The professional knowledge of film and television arts used in Manchevsky's film "The Storm is Coming" ~ For example, the film uses long shots, composition, montage, etc.
On the day when cinema was born in 1895, the Lumiere brothers did not realize how much change cinema would bring to human life. To this day, cinema has promoted and completely changed the way we interact with the world. Its methods and models, its infinitely broad and free time and space, have become the best medium for us to pursue a perfect spiritual life. The real freedom of film in time and space is the creativity of film itself - editing, which allows us to move freely in time and space, and time is no longer out of reach.
Time passes and the circle no longer exists. This is a sentence that appears repeatedly in the movie "The Rain is Coming". Just like the meaning of this sentence, the structure presented by the movie is also "time does not pass, and the circle no longer ceases." Director Manchevsky cleverly sets up the blend It's really amazing, and after being amazed, we found that this was not an affectation by the director, but a process of deep thinking and real emotional investment. Here we will first clarify the story line of "The Heavy Rain", and then we will analyze how the film achieves the ultimate unity of content and form through editing.
The whole film is divided into three paragraphs:
The first paragraph: words. In Macedonia, outside an ancient monastery, the young priest Cory and the older priest were picking tomatoes in the sun. The old priest said: "It's going to rain...". Sanmila, a young Albanian Muslim woman, is on the run from a group of gangsters headed by Mitre. The young priest Cory hides her. Mitre and his men broke into the church to search for Sanmila and set up camp outside the church. Overnight, Corey and Sang Mira became lovers. Corey decided to take Sanmila to London to find his uncle who was a photographer. After they both escaped from the church, they met Sanmila's family on the road. The family blamed Sanmila for causing trouble, forced Sanmila to stay, and drove away Corey. Sanmila wanted to leave with her lover, but was shot to death by her brother. Before she died, Sanmila asked Corey with a gesture not to say sorry.
Second paragraph: faces. In London, Anne is a female pictorial editor of a photography agency. The doctor told Anne that she was pregnant. She is faced with the choice of returning to her estranged husband Nick or leaving him for her lover Alexander. In the studio, Anne received a call from Macedonia. There was a young man asking for his uncle who was a photographer. She saw a photo of a Macedonian girl lying in a pool of blood after being shot. Alexander is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who left his native Macedonia and came here a few years ago. Now he has made up his mind to return to his native land, and he wants Anne to go with him. Anne hesitated, and Alexander left alone impatiently. At the restaurant, Anne tells her husband Nick that she is pregnant and that she plans to divorce him. Nick pleads with Annie to give him some time and their conflict will be resolved. Meanwhile, a foreigner got into an argument with a restaurant waiter and was kicked out. He returned a few minutes later and shot people dining. Anne survived by chance, but Nick was beaten to death beyond recognition.
The third paragraph: photos. Macedonia, Alexander returns to his native village. Villagers of different ethnic groups are already hostile to each other. The first person to greet him was a young tribesman under Mitre. Anne was in London, hoping to contact Alexander by phone. Alexander goes to visit his first love, the Muslim woman Hana, whose daughter Sanmila is. Hana asks Alexander to rescue Sanmila, where he is scorned by the Christians in the village. Alexander's cousin was killed by Sanmila when he tried to rape her, and Mitre's group kidnapped Sanmila. At night Hana came to Alexander and begged him to protect Samira. Alexander found the sheep shed where Sanmila was imprisoned and wanted to take Sanmila away. One of Alexander's relatives shot him to death. Anne hurried over and happened to witness Alexander's death as a heavy rain fell. Sanmila escaped from the village and ran towards an ancient monastery. Over the mountain, under the sun, the young priest Corey and the older priest were picking tomatoes under the sun. The old priest said: "It's going to rain...".
The sophistication of the narrative structure makes this film extremely charming. At the end of the film, the scene of Father Corey communicating with the older priest is replayed intact, and the plot structure of the film returns from the end to the starting point. From a narratological point of view, this is a flashback, but it breaks the general rules of flashback, that is, it does not lead a relevant character in the play to recall the past, but makes the story loop. It was not until the end of the film that the audience realized that the three not-so-close story segments were actually interlocked. This is a creative use of film editing techniques. Just by finding a suitable cutting point and adding an ending piece of film, the story section becomes a circle.
Of course, the cycle in the film is not a closed circle. The starting point and the end point are not repetitions or overlaps in a simple sense. Just as the circle mentioned in the film is not round, it is a coincidence and sublimation in a certain sense. . The director emphasized this point intentionally or unintentionally in the final editing of the film. He did not want the audience to just passively obtain a complete and complete experience.
The beginning of the first part of the film, "Language", is connected just after the end of the third part, "Photographs". The content of this story describes Anne's rush to Macedonia and happened to witness the shooting of her lover Alexander Kirk. In the second part, "Faces," Anne uses a magnifying glass to examine the photo of the body of the Albanian girl Samira who logically should not have been shot in the film. The living people have long since died, but the dead are still alive. Time has been temporarily disrupted, but this does not affect your judgment of reality. It just means that time is suspended in confusion, or amplified, but it is not amplification of time in the traditional sense by taking shots from multiple angles and connecting them together.
Some people may question the rationality of editing, and it is precisely this "rationality" that constrains our creative film editing. Proust, who had infinite reverence for time, recreated time according to his own memory, but director Manchevsky was obviously dissatisfied with reorganizing time and space traditionally. What he wanted to capture was the possibility of the coexistence and juxtaposition of time, combining the three The stories are collaged together. You can start with any story, but you cannot make the three stories form an inevitable connection and get a consistent result.
There are many puzzling details in the film: Why did the photographer show the picture of his lover Anne to the peacekeeping force officer on the car returning home, and said that she was dead? Where does Annie witness the photographer's funeral? Also, is the photographer uncle who Corey wants to seek refuge in London with is Alexander who was martyred to protect an Albanian girl? Because he himself said that he would rush back to attend the baptism ceremony of his nephew. Anne received a call in London from a Macedonian relative who claimed to be a photographer. Was it from Macedonia or London? Do we have to find a connection between them? The directors deliberately and seriously gave up on self-justification and did not seek to obtain a perfect "narrative". In fact, those unclear parts are exactly the parts that director Manchevsky tried to transcend through editing methods.
What is certain here is that the film "Heavy Rain" is definitely not a traditional film produced according to the concept of "Three Unities". After "Three Unities" is used three times in this film, A miracle happened: It turns out that the three paragraphs can completely form an independent chapter, but the combination of the three paragraphs, the constant repetition, analogy, and mutual echo of the three paragraphs truly liberated the narrative and made our single thinking change from the existing concepts of time and space. The chain went off the rails. It is the precise yet open connection between the three paragraphs that makes the entire film take on such a complex and ambiguous form.
The major difference between traditional narrative theory and modern narrative theory is that the latter provides a distinction between stories and narratives. The narrative mechanism of "Heavy Rain" is ambitiously based on trying to break the coherence, airtightness and self-containment of time and space. And this is the embodiment of the most constructive side of postmodernity, which eliminates authority and center, but does not shy away from sympathy and concern for the current situation of human existence.
In fact, the film also cleverly echoes the postmodern theme of the narrative mechanism in details. For example, entering the second paragraph, the film first shows us a bathroom glass with a face that cannot be seen clearly. All that could be heard was the cry of a woman. Next, the film shows us the heroine's busy work and the chaotic neighborhoods of London, including pop songs and sirens that can be heard everywhere. When we see the long street view of London reflected on the taxi window, covering two lovers who are making out, it just presents a typical human living situation in the post-industrial era: people who have no worries about food and clothing still cannot hide their inner feelings. Chaos and haste. London is a peaceful place, but the sound of gunfire still emanates from Oxford Street. The weather forecast continued to report that London was going to rain recently, and Alexander, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, suffered from bone pain. In the third paragraph, Alexander questioned the "no choice" and "objective, true" video art. He gave up his career with a mentality of atonement, forgot his Pulitzer Prize, and expected to return to his hometown. Cleanse your soul. The final shot of this sequence shows Alexander from above, blood gurgling from the bullet hole in his chest, and the rainstorm finally comes. The careful setting of all these details undoubtedly makes the non-traditional editing of the entire film more reasonable, so that we no longer misunderstand that the editing of the film is a mistake or an irreparable damage to the film that has been shot.
"Here Comes the Rain" is one of those films that lingers in your mind. It's like a film that never stops repeating itself. As the film reaches its end, At the same time, going back to its beginning, all the suspense lies in the same words on the Macedonian Rock or on the wall of the streets of London: Time does not pass, and the circle ceases.
The film’s exquisite narrative and breakthrough in tradition all lie in the editing of paragraphs and shots. This is undoubtedly a feast of film editing that will leave you deeply unforgettable and amazed.