The works of Bergman, Beratar, Angelopoulos, Tarkovsky and others all focus on the "doomsday" scene and are dedicated to exploring the belief dilemma of modern people. The apocalypse here has multiple interpretations, and in a broad sense, it is more like a crisis of the human spirit: if the faith of mankind is completely destroyed, completely overwhelmed by the empty currents of the times, what is the difference between the survival of the world and its destruction ? Human civilization is just a remnant shell that exists in name only, and the spiritual core of life has withered.
Facing the panic of nihilism in Western theology, Bergman entered into contemplation on the problem of God in this era; Beratar, from the perspective of opposing creationism, bluntly declared that God is absent and that death is the only direction of life; With his elegy at the end of the century, Anzhe depicts the loss of the human spirit, but never finds the "skyline"; while Tarkovsky, starting from his Orthodox beliefs, faced the issue of doomsday, even though he experienced loneliness and suffering, he still remained. With hope of rebirth and trust in the divine.
"Nostalgia" selects different time fragments: present, memory, dream, fantasy, history and transcendence (surreal), to complicate, multiply and shape real time from multiple perspectives. In the film, Russia and Italy are personified as two women: the Italian translator Eugenia and his wife Maria; two dominant tones are used: memories are in black and white, reality is in color . Tarkovsky attaches great importance to the integration of the natural and spiritual aspects of time, that is, the integration of indescribable psychological perceptions into natural representations. Therefore, the time we feel in his films often has a certain thickness and irregularity. Sex, this method can show the true appearance of life.
The film tells the story of three lonely people-the female translator Eugenia, the poet Gorchakov and the madman Dominic. They are also facing a spiritual crisis, but they hold different people, the world and the absolute holiness around them. They can be classified into three categories: the nihilistic, the felt and the prophet. The following will analyze them one by one.
The Void - Female Translator Eugenia
The female translator Eugenia lacked reverence. She kept a distance from mysterious things and stayed in a wait-and-see state. Her inability to kneel after entering the church and seeing the statue of the Virgin was her response.
The female translator has a beautiful appearance. The film focuses on the display of her upper body beauty twice, and the use of light plays a good role in foiling. However, her subsequent hysterical venting and trend-seeking nature unabashedly revealed the true nature of her vain beauty: this beauty only stays at the sensual level and has nothing to do with the sacred. The loneliness caused by the inner nothingness eventually makes her a seductress. The female translator used different methods to seduce the poet. In addition to posing an ambiguous gesture in front of the poet, she also tossed coins from the crack of the door, walked up the stairs jokingly, and tossed "I haven't told your wife for two days." It's over." These tentative questions and so on are reflected. It became clear to the audience that the female translator was trying to have a romantic relationship with the poet, but the poet was indifferent. There is a great communication barrier between these two lonely souls.
When the poet was also infected by the lunatic and tended to be close to the mystery, the female translator at this time completely exposed his nihilistic nature, and the sense of restlessness gradually increased. On the one hand, it is the catharsis of erotic desire, and on the other hand, it is the struggle of its inner loneliness. Her questioning about "freedom" to Andre turned into a questioning of herself instead, from which we can see the characteristics of the nihilists themselves. They pursue freedom but don't know what freedom is, and they completely reject divine touch. "What do you want? This (pointing to your exposed breasts, representing lust)? You don't want it, you are a saint, why can't you meet normal men." The status of saints has been marginalized as abnormal, and carnal lust is the mainstream of this era." When the poet was still indifferent, the female translator started the final hysterical attack, and it can be seen that she has lost her mind: "I want to sleep for ten days in a row, Forget about you...that's my problem, how am I like an idiot...please go and go back to your wife, even though you almost betrayed her, hypocrite!" in front of the poet The beautiful blonde becomes ugly and vulgar, and we can't be too hard on her. The exposed nature is not her own wish, but the result of the nothingness of this era, and she has also become a victim of it. This is Tarkovsky's true revelation of the phenomenon of the era. In this era, people who pursue the satisfaction of their desires are gorgeous on the outside, but lonely on the inside, and they are in extreme pain every moment.
Prophet - Mad Dominic
As Tarkovsky put it: "There are always people whose strength comes from their spiritual beliefs, and they take responsibility for giving to others. These people are often like children, but have adult motives; from a common sense point of view, their The position is not realistic, but it is selfless and selfless." This sentence directly summarizes the two characteristics of prophetic characters, namely "holy fool" and "self-sacrifice".
Prophets are cowardly in appearance and humble in status, but they possess mysterious spiritual power, the so-called "holy fool". Crazy Dominic showed his identity as soon as he came out. At the hot springs, the madman said to the female translator, "Don't forget what he said to her, which is what God said to Catherine (a Christian martyr)." When the female translator asked him what it was, the madman replied : "You are not she (Saint Catherine), and I am he (God)." Here the madman does not mean that he is God, but that he stands on the ground of God and declares his prophethood to people. After listening to the people next to them, they were ridiculed: "Good job, Dominic!" The lunatic was painted with the label of "ridiculous", and he became a misfit of the times. People thought he was crazy, but he just felt it. A minority of transcendental truths.
"Self-sacrifice" is another characteristic of prophetic figures. When the West moves too much toward rational speculation, the image of God gradually deteriorates and slips into the abyss of nihilism. The Russian spirit with the Eastern Orthodox Church (Orthodox Church) as the background acts as the guardian of pure faith, and their resistance and persistence are without exception. It is to awaken the fallen.
The lunatic has two special operations in the film. One is that he thought the end of the world was imminent, so he locked his wife and children at home for seven years, which we call the "doomsday event"; the other is that he climbed on the statue of the Roman emperor Aurelius He set himself on fire after giving a long speech to the world, which we call "Roman sermons." These two actions that are incomprehensible to ordinary people represent "saving the family" and "saving the public" respectively. The madman's leap from "saving the family" to "saving the public" has completed the real "self-sacrifice", which is not what ordinary people imagined. In the process of idealization, he must give up his ego for his beliefs, and endure a personal struggle of loneliness for his divine calling. The madman said a sentence before: " One drop plus one drop is a big drop, not two drops. " Including the "1+1=1" written on the wall of his house, which is intended to bring different people together and must All together can save humanity. This is the meaning of madman Dominic's actions and existence.
The Feeling - Poet Gorchakov
"I vaguely realize my dependence on the past, like an increasingly unbearable pain, which I call 'nostalgia'." The dependence, pain, and nostalgia referred to here have two attributes. On the one hand, On the regional level, on the other hand is the religious level. Nostalgia is a general feeling. In other words, people still experience homesickness even when they stay in their home country with their loved ones. Even with a nice house and a happy family, people still suffer from nostalgia because their minds are limited and cannot expand as they wish. Nostalgia is the powerlessness in the face of the world, and it is also the suffering caused by the inability to transmit thoughts to others.
The poet Gorchakov had this dialogue when he saw a female translator reading a Russian poem translated in Italian:
"Throw it away, poetry is untranslatable, like all art."
"Then how do we understand Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, and thus Russia?"
"None of you understand Russia."
"You don't understand Italy without passing through Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli."
"Poor humans can't do it."
"Then how do we understand each other?"
"Abolish borders."
"What boundary?"
"The borders of the country."
It is the pain that strikes the poet deeply: he has no friends and cannot communicate with others, so he suffers deeply. The character said "borders must be abolished" in order to make his ideas freely and non-conflictingly experienced by all. More broadly, his pain stemmed from his incompatibility with modern life. He could not be happy in the face of the tragedies in the world. Taking on this collective tragedy, he wants to distance himself from the world and live alone. His problems were all about compassion, and all the pain came from compassion, and he failed to fully express that feeling of compassion. He wanted to suffer with the others, but was largely unsuccessful.
Facing the dilemma, the poet tried to find relief, but there was no way out. Tarkovsky seemed to have become a god at this time, and he injected a divine light into the low point of the poet's life. The guidance of light struggles to transcend and break through, so as to explore the true meaning of life.
At the beginning of the film, a large number of birds fly to the sky during the religious ceremony, and then the poet is standing outside the church, and a feather falls. This feather seems to be a sign of the connection between the present world and the spiritual world. Momentum of assembly and feather falling. And its mystery is reflected in the eyes of the poet. He seems to see the feathers fall but looks back elsewhere. The feathers fall down until they fall completely before the poet notices the existence of the feathers, and the sound of the feathers falling is accompanied by a strange bell. sound. The film here creates a simulation of transcendental time and space breaking into reality. In the next picture, the poet picks up his feather and looks at his hometown hut in the distance. He sees an angel slowly passing by outside the house, his huge wings swaying slightly behind him.
There is also a transcendent image, in the poet's third dream, he walks in an Italian-style open-air church, this scene has never appeared in real time. And when the poet walked past the stone pillars of the church, there was a direct dialogue between God and Catherine——
"Lord, look at him like this, say something to him."
"What if he heard it."
"Make him feel your presence."
"I've been there, but he hasn't noticed."
At this point the poet wakes up and returns to reality again. There was the sound of birds flying away in the air, and the white feathers that had appeared in the black and white dream fell again in reality. This was another oracle that God proved his own existence. So everything is leading the poet to the ultimate quest - candle action.
When the signal of the madman's Roman sermon is sent, the poet's actions truly have meaning and function. With the help of the intersection of parallel time and space, the two originally lonely souls have a tacit connection. Just as the madman performs the self-immolation of Rome, the poet also lights a candle and walks through the hot spring pool, where the film climaxes. If the madman announced the destruction of this side and the rebirth of the other side in Rome, then the poet just represented the madman to complete the ultimate exploration and transcendence between this side and the other side, interpreting the essence of life to death.
Long back-and-forth shots of the delivery of the candles show the individual struggling to question between this shore and the other. The poet took a medicine before the start. During the three rounds, the poet's condition continued to worsen, and he continued to fail repeatedly. Until the end, the poet's body completely collapsed at the moment when the poet carried the pain and used his last physical strength to place the candle on the "other shore".
The film ends with the poet's ultimate dream, an eternal dream that traverses past, present and future. He lay still in the water, like a tombstone, staring straight ahead. A dog sits beside the poet. This dog has appeared in the poet's dream before, and he is also Dominic's dog in reality. If it is understood as Dominic's, it means that the poet and the madman's spirit are integrated.
Behind the poet is the hometown hut he has dreamed of many times. The home that haunts dreams finally sits firmly behind the poet, and there is a stable sense of belonging. However, we can soon find out that this home is by no means the home in memory. There are old church ruins erected around the home. This Italian-style open-air church only appeared in the poet's third dream before. The completion of the poet's candle ceremony made him finally return to the home he longed for in his life - the border has been abolished, Humanity is redeemed. This is a brand new home, a home wrapped in faith.
Interestingly, Tarkovsky never returned to Russia after filming "Nostalgia", and the reality in the film became the reality of the director himself. This seems to be another crossing of the boundary between art and reality.
Later, Tarkovsky said: "When filming "Nostalgia", how could I have imagined that the endless, depressing and painful homesickness in the film would become my later reality? How could I Thought, from now until death, I will always suffer from this heavy thought disease?
According to the script, Gorchakov's visit to Italy was only temporary, but he died at the end. In other words, he didn't go back to Russia not because he didn't want to, but because fate dictated it. Nor did I imagine that I would stay in Italy after the filming: I too, like Gorchakov, just obeyed God's order. Another sad event that deepened my thinking was the death of Anatoly Soronitsyn. He played the main role in all my previous films. He died of cancer, and a few years later I suffered the same fate myself. "
This article was first published on the WeChat public account "Notes on film writing, welcome to pay attention:)
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