In 1970 Fassbender directed seven films, and in 1972 he directed three more films and a five-episode TV series, however in 1971 his focus was all on one film work - The Merchant of Four Seasons. ". This well-planned work is a turning point in his creative career. If the aforementioned "God of Plague" reveals the clues of its form variation, then this "Four Seasons Merchant" is its true and thorough transformation from form to content. transformation.
The shift stemmed from a retrospective of Douglas Seck's films that Fassbender saw at the Munich Film Museum in 1970. German-born director Douglas Seck immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1941. Under the industrial system of the big Hollywood studios, he made many popular dramas, such as "Bitter Rain Loves Spring Breeze", "Spring Breeze and Autumn Rain", "Deep Locked Spring and One House Sorrow". Works, the storylines in the film with family life as the background were once considered by the industry to be cheap products in stores and not artistic. However, when Sek faded out of the film circle in his later years, his film aesthetics was recognized by the academic circles. It was in this Douglas Sack film retrospective that Fassbender saw Sack's personal style at a glance. He was amazed at Seck's ability to stay within the system without losing his personality. Seck let him discover " This type of storytelling that the average person thinks is impossible and real life is absolutely doable...I think it's time for what I said earlier to be a film for the masses." Since then, Fassbender has become Seck's unofficial heir, constantly exploring various ingenious techniques in his works to have a strong impact on the audience.
"The Merchant of Four Seasons," like all of Secker's family melodramas, delivers to audiences with exaggerated emotional experiences. Fassbender even admitted that he was fascinated by Seik's charismatic style when he conceived of "The Merchant of Four Seasons", and almost copied the story of Seik's "Deep Locked in Spring". The story of "The Merchant of Four Seasons" revolves around the relationship between people in family life. The protagonist Hans consciously and openly arouses the audience's emotions through the film in the continuous fluctuation of the dramatic experience, but makes the audience suddenly feel at the critical distance of emotional input. Pulled out, this instant deconstruction and alienation is like a diving experience. Divers suddenly return to the surface from the bottom of the sea. Although they can quickly complete a series of actions and reach the water surface, the sudden change of a series of environmental factors such as water pressure is what really makes people feel Painful "after-effects". The audience is constantly immersed in the decorative undercurrents and emotional agitation of the melodrama in the process of "floating", but at the end they have to face the roaring and shocking "after effects" of returning to the surface.
The limitations of Sek Hollywood put more energy on the "decoration" level, and the decoration of exaggerated emotions is more completed through the expressive arrangement and scheduling of space and vision. Everyday furniture, flowers, wall paintings and mirrors are all Become an undercurrent of emotional agitation. At the "roaring" level, the story relationship and character confrontation beyond reality often wakes the audience up through dramatic mise-en-scene and photography to wake up the audience that this is not a real situation. Instantly pulled away from the roaring emotions accumulated in the dark, and returned to the decorative spectator again. And because Fassbender has more freedom of personal creation, his works are more inclined to the after-effect of roaring in the level of "roaring" and "decoration". Hans lost his career as a policeman because of the temptation of a prostitute, and he had to become a fruit seller after losing his job. The contempt of his mother, the departure of his lover, the absence of emotional satisfaction, all kinds of internal tensions in society. All gathered in him, the protagonist's miserable situation at the bottom of the society has a strong roaring complex because of the more explicit social critical vision, but when the emotions are full enough to explode, decorative exaggerated effects such as sudden close-ups Reaction shots also give the audience a sense of the alienating effect behind this "pretend".
Although Seck and Fassbender have different emphasis on the balance of "roar" and "decoration," they both share the same stylized meticulousness in their use of visual design. Figures are often framed in windows or doors or behind railings, and close-ups of foregrounded figures are always tantalizingly lit against the despair behind the bright. In the scattered flashbacks of Hans or her sister Anna, time hides the trajectory of vertical development. The audience is always caught off guard by their slanted emotions, and the short-term emotional catharsis field is more and more crucial because of the subtle photography scheduling. Anna recalled the scene of her brother Hans saying goodbye in the corridor before joining the foreign army. The scene at this time rarely used two photographic tone. Hans, who was sitting on the stairs, looked up at his sister who was standing next to him. In the dialogue scene, Hans was completely swallowed up by the low-key darkness. He despairedly told his plan to the only sister in the family who recognized him. Anna, who is visually dominant, is completely integrated into the high-profile and bright light. He looks down at the brother under his feet but can only say the helpless words "there is a war over there, you will be killed". The illusion of Anna's visual ability to save Hans is clear in the final chase. Hans throws money into Anna and flees in despair. Anna tries to catch up with him but falls down in the dim corridor. The ground moves until Anna is framed at the top of the picture, and the light projected from the lower left and right corners of the picture coincidentally forms the figure of the cross. Anna crawled and wept softly in the light of the cross that symbolized redemption and faith. He was not Christ Jesus who could take the place of his brother to suffer and solve the problem, and Hans could not feel the firmness and hope of faith and directly abandoned the light of the cross. If the past experience has been unable to breathe and indulge, then the current situation is from numbness to the coldness of giving up. In the penultimate scene of the film, Hans and his wife come to their mother's house for a family dinner. A set of panning shots swept over Hans's mother, sister, brother-in-law and wife indifferently. There is no emotion under the deep vision, only the snobbery and hypocrisy in the horizontal inspection, Hans understands it, and after the end of this scene, he directly enters the death scene at the end. The surging emotions kept accumulating under the modification of the camera, and at the end, Fassbender could not hold back the essence of the roar, temporarily put aside the decorative nature of the Sek-style melodrama, and issued the most bizarre and deep roar: Hans imagined that he was whipped and tortured in a foreign country, and his companions in the distance did not immediately reach out to rescue. Hans endured the pain from struggle to numbness to despair. In the end, although he was rescued, he lost hope of survival. He died in imagination, and he died in reality.
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