Chapter 78 The truth is written on the face

It is usually very difficult to find the heroine of Zhang Yimou's films. When looking for the actor of Zhong Jingqiu, the director teamed up with eight teams and went all over the country's art schools. The last one selected was Zhou Dongyu, a high school girl from Shijiazhuang.She was selected because she has a clean face. Zhang Weiping believes that she has "unique temperament and extremely pure", "eyes are as pure as mountain spring water", and "people who watched the film agreed that she looks like Momoe Yamaguchi".In the news, Zhang Yimou's reaction was: "During the audition process, Zhang Yimou found that although this girl is 18 years old, she is like a blank sheet of paper, completely ignorant of many people in society, almost a real version of Jing Qiu. "

A clean face is the entry requirement for "seeking a girl". This is a well-known secret throughout the country. Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Dong Jie, and even the eight-minute Olympic folk music girls all have similar facial features.What's more, the background of the story is in 1975, and it advocates pure love, filled with abstinence, and the faces of the actors should be clean.However, Zhang Yimou is not the only one who has this kind of request. Any movie that sets the story background in the 1970s and 1980s will inevitably find some clean faces and create some clean pictures. Ten years ago, the unified appeal of "Peacock" and "Green Red" were all like this, even the famous event on Douban "Our mother is a beautiful woman, our father is a handsome guy" is no exception, provided by netizens Parents' photos, the unified temperament is "clean" (it is not ruled out that the black and white photos created this clean illusion), and the subsequent replies also repeatedly praised that era was cleaner than it is now.

People at that time were cleaner, quieter, and purer than they are now, which is almost a consensus.But when a slightly older friend talked about why she didn't fall in love at that time, she said that at that time, boys were dirty, so were girls, even herself, because, "there was no good shampoo. "If you can't take a bath often, what else can you expect?So, which one is closer to reality, the world represented by the clean faces in those images, or the world she described that is as dirty as Europe before the nineteenth century? "The past is a foreign land", most of the past time has been shrouded in clouds and mist, mixing and mixing all kinds of obscure details and impressions, making it difficult to see the original appearance.Paradoxically, why did "clean" become the impression of that era? Why can "clean face" speak for that era?

The history of the face is another hidden history.Chen Danqing believes that the face of a person is closely related to the times, and the reason why Lu Xun looks good is that such an era is enough to nourish a face that will not make us lose face even if it is placed in the portraits of the world's literary giants—the face of a person, It is the condensation of the vitality of the times and the expression of the energy of the times.In the same way, among the Miss Hong Kong in the 1980s, there were many peerless beauties, and the Miss Hong Kong after the 1990s became more and more ugly, because the energy of the 1980s has been gradually exhausted.

However, the history of the face does not happen so naturally. The history of the face is also a history of rejection and recognition, a history of intentional advocacy and publicity. In the 1980s, Western-educated New Wave filmmakers planned to revitalize Hong Kong movies. The first thing to change was the faces of the actors. Those female stars in Shaw Brothers movies who were fleshy and pink, with a bit of quack and street spirit The new spokespersons they found were Xia Wenxi and Ye Tong. Dellee Hepburn and Deborah Kerr in style". When talking about the changes in the faces of mainland female stars after 1949, the film critic Lou Jun thought so: "After the founding of the Republic, the functions of the city were suppressed, and the contradiction of old Shanghai that was both a city of sin and a paradise of fashion was recreated by revolutionary ideals. Integration, urban life quietly disappeared behind the screen, the land and peasants as symbols of revolution were highlighted, and themes reflecting revolutionary life and modernization became the mainstream." Therefore, stars after 1949, such as Xie Fang, Wang Danfeng, Qin Yi , Wang Xiaotang, and Zhang Ruifang, "their beauty is all oriented to the public space." Among their faces, most of them are maternal elements, and they refuse to project desires. Those female stars with urban symbols have to play female spies.It was not until the 1980s, when urbanization began again, that the delicate and charming faces of Pan Hong, Zhang Yu, Fang Shu, Gong Xue, and Xiao Xiong reappeared.

In the past world, the status was even more embarrassing. Usually, whatever face we gave it, it would have that face. We thought it was clean, and it was clean. take this responsibility.Zhang Yimou went against the tide of urbanization and tried hard to find a face with non-urban characteristics, which is also due to this need. Therefore, Benjamin believes that photographs (which can also be extended to all image fields) have similar functions to allegory, miniaturizing the world is a way of controlling the world.Controlling a face controls the way the owner of the face is understood, controlling the face of an era controls our memory of an era.In fact, people's faces have not changed much. What is important is what kind of face is chosen as the representative of the times.Therefore, Zhu Wen wrote in his poem: "The truth is written on the face."