Before I wrote this film critique, Film Slow Singing just won the “Best Artistic originality Visual Presentation” of FIRST International Film Festival. I just aware that this movie also has been selected in the 68th San Sebastian International Film Festival. These two great news are undoubtedly, important certifications about the quality of this movie.The fact that Director Xingyi Dong's debut feature has reached such a high level certainly makes people look forward to his future work.
...However, when I watched the FIRST ceremony, I thought it deserved to be selected for both the best feature film and the best documentary. This opinion is also the most intuitive feeling I have during the process of watching the film. I would say that this film has found a form of cinematic truth, and the audiences should not define this film by any known classification of film types. The classification of this film's cinematic category has already involved the truth outlined in this film. We had to do a thorough analysis of every part of the film to achieve a final understanding.
Therefore, We are going back to the beginning of the film, that rough road, we are bumping, the road is fading, Jun Sheng beckons to us, and we are still bumping.
The long take of the first scene is exemplary in that it declares to the viewer the cinematic properties of the film at the beginning. The film produced a distinction when it began to select the audience. The boring audience began to feel bored, and all the long take fans started to pay attention to the length of the lens. In this scene, the lens's continuous length becomes a standard for judging the director's courage. In the continuation of space, the duration became a metonymy of the director's determination.
...I remember I was sitting in the theater, the body leaning forward, surveying the vanishing point of the image. In my vision, the vanishing point at the end of the road metamorphosis into a geometrical formula, a formula that encapsulates all the world's visible images that implied by the movie. The constant changing frame of the image movement is the rigorous application of this form. In the darkness, I whispered, "Don't cut the continuity, don't cut, don't cut." In retrospect, a similar psychological effect occurred in commercial films, where the viewers whispered, "Don't end it, don't end it, don't end it," They are referring to the inevitable ending of a virtual world of "enframing. "
In the film's long take, we can feel robust self-consistent integrity; we realize that the long take was representing an independent world. The vanishing point at the end of the path is the starting point of the world. The existence of itself has already represented all the pure truth of the world. The changes we perceived as we move away from the vanishing point and into the landscape are only clumsy footnotes to the vanishing point's eternal truth.
Perhaps the director still feels insecure about his audiences; he throws the straw hat from behind us, trying to remind us of what the world behind us looks like, which is a delicate addition, a kind reminder. However, with the observation of distant vanishing points, we have vaguely constructed the world around us, just waiting for the image to discover.
The psychological stimulation we receive in the commercial film may also be an authentic psychological expression. However, its cognition of the cinematic world will never be as pure as that expressed by a long take in this film. The purity of this perception must be attributed to the director's intuitive in the choice of scene and his sufficient loyalty and determination to his film.
The exemplary nature of this long-shot lies in its introduction to the cinematic attributes of the film. The audience has seen the director's layout and the vague panorama of this world, and they just need to wait for the director to break our limitation in perception. After successfully narrating the image's ontological property, the director also clarified the aesthetic features and ideographic mode of the film.
As we drove past the peach trees, a group of passersby interrupts us, and Jun Sheng flashes past us to join the conversation. We watch quietly as the talking people block out the vanishing point in the distance. We briefly focus our eyes on the camera's foreground, watching the conversations between the black side and the white side, feeling a sense of potential dislocation. When the conversation was over, a gust of wind blew from the vanishing point.
...If we could be more careful about this scene, we could discover that it has already narrated what will happen in the film. Jun Sheng's alienation from the people around him informs us of the people film will choose and their story. The diffuse sand in the distance implied all the aesthetic expressions the film would present: the ideographic meaning of the form of the "wind."
The wind has always been one of the purest ideographic elements in the cinematic world; just as we have never perceived wind with our eye directly in real life, the cinematic world's wind is also invisible. In the first long take of the film. the ideal of wind is hidden in the movement of sand. The audience's psychological bias produced the misperception that the camera filmed the wind successfully. The wind is given a different meaning, namely, shares the same meaning with other pure ideographs, an invisible object, and an absent presence.
...As we have just claimed, the vanishing point at the end of the path has helped the viewer to create a 360-degree panorama, which is vague but contains a purity of truth of the viewer's mind.
The wind has a similar ideographic core. Its appearance is vague, but it points to our perception itself, so much so that we even give it a name. In this film, I think director Xingyi Dong has realized the possibility of wind and his film's expression. In the following parts of the film, the wind is exposed naked and separated from the material world. In the ambiguous resonance with the cinematic world, the wind is interpreted by the film as an idea itself. It is a constant change in stable long-shot. The original idea of the wind is constant, but the cinematic expression it presents itself creates the image's motion. It is the rebel, the deranged force of this world, disturbing the peaceful environment, but it also belongs to the world's static part, serving for an eternal formula.
This way of expression matches up with the director's selection and shockingly matches up with the story of the Junsheng. Because of the long-term imprison, and alienated from his old community. He experienced the dislocation between his experience. He felt the current reality of confusion, just like a gust of wind that comes out of nowhere in his hometown, causing a disturbance and discomfort. However, this wind is also trying to look back for its origin. He is derived from the village, he itself to belong here. The fate of Junsheng has also become a gust of wind in the village.
Despite the function in narration, the wind, as the most critical aesthetic ideograph in this film, also almost runs through the whole film, not to say that the wind blows from beginning to end. The wind in this film has been degraded by director Xingyi Dong, "translated" into a pure idea. This carrier contains both sides of the contradiction, which is the consistency of dislocation and eternity. This ideographic mode is pointed out in this film by the two expression media of sound and painting.
The title of the film is Slow Singing. The director Xingyi Dong tries to use the slow and laggard tempo of the song to indicate Jun Sheng's situation, which is enough to show the director's intention of taking sound as the core medium of expression.
...The scene in which Junsheng meets his old lover is a typical scene where director Xingyi Dong expresses the wind with the voice medium. During their conversation, the suggestion of film and sound leads us to believe that the camera's viewpoint is based on Junsheng. At least in front of Junsheng's eyes, the conversation between the two subjects should be face-to-face. After a long, drawn-out speech, Junsheng's sudden appearance -- from the position behind his former lover that previous hidden by a tree -- comes as a surprise to the audiences. The scene was so representative that the film appreciation host noticed it after the film watching, but she thought it just an expression of the director's humor. This view is not deep enough. All humorous in the cinematic world derives from absurdity, a dislocation, and our laughter only serves to conceal the unquestionable authenticity of this absurdity. Namely, the sense of humor that the host thinks comes from director Xingyi Dong's intentional dislocation of how he expresses this appearance. This dislocation effect is created by the combination of visual and auditory, but sound takes the main credit. Through the positioning of both sounds, we make the judgment of position, but in fact, the sound itself is an illusion.
...We infer the wind's existence by perceiving the sand in the wind, and we identify the reality of its position by sound. However, the wind itself is a kind of visual illusion that cannot be perceived directly, and the "singing" (rhythm) in this film is already being laggard, so any vision of the wind is false. Any judgment of the sound will be confused.
...There are a lot of similar expressions for proven. When Junsheng worked at school, he was responsible for ringing the bell. Once, he tried to rings the bell outside with a slingshot. In this scene, the director uses a fixed long take to help the audience realize that this is permanent. We could always remember the position of the bell by impression. However, in this setting, the cognition of the bell itself's position is doubtful and confused, which is a judgment that could be both yes and no.
The director hits precisely the confusion of judgment and recognition itself. In the long take, Junsheng keeps shooting an object, which could be a bell, a bird, or anything. When he shoots, any recognition about his object is limited by space and becomes pure confusion. When the bell rings, the sense of authenticity immediately begins to spread; the viewer's mind simultaneously hits the cinematic world's eternity in the ambiguous confusion. The process of shooting also becomes a passing wind.
A question might arise, why the auditory system in this scene is authentic, and that in the last scene we discussed is deranged? This points out precisely the division of the director into elements of his film, junsheng's participation in the sound is as unhinged as Junsheng's situation. The echo of nature is a confirmation of the cinematic world, which implies a kind of permanence. It is the involvement of the human subject that creates the deranged.
A similar pattern can be found in director ideographic meaning's exploration of mobile phones. After Junsheng had just bought a new mobile phone for the child, the two began to play a conversation full of childishness. Jun Sheng runs out of the camera, leaving a "can you hear me?" ", and the camera is locked again and locked in the child's face. In the film, we can only hear the child repeating the message, "I hear you," over and over again. We never hear the sound of Jun Sheng, but we already know what he is saying. In this scene, Junsheng's voice is still hard to believe, and it is still in a state of confusion. The viewer can only make up a dialogue relationship through false appearances, while a hidden worry is that Junsheng is genuinely full of innocence. And when the child looks up, take the initiative to break the static camera set, we saw Junsheng with a smile on his face. At that moment, an intuition was instantly established; we believe our previous judgment of Junsheng through the mobile phone conversation; the range of Junsheng's voice is taken place by the sincere friendship between him and the child. The conservation becomes a gust of wind. The deranged of Junsheng's situation is eliminated by our judgment that Junsheng is confirmed, an innocent and kind person.
The narration in the film language is consistent with the ongoing story that Junsheng's sense of time-induced dislocation alleviated through his friendship with the child.
In addition to the confusion of auditory medium representation, the visual medium also provides several examples. However, it's not as exemplary as the auditory expression.
What is more noteworthy is the sudden appearance of a documentary interview in the film. After the screening, some audience did stand up and questions about this scene. This kind of doubt also stems from a sense of confusion. We do not know whether this scene belongs to the real interview screen. It contains the interview's cinematic recognition pattern, but it is placed in an environment that does not belong to the interview. The scene itself is a gust of wind.
Another memorable scene is the expression of Junsheng after being fired. He was helplessly sat in the front of his house, and the director inserts a long take of the movement of a red plastic bag. Audiences believed it was the virtualization expression of Junsheng's situation as if his destiny is the trace of plastic bags in the air, and the wind is the power source of both. At first, I thought the movie would end in this scene because it was poetic, but the camera came back to Junsheng, suggesting that it was just a junsheng's dream.
A similar expression is expressed at the end of the movie, the long take of the temple. The long-shot starts with Junsheng's depression. He was playing an action game. Later, in the depth of field of the long take, we observed a potential violence scene. The director does not let Junsheng participate directly, but set the games as a fictional screen, use the battle in the game, implying the violence in real life. The absurdity in this scene is deranged. When the audience thought jun Sheng was going to be a spectator of this violence, he rushed out of the door and helped the camera find the prototype of that previous virtual game scene. He solved the deranged with the conflict. After that, the long walk he takes becomes a depressurization of the scene until he starts striking the clock. The chaos of the battle becomes a gust of wind.
...So far, I have tried his best to sum up the three dimensions of the film: the cinematic image itself, the narrative/psychological sequence of the film, and the ideographic aesthetic formula of the film.
These three dimensions are all worth pondering, and all reflect the talent of the director. However, what is striking is that these three dimensions come together to an endpoint, a vanishing point, a truth, the truth of the film. Whether it is between the confusion and the eternity of the film itself, or between the time difference and the eternity of Junsheng’s identity, or the confusion and the constant interweaving of the ideographic symbol of wind in the film, they all point to one specific set of opposites: confusion and eternity.
We suddenly realize that such a contradiction is cinematic, universal, and idealism. It contains truthfulness. Director Xingyi Dong's film creates this truth, and he creates the formula to express this truth.
This may not be the complete truth of the film(the questioning from epistemology still stands). However, I believe that every person who walks out of the cinema would sense satisfaction, a joy, that they have successfully accepted this truth, that they are willing to believe in the purity of this cinematic truth.
It is worth reflecting that many people felt bored during watching. When I watch the film, lost people use their phones, and some of them yawned countless times. Anyone who thinks this film is dull or too slow is misinterpreting the nature of the long take and the nature of the film in the first place. They believe that an expression of truth should be carried out through meaning and narrative sequence. However, the cinematic image itself is already narrated for itself. It is embedded in the screen as a carrier of truth, which you will never discover unless you actively explore it. The audiences are never passive in front of the film, just as human beings can never be purely passive in curiosity and truthfulness; most of us just choose not to take that initiative. Instead, they watch the film as a kind of escape. With his works as a director, Xingyi Dong Proves to us that film contains the essence of reality, but it goes further than reality. A long take solidifies the transience of time. We finally have the opportunity to look directly at the truth itself, just like the vanishing point at the end of the path, which condenses slowly.
On the screen, a sheep comes to life, time thickens, the audience stare, fertility is no longer a straightforward concept or phrase, and the film revivificates what it is. The man in the film may be as lazy about truth as we are in life. He was only surprised by the sheep's blood, but in front of the screen, audiences are holding their breath. What do they see?
...Ideas are infinitely elongated and shaped by cinematic images; this process is just like throwing mud at an invisible object. The object also becomes as thick as mud and begins to approach the object itself.
This is the charm of the long take in Slow Singing
Perhaps at this point, we finally have the opportunity to divide this film into a category, drama service drama, commercial film service business, art film service artistic expression, horror film service terror and excitement, suspense film service suspense atmosphere, comedy service comedy effect.
So Slow Singing should be categorized as a "truth-informing film," which serves the expression of truthfulness.
...On second thought, another director works in this category, FIRST International Film Festival Training camp’s former mentor, Bela Tarr.
It is not to say that director Xingyi Dong has already achieved the level of Bela Tarr. However, we can find a similar interest and ideographic mode, equal sincerity, and enthusiasm in their films. We could believe that Dong has talent, and we could look forward to his next film.
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