The name "Prose Film" is translated from "Prose Film". Prose is translated into words and film refers to film, so the literal translation is called "Prose Film".
Prose is a narrative literary genre, which expresses the author's true feelings and flexible writing style. In ancient China literature, prose is opposite to verse and parallel prose, and it does not pursue rhyme and sentence order. This is prose in a broad sense. In China's modern literature, prose refers to a literary genre as famous as poetry, novel and drama. This is prose in a narrow sense.
Generally speaking, it can be divided into two types: one is narrative, like Zhu Ziqing's back, which expresses his "love" between the lines through the description of stories such as buying oranges and climbing the platform.
The second is reasoning, such as Montaigne's Essays, which is all-encompassing, integrates book knowledge and life experience, and is the confluence of all kinds of knowledge in16th century, and is known as "philosophy of life".
Montaigne examines all sentient beings in the world with a wise eye, reflects and explores people and life, affirms people's values and desires, criticizes the church and feudal system, advocates breaking classical authority, and is full of human freedom and scientific knowledge. Simply put, it may be "chicken soup for the soul"!
What is a "prose film"? As the name implies, it is an essay film. Is that just a movie of prose? It seems right, but it seems not so right! Let's make two assumptions first. One is to film Zhu Ziqing's back, and the other is to film Montaigne's prose.
As far as the film "The Back" is concerned, think about it. Either make a documentary about Zhu Ziqing's father (this documentary has a short time span) or make a drama. Both of these situations pay attention to narration, and it seems that they can't become the lyric language like the article.
Then let's imagine what Montaigne Essays looks like. Noel Birch mentioned in an article about prose films in 196 1 that Jacques Faidel tried to adapt Montaigne's prose, but it eventually became an unfinished project.
It seems that some illogical and unrelated pictures are cut together to make sense? Besides being a bit too montage, it also means avant-garde. Avant-garde movies express a profound truth with minimalist, exaggerated, abstract and stylized film language.
So, what's the difference between them and prose movies? "Prose film" is regarded as a film practice between documentary, art film and avant-garde film, but it is not a feature film. Just like the original words of "prose film": "I am neither a documentary nor a feature film."
In my opinion, it is necessary to strengthen lyricism in the back, and it is through words or people who speak. For Montaigne's essays, we need to make up some reasonable stories to explain the truth, similar to the philosophical version of Tu Tu with Big Ears.