《装腔指南》P206-P208：维多利亚，逼格，荷马

我的译文：《维多利亚》

一个女孩在柏林的夜总会跳着舞。她是西班牙人，20来岁，美得足够亮瞎周边破败的环境(她的笑靥引人微笑)。她很开心，或特别想开心。但形单影只难免寂寞，她试着跟那个时髦的酒吧招待搭讪，可惜他不感冒。因为第二天她还要去上班，不得不离开酒吧，这时她遇到了一群可爱的柏林底层人物，领头的是个彬彬有礼的索内人。这是《维多利亚》(2015年)的开场几分钟，其情节最终导致同名女主角被卷入一场武装抢劫，并带来毁灭性的后果。
 
叙述是狄更斯式的。就如同是《雾都孤儿》(Oliver Twist)中那个场景的延伸版，天真的主人公在伦敦游荡，发现他的新朋友们不是只会玩游戏。这般说来，这部电影似乎看没什么大不了。但是，当你知道它是用一个完整的镜头拍摄完成的——在148分钟的拍摄时间里，摄影师一直跟随演员们在柏林溜达——你便会相信这里有一些特别的东西。近来，这类“一镜到底”的电影流行起来，在电脑成像花样百出的时代给人一种真实的感受。但在维多利亚的故事中，它很适合正在讲述的故事，并非只是一个噱头：试想一个女孩发现自己陷入了一段无法下车的旅程，令人眩晕的恐惧不断叠加，直到几乎无法忍受。这很适合导演塞巴斯蒂安·席佩尔(Sebastian Schipper)和剧组要求拍摄出的角色的冒险精神。据席佩尔说，他只能负担得起三次尝试。前两个都失败了。“没有备退路”，他在演员们第三次尝试之前告诉他们必须全心投入，他催促道：“去感受，去恐惧！”这番话发挥了作用。
 
《维多利亚》是一个关于浪漫和暴力的故事，但让它效果显著的原因之一是，这些元素都没有一个是明确的。被克制的浪漫只局限在两个人物相互爱慕的视线中。暴力也是通过暗示去体会而非直接展现出来的。在所有即兴表演的氛围中(一开始演员们的剧本只有几页长)，有一个精明的帮手在起作用。完成的电影仅持续两个多小时，但它似乎容纳一生的光阴。它做到了一些大片很少能做到的事情，为你呈现你会关心的也会想念的角色。它的浓缩和简练使它像宝石一样珍贵，这是长篇电视剧无论有多少优点都无法做到的。它做到只有电影才能做到的。

 

原文 P234

《How to sound cultured》-Victoria

A girl dances in a Berlin nightclub. She is Spanish, 20-something, and sufficiently pretty(her smile makes you want to smile) to light up her seedy surroundings. She’s having a good time or trying to. Alone, a little lonely, she attempts to chat up the hipster barman but he’s not interested. Then,, as she’s leaving, because she has to go to work the next day, she falls in with a group of likeable Berliner low-lifes, led by the courteous Sonne. These are the opening few miutes of Victoria(2015), whose plot eventually sees the eponymous heroine being roped into an armed robbery, with devastating consequences.

 

The narrative is Dickensian. It’s like an extended version of that scene in Oliver Twist when the naive hero, on the loose in London， realises that his new friends are doing more than playong games. And put like that, the movie may not sound so remarkable. But when you learn that it was filmed in one unbroken shot-the cameraman doggedly following the actors around Berlin for the entirely of its 148-minute running time- you may be more inclined to believe there is something special here. The ‘one shot’film has recently become trendy, promising an aura of truth in an era of CGI rckery, yet in the case of Victoria it’s more than a gimmick. It’s approapriate to the tale being told, of a girl who finds herself on a ride she can’t get off, the vertiginous fear growing until it becomes almost unbearble. And it also seems fitting that her character’s risk-taking was mirrored by the director, Sebastian Schipper, and his crew and cast. According to Schipper, he could only afford to try the experiment three times. The first two were dud. “There is no plan B”, he told his actors before their third attempt. ‘Give them your heart, ‘ he urged.  ‘Feel it. Be afraid.’ The pep talk seems to have worked.

 

Victoria is story of romance and violence, but one of the things that makes it so effective is that neigher of those elements is explicit. The romance is restrained, limited to the sight of two characters who above all seem to like each other. The violence too is understated, suggested rather than shown. For all the air of improvisation(the script the actors started with was just a few pages long), there’s a canny hand at work. The finished film barely lasts more than two hours but it seems to accommodated a lifetime. It does something that blockbusters rarely manage, presenting you with characters you care about and will miss. Its contained concentration and concision make it gemlike in a way that long-form TV drama, for all its virtues, can never be. It does things that only a film can.

 

P207：第三章

真逼格（Real Deal )

•勇气

•韧性

•善良

•神秘感

•偏心

•身体

•独处的能力

•缺乏自我意识

•淡泊名利

我不知道这些品质对我来说有多重要，直到我编辑了这个真逼格部分，它包含了这个星球上最酷的25件事。直到后来，我才能够通读我的文章条目，挑出一些共同的主题。也许可以把它们称为“九种最酷逼格”，与通常的九种品质相比较。这一节我要摒弃公允客观的面具。《教父》(The Godfather)中有一个场景，迈克尔·考利昂(Michael Corleone)将自己为父亲报仇的决定描述为“纯粹的生意”而非“私人恩怨”。这一部分正好相反。这绝对是个人喜好。

 

PART THREE:

THE REAL DEAL

• Courage

• Tenacity

• Kindness

• Mystique

• Eccentricity

• Physicality

• A capacity for solitude

• The lack of self-consciousness

• Indifference to fame and reputation

I didn’t know that these qualities were important to me until I had compiled this Real Deal section, which consists of the 25 coolest things on the planet, in my opinion. It was only afterwards that I was able to read back through my entries and pick out some common themes. You might call them the NINE REFINING QUALITIES OF COOL, for comparison with our Nine Defining Qualities. In this section I’m abandoning my mask of objectivity. There’s a scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone describes his decision to avenge an attempt on his father’s life as not ‘personal’ but ‘strictly business’. This section is the opposite. It’s strictly personal. 

 

P208：《荷马》

关于诗人荷马是谁我们其实一无所知，这是一个相对较新的发现。几个世纪以来,史诗《伊利亚特》(关于特洛伊战争)和《奥德赛》(关于经历十年战争的英雄奥德修斯归来)被认为出自于一位男性盲人吟游诗人。后来人们发现，这些诗带有口述诗的特征，也就是说不是被写下来的，而是根据记忆背诵来的诗。从而可以说它们可能不是由一个人创造的，而是由几代人的一系列表演诗人创造的。这让它们更有趣。这些诗歌加入了对观众评论的编辑。流行的部分保留下来并得到扩展;不好或无聊的部分将被删除。在某种意义上，你可以说这些诗是由希腊民众创作的。阅读它们的体验就像窥探古希腊人的内心。

不管我们是否接受这个过程构成了一个“突发性创造”的实例(类似于维基百科词条的添加方式)，结果都是惊人的: 两个完全不同但令人难忘的故事类型，由两个完全不同但令人难忘的英雄主导。在《伊利亚特》中，阿喀琉斯是一个不愿战斗的战士。他因为他的长官偷了他的一些战利品而生闷气，其中包括一个名叫布里塞丝的性感女奴隶。结果，特洛伊战争向有利于特洛伊人的方向倾斜，希腊人陷入了困境，直到有事促使阿喀琉斯重新加入战斗。当他归来，他的破坏力是无以伦比的。

《奥德赛》的内容更多样，描述了奥德修斯(一个机智的探险家和战士)的冒险经历，包括他遇到了吃人的独眼巨人、不可抗拒的海妖塞壬、自满的食莲者等等。此外也有诗意细腻的时刻，比如，当主人公遭遇海难，精疲力竭爬上海滩，躲在灌木丛中，被比喻为火花。还有那些余音绕梁的演说，例如，奥德修斯宣称，没有什么比男女之间的真爱更美好的。真爱使他们的朋友欢欣鼓舞，使他们的敌人烦恼不已。

 

Homer

Homer is a poet about whom nothing is known. That’s a relatively new discovery. For centuries, it was thought that the epic poems The Iliad (about the Trojan War) and The Odyssey (about the decade-long struggle of the hero Odysseus to return from that war) were the work of a blind, male, wandering bard. Then it was recognised that they bore the hallmarks of oral poems, meaning ones that weren’t written down but recited from memory. That is, they were probably created not by one man, but by a series of performance poets over several generations. This makes them not less but more interesting. It seems likely they were edited in response to comments from contemporary audience members. Popular bits remained and got extended; bad or boring bits would be excised. In a sense, you could say that the poems were composed by the Greek people. The experience of reading them is like peering into the mind of Ancient Greece.

Whether or not we accept that this process constitutes an example of ‘emergent creativity’ (comparable to the way Wikipedia entries evolve), the results are phenomenal: two entirely different but unforgettable story types, dominated by two entirely different but unforgettable heroes. In The Iliad, it’s Achilles, the warrior who won’t fight. He’s sulking because his commander-in-chief stole some of his booty, including a hot slave girl named Briseis. As a consequence, the Trojan War tilts in favour of the Trojans, while the Greeks flounder, until something happens that goads Achilles to rejoin the fray. And when he does, his destructive power is awesome.

The Odyssey is more varied, describing the adventures of Odysseus (a quick-witted explorer as well as a fighter), including his encounters with the man-eating Cyclops, the irresistible Sirens, the complacent Lotus Eaters, and all the rest. There are moments of fine poetic delicacy, such as when the hero, shipwrecked and exhausted, crawls ashore on a beach and takes shelter under a bush, and is compared to a spark of fire. And speeches whose resonance hasn’t faded, as, for instance, when Odysseus declares that there is nothing finer than true love between a man and woman, which is a source of great delight to their friends, and great annoyance to their enemies.