Zoom照进生活：电影创作的新可能

Eons ago - also known as January - Zoom was a semi-obscure service known mostly as a business-based videoconferencing tool. Now, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, it has become an instant vernacular, with toddlers using it for playdates, teenagers using it to learn, wine o'clockers using it to toast and families using it for virtual hugs during a time of enforced separation.

很久以前———其实也就是一月份的时候——Zoom还是一个鲜为人知的服务软件，大多数情况下作为商用的视频会议工具。而现在，在新冠肺炎带来的阵痛下，它已经成为一种即时会话工具，幼儿们将其用作玩伴，青少年们用其学习，饮酒者用其祝酒，在被迫分离的时候家庭成员用其虚拟拥抱彼此。

With its black-box simplicity and stacked spatial grid, the Zoom screen hews to a comforting form of classicism, evoking both Mies van der Rohe-esque modernism and the boomer nostalgia of "Hollywood Squares." As a metaphor for contagious times, its aesthetic couldn't be more apt, allowing practitioners to be connected and self-isolated, in a format that - however improbably - looks better as more people add their faces to its oddly mesmerizing mosaic of morphing tiles.

Zoom的界面以其黑盒般的简洁和层叠的空间网格，迎合了古典主义的舒适形式，且致敬了米斯·范德罗式的现代主义和以 “好莱坞广场”为代表的怀旧潮。作为疫情时期的隐喻，ZOOM的美学设计十分巧妙，它让用户们相互隔离，又彼此联系。让人不可思议的是，随着越来越多的用户加入到视频会议中，人们的脸显示在界面上，呈现出如同马赛克一般的效果，令人着迷。

In fact, Zoom has quickly become so ubiquitous, so reflexively accepted as How We Live Now (it's been real, TikTok), that it's only a matter of time before someone makes their first feature film entirely on the platform. In the same way that D.W.Griffith's novelistic editing and psychological symbolism anticipated audiences' expanding expectations in the early 20th century, and that the jump cuts and jittery handheld camera movements of the French New Wave both captured and informed the edgy sociopolitical impulses of the 1960s, Zoom is already promising to both reflect and infiltrate the visual language of its era.

事实上，Zoom已然迅速变得无处不在，并且被《我们现在如何生活》这本书所收录（抖音，这是真的！），因此有人仅靠这一个平台来制作他们的第一部故事片只是早晚的问题。就如D.W.格里菲斯的小说编辑和心理象征主义预见了20世纪初观众日益增长的欲望,而法国新浪潮的跳跃式剪接和手摇摄像机的运动既捕捉到了20世纪60年代尖锐的社会政治冲动，又为之提供了信息。zoom有望反映并渗透这个时代的视觉语言。

Like the aesthetic advances that preceded it, the Zoomification of movies will be the product of what has always been a dialectical relationship between technology and creators. In 2000, the British director Mike Figgis made "Time Code," composed of four separate story lines filmed on digital cameras that unspooled simultaneously, leaving it to viewers (nudged by increasing the volume on certain pieces of dialogue) to decide which part of the desultory, maddeningly random plot to follow. It didn't take long for movies like "Edge of Tomorrow" and "Sucker Punch" to adopt visual and narrative techniques from the very video games that were striving to look like movies. Over the past few years, filmmakers have experimented with re-creating the online experience in "desktop" movies like "Unfriended" and "Searching"; the conundrum of how best to show text messages on screen - beyond boring shots of pinging cellphones - has been attempted in everything from "The Fault in Our Stars" to the TV shows "Sherlock" and "House of Cards."

就像之前的美学进步一样，电影的“Zoom化”将是技术和创作者之间一直以来辩证关系的产物。2000年，英国导演迈克·菲吉斯创作了电影《时间代码》。它由用数码相机拍摄的四条独立的故事线组成，且同时展开，让观众（通过增大某些对话片段的音量）在相互没有关联，完全随机的情节片段中做选择，决定剧情走向。没过多久，《明日边缘》和《出其不意》等电影也采用了这样的视觉和叙事技巧，而这些技巧正是来源于那些画风逐渐向电影靠拢的电子游戏。在过去的几年中，电影制作人尝试在《解除好友》和《搜索》这类以显示屏作为叙事线索的电影中重新创造一种参与感。至于如何在电影中表现收到短信这样的情节而避免采用老套的插入手机铃声的方式，从《星运里的错》到《神探夏洛克》再到《纸牌屋》，这些电影和电视剧当中都已经有过各种不同的尝试。

Phones are the target exhibitors for Quibi, the new venture being launched next week by former studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who not that long ago was insisting that large-format theaters and 3-D were the future; now he's big on small-canvas stories designed for bite-sized snacking.

手机是奎比（被称为短视频版Netflix）的目标使用终端。奎比是由前电影巨头杰弗里·卡曾伯格将于4月6日推出的新项目。这位梦工厂动画公司的创始人不久前还坚称大屏幕影院和3D是电影的未来的发展趋势，不过现在，他更热爱那些适配小屏，能让观众"一口一个"的短片。

But phones have also become their own means of production: In 2015 Sean Baker made the sun-kissed Los Angeles picaresque "Tangerine" entirely on an iPhone, with nary a hiccup - a feat repeated last year by Steven Soderbergh with the basketball drama "High Flying Bird."

而手机也成为了他们的创作工具：2015年，肖恩·贝克仅用一部iPhone顺利地拍摄了一部名为《橘色》的短片，阳光灿烂的洛杉矶街头风情画在片中一览无余；去年，史蒂文·索德伯格的篮球电影《高飞鸟》也实现了手机拍摄这一创举。

If any filmmaker is already working on a Zoom movie, it's most likely Soderbergh, an inveterate early adopter of innovations with movies like "Full Frontal," "Bubble" and "Che"; his prescient 2011 epidemic thriller "Contagion" has already become the cinematic mascot for 2020, a year that has taken on the contours of an eerie dystopian allegory. But more than just a gimmick or pop-metonym, Zoom has the potential to add legitimate production value to the cinematic lexicon. For an example, look no further than a video of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing an excerpt from Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" that went viral over the past two weeks.

如果有哪位电影导演可能已经在用Zoom手法制作电影，那很可能是索德伯格。他在《正面全裸》、《气泡》和《切·格瓦拉传》系列电影中都采用了此类创新制作手段。2011年的作品《传染病》也采用了这种拍摄方法，这部恐怖电影放在反乌托邦式的2020年看来，就像是对现实的一种超前隐喻。但Zoom不仅仅是一个噱头或是带有流行色彩的转喻，它有着为电影行业增添生产价值的潜力。多伦多交响乐团演奏亚伦·科普兰的《阿巴拉契亚之春》就是一个例子——这段视频在过去的两周内迅速走红网络。

Created by principal double bass Jeffrey Beecher, the 4 1/2-minute film features 29 orchestra members playing the "Simple Gifts" theme from Copland's composition. Beecher sent his colleagues an MP3 of the digital score he'd created on his computer so they could hear each other's parts while they played, asked them to film themselves on their phones and send him the files. Then he spent 48 hours (with pizza breaks) furiously editing the performances into a poetic whole. Although Beecher didn't make the piece on Zoom, his visual design - rectilinear blocks that shift in placement and prominence, set amid a solid black background - evokes the platform's elegantly simple layout.

这部四分钟半的电影由首席低音提琴演奏家杰弗里·贝彻创作，片中29名乐队成员演奏了科普兰作品当中的“简单的礼物”主旋律。比彻把他在电脑上创作的数字乐谱的MP3文件发给同事们，这样他们就可以在演奏时听到其他人的部分。随后收集了每个人演奏部分的手机录音，用48小时的疯狂编辑使其融合成一个诗意的整体（包括吃披萨时的休息时间）。虽然这件作品不是使用Zoom完成的，但是他的视觉设计——直线划分区域、纯黑优雅背景、放置位置和突起不断变化，与Zoom简洁规整的布局异曲同工。

Beecher's inspirations were as varied as the obscure 1980s DIY cult film "The Wizard of Speed and Time," a vintage board game called "Guess Who?" and the choreography of Martha Graham, who commissioned "Appalachian Spring." But he admits that he was instinctively drawn to the "Brady Bunch"-era familiarity and clean lines of Zoom. "Out of isolation comes connection," he said in a recent telephone conversation from his home in Toronto. "How does culture serve our present quarantined time, not just in terms of supplying content for couch binge-watching, but ... how these adapted skills and perspectives will change the live arts experience once we move freely from our homes?"

比彻的灵感来源广泛，比如20世纪80年代的自制小众电影《速度与时间的巫师》，老式棋盘游戏“猜猜是谁”，参与过《阿巴拉契亚之春》的玛莎·格雷厄姆的编舞。同时他承认自己本能地被“脱线一族”所具有的年代感，和Zoom清晰的线条所吸引。他最近在多伦多家中接受的一次电话采访中表示：“脱离了孤独，才有联系。文化是如何在当下这种隔离时期为我们依旧提供服务，而不仅局限于电视频道？当我们重获外出自由时，这些适应新情况发展的技能和观点将如何被运用于改变现场艺术体验？”

【《速度与时间的巫师》】：美国电影，1979年上映，时长为3分钟。

【《阿巴拉契亚之春》】：舞剧《阿巴拉契亚之春》是柯普兰与美国著名舞蹈家玛莎·格雷厄姆紧密协作的产物，是柯普兰受伊丽莎白·斯普拉格·库立基基金会的委托、以摄取玛莎·格雷厄姆的个性为出发点而写成的。作曲家曾以美国边境生活为题材写过三部舞剧，《阿巴拉契亚之春》是其中最后一部也是最美的一部。

【玛莎·葛兰姆】：1894年5月11日~1991年4月1日，美国舞蹈家和编舞家，也是现代舞蹈史上最早的创始人之一。

In its own way, Beecher's experiment offers an answer to that question. Going to the movies has always been an exercise in collective solitude. Now that ethos has taken on life-or-death stakes. With filmgoers finding new ways of keeping their distance, whether at Netflix watch parties or "theatricasts" hosted by their local arthouses, Zoom promises to become not just a means of cinematic communing, but a uniquely expressive piece of cinematic grammar - one that gives "alone together" a prophetic, profound and potentially literal new meaning.

比彻的实验以自己的方式为这个问题提供了答案。去看电影一直是一种集体式孤独活动。但在目前的特殊时期，这种行为却成了生死攸关的大事。随着影迷们找到了既保持距离又享受文化的新方法，无论是在网飞平台上在线观看视频，还是把自家当成本地剧场。Zoom不仅仅是一种电影交流手段，还是一种独特的电影语法表现形式，无论是从表面上看还是潜在来看，它都为“孤独式相聚”赋予了全新的内涵。

【网飞公司】：成立于1997年，是一家在线影片租赁提供商，主要提供Netflix超大数量的DVD并免费递送，总部位于美国加利福尼亚州的洛斯盖图。