Art may be a different form of autobiography .
For example, the AI artist Zima in "Zima Blue" has explored the boundaries of art and expression between the cosmic nebula and the vast world, and finally decomposed into the original small cleaning robot in a pool of blue, returning to its purest self. truth.
"No Master" also tells the story of an artist's exploration and growth. Spanning thirty years in three hours, from Nazi Germany to East Germany and West Germany after World War II, from scribbled pencil nude portraits, red and white political slogans, intensely colored social realism murals, and finally back to blurry canvases Amateur family photos.
"Anything that is real is beautiful." The moment the hand covering the line of sight was moved away, the vague and clear sense of out-of-focus was the meaning of looking straight at the truth .
Kurt, who was born in Dresden, is the protagonist of this personal epic where art and politics are intertwined. "No Master" uses fine and coherent stitches to string together everything Kurt has experienced during the thirty years of this tremendous change.
The beginning of the story is an art exhibition called "Degenerate Art". Even though serious guides criticized the decay and meaninglessness of modern art, Kurt's young aunt Elisabeth squatted down and said quietly, "Don't tell anyone, I actually like this painting."
Elisabeth is the only person in the family who affirms and discovers Kurt's artistic talent. She is glamorous and agile, cheerful and free, and is an ignorant young Kurt who enlightened the concept of art and sex. However, Elisabeth's unstable mental state forced her to be sent to a mental hospital. Under the ruthless rule of the Nazis, she was judged as worthless, deprived of the right to reproduce, and then deprived of her life.
The tragic muse fell early, but her teachings of "Never look away" gave little Kurt the instinct to look directly at the truth. From then on, whether it was facing bombs dropped by bombers, the hometown turned into a sea of fire, the naked organs of the opposite sex, or Kurt never looked away from the pale face of his father who committed suicide behind the curtain.
Perhaps the most memorable segment of the film is the cross-editing on the eve of the fall of Germany . Fighters dropped tinfoil in the sky, followed by rows of bombs. In the magical silver and the city full of fire, the green bus that once honked Elisabeth was buried by a broken wall. Not far from the battlefield, the young boys of the family were shot through, and the red-haired boy in Kurt’s hometown The partner turned into a burning corpse, Elisabeth, with hollow eyes on the floor of a gas chamber. As for Kurt, he moved away the hand that his mother had hidden in front of him time and time again, and stared straight at the tragedies that were unfolding in all time and space at the same time.
After the war, Kurt was recommended to enter the Academy of Fine Arts to study social realism painting with his outstanding skills. There he met Elisabeth (later called Ellie to distinguish Kurt), a rich girl who is a fashion professional, who has the same name and the same beautiful body as his aunt. Sentimental and passionate love brought Kurt to Ellie's father, a rigid and ruthless gynecologist Professor Seeband, a former Nazi, and also the executioner who pronounced her death sentence on Elisabeth's medical certificate.
The lover deprived of reproductive freedom by the patriarchy, the lost youth, and the closed political system made Kurt's artistic path stagnant. He could only quietly paint the image of his lover into a series of propaganda paintings praising the working people. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, Kurt finally woke up and took Ellie, who had become his wife, to the imaginary place of freedom, and the murals left by him, a socialist defector, were all painted with white paint and erased. .
To tell the life story of any one person, it is impossible to leave the context. Kurt experienced the transition from Nazism to communism. However, for the East German people after the war, "communism" was not a revolution, but just a substitute for Nazism. Overnight, it seemed that only the portraits of the leaders hanging on the walls, the language and epaulettes of the ruling class had changed overnight. What remained unchanged was the forced unity of ideology, high pressure, rigidity, and single art form.
In such an age where all beliefs are crumbling, what else can we believe? Elisabeth also trusted Hitler, who was the luckiest girl offering flowers among the cheering crowd, but was deprived of her womb and denied the value of survival. Kurt’s father, trusting his conscience’s morality, would rather say "Drei liter" to fool the past than "Heil Hitler", but was forced to join the Nazis under the general circumstances, and was filled with Nazi status after the war. Discriminated against, hanged himself in the purity of the new world.
Professor Seaband was able to live in such a world like a fish in water, and his identity change was smooth and easy. His success was not only due to speculation. When he delivered the wife of the Red Army general in exchange for asylum, he once said, "I came to help because I have this ability." Coincidentally, when Kurt was in the slogan factory, when asked why he didn't use templates to draw letters, he also said "because I have this ability."
In a sense, perhaps Kurt is the same kind of person as the villain who caused his family’s tragedy. In this turbulent age, he firmly believes in what he is doing and his ability to express and heal. With the guilty scalpel, one person picked up the paintbrush.
Some people criticized the film for its understatement of the historical presentation and the overbearing of emotions. Indeed, the depiction of the cruelty of war and the pain of the people is restrained and distanced in "No One's Work". There is no fierce struggle or resistance, and some are just moving forward. But this may be the historical view of Donnersmarck, the director who once filmed "Eavesdropping ."
For people of later generations, those big events that changed the direction of the world are part of history. Its origin, development, influence, gains and losses have become numbers and stories, textbooks and common sense.
But perhaps the people at the center of the event have no ability to jump outside the event to see the full picture of history. They are carried forward by the torrent, trying to adapt to the new law of survival, numb and ignorant. This may be the truest reaction of the people of that era. It is too late to sort out the current situation, how could they have the ability to reflect.
This explains why Kurt failed to connect Seaband to the tragedy of his aunt until the end of the film. The drama that the audience was expecting failed to break out in an instant. This secret may be hidden forever by fate, and the wicked will always be at large.
We are not from the perspective of God, and we may turn a blind eye to the truth that is right in front of us. Donnersmarck uses such a time bomb that may one day be discovered, to outline the magical layout of fate, and everyone may be connected to each other in an unimaginable way. This hidden and unknown possibility is the most interesting philosophical proposition in life.
When Kurt was in the wave of avant-garde art, the director expressed his artistic conception through the mouth of the professor .
Professor Van Vertern, who always wears a hat, lit up posters of two different parties in the class, teaching students "Never choose political parties, choose art." Only in art can we have freedom.
He used his story of butter and felt to encourage Kurt to explore the depths of his heart. And Kurt finally used the most realistic photo to copy, learned to imitate the eyes with a pen, and used a fuzzy brush to depict the visual experience of childhood extending to the present.
Kurt said that his paintings are "masterless works." It doesn't matter who the woman in the painting is, she can be anyone. Airplanes, murderers, serious professors, they are symbols and reality itself.
Camus once said, "Usually, people who choose to devote themselves to art have regarded themselves as different. However, he will soon discover that his art and his own uniqueness are often rooted in similarities with everyone else. " .
Perhaps this is the true meaning of Wuzhu's work. This is Kurt's story. It is the moments and fragments of his life. It is his inner experience and emotions. This is also the story of Elisabeth, the story of Ellie, the story of Professor Seaband, the story of the survivors who have not yet been defeated, the story of all the passengers on the train to West Germany, and the story of everyone in this chaotic thirty years. s story.
From east to west, Kurt's artistic path is not awakening , but return .
In addition to the freedom of artistic creation , another sub-theme of "A Masterless Works" is the right of reproduction . However, I don't know whether it was the director deliberately or because of the director's own gender awareness. The female images in this film, except for the muse Elisabeth, other roles are very marginalized and functional.
Ellie was originally a creative fashion design student. After marrying Kurt and fleeing West Germany, she was completely reduced to a symbol of wife and mother, only appearing in the interstitial sex. Ellie's mother, betrayed by her husband for a long time, is like a shadow in the family. And Kurt's own mother disappeared completely in the story after her husband committed suicide.
Perhaps the invisibility of women can be barely interpreted as a kind of blank expression. The most unsatisfactory aspect of "No Master" lies in the embodiment of the source of inspiration in Kurt's artistic creation. As a film showing the growth of the artist, it does not portray the artist's creative process in depth. The whole film only has the moment when the window is accidentally closed, when the inspiration bursts. At other times, Kurt's mind and soul are tightly closed to the audience, maybe This is the biggest regret that the film has to mention.
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