This article was revised and published in "Sanlian Life Weekly" on September 16, 2019 (total issue 1054) . Reproduction in any form on any platform is strictly prohibited without authorization.
After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2014 for En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron), this year's Best of Om det oändliga (Om det oändliga) at the same festival The director, for the famous Swedish director Roy Andersson (Roy Andersson), may not mean much. He didn't even show up to accept the award. The acting producer said in his acceptance speech that the judges' decision would have an impact on the film's commercial future. But in fact, his films have no need for marketing to this day, people who will watch them will naturally go, and those who don't like them will not change their minds because of one or two awards.
Compared to most established directors, Roy Anderson's experience is peculiar. The 76-year-old has only six feature films to his name. It's not because of a late bloomer, in fact Anderson became famous early. Just after graduating from the film school, she was selected for the main competition of the Berlin Film Festival with her debut film "Swedish Love Story" (En kärlekshistoria, 1970), which won unanimous praise. At this time, he was only twenty-seven or eighty-years-old. In the face of such success, he seemed to have lost his film identity, and he repeatedly chose the script for the second feature film several times. In the end, the film "Traveling Love" (Giliap, 1975), which failed miserably at the box office and critically acclaimed. The quality of the film is debated by film historians today, but Anderson has not produced any feature films in the quarter-century since.
During this period of dormancy, he was mainly engaged in commercial activities such as commercial shooting, and became the most money-saving art film director today. It may be that the experience of "Traveling in Love" made Anderson aware of the limitations of the film industry on author films, and making films with his own money became his answer to this reality. Financial freedom provided the material basis for his extremely personal style and artistic expression after his "comeback."
In 2000, the main competition unit of the Cannes Film Festival, Roy Anderson's third feature film "Song from the Second Floor" (Sånger från andra våningen) won the Jury Prize, announcing the success of his official comeback. After that, he shot "You're Still Alive" (Du levande, 2007) and "Quiet the Sparrow" at the rate of one film every seven years, completing the so-called "Living trilogy". In his own words, it is "a trilogy on being human" (en trilogi om att vara människa), which shows and interrogates what is often called "the human condition" (conditio humana) in modern Western philosophy.
The "Trilogy of Life" established Anderson's unique artistic style: the film uses only fixed shots, abandons the movement of the camera in film art, and returns to the Lumiere Brothers' early fixation for inspiration, in depth of field, scheduling, actors and sets. make an article. In terms of content, it shows the absurdity of life and society, but it does not lose humor in pessimism, and sometimes criticizes social injustice and human alienation, but the method is also absurdity rather than cursing.
I remember that when I was watching "Quiet the Birds of Cold Branches", there was a scene that was incomprehensible. It was the colonial officer who drove the black slaves into a big iron barrel to burn. The barrel said Boliden. A later investigation revealed that Boliden, a Swedish multinational company specializing in mining and smelting, sold scrap (“smelting sludge”) to Chile in the 1980s, causing local residents to fall ill. The area was abandoned in 2009, and in 2013, the victims went to court, and Sweden was in an uproar after the incident came to light. Using the visual symbols of the old colonial era to interpret the evils of neocolonialism makes the audience inescapable of the evils of our time.
Anderson is very good at expressing the dislocation of time and space naturally and smoothly, and the analogy of this dislocation of time and space often brings great shock and impact to people. The lightness in form and the heaviness in effect give people a feeling of light weight, and at the same time aggravate his usual sense of absurdity. In "About Endless", there is a modernized scene of Jesus carrying the cross. The classically glorified body of Jesus turned into a bloated middle-aged man in formal clothes. He walked forward carrying the cross in an unknown corner of the modern city, and was flogged by men and women in sweaters. Stopped to watch, expression indifferent.
Faith is an extra dimension of thinking in the film compared with the trilogy. There are more than 30 shots in the whole film, most of which are not connected, but there is a priest's story that can be linked together, accounting for several shots. A priest who has lost his faith doubts the existence of God and goes to see a psychiatrist. This is a cold joke. Unable to answer his questions about God and existence, the doctor finally said, "To live is to be satisfied." And what kind of "live" is this? The priest has a hard time riding a tiger because it is his "job". Visited the doctor again, but was kicked out because the other party was going to leave work. Modern capitalist society leaves no room for the ultimate question beyond production and life. Anderson takes a priest and a psychiatrist, a pair of traditional and modern psychological comforters, and pessimistically presents the instrumental nature of faith and science in a dark humorous way. They are all about programs, not people. And the character is dark and indifferent in all the films after his "comeback".
What I love most about Anderson is that the big events of history and the little details of life are presented in exactly the same way in the same film. The biggest impact this time is the humorous reappearance on the eve of Hitler's complete defeat. The drunken officers give up resistance like all losers in life. The embarrassment of the Führer and the weight of history are indifferent to specific individuals. The director gave this scene the same rhythm and even the same length as the other shots. A father took his daughter to a classmate's birthday party in the rain, bending over to tie her shoelaces on the way; a female marketing director stared motionless at the bustling city outside the floor-to-ceiling windows; a few girls suddenly danced outside a quiet country bar. He makes it seem as if all of this has the same weight: you can say that historical events are insignificant, but a more positive interpretation should be that life itself is extremely important.
The two feature films that Anderson made when he was young were about two hours long, while the "Life Trilogy" did not exceed a hundred minutes each. "About Endless" is even shorter, just over seventy minutes, a bit like Kundera's trend of getting shorter and shorter. In this year's Venice feature films that are often two or three hours long, such a short work is titled "Endless", which seems a bit outrageous. Anderson said at a news conference that he wanted to make a film that looked like it would never end, and the audience didn't want it to end. Because of his slow, minimalist, fixed-shot, fragmented narrative style, each of the trilogy, especially the 100-minute "Peace in the Cold Branch," is a bit unnerving by the last ten to twenty minutes. An "endless" movie is a movie that makes the audience not addicted to it, and makes people feel that they can still watch it and the director can still make it. From this point of view, "About Endless" is his most brilliant work.
There is also a careful consideration in the film, which is to use a moving camera: a couple is flying in the air in the pose of a Chagall painting, crossing the city, but the city is in ruins on closer inspection. This is the only moving shot that Roy Anderson has used in a feature film in over forty years, and in addition to highlighting the themes of eternity and infinity, it is also an extreme artistic approach. The two people in the sky are moving, and the camera is also moving, but the only thing that doesn't move is the city that should be changing with each passing day, raising the ruins of the city to the absurdity he has always pursued.
For those who have never seen Roy Anderson, this shortest work is undoubtedly a good introduction. But as someone who has been chasing him for more than ten years and made up all the previous works, I and many of my colleagues at the Venice scene are a little tired of aesthetics, and some people even accuse him of frying. Such an accusation is unfair, because Anderson is using the same artistic style to talk about different issues, but there is no doubt about the fatigue shown in the film. The way of discussing topics has also begun to be modeled, which is reflected in "Han Zhi Que Jing".
Age can be a very important factor, as is achievement. Anderson, who has completed the trilogy, can be immortalized in film history, so he began to discuss topics such as eternity and faith, but he failed to find a film language and artistic style that was more suitable for showing "endless".
I think he might be tired too. In "About Endless", there is a humorous shot of a young man and woman who look like students. The boy is reading what may be the thermodynamic principle from a physics book: energy is immortal and only changes from one form to another. , cyclically. So he said to the girl that according to this principle, they are also immortal, and they may meet again in other forms after thousands of years. This is the scene in the film that addresses the topic of "endless" most bluntly. I have a vague feeling that "About Endless" might be Roy Anderson's farewell letter to the world, and "Endless" is a kind of wishful thinking in the future.
Roy Anderson's five previous feature films:
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