艺术死了

When the audience first heard this film's name, they have already realized that it was exemplary for its kind. However, when the film was screening at the FIRST International Film Festival, they realized that this exemplary comes from young peer directors' shared creative consciousness. What cannot be ignored is that today's young directors show a tendency in creation, that is, the tendency to continually explore and challenge the authentic boundary of cinematic art, which belongs to this generation of young directors alone. The tide of postmodernism is deconstructed; cinematic ontological is mixed with other artistic reorganization. We found that a new generation of directors' understanding of cinematic image is no longer stays in the field of film. Cinematic image separated itself from the film and reborn in a short video or on streaming, interactive video, VR, the rise of vertical screen film. the digital image is already not the privilege of film, but it becomes a tool of expression. These emerging film attributes impact the young writers and impact the traditional cognition of film they have learned. Under this contradiction, a new kind of cinematic image is produced. It focuses on the boundary between reality and fiction, and they are pushing the limit of cognition. In this year's FIRST International Film Festival, this creative tendency has been strengthening. The film that gained an excellent reputation, such as A Bright Summer Diary, Nova, Love Poem, Art is Dead, and other films have all shown an intense conflict between the authentic nature of the cinematic image and its fictional meaning. Undoubtedly, Art is Dead is the best film among them.

This exemplary character is also directly reflected in the audience's ratings and comments after the screening. In such a unique place as the FIRST International Film Festival, the audience must be intentionally looking for a kind of exemplary breakout peer cinematic image. This time, they found Art Is Dead. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss and consider the origin of this model, which can make us better understand this film and make us better understand the philosophy of film of a young Chinese cinematic peer. The whole film is filmed with a VLOG(video blog) shooting technique. The director keeps the same viewpoint throughout the film. During the filming, only the fundamental technical difference of the camera is changed. Such a mode of expression is influenced by the large number of VLOG circulating in the media today. The VLOG video's essence is a kind of video diary—a way of showing the events in sequence. To some extent, just as the implied author of the diary is the author himself, VLOG's camera is the director's eye. However, it can occasionally reflect on itself, showing the relationship between self and people and things.

In this case, what kind of result does the VLOG technique's choice point to in creating this film? Is the director's VLOG a manifestation of the public's psychological reality or a manifestation of the material reality of the VLOG image itself? This contradiction is already announced a young director's fundamental confusion in film creation. VLOG image itself is not in the service of authenticity; authenticity is just an additional property in the VLOG. In a film that desperately needs authenticity, such as Art is Dead, will the psychological authenticity surpass the substance reality during VLOG expression? Moreover, will the VLOG image's performance nature that brought out by the psychological authenticity, makes the audience realized advanced that the fictional nature of the death of Gang Liu?

Any slight error in any of these problems will lead directly to the fragmentation of the cinematic image. Director Shengwei Zhou delicately split two kinds of authenticity brought by the form of VLOG. At the start of the film, a performing VLOG lets the audience realized the film is displayed for a particular purpose, but then, after the death of Gang Liu, the shaking camera and the following mockumentary image of confusion reduce the performance nature. After reducing this contradiction, Shengwei Zhou’s VLOG successfully retained its authentic nature without being questioned; the audience was also willing to take the initiative to believe that the authenticity of the performances.

Why quibble about a little technique? Does this have much to do with the story? This question might not be worthy of such a discussion in any ordinary film. However, for an experimental film always exploring the audience's cognition, this question is almost the top priority. If the Director does not solve this technical problem, the subsequent expression will be impossible to discuss. In this film, Director Shengwei Zhou created a fictional setting, that is, the death of the painter Gang Liu. However, most of the reactions in these settings are real. The dramatis personae do not know the preset scene and the audience, but they act sincerely in this deliberate lie. If recorded in a documentary way, it is difficult for the audience to ignore the camera's presence. VLOG is based on a shared understanding, and it appears as a performance rather than a documentary. Thus, both sides of the camera -- the audience and the characters can let down their guard. The Director's exploration of the image could, therefore, been realized.

The film is divided into two main parts, the light-hearted exhibition in the early stage and the severe and cautious art critic in the later stage. The former creates many irony and contradictions, while the latter aims to show a problematic art community situation. It is worth noting the state of the audience during their watching because the director's exploration of the cinematic image not only stays on the screen, he goes further and comes to right in front of the audience. In the first half of the film, the truth of Liu's death is no longer necessary; it confirms Chinese scholar Rongchang Jiang's opinion about the news "the authenticity of the news is not the authenticity of the news events". While more streaming video keeps the news media's inheritance, we will be surprised to find that, in today's society, a short video that contains jokes unexpectedly showed the same authenticity effect as the news media. It forces us to reflect on an epistemology about our perception; we should not forget that there is always a strong bias or recognition behind any jokes.

A closer observation at this bias, we discovered that we might never pay any attention to whether something is true or not. News and streaming provide false assurance. There is always a gap in our perception, and that some people are aware of the gap and keep silent, while others choose to ignore it and voice their opinions. This is what the director Shengwei Zhou wants to criticize in the first part of the film: pluralistic ignorance and lack of reflection. The dramatis personae are already hard to distinguish from the actual situation; the audience mocked the dramatis personae that they worship a fictitious nature of virtual symbol without any aesthetic recognition. This kind of laughter originates from the audiences' confidence in the authenticity of the event. Situational irony constitutes the audience's laughter. In the film hall, laughter also becomes a kind of expression of opinions. They did not even realize that they are becoming the signifier that the director is criticizing.

In the solemn second half, the director once again stirred up this hidden string. When the literary critic cleaned up the random palette, the audience was surprised to find a fictional reality. His aesthetic works built the painter Gang Liu's existence in the audience's psychology. In this scene, even Gang Liu's existence's authenticity cannot be perceived anymore, even though the director has already confirmed that Gang Liu's death was fake. However, his unique aesthetic characteristics in his work make the audience believed his existence instantly. The flash that Gang Liu died into or a pair of aesthetic characteristics of paintings must be drawn. Liu's sag in painting in the face of interwoven with the painting constitutes an illusory chain. Without a doubt, we understand that others could create the painting. However, in the virtual scene director creates, our cognitive ability has already reached its limits; we lost our ability to retrospect on an epistemological level because we have just encountered the consequence of doing so. We can only actionless watching at the screen, where Gang Liu, as a pure signifier, has been combined firmly with his painting. We can only silently accept this mockery and accept that we become the people we previously laughed at.

I think the director can film all the audience's reactions, and that film may be the real Art Is Dead. In the unique illusory web of cinematic image-making, the viewer's cognition has been stretched to the limit, the viewer's confidence has been destroyed. The power of fiction never scares us because we are confident in our recognition of reality. However, when the reality that we have sworn to ourselves is knocked to the ground by a higher reality, we cannot help but feel a kind of doubt, an epistemological doubt about the current reality that we are lived in. However, in the director's real fantasy, we discovered that such a cinematic world is just a complete reproduction of the real world. News, VLOG, short video, confidence, and arrogance are staged in reality in a rigorous sequence. It is possible that the judgment about the authenticity of the cinematic image does not have any validity. However, when the audience realizes that all the film's judgment originates from the anaphoretic of reality, we will begin to tremble, which is the epistemological reflection that could only be produced by the cinematic image.

Perhaps for understanding this contradiction, we need to recall the beginning of Art Is Dead, the discussion about whether VLOG is reasonable or not. The two sides of the contradiction are always the authentic nature of the image and its performance nature. Suppose there is no artificial involvement in VLOG. In that case, this contradiction may be insignificant. However, because of the inevitable human intervention, VLOG is reduced by a possible truth expression to a human performance intention, a prejudice belonging to the community, a parallax view of truth. In the quiet film hall, the contradiction of image is extended infinitely here. At the endless parallax of this era, the audience gradually gives up searching for the truthfulness and deliberately performs. In the illusion created by Zhou, the camera finally returns to the dark studio, expresses its dissatisfaction with the audience on the sculpture, and looks out at the distant brightness. The camera eventually stops right before the final reveal of the truth. Like the audience in front of the curtain, hidden in false darkness. An accusation started to reverberate in every audience's mind: "Art is dead!"