"Rashomon" is a short story written by the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke in 1915. It was later adapted into a film by Akira Kurosawa and became known to the world. It gradually became a proper noun with a special meaning, meaning "every Individuals can only see part of the truth." Coppola's "Conversation" (also translated as "The Great Conspiracy of Eavesdropping"), because of the rich connotation and allegorical orientation of the film text, is enough to extend from the inside of the film to the film and the audience, and the world inside and outside the film to constitute human nature and human existence. Rashomon in a sense. As a "dream-making machine", movies have a natural advantage in reshaping reality and blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The language of the film is based on the audio-visual space-time quadrilateral. An excellent film can fully explore the language potential of the film itself and achieve a more "real" magical effect. Let's first take a look at how this film uses excellent sound. A "deception effect" is achieved.
The opening of the film is a high-altitude look down, the camera is gradually advancing "God's perspective", coupled with the monitoring sound, from the very beginning, the audience is brought into the position of omnipotence and omnipotence. "Darkness", as the audience, we have a higher status than the protagonist, because we are also "peeping" into the protagonist's world, watching how he works, watching his cautiousness, and watching his relaxed state. At the same time, the voice, as a "second-class citizen" in the two film languages of audio-visual, has always been suppressed by vision and only exists as a vassal. In this film, the voice "turns over a serf and becomes the master" has a more important narrative function than vision. We followed the lead and listened to the recording over and over again. Although we are "all-knowing and omnipotent" in vision, but "he knows is I know" in sound, at this time, in terms of importance, our subconscious "default" to the picture makes vision invisible. , and the sound, as the part we care more about, has become the dominant component that drives the narrative and attracts our attention, which is the so-called "blind man's ear is very smart" effect. The director grasped this point and took us step by step into the "labyrinth of truth" with the protagonist, so that in the end the situation suddenly changed, the development of the event was unexpected, and after being surprised, I suddenly realized that we were not omniscient.
According to Lacan's "Mirror Theory", the screen acts as a mirror, reflecting the world in which the protagonist lives, and at the same time, the connection between the world presented in the film and the real world presents a complex effect of "mirror in a mirror". As a suspense film, the film puts the audience in the "all-knowing" point of view at the beginning, and with the shattering of the hero's imagination, our movie hallucinations are also broken. It seems that the broken mirror is just a "mirror within a mirror", and there are more A mirror, this last giant mirror, is our reality.
The male protagonist presents the image of the "urban wanderer" described by Benjamin, and at the same time has the psychological depression of modernity. After the explosion of this period of time, the only belief of the protagonist is also broken (never casually mentioning God to fight. Broken Madonna), the act of smashing the Madonna leads to another layer of metaphor in the film, that is, how the ubiquitous ideological control of modern society shatters "human existence".
Different from the extreme control of ideology in "Eavesdropping" (also translated as "The Lives of Others") through the narrative strategy of "human nature finally triumphs over power", this film's criticism of ideological control can be described as cold to the bone. The male protagonist in the film is "incomplete" and "self-fulfilling" at the same time. The image of the male protagonist is typical of Marx's "alienation". As a professional and advanced monitor, the male lead's life is self-contained. But there is a turbulent undercurrent lurking beneath this peaceful consummation. Paradoxically, the male protagonist's professional ethics are based on anti-moral monitoring of his work objects. The elite status at work brings material satisfaction in life, but it also causes "lack of love and trust". He can't trust anyone, and he can't love anyone, but he has the desire to love and trust at the same time, and the most basic Human ethics, such a temporary stable situation is based on a weak foundation, that is, the situation where the hero stays out of the matter, and when the hero discovers his conscience, 'crosses the professional boundary' without authorization, and pursues the truth, the consequence is "comparing to the truth". What you think is even scarier", the hero's human morality was shattered in front of "We are watching you". In the last paragraph, the male protagonist digs three feet in the ground, vowing to find the listener, and it doesn't matter whether the listener exists or not. When the monitor becomes the monitored, the gears of the efficient machine of modern society turn into operation, drawing the male protagonist into a vicious circle, endless hell.
"The Dialogue" was completed in 1974, two years after the "Watergate Incident". At this moment, the United States was facing a comprehensive crisis. New Hollywood, as a pioneer of "anti-American mainstream values", criticized American society very sharply. "Watergate" first exposed the hypocrisy and darkness of politics. This film is both a metaphor for the ubiquity of power, and "listening" (which can be extended to surveillance), as a tool of ideological control, through Coppola's play , revealing its ubiquitous qualities.
In 2013, nearly 40 years after the film was released, Snowden provided classified documents to the media, which led to the "exposure" of several secret intelligence surveillance programs of the U.S. government, including the "Prism" project. , he blocked the crack of the hotel room door with a pillow to prevent eavesdropping. He also put a large red hood over his head and laptop before entering his password to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them. In today's society, surveillance is everywhere. Our information from the inside out is uploaded to the Internet, and all our behaviors through the Internet are monitored, and these are carried out without our knowledge or awareness. Even we are used to such surveillance and voluntarily upload our information. Zizek once mentioned that with the development of modern information and biotechnology, it has been possible to implant brain chips and control people's behavior through instructions without being aware of it. He even thought that all this was his own "free will". ".
About dystopian allegories, one is George Orwell's "1984", in the novel "Big Brother is watching you" has become a symbolic symbol of totalitarian society and is widely used. With the development of the information society, ideological control has not been achieved (or has been achieved) by violence as Orwell imagined, but has been achieved in a silent way by borrowing the role of the media, so the development of reality is more like another A dystopian language "Brave New World", we are "entertaining to death", we have no chance of escape.
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