"Kerry finds himself baffled by seeing his family feel nothing in the face of death. The fear of waiting in a dark prison is gone. Now he recognizes this eerie calm - an old friend of war. . In this calm, only the cold machinery of intelligence and sensibility is still operating. This is the general's anaesthetic. This is the essence of war."
--Kurt Vonnegut, "The King's Men"
There are not many war scenes in this film. The main dramatic contradiction is that the generals want to send Ivan to go to military school and Ivan refuses. The time and space of the battlefield is calm, and the old tower lets us quietly look at the faces of these people. Watching Ivan sleep, watching He Lin kiss Martha... More importantly, watching Ivan's dreams. Seeing the end, people deeply feel that the war is shrouded in a trance of calm, there is no winner in the war, and people leave their souls there anyway.
This film is the beginning of Laota's film art, and his beautiful artistic theory can be seen everywhere. This power from real observation is most clearly reflected in the editing, where the time pressure in the shot is intertwined in a random way - the sound of the cannonball, the splash of water, the splash of water, the sun is exposed, and in the fire, the cross that imprisoned the sun gradually Leaning, standing still for a long time after the artillery fire stopped.
And his favorite gossip.
Beach woods butterflies take off mother chuckles
Apples fall in rainstorm, horses are full
There is also the efficiency of the narrative...or the choice of art, that is, the interception after careful observation of real life. Ivan's three dreams, we don't need to explain too much, we seem to already know all about Ivan's past. The most surprising thing to me is that at the end of the film, when Ivan said goodbye to He Lin before he went to investigate, I somehow had a strong premonition that Ivan would never come back once he left, he would just be like this. quietly disappeared. The passages without any heroic sacrifice simply disappeared, just like turning around in the dense birch forest and disappearing without a trace.
How is this hunch conveyed? In addition to the soldiers' constant and compulsive planning for the future, and the shadowy swamp forest, it is ultimately due to the precise capture of the authenticity of the characters. This child who lost his soul on the battlefield, wading into the darkness with no way back seems to be just a cold necessity.
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