姜文 电影英文赏析

Jiang Wen--by Zhou Yali 091230125 Jiang Wen is a film actor and director. As a director, he is grouped with the "sixth generation" that emerged in the 1990s. Jiang is also well known internationally as an actor, having starred with Gong Li in Zhang Yimou's debut film Red Sorghum (1986).Born in Tangshan, Hebei, in a family of military personnel, Jiang relocated to Beijing at the age of ten, which has a big influence on his life and career. In 1980, he entered China's foremost acting school, the Central Academy of Drama, graduating in 1984. That same year, he started acting both on the stage (with the China Youth Theater) and in films. After appearing in many television series and films, Jiang became renowned in China for his role in the 1992 television series A Native of Beijing in New York, which made him one of the most popular actors of his generation. In addition to these he also starred in Hibiscus Town (1984), Black Snow (1990), The Emperor's Shadow (1996) and The Soong Sisters(1997). Apart from Red Sorghum, Jiang also collaborated with Zhang Yimou for the 1997 film Keep Cool.Jiang wrote and directed his first film in 1994, In the Heat of the Sun, adapted from a novel by Wang Shuo. A tale set in the Cultural Revolution, it won for its young lead actor Xia Yu the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and garnered six Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan. Jiang'ssecond feature film, Devils on the Doorstep, set during the Japanese occupation of China in the early 1940s, won him the Grand Prix in the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. Jiang has also acted in television series, such as Daqing Fengyun (2006), in which he played Hong Taiji.Here is the list of his filmography:And the films be marked, are directed by him.Now, we will explore the style of Jiang as a director of the 6th generation by one of his representative works--In the heat of the sun In the Heat of the Sun is an important film because its portrayal ofhistory and identity stands in sharp contrast to other films of the period, such as the near “epi c” frameworks used in Zhang Yimou’s To Live (Huozhe 1994) or Chen Kaige’s Farewell to My Concubine (Bawang bieji 1993). Indeed, Jiang has been described as gently mocking previous “Fifth Generation” films within the digesis.As a director, Jiang Wen stands uncomfortably between the “Fifth Generation” of graduates from the Beijing Film Academy and those filmmakers labeled as the “Sixth Generation.” The “Fifth Generation”, as Dai Jinhua states, attempted to challenge dominant Party representational and narrative codes, since their life courses had been structured by a succession of political campaigns. In contrast, members of the “Sixth Generation”had very different experiences, coming of age in the new priorities of Deng’s reforms. Consequently, these younger directors concentrate upon more contemporary issues, undisguised by historical settings, and film largely urban themes.As a member of the “liumang generation”, too young to be sent to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution yet old enough to have knowledge of life under Mao, Jiang has experienced the Maoist past, but has not been visibly scarred by it. Instead of ten bitter years, for the children of army officers (in common with Ma Xiaojun and his creator, Wang Shuo, Jiang’s father served in the military) the Cultural Revolution was “like a rock and roll concert with Mao as top rocker and the rest ofthe Chinese as his fans.”Jiang also appears to question dilemmas of individual identity to a larger extent than his filmmaking predecessors, who seem to be more focused upon issues surrounding “the nation.”Jiang explores how identities are negotiated in an era of superhuman models, and explores the human fragility behind attempts to replicate such yingxiong (heroes.) Moreover, in this film, Xiaojun is never presented as a victim. He is not crushed by outside circumstances, but is presented as an agent, as the “Chinese”past itself is revealed as the product of his imagination. The following sections explore the manner in which Jiang questions both dominant histories and masculine identities, and displays the extent to which Xiaojun’s narrative undermines both.As a director, Jiang is also constantly tricking his audience, building up our expectations in order to displace them. However, these tricks prolong his film in our memories, as we feel compelled to decode it in our heads. For example,at the end of the film, Mi Lan and Xiaojun’s gang meet at the Moscow Restaurant to celebrate the birthdays of Liu Yiku and Xiaojun, a fight begins between Yiku and Xiaojun after Xiaojun insults Mi Lan. Xiaojun stabs Yiku in the chest repeatedly with a broken bottle, the filmspeed slows down as Xiaojun looks down to see Yiku without a scratch. At this point, the narrator intervenes and the film stops and rewinds he is editing his own scene. “Don’t believe any of it,”he says, “I never did anything so heroic in my life.”In reality, he conjectures, they all probably went out and got happily drunk. Looking back, he doubts whether he knew Mi Lan, the catalyst to his own story, at all-she might have actually been Yu Beipei. The audience is stunned-so far, we have had no reason to doubt the narrative. This episode is the visual manifesto of Jiang’s film, literalizing the similarities between cinematic representation and the processes of memory. Memory, like film, is a process of selective editing, with only the most appealing scenarios being projected. We are pulled into the games of unraveling rules, and are involved in the search for knowledge that Xiaojun undertakes inside the digesis. In one sense, though, Jiang insists that this subterfuge does not matter: truth is only what we want it to be, a flawed representation of an already subjective version of events.In fact, In the Heat of the Sun is a film about representation, representations that individuals (including the narrator himself) find it difficult to live up to. For example, In the Heat of the Sun is concerned with the problems of standing in and standing for: the older Xiaojun as narrator exposes the impossibility of standing for even his own past, and the film at large complicates the representation of Cultural Revolution China as a time of misery for everyone all of the time (a brave move). That is, standing for the nation in any coherent sense is proved impossible.In the Heat of the Sun is undoubtedly “a film about the power of cinema to reconfigure the past.” This questioning and unraveling is of a particularly Chinese history. Although the film shies away from presenting a codified version of its era, its resonance comes from our conception of its events as history, both personal and imaginative.With the regard of all these, the wise, the smart, the technic and the skillful of the director can be seen easily. What we can’t deny is that Jiang is really a unique and talented director of Chinese film industry.。