Original title: A handful of noodles: emitting the unique flavor of the Loess Plateau
A handful of noodles is a film about the history, reality and culture of northern Shaanxi. The film closely revolves around "a handful of noodles". It is not flashy and has no tendrils. It makes three generations of inheritance stories of traditional handicrafts through hollow noodles. It focuses on the historical changes, social progress and people's aspirations. Therefore, it has strong narrative characteristics of local realism in artistic techniques. The film is rooted in life, deeply grounded, close to the people and the world, shows customs and customs, carries heavy historical and realistic connotation, reflects certain regional and ethnographic narrative characteristics, exudes the unique soil flavor of the Loess Plateau, permeates strong people's feelings, is a pursuit of ideological taste, pays attention to artistic style, has responsibility, and does not become vulgar The beautiful and vulgar feature films bring a ray of elegance to the current film art creation, so they are worthy of praise and praise.
The people and events in A Handful of Hanging Noodles originate from the true story of three generations of inheritance and production of handmade hollow hanging noodles by a farmer surnamed Zhang in Zhangjiashan Town, Wubao County, northern Shaanxi. Although Zhangjiashan Town is the hometown of Liu Qing, the famous writer who created the immortal "History of Entrepreneurship", the real popularity of this place is attributed to "a handful of noodles". The story of "Grandpa Zhang's Hollow Noodles" told by CCTV's "China on the Tip of the Tongue II" series in the "Heart Story" episode is exactly how the craftsman surnamed Zhang inherited and made hollow noodles for three generations. With the popularity of "China on the Tip of the Tongue", "Grandpa Zhang's Hollow Noodles" spread all over the country and became famous all over the world.
The script was created by Liu Yuzhu, a native writer in northern Shaanxi, with a strong flavor of northern Shaanxi culture. On this basis, the director Zhang Jing made a second creation to return to the creative attitude of the film aesthetic narrative noumenon, and use simple and sincere film language to move it to the screen. In this sense, the good intertextuality between the script, the director and the performance of the film "A handful of noodles" is also a repair of the ecological relationship between the script, the director and the performance of the film literature in the context of excessive entertainment and commercial film production.
The film A Handful of Hanging Noodles tells the story of the history and culture of northern Shaanxi, human relations, and social changes. The "memory" it carries is very rich. The subject matter of the film is ordinary, the plot and narrative are not complicated, and the actors' performance is more natural, but the film does have something moving, so where does its expressiveness and appeal come from?
The reasons are as follows: First, it is the historical and real life content contained in the story of the film. In the film, the three generations of descendants of hollow noodles represent three times and three ways of life. The film reflects the development and change of society, the evolution of ideas, and the coldness of human attitudes, reflecting the trajectory of social and historical development through the different experiences of three generations of hollow noodles, namely Roots, Cabinets, and Shuan Shuan Yesun. Secondly, all the characters in the film have distinctive personality characteristics, and they are all living "this one". The thoughts and feelings they embody are three-dimensional and full, reflecting the richness and complexity of human nature. In addition, the film has a bright rhythm and a smooth narrative. Instead of winning with the bizarre twists and turns of the story, it is good at presenting simple camera language, profound plots, and scenes that blend feelings.
The performance of the actors in the film is natural. They are not famous actors in the performing arts industry. It can be said that their performance is not "professional", but it can not be said that their performance is not simple and sincere. It is their natural performance that makes the film simple. In the film, the stories played on the Loess Plateau, the geographical customs of the ravines and ridges, the native born actors, and the wandering singing of Xin Tian You form a whole, which set off against each other to produce a huge aesthetic "bonus", thus giving a deep interpretation of the history, culture, and real life of northern Shaanxi.
Undoubtedly, under the influence of consumerism and the erosion of excessive entertainment trend, the "entertainment first" doctrine has become a powerful force in film and television creation for quite some time, so all kinds of vulgar, kitsch, and vulgar works are flooded on the screen, and the ideological taste and aesthetic style of the works are declining sharply, and the sense of social responsibility is becoming weaker and weaker, This has become a persistent disease in the current film and television production. If we do not use medicine and stone, it will be difficult to fundamentally reverse it. It is in this sense that the film "A handful of noodles" can be said to reflect the historical mirror image of social changes on the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi, and is a song of passionate concern about reality and embracing life.
(Author: Dang Shengyuan, professor of the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
(Editor in charge: Zou Jing, Wu Yaxiong)