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Introduction
More than half a century ago, the little girl Lin Yingzi followed her parents across the ocean from Taiwan to Beijing and lived in an alley in the south of the city. The decaying battlements of the ancient capital, the bells of camels in the setting sun, and the secluded alleys of the busy city... all of this made Yingzi feel novel and fascinated by it. The crazy woman in front of the guild hall, the little friend Niu'er who was covered with whip marks, the thief who haunted the grass, the wet nurse Song Ma who accompanied him day and night, the loving father who was seriously ill and slept underground... They all played with Yingzi. They passed, talked and laughed, and lived together. Their voices, faces, and smiles were still there, but they all quietly left one by one. Why is the world so miserable? The ignorant Yingzi thought deeply but couldn't figure it out.
More than 50 years have passed, and those who are far away from Beijing are still fond of all this. That hint of sadness and deep lovesickness are deeply imprinted in her childish memory and will never fade away.
"Old Things in the South of the City"
Dongyang Childhood Camel Team - Postscript to the publication of "Old Things in the South of the City" (Lin Haiyin)
The camel team came and stopped at my house in front of the door.
They are arranged in a long row, standing silently, waiting for people's arrangements. The weather was dry and cold. The camel puller took off his felt hat, and there was a stream of white smoke rising from his bald cup, which melted into the dry and cold atmosphere.
Dad negotiated the price with him. Each of the two-humped camels carried two sacks of coal. I was thinking, is there "Nanshan Gaomo" in the sack? Or "Black Gold and Black Jade"? I often see these big black characters written on the white wall of the coal stack on Shuncheng Street. But the camel puller said that they came from Mentougou, and they and the camels walked step by step.
Another camel puller was greeting the camels to eat fodder. They bent their front legs, stuck out their buttocks, and knelt down.
Dad has already negotiated the price with them. People are unloading coal and camels are grazing.
I stood in front of the camels and watched them eating grass and chewing: such ugly faces, such long teeth, and such quiet attitudes. When they chew, their upper and lower teeth grind back and forth, steam comes out of their big nostrils, and white foam covers their beards. I was stunned and my teeth started to move.
The teacher taught me that I should imitate a camel, a calm animal. See, it is never in a hurry. It walks slowly and chews slowly. It will always get there and it will always be full. Maybe it was born to be slow, but it accidentally took two steps to avoid the car, and its posture was ugly.
When a camel team comes over, you will know that the leading one always has a bell tied under its long neck, which makes a "ding, clang, clang" sound when it walks.
"Why do you need a bell?" I have to ask if I don't understand something.
Dad told me that camels are afraid of wolves because wolves will bite them, so humans put bells on them. When wolves hear the sound of the bells, they know that humans are protecting them, so they dare not infringe. .
My childish mind was full of ideas that were different from those of adults. I said to my father:
"No, Dad! Their soft soles are walking on the soft desert. There was no sound at all. Didn't you say that they walked for three days and three nights without taking a sip of water, just chewing the food poured out of their stomachs without making a sound? It was a long and lonely journey, so I put a bell on the camel to make the journey more interesting."
Dad thought for a while and said with a smile:
"Maybe, you. The idea is more beautiful."
Winter is almost over and spring is coming. The sun is so warm that it makes people want to take off their cotton-padded jackets. Isn't it? The camel also took off its old camel hair robe! Its fur fell off its body in large pieces and hung down under its belly. I really want to take a pair of scissors and cut them because they are so uneven. The same goes for the camel pullers. They also took off the large sheepskins they were wearing and put them on the peaks of the camels' backs. The sacks are empty, the "black gold and black jade" are all sold, and the bells ring more clearly in the relaxed pace.
Summer is here, and there are no more camels. I asked my mother again:
"Where do they go in summer?"
"Who?"
p>
"Camel!"
The mother couldn't answer, she said:
"Always ask, always ask, you kid!"
Summer passed, autumn passed, winter came again, camel caravan came again, but childhood was gone forever. I will never do the stupid thing of imitating camel chewing under the winter sun.
However, how much I miss the scenery and people who lived in the south of Beijing in my childhood! I said to myself, write them down, so that the actual childhood will pass and the spiritual childhood will last forever.
In this way, I wrote a book "Old Things in the South of the City".
I thought silently and wrote slowly. Seeing the camel team approaching under the winter sun and hearing the slow and sweet ringing of bells, my childhood came back to me.
"Old Things in the South of the City" uses its fresh and meaningful prose narrative to express the psychological journey of an era like "childhood past events".
In the film, Xiao Yingzi is the narrator in the story, but due to her young age, this will inevitably dispel the deep semantic meaning of the text and the symbolic meaning of the absence of the object of desire, thus shirk the responsibility for Xiao Yingzi's social behavior.
The biggest charm of the film is that the director deliberately allows the real narrator, the adult "Little Yingzi" (also said to be Wu Yigong or Lin Haiyin), to create a distance in time and space from the story being narrated, making the film's story more interesting. The narrative style casts a melancholy and hazy emotional tone.
In the scene at the beginning of the film, Xiaoyingzi imitates the appearance of a camel chewing. This not only reflects her inner innocence and childishness, but more importantly, establishes her narrative perspective in the film. Most of the shots in the film were shot from a low angle of view of Xiao Yingzi. In this way, as Xiao Yingzi's innocent gaze is traced back, the sad mood of "everything has gone away from me" becomes particularly real and at the same time more realistic. Pathetic and painful.
Judging from the content of the film, the fate of the characters told in the story can be said to be quite miserable, but the tone is still quite gentle. Ru Xiuzhen went crazy because the college student she was in love with was arrested by the police for engaging in underground revolutionary activities, and her life and death are unknown. The director used Xiu Zhen's sad voice-over to tell the story. The camera slowly moved inside the house where the lovers once lived. The peeled vermilion walls and windows seemed to have left the mark of their emotions. These provide the film with a rich audio-visual imagination space, immersing the audience in a specific emotion.
The free love between Xiuzhen and the college student cannot be tolerated by the clan etiquette, but the illegitimate child was thrown into the Qihua Gate as a shame until the mother and daughter met and went to the train station, and eventually died tragically on the train. Under the giant wheel seems to be the inevitable destination arranged for them by that society. In order to show the tragic fate of this character, the film carefully shot the farewell scene on a rainy night, allowing the white smoke from the train chimney to engulf the entire long shot. In the heavy rain, Xiao Yingzi, who was seeing off the mother and daughter, fainted. Outside the screen came the shouts of people buying newspapers: Look, mother and daughter were crushed to death by the train. The director here did not let Xiao Yingzi's young mind bear too many blows, nor did he want her pure eyes to be covered with too much dust. All the heavy spiritual catastrophes were pushed behind the scenes. This implicit expression technique is very thought-provoking. .
On the contrary, in showing the mutual care and consideration between the young Niu'er and Xiao Yingzi, the director deliberately relied on the continuation and accumulation of various audio-visual images to exaggerate the permeation and diffusion of the inner emotional atmosphere. Through four shots of the little chicken in the rattan box and the mirror language on the swing, it depicts their inner feelings of innocence, innocence, sadness and frustration, separation and bitterness, and bitterness and loneliness. This emotion runs through the film. In a soothing and calm rhythm. Because of this, Xiao Yingzi's melancholy when leaving was superimposed in the melody of "Li Ge", and she longed for the long swing and the fluffy chick. In her retrospective gaze, a heavy sigh emerged, giving rise to a delicate and sad poetry, just like the night rain under the eaves in the film, which washed away into water circles and spread like ripples. Come on.
If in the first half of the film, Xiao Yingzi is still a carefree child, and the cruel realities she feels are just novelties, then in the second half, starting from Xiao Yingzi waking up in the hospital bed, But it was a nightmare escape and breakout. From then on, Xiaoyingzi began to mature, and she gradually realized the complexity and pain of the world.
The world is too small for the innocent little Yingzi. It should be as colorful as the sea and sky. The clips of chanting "Let's go to the sea" appear twice in the film, which clearly reflects the director's subjective wish.
In the wild grass garden, Xiao Yingzi encountered a kind and honest thief. The crows and cries lingering above their heads seemed to indicate a tragic atmosphere of fate.
From several conversations between Xiao Yingzi and the thief, we know that the thief is a good person, but social reality forces good people to become thieves. Traditional cultural upbringing and overwhelming life pressure led to a double split in his spirit and behavior, causing him to suffer tremendous mental suffering while stealing other people's money.
But behind Xiao Yingzi’s pure and kind eyes, she inadvertently harmed the thief again. She gave a small Buddha statue (which can be a metaphor for the thief's inner need to find a way out) to a plainclothes policeman who was shaking a rattle, but it became a basis for the thief to be caught. In Xiaoyingzi's tearful eyes, another friend left her. Another emotional scar was smeared on her soul before she had time to repent. Just as the famous poet Bei Dao wrote in "Electric Shock": I once shook hands with an invisible person/screamed and my hand was burned/left a mark.
When the kind-hearted little Yingzi gradually became filled with the pain and sadness of life, her family also suffered one after another misfortune. First, Xiao Yingzi's father passed away peacefully and turned into a stone monument in a Taiwan cemetery. The six scenes of the red leaves stacking in her father's cemetery undoubtedly pushed the theme of farewell throughout the film to a climax. Then Song's mother said goodbye to Xiao Yingzi's family, and rode back to her hometown on the little donkey brought by her husband. This kind woman was left with the loneliness and loneliness of losing her children.
At this time, Xiao Yingzi was lying on the back of the carriage, saying goodbye to her childhood home and spiritual nest with tears in her eyes.
Xiao Yingzi appears as a main character in the film. When she discovers that there is a huge contrast between the good wishes of adults and reality, her innocent and kind young heart becomes increasingly weak. The endless cycle of tragedy entangled in the film is even more eye-catching and thought-provoking. This is also the key to the film becoming rich and thick.
But this is not entirely true, because the "old things in the south of the city" we saw in the film can no longer be the original things. She bears the imprint of Xiao Yingzi's childhood past, but more of it is the "old things in the south of the city" imagined by Wu Yigong or Lin Haiyin. They are the lingering fragrance in their memories and the fermentation in the depths of their emotions. The altar is full of old wine, so they nourished and nurtured that "old story in the south of the city" with their own hearts.
The "little story of the big era" they described is no longer recalled with a heart-wrenching sense of repentance, but with an open-minded, calm and peaceful mentality. Therefore, many life details in the film are filled with a deep feeling of nostalgia, and they all retain a rare warmth: such as the bells of the school and the singing of children, as well as the windlass well, the The waterwheel, the dog sticking out its tongue under the scorching sun, and the quiet alley with the sound of cicadas like rain... came to life through their artistic rendering and sublimation.
When we follow the characters in the film to realize their respective destinies unknowingly, you will be pleasantly surprised to find: with the "one"
"Old Things in the South of the City"
"Old Things in the South of the City" is an autobiographical sketch of the famous female writer Lin Haiyin. It is a novel based on her life between the ages of seven and thirteen. It can also be regarded as her masterpiece. It describes the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Yingzi's warm and happy family lived in a courtyard in the south of Beijing. Through the childish eyes of the protagonist Yingzi, it shows the world the joys and sorrows of the adult world. There is an indescribable innocence, but it reveals the complexity of the world. "Old Stories in the South" was selected as one of the "Top 100 Chinese Novels of the 20th Century" by Asia Weekly. It was also adapted for the screen in the 1980s and won many awards including the "China Film Golden Rooster Award", touching a generation. It is full of nostalgic tone, and expresses the multi-layered emotional colors in it in a natural and traceless way. Everything in the book is so orderly and flowing slowly. The slow camel caravan, the slowly passing people, the slowly passing years... the perfect combination of scenery, objects, people, events and emotions, like an elegant and implicit poem written by a little girl more than half a century ago. Lin Yingzi followed her parents across the ocean from Taiwan to Beijing, and lived in an alley in the south of the city. The decaying battlements of the ancient capital, the camel bells in the setting sun, and the lonely alleys in the busy city... all of which made Yingzi feel novel and fascinated. . The crazy woman in front of the guild hall, the little friend Niu'er who was covered with whip marks, the thief who haunted the grass, the wet nurse Song Ma who accompanied him day and night, the loving father who was seriously ill and slept underground... They all had sex with Yingzi. They had played, talked and laughed, and lived together, but their voices and smiles were still there, but they all left quietly one by one. Why is the world so miserable? The ignorant Yingzi thought deeply but couldn't understand it. p>
More than 50 years later, the wanderer who is now far away from Beijing is still affectionate about all this. That faint sadness and deep lovesickness are deeply imprinted in her childish memory and will never fade away. , also moved me deeply.
When I read "Old Things in the South of the City", I felt a little warm in my heart, because it is rare to see such exquisite things, because she did not express anything deliberately, just a picture. Scene after scene, the old Beijing in the eyes of a child is described calmly, as if life is telling itself, so unhurried, gentle and gentle, so pure and indifferent, so long-lasting and fragrant, so full of the smell of human fireworks. But he has no desire to pursue fame and fortune.