A Cult Film classic, The Mole is a long-running Midnight Cinema program. And it is indeed a peculiar midnight nightmare, most of which are sun scenes, exterior scenes, blue sky and white sun, yellow sand and blue blood, under such strong light, all the weirdness has a straight face - good Director Xiang is not trying to frighten and intimidate the audience through various visions, but only to reveal his inner whims. In terms of structure, the film can even be called "rigorous": the transitions between the various passages are not necessarily plotly necessary, but putting them in a temporal sequence and naming them can form a purposeless structure , making it a self-contained text with inherent closure.
The protagonist in the film is played by the director himself. The first shot at the beginning of the film is "Mole" and his son riding from afar and entering the desert. The father is all black, while the child is naked. Ask the child to bury the first toy in the sand with the picture of the mother, he says, "You are seven years old." They pass a slaughtered village, the "mole" kills the butcher Colonel, - this paragraph Here, an innuendo to the dictatorship of the South American Americans can be seen. After that, he took the colonel's woman and left his son in the village to fulfill the woman's request: to defeat the four musketeers in the desert. This is a journey of self-seeking. Although he defeated all opponents, he did not gain inner victory - so the last paragraph in the film is redemption and sublimation: trying to lead a deformed person in a cave to the outside world .
For a surreal film, outlining the plot usually doesn't make much sense. Although for this movie, the plot still has a metaphysical "pursuit" clue. What is more interesting is the imagination and beauty of the picture: for example, the beginning of the scene: Why is my father wrapped in black? Why is the child naked? Why are they still holding an umbrella? These problems are all unsolved, and can be interpreted in various ways, and they are understood as symbols, but they are more of a visual spectacle, canceling the chain of meaning established by the signifier and the signified, acting in isolation and directly For "feeling" rather than "consciousness". The Freudian sociological logic reduction of the image in the dream is inevitably narrow and utilitarian. When surrealism tries to distort time and space and cancel the causal logic of reality, it is better to sink in and explore your own feelings. border.
As a director, Jandlovsky does not necessarily have a deep understanding and grasp of the language of film. The shots in "The Mole" are flat and straightforward, mostly in extremely stable and closed compositions—which resonate with the overall structure of the film. His grotesque is a serene grotesque on the surface, with simple, well-defined elements. But many of the scenes in the film, like installations of contemporary art, have a carefully crafted sense of absurdity. For example, the man in the movie uses rubble to draw a woman's shape on a stone, and then bends down to copulate. In the movie, one can clearly experience the persecution and suffering of sex and violence on the body and on the heart. At the same time, the ultimate transcendence and redemption are another kind of persecution and suffering. The four musketeers in the desert, like the four eastern hermits, can also see the influence of Zen Buddhism on directors who have experienced the 1960s in the West. This scene is very conceptual, but it is not lacking in beauty. But buried in the depths of Yandlovsky, are childhood circus memories and Christian influences? The "mole" eventually self-immolated to death and turned into a hive of bees, often understood from a religious point of view.
After "The Mole", Jandlovsky's works include "Holy Mountain" in 1973 and "Holy Blood" in 1989. With this "trilogy", he has become the most important surrealist film director.
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