"Strange Talk" directed by Kobayashi Masaki is adapted from Koizumi Yakumo's novel of the same name. Like "Strange Tales from a Liaozhai", it tells four different strange stories, with narration throughout. Although it has horror elements, the form of "Strange Talk" in the 1960s is obviously different from the typical Japanese horror films of later generations, such as "The Grudge" and "Midnight Bell", which is even more different from American horror films. Going back in film history, it should be seen that "Strange Talk" has inherited more of the techniques of German expressionist films and combined it with the content of Japanese culture.
In the first story, "Black Hair," the narration storyteller-like storytelling emerges and leads the audience through four stories. The sense of stage and scenery in the lens also appeared, and it became more and more prosperous in the four stories. Initially, we see the exterior scene of an overgrown courtyard. In the interior scene, we can see a slightly unreasonable but acceptable warm light of realism. When the protagonist samurai leaves his wife for the city, a large number of The location and natural light sources also give the image a more realistic tone. Later, when the samurai returned home, the dark sky and the interior suddenly caused a large shadow or shading in the picture, and in the ruins, the same wife as the samurai had imagined before appeared, and the image at this time began to turn from the realism style. Stage sense. The main reason is that the light has changed from warm light to white light, and the wife's face looks much whiter than before, and in the dark room, there is only one candle that flickers weakly on the walls and floor illuminated by white light. The warm-colored firelight and the unrealistic fill light make it easy to think of the stage of the drama. Compared with the previous realism style, discomfort begins to appear outside the plot. The pale walls are full of footage. When the samurai finds out that his wife, who slept together all night, is actually a skeleton, his face gradually loses its color as he escapes from the haunted house. There is no natural footage such as the sky from the beginning to the end. Running, still continues the texture of the stage.
This stage quality continues in the following "Snow Girl", "Exterior", the surreal sky full of clouds and moon with obvious traces of painting, and gradually turned into eyes, reminiscent of Hitchcock's "Doctor Edward" The eye of Dali in the dream sky. As for lighting, the previous white light evolved into a more expressive blue light to show the appearance of Snow Maiden, the color is as gorgeous as the Italian lead-yellow movies such as "The Storm". The surreal sky on the exterior and the expressionist lighting on the interior give the entire sequence an artificial feel to the stage. "No Erfangyi" starts with a realistic tide and turns to the "storytelling space" of playing and singing. In the pipa and the aria, the Genpei family battles and the "pool"-shaped sea under the surreal sky in the story. Later, the space where the dead ghost of Heike invited Yoshiichi to play and sing also adopted such a surreal stage.
The fourth chapter, "In the Teacup", is more reliant on narrative. It begins by telling the audience that the story comes from an Edo-era writer, and adopts a nesting method, so that the ghost of the teacup in his pen appears within the "reality" itself. middle.
In Strange Talk, we see two different non-naturalistic image narrative methods: non-material speech such as narration, playing and singing, and writing, and material transformation of light and scenery. As mentioned above, these methods bring artificial and stage feel, but also bring the following questions: what is the difference between such images and theatrical video? Or does its power come from the "traditional arts" of drama, painting, playing and singing?
First of all, we have to make sure that theatrical video is the reproduction or recording of the drama, it is the capture of time, and the image of the stage sense is the carving of time. The forms of drama, playing and singing are all about presence, and video does not value presence, it is the avatar of presence, it is a mechanical reproduction. Then when the narration of the narration, the unnatural lighting, and everything else, they provide the option, or focus, for "replication." What they create is a cinematic alienation. For theatre, the stage is the frame, the artificial feeling is its foundation, and the foundation of film is photography—the reproduction of reality.
The unnatural alienation should prompt us to think intellectually, but the above-mentioned alienation elements in the video seem to make the audience more captivated by the atmosphere created by the elements. The reason is that these narrative methods are not symbolic, there is no huge metaphor behind them, they serve and contrast the surface of the image. Going deeper into it, these "distancing" are actually more suitable to be called "weird". Like the theme "Strange Talk", weirdness and discomfort are the effects that these techniques want to achieve. The scriptures, and (in the eyes of those unfamiliar with Japanese culture) bizarre playing and singing, all constitute a spectacle for the senses.
Therefore, the positioning of "Strange Talk" is not so much horror as it is "hunting". We are always under the safe stage, there is no sudden jump scare, we are more like a zoo than a haunted house or a roller coaster. Here, the simulacrum of the real stage, the "stage in front of the camera", has carried out a transcendence of the ontology. The "realism" on the stage has become the formalism in front of the camera, and the means of alienation has become the assistant of immersion. Just as he will no longer pay attention to the stage of images by focusing on the drama, the "enlightening" nature of the original works to persuade people to do good, and in the images they also become the enjoyment of the senses. The refraction of media undoubtedly changes our attention and the information conveyed, and the medium of image is a medium enough to accommodate various media information, and their combination will also change the narrative of pure media.
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