This time, Bai Lecture brings us a film adapted from a short novel by Bruno Schultz by Polish director and neorealist master Wojci Haas. In the two-hour film, Haas constructs a dream of the protagonist Joseph in the fragmented hourglass time. From the broken Gothic columns up and down, to the gaze in front of the tombstone, we followed Joseph, and in the magnificent colors and gorgeous transitions, we felt the director's views on war, religion, politics under the carrier of time ties. , Destiny and many other topics. Any attempt to interpret the time aria of this chapter Huacai with plot analysis will be futile. Here, the author will discuss several audio-visual touching points in the film, and try to write down my own views and feelings.
The beginning and end of the film are very interesting, starting with a fixed shot of the scene outside the window, zooming to look around the entire dark Gothic column, where the film's realistic cool tones are laid; the end is a pan down, the director let us Looking down from the nursing home to the tombstone, the same colors as at the beginning symbolize decay and death. After the male protagonist arrives at the sanatorium and enters the room, until he wakes up in a white light, the main part is carried out in a magnificent imaginary world, and the transfer of colors also allows us to perceive the transfer and changes of the movie's mood very well.
Joseph's dream, he fiddled with the hourglass of time, we felt in each gorgeous transition. Haas cleverly uses some spatially divided ideographic mediums to present the changes of the plot, time, scene and place. The director asked the male protagonist to climb out from under the bed and dining table three times, and each time he climbed out, he returned to a place that was brand new in time and familiar in space. The first is from the home town of the story's starting point, fleeing from his mistress Adela's house to meet his father in a prosperous market, which leads to the most splendid and absurd scene in the movie's dream sequence; the second is in the comparison Anka fled to the home again under the bed, and once again searched for his father, which led to the discussion of religion in the town; the last time was to return to the sanatorium from under the holy table in the town, to witness the holy sign of the resurrection of the wax figure. Each transition that exploits the narrow space symbolizes Joseph's new understanding of the broken hourglass of time. Another amazing way to transition is to use horizontal perspective movement to switch spaces. For the first time, the male protagonist peeped between the cracks in the broken windows, and saw the female nurse leading the new family members to the nursing home, and then the camera panned to the male protagonist's dream, and once again took off the cover, which was already the mother's home. Subsequent movie dream texts also appeared many times with the effect of panning the vision to bring about spatial transitions, each time the director gave the audience a psychological hint and preparation for plot jumps. Joseph is both the subject of his own space-time dream fantasy and a parallel mirror. The observer of , he can't escape the function of time knot while playing with time.
The most outstanding part of the film is naturally the discussion of time and space. Whether it is a visual and intuitive presentation or the philosophical thinking left by the hero's lines, it is impressive. Visually, Hass mostly uses a long lens, and the scenes in different time and space dimensions are set with distinct colors, allowing the audience to travel with Joseph in a dream and experience the alternation of time and space. The movie starts with the columnist who leads the way. The male protagonist comes to his father's sanatorium to find himself, and finally wakes up. Joseph gets up from the bed, is put on a chandelier by doctors and nurses, and inherits the army and the army.
The double identity of the father. Finally, the ending scene of the cemetery and the argument between the male protagonist and the doctor are also obvious plot hints for Joseph's death in the hourglass time and space. Doctors suggest at first that the father is dead, but the nursing home tries to freeze time; Joseph and the Elephant troupe discuss greatness in the dream; and finally the exclamation that "space can be manipulated but time can't be manipulated." Both make it easy for the audience to empathize with Joseph, feel the time in awe in the visual spectacle, and at the same time reflect on their own grasp of the knot of time beyond the film text.
Of course, the political and religious issues and many metaphors that can be seen everywhere in the film are also quite exciting. The author does not know much about the political and religious history of Poland, but Haas used various metaphors such as food, objects, wax figures, etc., to achieve not only the construction of the movie scene concept, but also the directional discussion of the war history. The whole film can easily put the audience in Poland before and after World War II to understand the reincarnation of history, and the two stops of Joseph at the wax figure are the most straightforward and obvious examples. First of all, the freezing of the characters by the wax figure coincides with the play of the hourglass of time in the sanatorium. The wax figure transcends the simple mechanical principle and starts to move, which also constitutes an intertext for the manipulation of time in Joseph's dream. Secondly, the setting of the historical figures of the wax figure also allows the film story to be placed in the historical background of the war. Finally, the movement of the wax figures, which form a visual spectacle, constitutes a breathtaking contrast to the stillness of the species.
Finally, the film's full of imagination has an obvious influence on the later works of film history. The workers singing and dancing performances that appeared in the town for the first time, with dazzling arias and rotating shots, can be found many times in the films of Hungarian poetic film director Mullatal, such as "Whale Theatre"; for the shaping of spectacles , the right balance of ambient background sound and color seems to have been inherited in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now"; the interweaving of dream reality, absurd religious metaphors, especially the erotic suggestion of naked women in the room on the stairs, are very interesting. It's hard not to think of Yugoslav director Kusturica's epic "Underground" and so on. Haas combines the perfection of the spectacle with the metaphor of political philosophy to thoroughly immerse the audience in the fantasy world he weaves.
#The revised version of this film review is published on the official website of Peking University Centennial Lecture Hall and its public account#
View more about The Hourglass Sanatorium reviews
