Hometown boy film review

Hometown Boys Film Review (1): Seeing Hometown Boys in the Wilderness

It's the first time I went to the wilderness bookstore and looked for it. There are already many people in it. Shortly after the start, Mr Xizhi Guo came. Although it is the first time, it is almost expected.

The film tells the story of a painter who returned to his hometown of Jincheng, Liaoning, and painted his friends who grew up together, including laid-off workers, farmers and bosses. For the painter, he wants to use pen and color to present these forgotten people and rural remnants swallowed up by the city.

After reading it, most of them were scattered, and the rest sat around in a mess. The film that Teacher Guo said is too literary. Documentary should be head-up, or better, lower than life, not higher than life like this, a bit promiscuous. Especially music, is melodramatic. The perspectives of directors and painters are staggered. Documentaries like this can be broadcast on CCTV.

I began to ask a very detailed question: the wars that Shu Jun participated in and the sand on him. Teacher Guo suggested that we should grasp the overall problem of the documentary, and no one can fully understand it. I think I have mastered the whole thing and need to dig deeper into the details. Of course, the teacher has his own reasons for saying this, because it is impossible for everyone to have a global view. Teacher Guo mentioned the commercialization of art at the beginning of the film. He said that only poems and documentaries are not commercialized now because they don't make money.

The deepest sentence I remember is that it won't be too far to come from generation to generation. So why history? Understand history. You are here because of history. A person's living habits and personal qualities are closely related to the hometown where you grew up. Then, how can you not know your hometown, your relatives around you and your childhood friends around you?

Since I saw Mu Ye Village in Ogawa Shinsuke, I have a sense of mission to know my hometown. Teacher Guo said that the homework he gave his students was to go back and shoot his hometown. He said to start from one thing, not from a grand perspective. It's like turning a stone into gold to me.

Hometown Boys Film Review (2): old boys on Canvas

■ A word comment: After hearing the theme of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Hou Xiaoxian's local memory seems to be alive again in the mainland. A similar urbanization process is equally touching.

In Victor erich's Sunlight on the quince tree, the painter waits for the best sunshine to fall on the quince tree. After waiting for a long time without hope, he gave up the unfinished oil painting and chose sketch. The painter explained that life is the same, things can't be perfect, you have to give up something. Among many films about artists' creation, this film has always been unavoidable. At the end of Hometown Boy, Liu Xiaodong's painting shed was vandalized, and the unfinished paintings in it were also destroyed. Seeing this, I somehow thought of Sunshine in the Tree. Liu Xiaodong hopes to find the lost things through painting. He chose many familiar people and various backgrounds. Don't you know that some things are doomed to give up and are slowly forgotten? He wants to find some familiar feelings in the past, but some things cannot survive in the present.

When filming, wait for the clouds to arrive, and when the painter paints, wait for the rain to stop. The weather change is too unusual. It can be seen in the eyes of creators, but it can affect their inspiration impulse. This is a group of observers walking in the orbit of time, traveling and strolling in the light and shadow. Time in the painting is static, time in the movie is long, and time in life is endless. The three are integrated. In Hometown Boy, they are interdependent and inclusive, connecting the past, the present and the future.

In East, Liu Xiaodong is a professional painter. In Hometown Boy, he is not only a painter, but also a son of his parents, a playmate of his friends and a collaborator of the Taiwan Province provincial team. Liu Xiaodong explained that a painter paints from only one angle, and objects need to be placed there, so it is better not to move. Making a movie is different. The director can choose the best angle and record in all directions. He painted old friends in his hometown, and Hou Xiaoxian photographed old friends for him. This is a place exchange. He chose to go back to his hometown to paint, and some of them were touched by an old man with X-rays when he was in Beijing, which reminded him of his childhood friends. When watching movies, I will also be moved, smell the local flavor of Taiwan's new movies, and think of my hometown complex.

The director of Hometown Boy is Hung-i Yao, a young member of Hou Xiaoxian's department. Generally speaking, people who are related to Hou Hsiao-hsien's works and then work alone are counted as Hou Hsiao-hsien's departments. Hou Xiaoxian usually gives more care and help to these people, such as "Hometown Boy", which is personally supervised by him and has a fixed cast of actors and actresses.

This documentary presents a closed structure, with a short hard of hearing old man and a talkative old mother at the beginning and end. When we really cut into the small town of Jincheng, the film began to have earth-shaking changes, showing an amazing nostalgic atmosphere, echoing Liu Xiaodong's creative intention, and beautiful things will lead to creation. He loves this land and the people who live here.

Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" chapter is used in many movies. Fans who are familiar with Taiwan Province films should know that there is a story behind the music. Hou Hsiao-hsien used Jonathan Lee's film when filming The Man from the Wind Cabin, which was released shortly after its release. Later, Yang Dechang suggested that it would be better to match a version of the classical concert. He suggested using Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so The Man in the Wind Cabin had another feeling. In Hou Hsiao-hsien's words, Coming Back to Life is very popular abroad, and Hou Hsiao-hsien has initially established his own personal style. The excerpt from "Hometown Boy" must mean something. The past youth did not appear directly in the film, but was mentioned by the painter himself from time to time. From the cupboard to Jincheng, after decades of youth, people have changed, but the feeling of picture transmission has not changed.

Fast or slow trains, beautiful fields and reeds, without anyone disturbing them. Is this past or present, or is it a memory disorder? From time to time, the film will jump to the nostalgic tone and directly filter and beautify the reality. I have seen too many dilapidated towns and villages, including my hometown, where there are idle people everywhere and the environment is dirty and chaotic. Time seems to crack there, and there is a gap, which is neither the expected present nor the remembered past. Jincheng in the movie is not as beautiful as it is now. Disappearing hometown and reunited friends are getting old in faded time and vague memory.

As for the KTV scene, Hou Hsiao-hsien finally ran out of the crowd and began to sing in Minnan-just like Assaia's Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien. After singing, everyone drank to the past. Liu Xiaodong said that his paintings are about people's stories and people's collapse. Then "Hometown Boy" is a supplementary explanation, faithful to the creator's self-discovery, and its shooting subject is the painter himself and his changed hometown. Beijing Youth Daily

Hometown boy film review (3): Hometown boy has money.

Many years ago, I saw a painter who visited Liu Xiaodong and just got rich. He said in the camera: An artist will become rich after success, but this does not affect him to continue to be an artist. Like Liu Xiaodong who was still young in the camera at that time, I took it for granted.

Time passed day by day. As a successful artist, Liu Xiaodong is not rich but very rich, and the auction price is as high as tens of millions of dollars. Fortunately, he continued to do the serious work of an artist, painting, being a teacher and making movies with his former friends. The characters in the picture extend from friends around them to migrant workers in the Three Gorges and miss Thailand. The way of painting has also expanded from the studio to the real scene. In recent years, Liu Xiaodong's live paintings are always accompanied by documentaries, and become another sound outside the canvas. He said that until one day, he wanted to draw his boyhood friend, the boy in his hometown.

At the beginning of "Hometown Boy", Liu Xiaodong said in the camera: He has been afraid to go back to his hometown to paint his friends, because he knows that these paintings will have high commercial value at his current price, but in our China concept, the friendship between friends seems to have nothing to do with money. This passage makes me feel a little sad. Time has changed everyone in this way, and the things that are taken for granted have quietly changed. We can't say that money is money, painting is painting, and artistic creation ultimately conveys the artist's feelings and understanding of life itself. We are all carried forward by the times, and we will leave traces anyway. The hometown boy has such a beginning, which makes me both look forward to and worry. But when Liu Xiaodong's friends appeared, those lively hometown boys immediately dispelled all doubts. They are so true, frank and sincere about their stories.

Documentaries like "Hometown Boys" are actually very difficult to shoot. There are more painters who become autobiographies of artists. Lack of painter's part and special subjective perspective. Hou Hsiao-hsien's team did just right, so that photographers could hardly feel the existence of the lens. Boys in their hometown can show their natural vitality, and their respect for reality and people is also in canvases and images. Painters are just Liu Xiaodong's profession. In Jincheng, he is no different from his childhood friends. We see more real stories, characters and lives of everyone outside the canvas, which are more vivid than those fixed in the gallery.

The appearance of photography and movies once had a great influence on the development of painting. In Hometown Boy, there are many scenes of Liu Xiaodong painting. When facing the same life scene, these two different carriers overlap and appear on the screen, which produces a very wonderful chemical effect. As Liu Xiaodong himself said, "Movies are sometimes better than paintings, and the lens can record more perspectives. When painting, you can't look more. "

In a word, this is an emotional documentary, beautiful and warm, not boring at all. It is the humor and strength of life itself that moves the film. It records the yesterday and today of the hometown boy, and also depicts the portrait of the whole era. We are not young people in small towns, and we are not old yet, but as director Wu said in his acceptance speech at the opening ceremony of the Shanghai Film Festival, the film is so charming that it tells you that life was or used to be like this. We are so different from the boys in our hometown, but we can be so similar. Life is not as colorful as fashion movies, they are real and sharp, and there are not so many melodramatic things. Just like the tattoo on Xu Zi's arm, it's only a half-tattooed dragon, because it hurts too much.

Hometown Boys Film Review (IV): Hometown Boys

"The working class was flooded, and we suddenly found out that we are all city people, our hometown was occupied by buildings, and we are all city people without hometown." The painter Liu Xiaodong wrote. 20 10, 30 years after leaving my hometown of Jincheng, Liaoning, I returned to my hometown to paint for my old friends, 26 paintings, and also made a documentary "Hometown Boys", directed by Hung-i Yao and supervised by Hou Xiaoxian.

Jincheng town used to be famous for paper mills, but now it has declined. Liu Xiaodong's former partners are middle-aged people who have experienced many vicissitudes, but they can't help living happily in Zhihu. The relationship between commercial art and rough reality, the relationship between the painter and the painted becomes more subtle, perhaps simpler, or more the aesthetic distance between childhood and hometown. Cameras, such as Liu Xiaodong's "third eye", try to capture how painters capture life history with brushes as a way to the past. The reed sea dancing in the boundless wind has an eternal poetry, which, in Hou Xiaoxian's words, is a bit like time standing still. It also reminds people of Shi Hou's movies, which are quiet and serene, overlooking the sea by the mountain; The train carrying reed stalks reminds Hou Hsiao-hsien of the small train in Tainan Sugar Factory, and the flow is familiar.

The painter walked out of the studio, or restored the studio from a fixed and closed architectural space to a mobile and open daily environment. The original scenes can be fields, quarries, billiards halls, so-called sketching, realism, and movies (such as "moving photos" in Japan). This nested framework: reality, brush, camera, digital HD and 16 mm camera; Different textures: canvas, photos, images of two colors on the screen … like a hall full of mirrors, reflecting each other.

Hometown Boys Film Review (V): Miracle of Life

We really don't know what else to see in today's era of information junk. Perhaps only documentaries are the most authentic.

The film recalls Liu Xiaodong's hometown in a very rambling way. The whole atmosphere is filled with deep homesickness. There is nothing gorgeous, everything is just plain and real daily life. However, the painter's paintings are very touching. Those portraits are not just pieces of cloth, but burn in those brushstrokes. You will feel that you are also infected by what the artists want to express. I wonder why someone would draw such a figure, even more real than a real person, and it belongs to the living skin of the moment.

Teacher Liu Xiaodong's hometown is charming, a simple northeast town. I have always believed that art must become a daily expression. I found that no matter what, life and the world will not change, only knowledge will change. Truth is fascinating, and art can only be true if it is rooted in the times and life. Sometimes people may ignore everything and stay away from everything before they feel the truth. In the fields, in the hills and streams, in the wheat fields, in the fragrant rice after harvest, even in the forgotten time.

Teacher Liu Xiaodong said: Actually, I am a painter.

I think this is not his modesty, but an artist's truest feeling about life. What can transcend everything and life? Everything is a miracle of life.

Film Review of Hometown Boys (ⅵ): Two dimensions of reality: the reality of performance and the reality of images.

The first dimension:

Q: How to realize the authenticity of the performance?

A: Alienation of image, performance of actors and fiction of stories.

-Alienation of images: Duras, antonioni, Anjiro, Jia, Ceylon, etc.

-Performances by actors: legal copies of Lu Le and Abbas, etc.

-Fiction of stories: Abbas, Gomez, Ferini, etc.

Hometown Boy Film Review (7): Hometown Boy: Oil Time Machine

Hometown homesickness, urbanization changes, memories of youth, "Hometown Boy" records the story of painter Liu Xiaodong returning to his hometown-Jincheng, painting for his neighbors, friends and relatives. This seemingly bleak film, like a pot of turbid wine, charmed strangers and stirred up the past. It turns out that those days are gone; It turns out that those faces are unfamiliar. At the beginning of the film, Liu Xiaodong expressed his true feelings of being afraid of being close to home through voice-over. The author believes that this "timidity" has laid the foundation for Liu Xiaodong's observation perspective.

Just like Liu Xiaodong's monologue in the movie, "The perspective of a painting is fixed and has boundaries." Therefore, Liu Xiaodong's oil paintings for others, in turn, reflect his own observation of the world-multi-dimensional perspective. Everyone in the painting is going through a different life journey. Some of them have been laid off, some have opened KTV, some have worked as quarrymen, and some have done nothing all day ... Because of this, the appearance of these characters-black and white sketches-constitutes the narrative structure of the whole film. It is also the real experiences of these characters that constitute the spiritual complex of contemporary China people. As an audience, we can always see the shadow of us or our parents in them. Or, the shadow of a way of life.

"Time is the greatest art," Liu Xiaodong said. How to embody the art of "time", The Boy in My Hometown adopts two narrative techniques, both external and internal. First, it's like the opening shot of a movie. In depth, there is a newly-built expressway above the picture. Some farmers ride bicycles, and some city people drive vans. People and cars are buzzing; Below the picture is a barren paddy field, undeveloped. Secondly, the first shot is the depth picture of rural scenery with editing, and the next shot is the town street with buildings on both sides. It is particularly worth mentioning that there is a towering chimney in the depth of the picture, which matches the clip. This chimney is like a switch to open a time tunnel. Magic realism is generally symmetrical to two different lifestyles. Speaking of contrast, this side of the street is strewn at random, with migrant workers standing in a row and resting; Across the street, sitting in a row, the hotel lady is waiting for the guests.

Golden wheat waves, white fog, red light leakage (some paragraphs of the film were shot on 16mm film), and oil paints wiped on the canvas. The Boy in My Hometown seems to be a "time spectrum" existing in the author's memory, which exquisitely shows the inner color of an outsider-Liu Xiaodong: things are inhuman. It's very local and poetic. The rust color in winter, the flood in summer, the billiards room in autumn and the rainy day in spring are woven into a silent poem and disappear in time.

From playing football to beating eggs to playing cards, the characters in the film seem to be hiding themselves in that forgotten childhood by playing games. Liu Xiaodong picked up a paintbrush and began to draw. In Liu Xiaodong's own words, "My painting is getting simpler and simpler." The author believes that this "simplicity" is not realism in the full sense. Because most of these works are posed. Liu Xiaodong threw real people in the real world into his fictional memory environment. For example, he inadvertently chatted with a female neighbor on the way to the billiards room and drew her, which is a vivid example. Moreover, this movie has appeared many times, and he fiddled with his props in order to draw a person. These actions symbolically make these paintings have the semantic density of revealing the culture, politics and history of "people in a broad sense".

In the twilight, the ears of wheat are falling apart. The train bathed in the sun passed by. Someone left, someone came back. Some people returned to China after retirement, while others were never heard from. The train that appeared many times in the movie became a time machine in Just Visiting. The people crawling and sitting collectively unconsciously shuttled through the colorful just-visited.

The article was published in Oriental Morning Post 20 1 1 on May 24th. Other media or individuals are not allowed to reprint.

Hometown Boys Film Review (ⅵ): A Journey to Root-seeking

"Looking at two old people watching an X-ray film by the sewer in Beijing, I immediately thought of a forgotten person, because we are very busy in the city, and everyone is very busy even if they meet and say hello. Suddenly, when two people study the body, in the gutter, they will suddenly evoke a desire to express forgetting.

I think my brothers are forgotten characters in my life. One is the whole working class. Under the great social background changes in China, the working class feels forgotten. There is also a whole process of urbanization. Small towns are abandoned and will be annexed by cities sooner or later. Even if they have personal talents or personal qualities, they are just like a group of forgotten people. "-Liu Xiaodong's hometown boy.

After 30 years away from home, I went back to the original starting point, traced back to the source, and recorded my hometown with a brush.

Hometown Boys Film Review (9): When recording becomes an art …

The local feelings of China people actually hide huge contradictions. A place of birth or life contains the most primitive soul self-esteem, although we don't really realize it. The sense of honor of life fell like this when we had no choice.

Since ancient times, "heroes don't ask the source", why not ask? Have you thought about it?

"Heroes" are often afraid to mention because of their low status and poor family background. It's not that they shouldn't ask the source, but that heroes don't want to be asked the source. Did the hometown boy really explain its origin? It is fair whether Liu Xiaodong is a hero or not.

During the New Year in China, a large number of immigrants traveled thousands of miles to Wan Li and then returned to their hometown. Hometown is not only the home of most people in China, but also an inseparable place. You used to live there, form habits there, make friends there, complain about the troubles of life there, complain about the bad environment there, and complain about the quality of people there. It seems that once you leave this area, you never want to go back. So everyone is striving to go to the outside world, find a better pure land than home and realize their dreams. To put it bluntly, it is to get rid of this pain. The person who did this left his hometown happily ... and abandoned the place where he was born, not wanting to be asked.

Liu Xiaodong has been taking his own path of "recording", whether it is a brush or this film. His heart belongs to the land where he grew up, which is the source of inspiration in his art, and only this hot land makes him realize that the most touching thing in human nature is not gorgeous brilliance, but primitive plainness. Nothing in the world can burn forever like a flame, because it is still ashes after burning, but the calm running water is solidified forever.

There doesn't seem to be much scope in Liu Xiaodong's homesickness. It seems that Liu Xiaodong doesn't want to set his hometown in Jinzhou, Liaoning. He just put the town in the depths of his birth. Jincheng, which is only half an hour's drive from Jinzhou, even Jinzhou people wouldn't know this place if it weren't for a Jincheng paper mill. But it was Liu Xiaodong's home, and it was not a beautiful but profound place in his memory. His unadorned record is neither belittling nor flattering, but a simple record, which is unlikely to be noticed in a rapidly developing society. This kind of record constitutes an element of his art and is also something in his bones. Just like his tone of voice, he still speaks Northeast dialect after living in Beijing for so many years. Can't you change it? I don't think he wants to change.

We know a lot about Confucianism and traditional culture. How many people can really apply it? Benevolence, courtesy, wisdom and faithfulness are interpreted as flattery and worldly affectation in the fierce competition. When one day I suddenly look back, I may find that the simple truth is so great and so hard to face.

"One can't forget one's roots" is so simple, but it is also the most difficult moral principle to achieve.

Hometown Boys Film Review (X): It's theirs and ours.

This is a story from Jincheng in Northeast China. Painter Liu Xiaodong went back to his hometown to paint friends around him. We always have a place to go back. Even if you have been wandering for a long time and turned a foreign land into your hometown, there is only one place where you were born. Looking for the past in Liu Xiaodong, we are afraid of forgetting, but we also see the part that belongs to us in this documentary.

One day, the painting was destroyed, and the shed that Xiaodong and his friends built was deliberately hit by a car. Right, you don't have to draw the rest of the painting. The color of the background and the sketch skeleton of the characters constitute the final work, which forms a new visual effect with the chaos and folds left by the damage. From another point of view, this is a work "hit" by reality, and the destroyer and Liu Xiaodong * * * completed the "egg setting" of this work.

Liu Xiaodong used a brush to freeze the living people at that moment. He used painting to re-show life, his thoughts and his revised reality. The sadness, helplessness, fatigue, old age, innocence and dullness on those people's faces are all familiar to us, even our own.

A certain way of life in villages and towns has its own unique humor, while people who leave the city and are forgotten by Liu Xiaodong have relatively primitive firmness and peace belonging to ordinary people. As Xiaodong said to his friend, everything he can see at home is his property, and there is nothing else. There, people saw the simplicity of matter, and their desires were dispelled by this reality.

Therefore, this is what Hou Xiaoxian likes. Here he can see his familiar "childhood past events" and "people in cabinets". As a result, he became the only person who made this film. In the KTV scene, we saw Hou Daoxiu's voice, just like a businessman in that small town, with his simplicity in his little gestures of pulling his voice and making faces.

The most familiar humor often comes from old people. Xiaodong's father is hard of hearing. He asked why his father has such good ears today. The old man replied that his teeth were good, so the audience was happy, but someone cried. I don't know about others, but I thought of my grandfather at home. He is so similar to Xiaodong's father. Since his brain became ill, he often joked between the lines and became deaf. There are unbearable things hidden in it. The old man's mistakes make you laugh, but the reality behind them is that he is very old. One day, you can't even hear the wrong words, only memories. In the face of these, we should learn to resist sadness.