At the end of 2019, after watching the work "Detachment" directed by Tony Kaye, my inner emotions were extremely complex and intense, and I couldn't explain the power of this film in words for a while. A month later, I watched the film again, and I thought back to my feelings after watching it. I thought it was a kind of pain that could not be appealed to by violence, and empathy that could not be explained by words.
The director of the film, Tony Kaye, is a British director who specializes in documentaries. His first feature film is "American History X" starring Edward Norton, mainly about racial discrimination in the United States. The second feature film is "Transcendence". Using the lens of a pseudo-documentary, the film attempts to explore multiple topics such as the American education system, the growth of adolescents, and the relationship between individuals and society from a "special" public high school in the United States. Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) comes to a public school as a substitute teacher, teaching English (literature) classes. The students here are either stubborn or mentally ill. They ignore teachers and discipline, and can even be said to be "children abandoned by their parents". Parents threw it into the school, trying to delegate the responsibility of education to teachers to save these children. What can the teacher do, suffer the ravages of the children's mischief during the day, and go home at night to sleep with the pain. Each of them bears the heavy responsibility of life and the responsibility of education. Henry was trying to separate himself from all this hustle and bustle, separate from other people, escape from emotion. But the desire to make some changes in his heart made him try to redeem those immature souls. He picked up Erica, a down-and-out girl on the bus, and he used words to evoke the beauty in the hearts of young people, but he failed to save them.” Unseen" Meredith.
The film is generally divided into four types of shots, the first of which is the interview-style perspective at the beginning of the film. The male protagonist Henry "tells" his feelings about the whole thing to the audience in front of the camera, creating the feeling of an interview from a second-person perspective, including the interview scenes where many educators reveal their sincerity at the beginning of the film. The only difference is that the footage is in black and white as educators tell about their relationship to the profession of teaching. Some of these teachers have entered the teaching profession by accident, and some are seeking higher ambitions and goals in life. This kind of objective and documentary black and white footage becomes a kind of irony after watching the whole film. Do you think teachers can really change a person's life? Can teachers really change things? No, one teacher is not enough. The interview shots with Henry took a close-up approach to the characters, which is different from the half-length or almost full-body shots of the characters in "Phantom Thread" and "The Irishman". The large-scale features of the film put the audience in a sense of urgency for close dialogue, making the audience almost fully immerse themselves in the film to communicate with the characters. The content of the interview is closer to a documentary, usually some protagonists' comments or opinions on the event, expressing the meaning of Detachment from another angle, that is, separation. It is not only a witness to the event, but also separated from the event, looking at these people and things from the perspective of a bystander.
The second shot is a chalk drawing that runs throughout the film. The director criticizes the distortions of the American education system in a form of absurd satire, questioning the legitimacy of 'No chile left behind Act'. In addition, the skillful use of this kind of simple strokes depicts the inner psychological state of the characters, such as "moths flying into flames and burning themselves" and "psychological fortress disintegrating" are all fables, which have been confirmed one by one in real life.
The third shot is a flashback of Henry's childhood memories. The shot adopts the retro tone of old film, and deliberately uses blurred, jumping, and shaking scenes to show the unclear and uncertain childhood memories of an adult's mind. Indeed, psychologists and sociologists have done a lot about the effects of childhood trauma on people. But at the same time, research has also shown that memory is constantly being repaired in the human brain, and people's dreams, experiences, and the environment people are in will indirectly change a person's mastery of their own memory, which is what the saying goes "Man remembers what he wants to remember". Henry's family bond is a thread that runs through the film, but that thread leads to an open ending. Why did Henry's mother commit suicide? Did Henry ever forgive Grandpa? What happened between his mother and grandfather? The director chose to avoid talking about it, or he was not going to discuss it at all. More importantly, Henry's childhood became his lingering trauma, and the departure of his parents made him lose the original emotion of being a human being - family. This lack of emotion makes him choose to be detached from the world.
The fourth shot is an ordinary narrative shot. The use of a large number of zooms and handheld cameras makes the film more documentary-like, as if following the characters in the film to understand their life stories, as if it were a creation without a script , where the camera swiped, a story begins. Of particular note is the use of zoom lenses in the film. Meredith, a fat girl with low self-esteem in the film, is keen on photography and painting. She uses a zoom camera to capture some of the micro-expressions and weird behaviors of others. The director borrowed her "camera" to constantly capture close-ups of characters in the story, coupled with the superb performances of the actors, to create unique people with expressions. (The male protagonist's melancholy eyes, a certain male teacher's ferocious desire to be noticed, the female teacher's shocked eyes, the female headmaster's weakly curled body)
I personally think that the zoom lens itself is also part of the theme of the film. People seem to be close to each other but they seem to be separated by thousands of miles. Sometimes we want to be separated from the world, and sometimes our eyes are willing to see, but we only pay attention to what we want to see something, while selectively ignoring something.
Speaking of which, we have to start with the name of the movie - Detachment. Detachment, the meaning of this word in the English dictionary has two meanings, the first refers to the act or process of separation, similar to Separation; the other refers to indifference to the outside world, more like the artistic conception of the Chinese translation "detachment". In my opinion, these two meanings have their own reflections in the film, which can be discussed separately or together. Interpretation of the content of the film varies from person to person, and I choose two points to share my opinion. One of the meanings of Detachment - separation, for me the biggest feeling is the phenomenon of "dislocation of social roles".
Undoubtedly, this is a film that explores the education of young people, and there are naturally all kinds of young people in it. At the same time, they are also a special group of teenagers. Everyone has more or less "problems", some are diagnosed psychological disorders, and some are rebellious and tired of learning. They were all "forced" to study in schools because of the 'No child left behind' Act (No Child Left Behind Act) enacted by US President Bush in 2002. The original intention of the bill itself was to improve the general education level and encourage equal education across the country, but it eventually deteriorated into a competition between private schools and public schools, and even became an "excuse" for parents. Those who profit from it are the principals of private schools, who can make enough money for their students' education with their reputation; there are also lazy and irresponsible parents, who justifiably leave the responsibility of education to the schools. Who is the ultimate victim? Teachers in public schools and children forced to stay in school. Teachers are a relatively important role in society. They are responsible for educating the next generation. This education includes guiding children into socialization, teaching social discipline and norms, and carrying out basic social activities and interpersonal communication. Their original responsibility was to educate, but under the combined pressure of the implementation of the bill and the irresponsible shirk of parents, the responsibility on their shoulders has increased, that is, to save. In the film, a male teacher stared at the ceiling and silently recited, "Saved another child." After giving an ideological education to a disheveled female student, where did these teachers save the child? I personally thought that it was rescued from a misplaced social role. *The No Child Act is the modern version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The act requires that at the end of the 2005-2006 school year, all students in grades three through eight must take standardized achievement tests in reading and math each year. Also, take it again in high school. For the school, the school and its teachers will be assessed annually based on student achievement. The results of the assessment will affect the number of students and the reputation of the school.
As you can see in the video, many students in this school disrespect their teachers and take pleasure in challenging their teachers' authority. They think they have the ability to step into society, but they are just struggling to complete the federal government's unified examination." Indicator tasks” before entering school to study. The childishness of children has long disappeared from them, and they are more arrogant, rude, and arrogant. In Chinese education, this is usually considered "rebellious", I prefer to call it "negative precocious phenomenon". (Erica asks Henry "Why do you still think of me as a child?" But she's just a child; a schoolgirl fantasizes about her life in a model band but is cruelly exposed by the teacher played by Lucy Liu; Meredith needs someone who can give her love The most obvious dislocation of this social role is that students disdain to be a student and listen to the teacher to impart knowledge. They think that they have already been exposed to enough knowledge in society.
The reasons for this phenomenon are naturally multi-faceted, and the phenomenon itself is also two-sided. But there are three main reasons why the director wants to express in this film: the neglect of the parents of students, the exploitation of public education by capitalism, and the excessive assimilation of teenagers in the era of "information explosion". I don't want to go into the first two points, but I want to talk about the last point: Ubiquitous Assimilation. This is what Henry wrote on the blackboard in his penultimate class as a substitute teacher. If translated literally, it refers to absorption all the time. But if combined with Henry's later examples and interpretations, I will interpret it as the most commonly used word "information explosion" and assimilation is more like we are constantly absorbing social norms and restraining ourselves in society, thus A phenomenon of assimilation was formed. This phenomenon will lead to the lack of imagination of the new generation, except that the social phenomenon they have absorbed will no longer be able to try a new path; it will cause teenagers to be anxious due to the explosion of information, lack self-confidence, and lack the courage to break through the routine; it will lead to social discrimination The intensification of social roles restricts social roles to certain characteristics. Of course, it also has some positive effects, and I have always believed that any social phenomenon has two sides. However, for less socialized adolescents, the disadvantages of this phenomenon clearly outweigh the positive effects.
The second is another meaning of Detachment - indifference and detachment. For this, the director directly quoted a sentence from Camus' "The Outsider" to show it. The male protagonist's attitude towards the world is also completely in line with the appearance of "detachment". In the face of family past, he did not struggle to find answers but chose to forget them; in the face of career, he did not require a stable job but only wanted to do a good job in "education"; in the face of other people in the world, he has always been one. A listener, not a complainer. He seems to be aloof from the world, yet maintains a proper distance from the world. In this way, it does have a taste of existentialism. But Henry, the hero of the film, is not completely indifferent to the world. He saw (see) the suffering of others, he rescued the male teacher in the iron fence who longed to be seen (be seen), he rescued Erica, a young prostitute who had gone astray, he hoped to understand (see) and comfort Meredith's sorrow . But as the line said, "We only have limited space for others." He is really like an angel who saves the world, but he has to admit that everyone is moving forward with a heavy burden, and in addition to saving himself, he can't be demanding of others.
The atmosphere of the whole film is extremely depressing, revealing all kinds of unspeakable sufferings in the world, but looking back, the director also faintly conveyed another message: even if the world is suffering, you must embrace others. With the development of modern society, we have to admit that deep communication between people has become scarce. In order to make our lives better, sometimes we have to maintain a certain "detachment" from the world, but after all, we must remember that the feelings between people are irreplaceable, because the feelings we need for each other are so strong that life seems so meaningful significance.
The film "Transcendence" is jokingly called a "depressive film" for a certain reason. The melancholy and cold feeling of the whole process and its constant excavation of the bitterness of the world can't help but make people sad. As part of the film art, the film itself also contains some artistic value, and the handling of its lens art is not lacking in subtlety. As for the inspiration of the content of the film to the audience, it must be different from person to person, and the audience is left to savor it.
In this detached classroom, I have learned: to please myself and then to please the world, to know the world and then to know myself.
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