JIANG JIAXIN

“The year of dog” is the second film of a long-term documentary series project, which documents the artist’s family mundane life during the Chinese Spring Festival period. Different from the first film, “the year of dog” focuses more about the artist’s family members than himself, presenting words and behaviors from a variety of real life scenes. Even though, compared to the first film, because of the status of the artist as employed, there were less scenes showing the artist’s family members judging and coaching the artist himself, “male chauvinism”, “excessive infatuation to materialism”, “selfishness”, they drive the judgements and conflicts happen across all family members. For audience, they will sense stress from dialogues in the reality of hierarchical family relationships; and in the meantime, they will also recognize similar ideologies from the family members in a variety of plots, influenced by this inherent family cultural and cognitive environment. After recognizing his family environment, the artist started to work on using his family to reveal regional sociality, questioning these social ideologies as well as seeking for changes, as those ideologies constantly influencing the public and being passed down generation after generation. 

Similar to the first film, in “the year of dog”, the artist documented some scenes of his family cooking, which includes a scene of his cousin cooking, his father cooking, his aunt cooking, and his uncle cooking. In the scene of his father cooking, the artist even uses seven minutes of raw footage to show how his father made a dish called “fried pig’s intestines”. In “the year of dog”, those food making scenes, combined together with other trivial moments in a chronological order, perform a role of slowing down the rhythm of the documentary. In the meantime, those food making scenes use extremely dynamic pictures being expected to bring some momentary peacefulness into this film, in a way, reflecting the artist’s inner helplessness and monologue in the life full of noises when he was with his family.

《狗年》是一个长期系列纪录片项目的第二部，这一系列纪录片纪录了艺术家在中国的春节期间的平凡家庭生活。与第一部不同的是，《狗年》更多地关注了艺术家的家庭成员而不是他自己，呈现了在各种现实生活场景中的语言和行为。与第一部相比，尽管由于艺术家的受雇佣身份，少了很多家庭成员对艺术家进行判断和指导的场景，然而“大男子主义”、“过度迷恋物质主义”、和“自私”，推动着所有家庭成员相互之间的判断和冲突。对于观众来说，在片中现实的等级家庭关系中，他们会从对话中感受到压力；同时，他们也会从各种情节中注意到来自家庭成员的相似的意识形态，这些意识形态是受到这种固有的家庭文化和认知环境的影响的结果。在意识到这种家庭环境之后，艺术家开始通过他的家庭来揭示地域的社会性，并且质疑这些社会意识形态并从中寻求改变，当这些意识形态不断地影响着公众，并代代相传的时候。

与第一部电影相似，在《狗年》这部电影里，艺术家纪录了一些家庭烹饪的场景，包括他的表弟做饭，他的父亲做饭，他的舅妈做饭，和他的叔叔做饭。在他父亲做饭的场景中，艺术家甚至用了7分钟的原始镜头来展示他父亲是如何制作了一道名为“溜肥肠”的菜。在《狗年》中，那些食物制作的场景，按照时间顺序与其他琐碎的片段结合在了一起，这些食物制作的场景起到了放慢纪录片节奏的作用。与此同时，这些食物制作场景使用了极其动态的画面，被给予了艺术家的期望，来为整部影片带来一些短暂的平静，这在某种程度上，反映了当艺术家与他的家人在一起的时候，他内心的无奈和所经历的嘈杂生活中的独白。