Counting the one I just watched, I have watched the movie "The Tree of Life" 4 times. This time, do I understand?
After 4 times, have I understood Terrence Malik's amazing work "The Tree of Life", let's talk about it again. What is certain is that the first time I played it 5 years ago, I was in a fog. I didn't know what story the director told in 2 hours and 45 minutes. Are fans like me who opened the movie for Brad Pitt as lost in a half-hour-long cosmic prehistoric picture?
At that time, at the 15th minute of the movie, Mrs. O'Brien had been informed of the accidental drowning of the youngest son of the O'Brien family. Feeling grief-stricken, Mrs. O'Brien picked up the phone, feeling that the only way to alleviate the pain of the loss was to talk to her husband. Mr. O'Brien, who is busy at work, can't let his grief turn into tears like his wife. However, his out-of-focus eyes that occasionally look into the distance when he is working diligently as usual, let us He was heartbroken to read it.
Following Mr. O'Brien's line of sight, what can we see? I thought Terrence Malik would let us follow Mr. O'Brien's recollections and see how the youngest son of the O'Brien family was clever or naughty or stubborn when he was alive. However, I was wrong. From the 15th minute of the film, Terence Malik uses the "National Geographic Channel" narration method to present the Big Bang and the Cretaceous crustal nuclear explosion and the emergence of life beautifully for half an hour. Compared with the 4.6 billion-year development history of the earth, Terence Malik gave a brief history of the earth in 30 minutes. Is it too large? In 2021, one of the most interesting things I have done is to go to an elementary school every Tuesday afternoon to explain a set of books to children, "The Miracle of 4.6 Billion Years - A Brief History of the Earth". This set of books, titled "A Brief History of the Earth", is composed of 13 sub-volumes. Relatively speaking, Terence Malik asked the film to tell "A Brief History of the World" in 30 minutes, which is not at all. Big. The question is, isn't The Tree of Life trying to tell the story of the growth of the O'Brien family's three sons? What does the Big Bang, the Cretaceous crustal nuclear explosion, and the emergence of life, the three most important nodes in Earth's history, have anything to do with the growth story of the three sons of the O'Brien family?
When I watched "The Tree of Life" for the 4th time and saw the half-hour "National Geographic Channel" style brief history of the earth, I was suddenly enlightened. Why would Terence Malik insert a 30-minute "documentary" into a feature film? From the picture to the background music, it was determined that the 30-minute "Side and Oblique" was not easy to complete, and it was necessary to work hard. The reason why Terrence Malik temporarily put aside the story of the O'Brien family and told the story of the earth is because of a "Tree of Life", the famous director who is known for his low productivity wants to express not only The story of the O'Brien family, but I want to use the story of the O'Brien family to comprehend the story of human beings on earth.
So, how can the story of O'Brien's family achieve the effect of point and face? The story of "The Tree of Life" takes place in Texas in the 1950s, where Terence Malik grew up; he was born in 1943, and the life trajectories of the three O'Brien brothers coincided with it, so , Terrence Malik chose the story of a middle-class family in Texas in the 1950s to map a brief history of the earth, in order to borrow the story of the O'Brien family to express his own understanding of pain, happiness, sorrow, love and death. Emotional experiences, and what imprints those experiences will leave on individual lives and human history, are presented in small detail.
However, the time span from the Big Bang, the explosion of the crustal core in the Cretaceous to the joys and sorrows of O'Brien's house is so large that we feel that there is an insurmountable gap to connect the two. But Terrence Malik's "The Tree of Life" connects the two seamlessly. How did he do it?
He used the masterpieces of the most representative composers in the history of classical music to synthesize the flowers blooming on two branches and tilian.
In the order in which the wild goose has left marks in this world, we first rank the names of the composers whose works appeared in "The Tree of Life": Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Smeta That, Mahler, Respighi... From the Baroque period, to the classical period, the romantic period, to the national music school, the representative of the classical music scene in the early 20th century, Terence Malik, who is familiar with classical music, used a The soundtrack of the film almost outlines the history of classical music, so as to coherent a film, is there any reason why it is not smooth?
Among the classical music works that appear in "The Tree of Life", long or short, I think Terence Malik used them most appropriately, Smetana's "Vltava" and Bach's The Law of Averages.
The former, in the 57th minute of the film, Terence Malik chooses a movement "Vltava" from Smetana's "My Homeland" to match the picture, which is Mr. O'Brien's home. The scene where the three young sons were playing on the grass was the scene where Mrs. O'Brien was at the bedside telling the young son a bedtime story, and the scene where the three sons, who had become teenagers, were running, chasing, and seeking pleasure. The effect of such a combination of sound and picture shows the vigor of human growth period incisively and vividly.
The latter appears at 1 hour and 10 minutes into the film. That morning, Mr. O'Brien went into the children's bedroom, tossed the covers off them, and the three sons gathered around their father, who was sitting in front of the organ, and listened to him play Bach's "Equal Temperament."
Generally speaking, the equal temperament refers to the basic temperament of European classical music. Bach set a model for the creation of the well-tempered piano for the first time with the Well-Tempered Piano Collection, which has a far-reaching influence. But the law of averages has another meaning: we have no way of knowing which of a series of big and small things that are going on will succeed, but the law of averages tells us that if we do one thing over and over again, we will get further and further away from our goal. The closer you get, the more you reach your goal. So, on that morning, when Mr. O'Brien played Bach's "Equal Tempered" to his three sons, did he put both meanings of Equal Tempered in the sound of the piano? Look, as soon as the camera cuts, we still hear Bach's "Average Law", and what we see is Mr. O'Brien teaching his sons how to behave in a very strict manner.
And just like that, the O'Brien's sons grew up amidst the thematic music. Of course, the younger son had not yet grown up to the age where he could compete as evenly as his older brothers with his harsh father. But so what? The short-lived little O'Brien has, like his parents and his older brothers, merged into the swift river and has been written into the law of averages.
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