Didn’t swim until the sea turned blue

◎Zhang Hailu

　　On the evening of October 18th, Jia Zhangke unexpectedly announced that he would withdraw from the Pingyao International Film Festival founded by him and hand it over to the local government of Pingyao starting from the fifth next year.

On the first night, his new film "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue" had its Asian premiere in the "Spring in a Small City" theater of the Pingyao Film Palace.

Fans sighed that the Pingyao Film Festival failed to make the water blue.

　　By the dyke in Haiyan County, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, the writer Yu Hua recalled the scene of swimming in the sea as a child. “Remember that the sea is yellow, but the school textbook says that the sea is blue.”

One day, he swam a long way down the current with the waves, thinking that he should keep moving forward until the water turns blue.

　　Yu Hua’s remarks with the spirit of a foolish old man moving mountains and a romantic atmosphere led director Jia Zhangke to abandon the original upright title of this latest documentary, "Literature of a Village", and renamed it to the beautiful "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue".

　　This documentary film is also like an image derivative of the Lu Liang Literature Season that began on May 9, 2019.

On the opening day, Jia Zhangke had an idea. Since so many influential Chinese writers have been invited, shouldn’t we use interview materials to make a documentary?

Use the literary history since the founding of New China to tell the impact of rural changes and drastic changes on the lives of Chinese people.

　　This week-long literary season was held in Jiajiazhuang, Fenyang, a subsidiary of Luliang City.

The distinguished guests include contemporary writers such as Mo Yan, Su Tong, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Alai, Li Jingze, Liang Hong, Han Dong, and important poets such as Ouyang Jianghe, Xichuan and Yu Jian.

Fans know that Fenyang is Jia Dao’s hometown, and is the most important background board to mark the era and homeland memories in masterpieces from "Xiao Wu", "Platform" to "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers".

However, this "same surname" Jiajiazhuang is a historical village where Jia Zhangke moved to live in these years.

　　The documentary starts from the leisurely courtyard watching the life of the old people in the village. It is gradually divided into 18 chapters with its own set of rhythm and logic.

In the form of oral personal and family history from interviews, it focuses on the four representative writers of different eras: Ma Feng (deceased, recalled by his daughter), Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong, as individuals after the founding of New China in 1949 Past events with home.

It can be regarded as another oral documentary carrier "My Hometown and Me".

　　This is also Jia Zhangke's third oral history documentary after "Twenty-Four Cities" and "Legend of the Sea", from factory and mine workers to citizens, and then back to farmers who nourish 9.6 million square kilometers of land.

　　It is completely different from the expressions of the famous writer who used the villagers’ group portraits to spread the foundation of his homeland and introduce the famous writers to tell the past. The people’s writer Ma Feng has lived in Jiajiazhuang for a long time more than 60 years ago. He has grown up and changed together with the village in the land reform. As a prototype, local villagers created the short story "Han Meimei" and the movie scripts "Young People in Our Village" and "I Know Three Years Early".

It can be said that Jiajiazhuang's context and even "shadow context" are very rich.

　　As in the aforementioned oral history documentaries, the stories of workers and citizens are not developed. Most of the time, "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue", it only uses the villagers of Jiajiazhuang as the background board and chooses to let influential writers come. Complete the large oral part.

The homeland and homeland have also gradually expanded from Jiajiazhuang, recalled by Ma Feng’s daughter, to Shangluo, Shaanxi, where "post-50s" Jia Pingwa is unforgettable, Zhejiang Haiyan where "post-60s" Yu Hua lives relaxedly, and "post-70s" Liang Hong chose The return of Liangzhuang in Henan.

After all, it is a movie that is going to attract the audience—even if the audience is small—the writer's name and storytelling charm are far better than those of the villagers who stay together.

　　However, the 18 chapters are also interspersed with fragments of novels and poems read or recited by the villagers of Jiajiazhuang. Their Mandarin is extremely non-standard, but they have the true beauty and rustic flavor that surpasses the poem recitation programs of TV stations.

Music works from Shostakovich and Rachmanilov are often interspersed with freehand passages of sketches depicting the image of the land and villagers, and occasionally transition to the performances of Jin Opera and Qin Opera, which of course will lead to some Weird auditory experience.

It is destined that some people will criticize its pretentiousness, and some people may be sure that this application reflects the reality of the mix and match.

　　The chapter "Leaving Home", accompanied by the picture of the train carriage, is directly matched with Bocelli's golden song "Time to Say Goodbye".

However, it was also from this chapter that I began to pay attention and stared at the movie time in the future, and finally found that this documentary focused on literature and writers did not show any book or paper print!

　　The young people on the train are all swiping their mobile phones. The idlers and passengers on the Xi’an Railway Station square are also bathing in their mobile phone time. Liang Hong is on the train from Beijing back to his hometown in Henan. The son next to him is also wearing headphones and playing with his mobile phone. .

　　This is the real view of reality.

People's reading habits have been completely changed. There is no need to steal the four-volume "Dream of Red Mansions" from relatives as Jia Pingwa recalled, and there is no need to read like Yu Hua, who can only read a bunch of unknown names and no beginning and ending. Fiction.

A large bookcase or a library can be stored in a thin Kindle e-reader, and the reading efficiency may become higher, so why bother to pursue the "weight of literature" conservatively?

　　Of course, after all, it is an oral narrative of past history. Even though there are many scenes of "low-headed people" who use mobile phones, the documentary does not mention technology's changes in the way of reading and literary creation.

　　When the Asian premiere of "Swimming Until the Sea Turns Blue" was held at this year's Pingyao International Film Festival, the segment of Yu Hua's account drew laughs and applause from the audience.

This is something that none of the other three narrators can do.

Yu Hua walked from the noodle restaurant in Fenyang to the street, talking about his literary fame.

In 1983, he started literary creation when he was working at the Haiyan County Cultural Center. He cheekyly put his works in the two most important magazines, "October" and "Harvest". "If I was rejected, I would continue to vote for lower grades, "Beijing Literature "Shanghai Literature", no more, it's a big deal to vote for "Lv Liang Literature and Art." One day, the telephone switchboard in Haiyan County received a call from "Beijing Literature" and asked Yu Hua to revise the manuscript in the past, including travel expenses, board and lodging, and living allowance.

The only requirement for publication is to change the end of the work to "bright".

Yu Hua immediately agreed, "As long as it can be published, I will make you brighter from beginning to end." In the end, it only took him a day, very easily, to brighten the darker ending of the novel, and he still had this opportunity. After playing in Beijing for a month, I felt very rich when I returned to Haiyan.

A few years later, different magazines sent three letters of appointment at the same time, and he was extremely proud. “From the time when no one wanted to submit articles, to the time when I asked for them, that was the only moment I felt famous.”

　　I believe that in reality, Yu Hua does not have the strength to swim out of the yellow water at the end of the Haiyan dam until the water turns blue.

In Liang Hong’s hometown in Henan, a river that is always diverted, but she and her family can easily perceive what is thirty years in the east and thirty years in the west.

The son of a middle school student who went back to his hometown to play is obsessed with physics and wants to understand the scientific cause of the river's changes.

Sitting on a pile of rocks by the river, he was like answering questions in class, telling about the geological basis and water movement.

Jia Zhangke on the camera asked, could he introduce himself again in Henan dialect?

The child who went to Beijing with his mother as a child said that he had almost forgotten.

Liang Hong leaned in front of the camera and took his son to speak dialect sentence by sentence. After a while, he became coherent and agile.

　　When the movie is over, walking out of the Pingyao Movie Palace, the most lively pedestrian street in the ancient city, there is a singing voice from a clothing store, "There are many milk tea shops on the roadside of Dongjiekou. You can't speak dialect for students born after 00."