was filmed, and then let the director enter the painting. Although this buddy is just a small episode that evokes a happy atmosphere, these seemingly unimportant "idle pens" are indispensable for a documentary that needs to cover a million things.
"Side-jump shot" is a close-up that has already appeared in the panoramic shot of a scene and was later shot. Side-jump shots are very popular in editing. When the characters in the dialogue scene have spoken for too long, and the audience has passed the "sensitive time" for the scene and is boring, a side-jump shot is the magic weapon to save the editing table, for a Bringing dead scenes to life. For example, when the children were taken to the zoo by Zena to take a photo, they gave a close-up of the camel, the giraffe and the elephant, which was a side jump. Nearly 30% of the film is made up of side-jump shots, which free the camera from the interviews and present the audience with a full picture of Calcutta's rich and diverse society.
There is also an accident here, and it is a daily conflict outside the group of children protagonists recruited by the director. A child downstairs in the brothel ran upstairs and stole something. The housewife immediately beat the child, and even came to the fence and cursed the child's grandmother. The vicious words were unbearable. This incident is not uncommon. It is commendable that the director creatively used other characters in the scene of the incident to give the reaction of a boy and a girl who were listening to the two conflicting families. Their eyes were too rich in content or helpless. , or pity, the state of existence conveyed can resonate with any audience.
Epilogue
I like this documentary, not just the subject matter, because such living conditions, such contradictions, and such tragedies are not uncommon in most cities in India. But director Yu Zena, and her sincere photographer, made me feel a kind of artistic self-consciousness unique to documentaries. This kind of self-consciousness is the keen observation of life, the sensibility that penetrates into the heart through the eyes of the characters, and the natural sensitivity to different space environments. This is an ability that many masters of feature films will envy, and it cannot be achieved with expensive technical means by peers who stick to the main line and are unwilling to broaden their horizons.
If I hope to enter a hall-level art academy in the future, I should also start with the practice of documentaries, but I want to get out of my small and monotonous personal world and explore the infinite charm of other people's reality. This film will definitely inspire me.
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