Author: Xu Zhuoyan.
Editor in charge: Xie Wanfei.
WeChat editor: Wang Xinyuan.
When we talk about Hou Hsiao-hsien, we inevitably talk about long shots, heads-up perspectives, and poetic audiovisual language. In the film "Once Upon a Time in Childhood", director Hou Hsiao-hsien shows the faint sorrow of growing up and the typical events of traditional Chinese families with his usual calm and peaceful style and almost documentary tone. But for me, rather than defining it as a typical "Hou Hsiao-hsien-style" film, it is better to see it as a prose poem written by director Hou Hsiao-hsien for a lost childhood.
Hometown dreams
At the beginning of the film, the ambient sounds and birdsong of the market pull the audience back to the fifties and sixties of the 20th century. Accompanied by Grandma's call of "Ah Xiaogu", my thoughts are full of thoughts - Hokkien is a very magical language, and its soft and deep tone brings people unconsciously into another world. The first time I watched "Once Upon a Time in Childhood", the long and bland plot made me drowsy as a young man, so I easily defined it as "ugly". So my grandmother's feelings for her hometown were reduced by me to the empty word "nostalgia", staying on a thin A4 paper, and there was no empathy at all.
But maybe it's getting older, and there is a little bit of hypocrisy of "worrying about giving new words";Or maybe it's thousands of miles away from home, and there is a bit of melancholy of "being alone in a foreign land as a stranger". Sitting in the dormitory, I repeated the scenes from the movie over and over again, listening to the familiar tones, and suddenly I was able to empathize with the emotions and identity of the hometown in the depths of my heart.
Language is a conventional system of symbols. As far as the "local sound" is concerned, the language environment in which Grandma lives has shaped her emotional identity and identity with Meixian. "My heart is my hometown", but grandma, who speaks Meixian dialect, has never been able to integrate into Taiwan, and the difference in language environment reminds her that she does not belong here all the time, awakening the nostalgia in grandma's heart, even if her family is around. As for Ah Xiao, he grew up here, took root here, and the concept of his hometown is nothing more than Grandma's mouth fluttering lightly, "After crossing the Meijiang Bridge, it is Meixian." Director Hou Hsiao-hsien talked about the impact of the political situation of the mainland and Taiwan on Taiwan's local landscape while discussing the topic of "hometown". In the tide of the times, the passing of countless "grandmothers" implies that the older generation's dreams of returning to their hometowns are shattered, and the appearance of countless "grandmothers" symbolizes the confused status quo of rootless descendants being swallowed up by the acquired cultural environment - human beings are just ants that have been consumed in the dust of history.
Poetry of Death
Ah Xiao's growth undoubtedly comes at a heavy cost. My father died, my mother died, and my grandmother grew old. The issue of "death" carried through his childhood.
Unlike the grief of her mother and sister, the immature Ah Xiao only felt lost and overwhelmed when facing the death of her father. The death of his father seems to be just a kind of interruption of Ah Hyo's intimate connection with this strange world, but it is the experience of facing "death" for the first time in his life that ends Ah Hyo's childhood. The death of her mother is the end of Ahyo's youth, who tries to take care of her brother and grandmother as she tries to take care of her brother and grandmother. After being forced to "grow", he found that even if he tried his best, he could not change the law of birth, old age, sickness and death.
At her mother's funeral, through her brother's shoulder, Ah Hyo couldn't stop crying, and her restless and ignorant teenage years came to an end. The film begins with Grandma's cry and ends abruptly as the camera focuses on the brothers' calm performance of Grandma's death. "The person who collected the corpse gave us a fierce look, and he must have said in his heart that the unfilial descendants ......The film is very restrained about birth, old age, sickness and death, this restraint is not the weak relationship between Ah Xiao and Grandma, nor is it full of indifferent unfilial piety. This peace is the sadness and guilt of the immature children and grandchildren in the face of silent death and farewell, and its essence is the powerlessness of birth, old age, sickness and death and the passage of time, which is essentially different from "indifference". Grandma's aging is not only the passing of Ah Xiao's childhood, but also the end of a generation's nostalgia and the end of the era.
A song of growth
In the autobiographical film "Once Upon a Time in Childhood", the so-called "life to death", growth and death are intertwined, spreading into the background color of Ah Xiao's life. The set of antonyms of life and death are no longer antagonistic in Hou Hsiao-hsien's narration, and the darkness of death after the boundary is extinguished is lit up by the vitality of life.
Under the dim light, when Ah Xiao got up in the middle of the night to meet his mother because of a dream, the image of his father reflected the scene of his mother. The breath of youth and aging collides in a cramped and narrow space, but it exudes a sad but not sad atmosphere. It seems that we in adolescence are always eager to prove our maturity, and Ah Xiao is inevitable. Fighting**, Soul Flesh**—he looks for an opportunity to vent the over-inflated hormones in his youthful body. But the physical changes are not a complete sense of growth, after experiencing life and death, the growth that touches the soul begins to sprout, and the successive departure of the older generation forces Ah Xiao to take over the burden with the pain and guilt of trauma. The passage of time, life and death. Perhaps looking back on the past, Hou Xiaoxian no longer remembers the state of mind of the year, but over the mountains and rivers, the road is far and the pit is deep, overlooking the swamp of Axiao's youth at a height of 10,000 meters, the past of childhood drifts with the wind, and eventually becomes the memory of the times.
The branches of the big trees grow wildly, the full and mellow ballet music, and the drizzling ......Hou Hsiao-hsien affectionately tells this prose-like past with his oriental poetic audio-visual, and Ah Xiao's childhood passes away in slightly bleak tones, soothing and melodious backgrounds, and soft and familiar rural sounds. Hou Hsiao-hsien uses "desolation" to describe the end of the film - the family is broken and deconstructed in the continuous life and death, and the hometown that exists in the memory of the older generation is nostalgic and passing. "Childhood Memories" tells the story of individuals growing up to find the remembrance of their hometown and the identification of their own emotions and identity, all of which are intertwined into the collective memory of the times.
Review: Yang Yue.
Reviewer: Zhou Wei.
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