The Wild Pear Tree: The Minority Dilemma and the Anti-Oedipus Trap
1 Literature, Film and Minorities
We see that "The Wild Pear Tree" is undoubtedly related to literature, which is not only reflected in the film's use of the novel of the same name, but also implies a certain affinity between the film's style and literature. Here, we try to discuss three kinds of literature-film relations: literary films, literature-films, and films about literature.
As far as the actual situation is concerned, in literary films, both literature and film pursue classic, popular and smooth effects; and behind this majority aesthetics, it is the chain of signifiers that plays a supporting role. So the ups and downs of the plot, meticulous arrangement and moving performances have become the strength of this type of film. The other genre—literature-film, represented by Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest in Bazin, has a unique aesthetic creation: sound and picture are opposed, as if mixed with a certain “pure” In the end, the film is no longer an appendage or a substitute for the adaptation of literary novels, but a new creation that can match or even surpass it. Of course, we must first sincerely point out that there may be as many conveniences and inadequacies of this classification distinction: apart from possible "racial discrimination", there are already many differences within literary films at least - such as stream-of-consciousness novels The cinematization of literature such as new novels (Last Year at Marion Budd, Hiroshima Love) has in fact long ago demonstrated the chaotic and ambiguous movement of borders.
Importantly, we have seen here a potential battle of literature-reality of the minority against the literature of the majority. The outstanding representative of this confrontation was Kafka - the multiple dilemmas of history and identity made majorityism something intolerable for him; to escape from this repression, literature had to submit both to grammar and to Disregarding grammar - making language "stutter" or "shake" without being captured by signifiers; one has to have some speakers and virtually no speakers (i.e. some famous style of free indirect discourse)- Makes individualization hidden to form a kind of collective expression... Deep down, this pure literariness/stylization is undoubtedly related to the intrusion/interaction of politics, because it summons the "absent/non-existent people", because It focuses first on the power of language, or the right to exist.
In this sense, a film about literature, or more precisely, a film about literary concepts/beliefs, is exactly what is minority, metaliterate, and what exists as a novel in the Ceylon film "Wild Pear Tree". It is worth noting that a film that is not directly adapted from a meta-literature, or a film that directly addresses the "how to write/why of literature" is a true film about literature. For, of course, these elements can still be captured by the chain of signifiers: if they only appear as "content". As a result, a smooth plot/content will likely become the biggest killer of this style. Just as metafiction often has to escape novelization to establish its own identity, of course, movies about literature must learn to walk away from the plot practice. , even anti-plot. And if there is contempt for content, no doubt only those who have important content know how to do it.
2 The Anti-Signifier Code: Fragments, Dialogues, and Images
From what we've seen, The Wild Pear Tree's lengthy dialogue and mixed themes are almost unbearable. But if it were to be defended, we might be able to quote Heidegger's famous judgment: "A bad hammer is more a hammer than a good hammer"—a decision that highlights the thing-in-itself perhaps here It is a string of passwords that unlocks "Wild Pear Tree": it is under this anti-signifier-like encoding that texts and images can break free from the "web of meaning" and reveal their original power as symbols.
The first is the fragmentation/blocking of the narrative. If the usual narrative strategy is linear or jigsaw-like, here it is in a tangram-like style: what matters is not the final appearance, nor the boundaries of the pattern, but each component itself. Color and texture lie in the collision and combination of each plate, in the inherent rules of the game to assemble-disassemble-reassemble these plates-this decentralization strategy implies exactly movement: against the reality of majorityism- The movement of the signifier chain. However, we should admit that the director of Ceylon may not be a "skilled" gamer yet: the serious and heavy themes are far from jigsaw puzzles in his eyes, far from the light and dusty texture we expect, but The massive boulder, he tried to set up some kind of Stonehenge to listen to the sky, but his strength is too small, or three hours is too short.
On the other hand, long, tedious dialogue does regain its sonic intensity under the weight of this dreary—only in a passive, self-defeating way. Different from the language of "stuttering", the dialogue used by Ceylon tries to achieve a certain "shock" effect by relying on the sharp density, and it can even be said that the dialogue still retains the fluent quality, but in the extreme thickness, numb intonation and In the heavy repression, this fluid ideographic function self-destructs: who can derive pleasure from these noisy acoustic symbols? An example is the long conversation between the male protagonist and the two imams on the road: they climbed over the mountains, "wandered" on the trail, and the chattering discussion was mixed in the natural environment and became a kind of sound- —It pervades fields, hills, and towns, and even its intensity never diminishes with distance, transforming into pure noise, the expression of some invisible subject of speech... But this sound, steady and numb, is precisely the slave/ The language of the prisoner: If meaning does collapse here, then at the same time nothing new can be created. A contrasting example comes from the sound master Jacques Tati's "Play Time": what Tati created in the high-rise building is a world of pure sound-game, where the signifier retreats as a plaything-like existence. Behind the scenes, because the world is built first of all by the intensity of sound, not by signs of meaning.
But the more profound contradiction lies in the fact that the "shock" pursued by "Wild Pear Tree" can not only be completed by words-dialogue, but should be handled by images. Regrettably, the director does get caught up in language too much, which in turn undermines the exploration of his images. The biggest of these breaks is the mundane and powerless (even majoritarian) point of view, which may be the inevitable result of too much dialogue. To some extent, we expect some kind of Pasolini's poetic cinematic shot of free indirect discourse; perhaps a more apt example is Jean Viggo, the young and talented director: in his short documentary " In Impressions of Nice, we clearly see a camera movement like flowing water—the viewpoint lurks on the road, corners of the city, or abrupt upward, or continuous fluctuations, showing a bourgeois in the clear texture A comic strip for our small town vacation...
And if the director himself is aware of this, perhaps it can be seen in some trivial, short-term insertion shots (increasing the use of montage): rather than the role of connection, the effect of these short-term insertions is to interrupt. - Interrupting the continuum of time and space and the production of meaning. However, this is not the real product of the film machine of "Wild Pear Tree". In fact, several surreal / hallucinatory passages suggest us more: they may have some kind of "shock" feeling out of thin air, but unfortunately What’s more, we see that directors often attribute these images to short-lived dreams or delusions, which just signifies the director’s submission to and identification with the organizational logic of the majority. It was at this point that some kind of anti-signifier effect that the director wanted to achieve was hit by a dimensionality reduction, and an embarrassing situation emerged: "Wild Pear Tree" itself is still quite smooth, and there is still some kind of The "clues" run it through, which is incredible.
3 Self-defeating machines and the anti-Oedipus trap
If The Wild Pear Tree does produce anything as an anti-signifier film machine, we have reason to question the legitimacy of its product. In a sense, we witness the reconciliation-submission process of this Freudian family: at the end, mother and daughter are somehow made-furnished in a "new family" where electricity is finally restored and redecorated. The family rift created by the "currency/gambling crisis" appears to have been fully mended, or even cemented, as dictated by territorial rules. And the father, this Kafka's fictional becoming-animal figure, seems to have fled far from the country, escaped the control of the family, but is it really so?
We see this in the final father-son conversation: instead of continuing to dig the well, the father finally feels the need to make "some kind of timely retreat" - a sign that the dilapidated cottage is by no means an "escape family" "The sanctuary, but a "new family" who failed to escape and was captured again, only looked more shabby. Perhaps the transition from the (silent) black dog-father to the (manic) white dog-father became the hallmark of a kind of becoming-watchdog movement: wild jackals haunt the forests of Turkey , and the father is now on the side of the flock.
In fact, ending the male protagonist's wandering movement in "Wild Pear Tree" with some kind of father figure just exposes the self-defeating nature of the film's machine: this wandering is the rebellion of an angry, romantic, lonely youth Anti-Oedipal behavior, and in fact it is this movement that highlights the countryside, streets, schools, bookstores, harbour squares and other spaces, making them a kind of invisible subject that makes noise - which seems to be the Some kind of becoming-road, trying to escape from the bounded ground, as Woolf said, "The skinny dog runs on the road, and this dog is the road."—but when this When the road finally leads to the figure of the father, everything becomes ambiguous and docile again, as if it had just gone in the wrong direction, allowing the aimless wandering movement to be codified: understood, excavated (persistent?) or whatever thing.
From this, we can see that there is indeed some kind of anti-majority product in the "Wild Pear Tree": it tries to show the tyrannical and absurd nature of the majority, but that's all, it fails to get rid of the majority itself logical designation. After both sides are wounded, what is ushered in is some kind of anti-Oedipus trap: fatherly love and majesty are reaffirmed and consolidated, just like the image of the mother - both love for the man who talks about animals and the fragrance of the earth (or love to the man himself), and also attached to the snake and scorpion under the gold coin.
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