Cinema Scope谈《地球最后的夜晚》（下）
Cinema Scope杂志（第75期）封面是毕赣《地球最后的夜晚》。本期刊载了毕赣、拉斯·冯·提尔、李沧东、戈达尔等人的采访。以下是Blake Williams对《地球最后的夜晚》的评论文章，笔者将它翻译成中文，分为两期刊载，这是第二期。供广大影迷参考阅读。（注：文中插图为笔者为助于读者理解文章所配）
By Blake Williams
And why would he be? For one, Bi came to filmmaking from poetry, which he’s written a book of, and which he credits as the primary foundation forKaili Blues. His films, then,oughtto confuse our imagination, to place us on the margins of events, where, as Bachelard believed, we can be awakened from our automatisms. There’s a necessary two-ness and, thus, in-between-ness inLong Day, which is part of why it creates such an unusual aura. Electric yet catatonic, roving yet paused, indexical yet virtual, multidimensional yet flat—Bi’s films are never content to offer just one impression, derived as they are from such disparate sensibilities. WhileKaili Bluesis perhaps the more balanced embodiment of both of these modes, it’s this follow-up that hones and enriches his dualistic grammar, creating tension and complexity out of low-key lighting, long pauses, and—most of all—stylistic dissonances. Indeed,Long Day’s Journey Into Night, whichtakes place almost exclusively at nightdespitebeginning on the summer solstice (“From now on our days will be shorter, our nights longer”), is often in conflict with what we expect from it. It’s the kind of film where you receive a pair of polarized 3D glasses on your way into the cinema only to be instructed, via an opening onscreen intertitle, to not put them on (“This is NOT a 3D film,” it begins). The spectacles were eventually needed, of course—albeit to behold a nearly hour-long single take originally photographed in 2D—but there was something productively perverse about being forced to experience nearly two-thirds of such a ravishing, plaintive,tactilemotion picture while holding onto, and thus be constantly kept at least somewhat mindful of, such a flappy, flexible, plastic piece of hardware, never knowing when (or evenif) they’d need to be transferred to my face.
他为什么会这样？首先，毕赣的电影创作来源于诗歌，就如他的电影前作《路边野餐》证明的那样，改编自一本他写的诗集。他的电影，随之应该是混淆并打乱我们的想象力，把观众推至事件的边缘，在那里，像巴切拉所信奉的那样，我们能够从自我能动性中醒来。这里两者具有必要性关联，因此，在《地球最后的夜晚》中，关联之网解释了为何他要创造这样一个不同寻常的光环的部分原因。电动但紧张，流动但停滞，索引但虚拟，多维度但平坦—毕赣的电影从来不会满足于仅仅提供一种印象，而它们都是从这些不同的感受中衍生出来的。而《路边野餐》可能是这些模式更加平衡的实例，它是这种艺术追求的磨刀石，丰富了这种二元性的电影语法，创造了一个复杂紧张的低照度的长镜头，总而言之，是一种不和谐的风格。事实上，尽管《地球最后的夜晚》的故事几乎完全发生在夏至（一年中白天变短，夜晚变长的节气），它也与我们往往所期盼的相冲突。这种电影仅仅是建立于在你需要之处用戴上一副偏光式3D眼镜这种方式去介入，借助于打开的银幕的提示，你在影片的某个地方需要戴上它（它开始的部分并不是3D电影）。当然，最终是需要戴眼镜的—尽管这是一个以原始2D的格式用摄影机拍摄出来接近一个小时的长镜头—但是，这里依然有一些创意性的东西值得我们经历。有接近2/3的时间这种令人陶醉的、悲伤的或可触的运动画面在持续发展。因此至少一直保持着神经紧张地观赏它，例如飞扬的、灵活的、或柔软的塑料硬件，不知道何时（或者即便知道）会扑面而来。
It’s a film of here and not-here, of has-been and will-never-be. It names itself after an immortal Eugene O’Neill play, a Sidney Lumet Palme d’Or-contending Katharine Hepburn vehicle, and an episode ofGrowing Pains’ second season, without having anything to do with any of them. (The title “matched with the film’s spirit,” Bi says.) It sutures together two competing impulses duking it out in the Chinese film industry: the impulse to globalize and welcome Hollywood and computer-generated imagery, and the impulse to be true to local roots and historical perspectives, forwarding documentary aesthetics as the essential avenue to truth and resistance. It speaks (literally) of spells and out-of-body experiences, of forgetting our bodies and the facticity of where we are in space, and then frames its action in formal registers that are notoriously conducive to proprioception—making us feel and become conscious of our bodies and its various operations, thus grounding us very much in ourselves, the Earth’s gravity magnified. It offers not one (ping pong), not two (billiards), but three (basketball) near-satisfactions of 3D cinema’s great unfulfilled promise—to revitalize and finally, absolutely complete the sports movie—only for each respective sphere to remain attached to the screen, swallowed back into a plane from which it always artificially bulged.
这是一部关于在场与不在场、过去与将来的电影。它以欧吉尼·奥尼尔的非道德表演给自己命名，西德尼·吕美特竞争金棕榈奖的作品里面凯瑟琳·赫本开的帕尔默汽车，以及《成长的烦恼》第二季的时代，不需要对他们任何人做任何事。（毕赣所说的标题“与电影精神相匹配”）。它将中国内地电影产业中两个相互竞争回避的冲突缝合在一起：第一，好莱坞的全球化影响以及依赖计算机生成图像的趋势，第二，对于地域性寻根和历史观点的真实冲动，把纪实美学当作寻求真理与反抗的必不可少的途径。它拼写出（从字面意义来说）先验于身体的体验，遗忘了我们的身体和在空间中的真实性，然后在正式的记录中构建其行为。那些众所周知的有利于本体的行为—使我们感觉并意识到我们的身体和各式行为，从而让我们更加依赖自我，将地球的引力扩大。它提供的不是一个（乒乓球），不是两个（台球），也不是三个（篮球），而是复兴了接近令人满意的3D电影伟大的未竟的希望—并最终完全完成了有关于运动的电影—只为了每一个相应的范围保持附着在屏幕上，从总是被人工塞满之处吞咽回平面中。
And it’s across these points—in the midst of its post-converted long take—that I became most won over byLong Day’s journey to the stars, precisely because it delivers, however incidentally, one of recent cinema’s most damning demonstrations of how technology is cosmically incapable of saving us. The film transitions, finally, into stereoscopy at the moment Luo goes to the movies, puts on a pair of 3D glasses, and then slips away to Neverland, drifting off into hostile territory, to some incarnation of Luo and Bi’s hometown of Kaili. Having already warned us earlier in the film that movies, unlike dreams, “are always false,” we plunge deeply, unremittingly into a despairing domain that feels simultaneously tangible and illusory. Movie, dream, or something else entirely, truth and falsehoods become altogether indistinguishable here.
正是在这一点上—在它后转换的长镜头之中—我变得更加欣赏《地球最后的夜晚》这部影片。正是因为它传递了，而且是在不经意间地，一个在最近的电影中技术在很大程度上无法拯救我们的最该死的明证。最后，在罗先生（黄觉饰）去电影院看电影的时刻，影片立体化了，观众此时戴上3D眼镜，随之溜进梦幻岛，漂入敌对领土，一处罗和毕赣的家乡凯里的化身。影片在较早的时候就已经警告过我们，不同于梦想，电影“总是虚构的”，我们深深地、坚定不渝地陷入到一个绝望之境，同时感受到有形与虚幻。电影、梦想，或者其它的一些东西，真实与谎言，在这里根本无法区分。
Guided merely by a map on a door, the camera traces a winding, flying trajectory that we might cognitively follow along with, provided that our memories are as trustworthy as promised. By foot, motor headlight, zip-line, and (absurdly, beautifully) a spinning ping pong paddle, we move through a space that is bent and warped in some most plastic and untruthful ways, thoroughly analyzed though the terrain was by post-conversion algorithms that still, to my eye, cannot pass the Turing test. As Michael Snow reminded us (with an assist from John Lennon) in the midst of his own iconic “long” take: Nothing is real. Here, though, it’s something to get hung about. In Bi’s tireless effort to convince Luoandus otherwise,Long Dayachieves its greatest power, having arrived at something we can comfortably call night.Because wecango home again, but time will not have stopped, and the sparklers won’t still be burning when we get there.
假如我们的记忆像允诺过的那样值得信赖，仅仅依循门上一张地图的引导，我们就可以通过认知跟随电影镜头，风一般地追踪那条蜿蜒的飞行轨迹。通过脚、摩托车头灯、溜索和一个（荒谬的，美丽的）旋转的乒乓球拍，以一些最可塑的和不真实的方式，我们穿过一个弯曲反常的空间。深入地分析它会发现，虽然地形是通过后转换算法得来的，但在我看来，它不能通过图灵测试。正如迈克尔·斯诺提醒我们的（在约翰·列侬的帮助下），在他自己标志性的“长”镜头中：没有什么是真实的。尽管如此，这仍是一个悬而未决的事情。在毕赣不知疲倦的努力下，使得罗和我们其他人相信，“长日”获得了它的最大的力量，已经到达了一些我们能够舒服的称为“夜晚”的东西。因为我们可以再次回家，但时间不会停止。当我们到达那里的时候，火花不会继续燃烧。
（完）
