Chapter 54 Chapter 54 How to understand "visual excess"?

Watching "Death of the Avenger", I can't help but think of Peng Lijun's recent article "It's Not Too Late - Post-97 Hong Kong Movies", which uses the concept of "visual excess" to analyze Huang Jingfu's special article.I believe that starting from Huang Jingfu's short films, most people would object to Huang Jingfu's works. The visual effects have always been greater than the feeling of the characters. Therefore, Peng Wen's analysis and "Sister-in-law" both use the appearance of characters as a visual vassal tendency, which is indeed a Fair opinion.It's just that the author seeks an aesthetic explanation for Huang Jingfu's "failure", so as to express his unique feelings of love. I think it might as well extend a dialogue.

Peng Wen tried to put forward the possible aesthetic basis behind Huang Jingfu's creative strategy of emphasizing "visual" and discarding "narrative". Taking the example of video artists as evidence, it reflected that narrative has been linked to ideology, while "story" is regarded as As a tool for expressing emotions and establishing value, focusing on visuals to oppose narrative can also become one of the strategies to counter global cultural hegemony.The tendency of video artists to resist narrative is true, but I don’t think it should be used as a background to guide readers to interpret in this direction. The most important reason is that even though Huang Jingfu started with experimental short films, he never showed resistance. narrative tendencies.And his most successful masterpiece "Fu Bo" (co-directed with Li Gongle, 2003) is an excellent demonstration of the precise combination of visual form and narrative content (the complex exploration of father and son from opposites to the same body) (written by Li Dejian) ——The "visual excess" in his later works just shows the inadequacy in the control of narrative elements, rather than a self-conscious aesthetic exploration.The paleness and poverty of the narrative, the examples of Peng Wentong and "Sister-in-law" have already been well-documented.In fact, in the subsequent "Ten Minutes of Love" (2008) and "The Avenger's Death" (2010), we repeatedly saw the mismatch between narrative elements and visual forms.In the former love sketch on Lamma Island, the director has always used beautiful photography to avoid developing the narrative relationship between the characters, so at the beginning it was both fantasy and reality, and it ended with doubts. journey of.The latter more wantonly ignores all realistic narrative logic, but is eager to bring out the allegory of humanity and divinity through the arrangement of continuous killing and revenge. The lens seems to be laughing at itself above the shapeless concept that has long since died.

Peng Wen used the scene where Turbo was beaten and even forced to have sex with a dog to explain that Huang Jingfu did not hesitate to violate the audience's visual principles to construct an impossible camera position-"The author's presence is strongly shown in the film, and he is not at the same level as anyone else." Genre film standards or the audience's cognitive desires will not be compromised." I would like to point out that Huang Jingfu's "visual excess" is firstly based on the inability to balance the narrative and the imbalance of visual style, and falls back into the visual "author's presence". The style is misjudged and biased, so it is in the current embarrassing situation-neither able to fight a bloody way at the artistic level, nor can it integrate into the commercial market to expand its living space.The scene Peng Wen pointed out reveals the director's attempt to emphasize the value of his own existence by destroying the visual conventions of reality.This kind of fragmentary and scene-based label understanding, in turn, just shows the creator's inability to control the whole and implement the style.The irony is that the above-mentioned so-called "visual excess" creative style has never been new in the genealogy of Hong Kong movies. From Gui Zhihong's anger to death to Huang Zhiqiang's rage, they all vividly express that everything is too much, too much. All crazy local characteristics.However, it is worth reflecting on that the crazy performances presented by the above directors in visual style are actually implemented with a unified style and imagery, while the narrative elements in them may be thin and rough, but they are constructed on the principle of complementing each other rather than being obedient.While today's film fans are flocking to the metallic sci-fi aesthetics of Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo" (1988), Huang Zhiqiang has already demonstrated the amazing creative attempt of boxing martial arts and sci-fi sci-fi crossover in "The Ring" (1983).Gui Zhihong's "visual excess" performance of violence, pornography and even fantasy is almost everywhere, but what is behind it is still the display of the concept of fate, and the resulting anarchism madness and rebellion , so as to achieve one after another angry heroes who challenge fate.In short, visual style and narrative elements should never be regarded as a binary opposition, especially in the category of commercial genre films, "there is no future" is almost a suicidal road of no return.More importantly, the review of visual style has always been based on the whole film as a whole, and "there is no sentence but no chapter" cannot be a compliment.

Looking back, I was actually one of the people who had a soft spot for Huang Jingfu.However, I choose to deny his image interpretation of "excessive vision", so as to summon the reborn Huang Jingfu in "Forbes"-this is probably the purpose of this article.