Only for personal archive use.
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Ideas: Three clues, three homesickness
The context of these three lines can be said to be very clear. They are musicians at the end of the eighteenth century, lunatics who imprisoned their wives and children for seven years, and lunatic Russian poets.
The first clue: the murky foundation of the narrative
Looking for musicians is the narrative foundation of the whole film. If there were no musicians, then the entire narrative would cease to exist. It can be used as such an important clue, it only has text (lines) hints, and there is no direct shot in the movie. And this reminder gradually faded after the appearance of the madman.
Of course, this approach is commonplace in art films. But every time it appears, it must have a special purpose.
This line has never disappeared. It is a creative motif and one of the windows that opens the film. The reason why its prompt is downplayed is that it has long been rooted in the hearts of all the characters that appear. The image of a musician who longs to return to China but commits suicide after returning to China represents a core contradiction. Through the ubiquity of this image, the theme of "homesickness" has risen to the height of ubiquity.
Second clue: sacrifices on the altar
The lunatic who imprisoned his wife and children is the most prominent role in the film. This kind of prominence is not reflected by a relatively large number of shots, but an emotional performance. From extreme indifference to extreme fanaticism, he became the character with the farthest emotional vertical axis in the film.
But he became flat because of this fullness. He is without a doubt, at a glance (compared to this, the protagonist Russian poet has more mysteries than him). Therefore, he can only become a "homesickness" completed process, that is, become a part of it. Corresponding to his role is his ending: self-immolation under the eyes of everyone and amidst joy and joy. He is a sacrifice to pain.
The third clue: calm and final completion
The Russian poet looking for a musician is undoubtedly the protagonist. His fullness lies in his blankness. Instead of looking for the reason for each of his subtle movements, it is better to accept the elusiveness of him. He is sensible, but he also has many unthinkable actions.
He is looking for musicians, and musicians are looking for homesickness. What he seeks is to seek homesickness itself. When we pursued him, we succeeded in becoming the subject of pursuit, that is, the person who pursued the homesickness itself. In this endless chain of pursuit, the meaning of homesickness itself is obscured. Are we looking for the pursuit itself, or the purpose of the pursuit? Or is homesickness itself a kind of pursuit? This is the first contradiction.
He talks to himself and rejects the outside world. Here comes the second contradiction of homesickness. Here, homesickness is treated as an extremely personal experience, and the outside world cannot interfere/intervene. However, homesickness, as mentioned in the first clue, takes root in everyone's heart. The contradiction here is a universal special experience.
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Ideas: form and content
One is the tolerance of homesickness.
In the film, black and white and color are often switched between (this is also used in many art films...but the same as above, each appearance has a different purpose).
Most of the time, black and white color processing mostly occurs in scenes outside the main timeline: fantasy, memory, and pure surrealism. The effect of black and white is very obvious, it is a kind of obliteration of the particularity of color. It revitalizes everything into nothingness (retaining only the outline, light and dark in the picture). If homesickness is divided into two parts, homesickness and sorrow, then all black and white pictures will become a subset of "hometown". Black and white obliterated the particularity of the individual.
Second, the stagnation and solidification of homesickness.
There are a lot of long shots and deliberately slowed down shots in the film. Speaking of slow-down shots, I have to mention the section where the lunatic chased the child who was rescued after being imprisoned: it appeared in the form of a reminiscence. In contrast to the "fleeing" among the population, this section was slowed down very slowly, almost like a father and a child walking one after another. In the stagnation of time, it is simply suffocating...
(This kind of processing weakens the speed of action in reality and the speed of time passing. In other words, the daily experience is dispelled here, the director replaces it with the rhythm he has conceived, and the defamiliarization is completed here. We are able to pass " "Camera" is a perspective to view the experience of a character or the creative world itself)
On the one hand, this reflects the long memory and the lunatic's notion that his violent behavior is regarded as a kind of "pilgrimage." On the other hand, this is the characteristic of homesickness (or even the body), that is, a kind of stagnation (solidification).
The dialogue in the film clearly reminded this: the Russian poet said to the female translator, don’t move, you are beautiful in this light. The female translator laughed, and the Russian poet said again, I can understand why he wants to imprison his wife and children.
The reason why the lunatic is a sacrificer is because he tried to use his personal behavior to preserve "homesickness" as a specimen. However, just like the powerlessness of memories to forget, people can never truly have "homesickness". In other words, "homesickness" is a solidified impression in the human mind that transcends dynamic "memories" in changing objective things. It is the human desire for eternity.
In the river that can't step into the second time, the soul preserves the memories of the touch of the water. The number of times you can get involved has become countless.
It is not difficult to understand the people standing in a black and white background. It is creating a sense of solidification. At the same time, the subtle movements and the misty rural scenery are also very wonderful, it easily captures the dynamics of the onlookers in the freezing. For example, this is like a trembling feather on the tip of a mountain, giving people a breath (sorry, what kind of metaphor is this?).
(At this point, I suddenly thought of the white hair on the head of the Russian poet and the white feathers that slipped off at the beginning of the film. I was always puzzled by this shot. By the way, what does it have to do with the white skirt?)
(Let’s brainstorm: -D)
Third, homesickness and religion (belief), religion and conception
At the beginning of the film, the female translator walked in the church and watched the women perform a prayer ceremony. She asked questions to the clergy and couldn't kneel down to pray.
From here, the film’s creative motif "religion" has emerged, and at the same time, the female translator has naturally become the opposite of this motif.
"Religion" is bound to the mother here. The prayers in the prayer ceremony, the priest's answer to the female translator ("They are all mothers"), and the release of the flying birds from the cage suggestive of childbirth, all reflect this. Here, mother is a symbol, with rich connotation and denotation.
"Homesickness" has changed from a kind of personal experience to the pronoun of the source of life... all kinds of dedication to faith have become sacrifices in pursuit of the identity of life. In the source (township), life is not an individual, but a kind of tolerance mentioned in the first.
The female translator is not playing the role of a mother, but a (nearly) the role of a girl. The rejection of her by Russian poets is precisely the rejection of her by identity. The wife who never appeared on the scene became the real mother (she was compared to the portrait of the Virgin by Russian poets). But this does not mean that the film has a negative attitude towards female translators: she is the most vibrant and powerful in the world, so she (to a certain extent) can even be the opposite of the huge motif.
On the level of religion and motherhood, there are many things that can be said. The combination of female image and religion is not a novel topic in itself, but there are intricacies here... and we can even read the subversion of the capital order, the memory and pursuit of pastoral songs, and even the Oedipus plot. But I myself don't know much about it, so I put it aside for now.
I write here first, and I have questions throughout the article.
Anyway, this movie still touched me. I believe that everyone will have some unspeakable memory impressions, those uncapable of the past. "Homesickness" reflects the extent to which we can capture those feelings that are extremely short but extremely long in time. This feeling is "not about being pregnant or homesick." It may be some kind of universal pain, human beings face eternally small desires and struggles... The heart of the Russian poet stops beating, the madman dies in wailing, but the flames shine.
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