The Spatio-temporal Narrative Analysis Of The Assassin

The Assassin was directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien in 2015 which had won the Best Director Award at the 68 th Cannes Film Festival.The narrative method of this film is different from the general movie.The clues to the structure of the film are not coherent in the story surface,but the state of the character's inner emotions.That is to say,its narrative logic is not based on the logical rationality of conventional commercial movies.It breakthrough the audiences' common understanding and based on the context and atmosphere created by an image and the rationality of the mood of the characters it expresses.It is a non-linear narrative.The narrative of the Assassin featured as "hidden",not "shown".The performance often deliberately erased the sense of "acting".The development of the story does not rely on the "performance" of the actor's exaggerating body expressions.Instead,it uses subtitles on the screen or condenses powerful and intriguing semi-classical style language to express information.The director deliberately smoothed out all possible theatrical elements and led the audience directly to the depths of the human heart.In the use of the camera,Hou Hsiao-hsien became the defender and practitioner of Bazin.By using of long shots,he demonstrated the normality and complete psychological motives of things,avoided restricting the audience's perception process,ensured the sense of time,transparency,and polysemy,maximized the faithfulness to reality,and expressed respect to audience.The art design and scenes selection in the Assassin can be seen as first class.In terms of spatial narrative,the movie as a whole shows a clear binary opposition between closed space and open space.Both are relative to each other to form a complete spatial representation system.Specifically,a closed space represented by an indoor scene symbolizes imprisonment and gives people the feeling of being suppressed and repressed.The open space represented by the outdoor scene symbolizes freedom and gives people a sense of relaxation and freedom.The director skillfully distinguished two kind of space by the scheduling of color(black and white picture and color projection),sound(different sorts of sound and music),scenes(mountain hill and foot;indoor and outdoor),etc.,and all dispatches are accord of the current mood and emotions of the character perfectly present how the character step out of the closed space of "Tao Guan" and join the open world.It became Foucault's“concept of apocalyptic and theoretical vitality” and Bazin's “polysemy andambiguity in realityCorrespondingly,in order to realize the full expression of the characters' emotions,the film is shown in the rhythm of delay.The director understate the ever-changing social history time,makes the camera focus on trivial and monotonous daily life,and uses a large number of long shots and empty shots to photography the natural mountains and rivers,let the invisible natural time become the main character in the picture,in the audience,flowing in front of you.In seemingly insignificant way,time is given to what Benjamin calls the ability to look back at us.We also see the time itself,and then through the reflection of time we see the world of our lives and ourselves,and realize the exchanges between people and the world,people and themselves.The movement of film time here is no longer simply a symbol of the speed,but a kind of emotional resignation and symbolism,so that the film itself has a "poetry" attribute.It can be concluded that the director in The Assassin is no longer a storyteller but a lyric poet.Hou Hsiao-hsien once admitted that this was influenced by Shen Congwen.When the audience watched Hou Hsiao-hsien's film,they had a feeling of reading Shen Congwen's works.Both of them were working under a special historical background,but their interest was not in the “era” but in the “people” in that era.Shen Congwen once thought that text had its limitations as a medium of expression.Therefore,he was particularly fond of the arts and crafts,emphasized the new spiritual enlightenment which brought by them.And music,for Shen Congwen,is the most abstract art form,but also the most important form of all artistic media.Hou Hsiao-hsien has precisely integrated Shen Congwen's sentiments and aspirations into the film art by combining the "visual experience" represented by "fine art" and "auditory experience" represented by "music".Prof.Wang Dewei of Harvard University believes that both of them can be observed in the coordinate system of Chinese lyrical tradition.Under this premise,this article elaborates on the narrative features of this film and the Chinese lyrical tradition embodied in the spatio-temporal narrative.In order to deepen the understanding and appreciation of the Chinese style of Chinese film,it is necessary to explore a feasible way for Chinese film to move toward the world.