(This article was first published on the WeChat public account of Muweier)
Deleuze pointed out in "Motion-Image" that the world of water is a system of motion and perception that is very different from the world of land. There, the center of gravity is no longer stable, everything and everything is in swing, and the rules we have to obey are that there are no rules. So, the union of the lover of an industrial diver with Wentini guides Wentini to her origin, and opens up a new world, to a world of ours, where goods flow freely and people are imprisoned. challenge or subvert.
Wentini, the narrator who was broken up, heard a call of "Wendini", saw the statuette of the diver in the aquarium, and stopped, as if following this guide, she met Christoph, an industrial diver. When the other party was babbling about himself, he hit the aquarium, cracked and slipped, and the two fell into the water with water plants hanging on their bodies. Wentini was stabbed and bleeding, and fresh red blood dripped from the white shirt, next to the dazzling red hair. The green grass is clear, the eyes meet, falling in love. The literal description cannot convey the verve of this festival. The poetic nature of this moment reminds me of the famous dancing fountain scene in Dolce Vitae. If I had to describe it, I would only say that I don’t know where it came from, and I just went deeper and deeper.
The 90-minute length of the film includes two accidental deaths, one murder, and one suicide, all connected to water. Wentini and Christoph dive and are attracted by strange fish and drown; Christoph drowns at work; Wentini murders her ex in the swimming pool, and then jumps into the sea, as in "Death of the Sacred Deer", the mythology guides "one life for another". Rescue Christoph. It is through the first two deaths that the overwhelming love for each other is confirmed, and the second two deaths, like "The Peony Pavilion", make the living die and the dead live. Water is dangerous to people of land animals, but it is also the destination of lovers. In the end, Wentini visited her lover again in the water. The lover's world is connected with water, and the water vapor is dense.
At the end of the film, Christoph comes ashore wet and pulls the hand of his pregnant lover, and the disturbance of the water on the land order started by the rupture of the aquarium seems to subside. But the camera moves down and the water waves float, as if Wendini casts a nostalgic glance at her lover, which is heartbreaking, as if to imply the never-ending disturbance and the ever-flowing boundary.
Therefore, "Wendini" is not just a love story, it borrows the shell of mythology (Wendini is the name of the water monster in mythology, if betrayed by her lover, she will kill her lover), connecting the changes of Berlin city. History, in conception, is in the same strain as Petzold's films.
Petzold's films are always in the guise of melodrama, moving between history and reality, lies and truth (more precisely, different narratives of the same event), irrationality and rationality. In "Barbara", Barbara, who was intent on fleeing to West Germany, renews her understanding of East Germany through an accidental interpersonal relationship (and thus affects her personal memory), and finally regards the other country as her hometown; "Transit" seems to show that World War II and the present More than 70 years have passed, and the situation of people being imprisoned by the borders imagined by the community has not changed. What is a boundary? Objective borders are in fact only forms, subjective borders constructing our past, present and future (refugees can cross the high seas, cross land borders, but are stopped at "transit" places). So whether it is to observe the past, the present or the future, one must penetrate deeply into the human mind.
As a result, Petzold's characters often burst into irrational states, such as the last-second decision in "Barbara", the frantic pursuit in "Phoenix", not to mention the lightning bolt in "Wendini" Love at first sight and life and death love. Irrational states are not so much outbursts as human states that are inherently free-flowing, and Petzold captures and characterizes them. Between rationality and irrationality there is only an artificial opposition.
Therefore, Petzold's extension to the mythological theme is inevitable ("Wendini" is the starting point of Petzold's mythological trilogy), because myth is equal to the ignorance of human beings in the discourse since the Enlightenment , and the "irrational" age, in turn, occupies the artificial boundary of rationality/irrationality mentioned above. German philosopher Hans Blumenberg pointed out in "Mythology" that "the boundary between myth and logos is imaginary", and myth also has its rationality. The only difference is that in the past, the boundaries of Petzold still had physical coordinates as a frame of reference (such as East Germany and West Germany), while in "Wendini", the two dimensions of time and space must be based on imagination. wings to create a frame of reference.
Blumenberg pointed out that the Enlightenment viewed and measured everything from the point of view of the end of the process, rather than starting from the point from which the process takes its departure. The former is related to teleology and often leads to determinism, as if things can only and must point to an end. And when we focus on the starting point, then our vision will not be limited to the immediate world, but will embrace the possible worlds, which is the direction of research in the arts and humanities.
This idea is implicitly pointed out by Wendini in the film. Architectural theory declares that "the design of a building begins with the best realization of its intended use," so style is always determined by function, she said. But that's not the case with the architecture she's talking about - an old royal palace is now a museum. In the old days, Wang Xie, now Xu the public. Berlin, which accommodates these, has become a city full of charm, allowing lovers to create new memories in every corner. When the tourists pointed out the coordinates of their moment on the model for Wendini, Wendini, who was a lover, immediately looked through the corner of the model to the cafe where they often dated. And then, her love with Christoph was accompanied by a ban on cafes and the opening of underwater worlds. Giving meaning to space is the privilege of human beings as subjects. Through this, we create a world for ourselves.
I myself experienced a similar situation in Berlin. At that time, on the way to the Berlin Wall, the author was attracted to stop by an old brick red bridge. After a while, a yellow train (pictured) slowly passed on the railway bridge above the old bridge. The deep, quaint red is matched with the bright, brand-new yellow and the misty sky. The ancient bridges and the modern buildings in the distance complement each other.
Architecture and urban planning provide an experience that is both real and illusory, and it is the expertise of film art. The Eye of the Movie allows the mental presentation of thoughts flying from the model to the cafe where the lover is, and allows the gaseous perception of the lover who may be dead or alive. It is through art that we not only have the world in front of us. "Wendini" gives us at least three worlds: the Berlin we live in now, the Berlin that is still related to the present as history, and the world our lover creates because of love. This is probably Petzold's eternal theme: the world we live in faces the disintegration of old frontiers and the tyranny of new frontiers in every sense (the most obvious being the constant flow of refugees pounding existing borders, while Cold War mentality and hegemony ism is on a rampage to establish new boundaries), and people are at a loss. Only art allows the imagination to take over, allowing us to see countless possible worlds.
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