The filming of “Pretending Not to Feel” began with a high school student’s essay “Standing at the Tail of Nineteen.” This was my first time starting from a written text, a novel or essay, and then converting it into images to become a film. Why did I choose this written work? First, because the story possesses a cinematic quality—its uniquely developing details made me aware of its visual potential. The essay is only about three thousand words long, telling the story of a mother who, unable to endure her husband’s infidelity, leaves home with her daughter. With no fixed residence, she hopes to solve her housing problem through remarriage, but her new husband turns out to be incredibly stingy, forcing her to divorce again… thus the daughter follows her mother moving from place to place!

At that time, it was precisely this detail of “moving house” that showed me the visual impact. Each time the story progresses, it’s because of “moving.” Because of moving, various conflicts and dramatic tensions arise, different characters enter the story, and because of moving, different scenes are displayed, thereby enriching the characters’ action lines. This literary element, when reading the text, immediately offered me a visual possibility.

In the novel, when this mother and daughter enter life, the narration begins with the little girl’s feelings, presenting a literary state. But when filming, I tried to shift the focus to an everyday state, which means you need to find action lines for every character in the story, as well as the reasons and details behind these actions.

A story formed by words is an abstract story, because text itself is an abstract expression. When readers are moved by words, that reading is active—readers create various rich imaginations in their minds. Film is just the opposite: film is concrete, and the audience watches passively. What you show them is what they see. However, good films require you to connect these passive visual elements together to create an abstract emotion for the audience, which is what moves them. How do you complete such a transformation?

This requires the director to express with film language, which consists of images and sound. The length of your shots, the measure of lighting, and the design of composition, along with sound coordination, controlling the actors’ performances and their blocking within the frame—all these turn abstract words into concrete narration, thus forming a film.

Since shots are filmed one by one, this is the most fundamental difference from stage performances. For the same emotion in film, you might capture it from several different angles or complete it with several shots, which interrupts the actor’s performance. At this point, you must be very clear in your mind about the beginning and end points of each shot to eventually edit together a complete, moving emotion or conflict from these fragmented shots. With digital photography, production costs have been greatly reduced, making shot language more free. Because of this “freedom,” you still need to control the rhythm of the content being filmed and grasp the content in each shot well; otherwise, even the most advantageous premise can lead to mistakes.