都市幻景、魅影姊妹和新兴艺术电影的特征

Urban Dreamscape,Phantom Sisters,and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema

中国近期有多部实验电影试图运用电影语言和叙事工具来关注中国都市的当代转型及城市中的日常生活。如果静止和沉思是第五代电影的主旨和准绳,那么"都市一代"的实验电影则以其动态性及其对当代城市生活的瞬息万变的高度知觉为特征。《月蚀》和《苏州河》两片激进的当代性体现在它们对于引入另一种现象学的政治与诗学的坚持。魅影姊妹是过去和当下相复合的人物形象,各自不完整却又相互重叠。她们表现了发展过程中的不平衡性以及这种单向度的意识形态对人的摧残,同时也借助多种方式的感官修复过程来确保社会记忆的持久性。从更宏观的世界影史的角度来看,这些电影造就了德勒兹所称的"直接的时间影像":它试图重新确立电影中的时间与思想。从这个角度来看,这些影片的视觉风格可以理解为是把现代人的失落感和疑虑调配到黑色电影的语法中来,改装出另一种适用的"方式与格调",再用它对消费主义大行其道的当代中国文化进行批评。

The recent years have witnessed a preoccupation with the contemporary transformation of Chinese cities and daily life therein by many experimental films in China through innovative deployment of filmic vocabularies and narrative devices. While stasis and contemplation constitute the keynote in the Fifth Generation＇s canon, the experimental cinema of the Urban Generation is marked by motion and a heighted awareness of the ephemeral temporality of contemporary urban life. For example, the radical contemporaneity of both Lunar Eclipse and Suzhou River lies in their insistence on introducing a different politics and poetics of phenomenology. The phantom sister, as a compound figure of the present and the past, both incomplete and overlapping, registers the unevenness of development and the casualties inflicted by the ideology of progress while reaffirming the tenacity of social memory, aided and processed by various sensory prostheses. From a broader perspective in the world film history, these films contribute to what Deleuze called the ＂direct time-image＂ that seek to restore time and thought to cinema. In this regard the visual style of these films can be understood as a transposition of the sense of loss and doubt permeating the society onto ＂mannerism and style＂ through noir-inflected idiom, thereby exposing and commenting on the prevalent epistemological and moral uncertainty that has overwhelmed a postsocialist consumerist China.