This three-hour film won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards. It is well-deserved! Regarding the historical background, it shows Nazi Germany under World War II, socialist East Germany and capitalist West Germany during the Cold War. Regarding the subject matter of the story, it combines many elements of World War II, Cold War, disaster, human nature, love, art and philosophy. And every angle is intriguing and worth thinking about.
Regarding history, only Germany under World War II, the cruel and crazy Nazi Germany, slaughtered the weak without any scruples! The young and beautiful aunt of the male protagonist Kurt was mercilessly killed by the Nazis due to a neurotic behavior towards art!
Regarding human nature, Carl, a bloodthirsty opportunist, threw himself into the side of those in power again and again for the sake of identity, fame and money. A Nazi lackey, seized an opportunity, became the hospital director of the GDR, faced a crisis, and became a dignitary in West Germany after fleeing!
The core theme of the film is not to criticize justice and evil, but to explain Gerhard Richter's artistic exploration. Three mentors in his life!
The first is his aunt, a beautiful, intelligent and neurotic woman. She has her own unique thinking about art, and will not be influenced by Nazi ideas. She dares to show her perfect body and feel the existence of herself!
The second is the mentor of the GDR, who values the male protagonist's artistic talent, trains him with all his heart, and gives him the best job. But under the system at that time, the male protagonist could only paint the walls under the very narrow and selfless creative theme, and paint one after another of social realism propaganda posters!
The third and very important teacher, he preached Descartes' "I think therefore I am"! Mentor educating the male protagonist: Descartes once questioned everything, all things, all things that can create illusions, deceitful, imaginative hallucinations, but he understood that no matter what to think about, no matter what comes from it, he called all uncertainties for me! who I am? What am I?
The classic picture in the tutor's class, he explained the creative freedom pursued by existentialism: only in art, freedom is not an illusion, only an artist can let people regain the feeling of their pursuit of freedom after this disaster, everyone, whether you are A garbage collector, or a farmer, has the opportunity to become an artist. When he can display his subjective ability randomly, if you do not have complete freedom, then it is nothing! When you freed yourselves, you freed the world. You are priests, you are revolutionaries, you are liberators. Let the fire come more violently! This class is in line with the famous French existentialist master Sartre's "Existence and Nothingness" published in 1943, which explains that the core concept of existentialism is human freedom, and freedom is set by Sartre as the essence of human beings. . (See Zhu Liyuan's "Contemporary Western Literary Theory") Writers write to appeal to the freedom of readers, and only when he obtains this freedom can his works exist. (Refer to Sartre's work, Shi Kangqiang's selected translation of "Sartre's Literary Theory")
What the protagonist Kurt finally understands is the uncertainty of vision, which belongs to the postmodernist tendency. He answered the teacher's question and said: Lotto, if I randomly read 6 random numbers, it is meaningless, but if I read The numbers are the lotto numbers, and these numbers are suddenly real and convincing, even beautiful. This is to illustrate the rupture between the signifier and the signified, and the theory involves Jacques Lacan's theory of mirror images, the theory of gaze, and other related visual theories. To put it simply, what the eyes see is not necessarily the real existence, but only the display of self-instinctive desires. The 6 numbers can refer to ordinary random numbers or to lotto jackpots that represent monetary wealth. From the protagonist's understanding and creation of painting art from the back, we can see that he deliberately blurs the so-called real photos. This blurring process allows everyone to use their own instinctive awareness to understand the existence of the picture and understand the reality in different gazes , This is the core artistic interpretation of "The Work of No Master"!
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