In 1944, a civil war broke out in Greece, and the family of the great director Angelopoulos suffered. His father was tipped off by cousins, and the communists of the People's Liberation Army of Greece arrested him on libertarian charges. A few months later, his father was released and traveled across most of Greece to return home. This terrifying and absurd incident left An Zhe with lingering fears. Years later, he put this scene into the movie "Reconstruction". The prototype of the character Spiro in the film is his father.
An Zhe once told a story: when he started filming "Reconstruction", he remembered one afternoon in that small village. It was drizzling, mist shrouded the empty mountains, and villages had been abandoned. Most of the villagers moved to Germany with a dream to improve their lives. Only a few old ladies in black, dazedly visible in the dim light, were walking on the narrow path. He heard an old, hoarse voice singing a very old song. This is an old man singing : "Oh, little lemon tree... oh, little lemon tree..."
"Reconstruction" is a somber film that outlines the social ecology of a poor Greek village based on a love murder that took place in the poorest and backward region of Epirus in northern Greece. Young and middle-aged people have fled to Germany to make money, traditional rural society has collapsed, and the families left behind are like lingering tile-roofed houses. In "Reconstruction", the village has become an abandonment of history. When the villagers stand by the roadside and accuse the two men and women, the directness and absurdity of people's hearts arise spontaneously. What An Zhe wants to talk about is not murder, but the exile of the lost by history.
Back then, An Zhe had already grasped the art of long shots. His fascination with long shots began as a student. One class, An Zhe was late, and the professor asked him to hand in a script for a short film. He asked his classmates for a cigarette, and drew a circle on the blackboard with the cigarette and said, "This is my script, a 360° The panoramic shot." The professor became angry: "You didn't come to learn this!" An Zhe said: "The purpose of my coming here is to experiment, if the school can't experiment, where else will I go?"
"With him without me, with me without him." This is the attitude of the teacher. Later, when An Zhe's short film was shown, the whole class stood up and applauded. The teacher said, "I know you're not applauding the movie, you're driving me down!"
An Zhe was dismissed from the school because of this. Many protested, including Sadur, who teaches here, but the results have not changed. Unmoved, Anzhe continued to watch the films of Alain Resnais and Godard. He yearned for France, not only because of the French New Wave directors, he loved Stendhal's "Red and Black" and "Parma Abbey" , and was once immersed in Camus' philosophy of resistance. After two years of military service, he dragged his boat ticket to the banks of the Seine, where he studied and worked odd jobs for a living. Moving at night, selling carpets, and singing in nightclubs enriched his bottom-level cognition, and his advanced studies at the French Academy of Films allowed him to master more professional directing skills.
In Paris, Angel joined the left. He took part in some student demonstrations in the 1950s, such as pro-Cyprus, but whenever students on the left and right fought in the square, he stayed away. An Zhe used to be radical and hopeful for the revolution, but the trauma of his family left him with lingering fears. Gradually, An Zhe adjusted his political attitude little by little. He criticized Stalinism, portrayed the sadness of the revolutionary disillusionment. In 1975's "The Wandering Entertainer", he used the tour of the Wandering Theater as the background, and through flashbacks told the history of Greece from the autocratic rule of General Metasachs in 1939 to the rise of the right-wing general of Papagos in 1952. Through oral and radio, we know that the troupe has been repeatedly interrupted by political events, from tyrannical generals to Nazi invasions, from terrifying air raids to the sound of gunfire in the dark, and there is an impressive scene in the film: as the Germans retreat, Greek soldiers ride horses Running wildly, the people rejoiced in the rallies, some held up the head of Marx, and the singing of the proletarian revolution resounded, but soon, gunshots rang out. "On that day, the square of garbage will be turned into a arsenal, and the determined young people will sing not hymns but poems, and will not succumb to tyranny. Be full of hope for freedom covered with scars! " The ruins dispelled the dream.
Looking back on half his life, An Zhe once said : "I am a child of war. The first sound in my memory is the sound of the war siren, and the first picture is the scene of the Nazi army's invasion of Athens." The German invasion of Greece is projected in a scene in the opening scene of Journey to Sether: a young German soldier directing traffic is touched on the shoulder by a child, who then runs into narrow, criss-crossing lanes, and the soldier walks away. Chase behind.
In 1936, the Metazas dictatorship, World War II in 1937, civil war in 1944, military coup in 1967, and the downfall of the military government in 1974, Greece is the birthplace of European civilization and was once the center of the entire Europe and even the world, but in the twentieth century, Greece is just a small country in a remote corner, a lost land that has been repeatedly invaded. The huge sense of gap is imprinted in An Zhe's heart, and it also affects his views on history and world affairs. History may not necessarily rise linearly, or it may continue to fall. As many winners as history has achieved, as many losers have been banished.
There is also a lost father in Anzhe's heart. "The disappearance of the father who was taken away - we don't know if he is still alive - is a heavy burden for all of us." "Reconstruction" opens with the return of the father, "Landscape in the Fog" and so on and the search for the father related. "This father is either real or virtual - but he is the central character, the protagonist, of the whole film," Anzhe said .
Father and hometown are sometimes ambiguous, and they point to the past together. "Landscape in the Fog", the two siblings travel to Dream Germany to find their fictional father; "Journey to Sether Island", the protagonist's journey back home after 32 years of exile abroad; "The Gaze of Ulysses" ”, a director looking for the unprinted three-roll negatives of the Ma brothers, he followed the footsteps of the Ma brothers and crossed the Balkans, but he wondered: “How many borders have we crossed, but we are still Here, how many boundaries do we have to cross to get home?" An Zhe said: "For me, to find a place where I can live in harmony with myself and the environment, that is my home. Home is not a house. , not a country. However, such a place does not exist." As long as you leave, the hometown at this moment will never be there, whether it is when you return, or the deepest memories, it is a strange hometown.
An Zhe has been trying to shoot epics, but things backfired. Instead, he is best at lyrical poems. An Zhe's lyricism is never vigorous, gloomy and succinct are his characteristics. Unlike ordinary lyric poets, his camera language is so restrained. Emotions are rare. He appears rational and forbearing in his treatment of the film, but when he removes the rational shell, the lyrical nature of the film is very obvious. There is always a poetic character that leads the audience. In the empty and cold picture, An Zhe's The shadow is actually very obvious. The characters play the imagery in the poems in his films. What convinces us is no longer the thrilling plot, but the lyrical temperament of the whole film, which is An Zhe's author temperament.
If Wong Kar-wai shoots the lost people of the city, then An Zhe shoots the lost people of a nation. Exile is his eternal theme. The individual breaks through the collective myth, bids farewell to revolution and heroes, but lives in the eyes of the world. In loneliness. In An Zhe's shot, the old man and the child are the protagonists ("Eternity and One Day", "Landscape in the Fog", "Crying Grassland", etc.), and they are also partners walking hand in hand. They escape from their inherent life, as if they are looking for something. But only the remains of what was sought were found, not even anything. In "Eternity and One Day", when the old man and the child were by the roadside and the child was about to leave, the old man finally couldn't bear it and asked him to come back, the reason being "you have two hours left from the boat, and I only have tonight", But the child still left. The old man was still on the road, from night to dawn, he saw the sea he saw when he was young, and heard the music of the accordion; he saw the change of the border, and he passed the migrants. When he faced the sea, he asked his wife, "How far is tomorrow?" The wife said, "Eternity plus one day."
Compared with the collective carnival and the carols of history, An Zhe is more nostalgic for "the tenderness of the moment", which is the brief hug of a stranger at the crossroads. Water, fog, dust, An Zhe puts his images in the hazy, adding a vague atmosphere to the scene. The only thing that is not vague is the emotions—the emotions of the little people, family affection, friendship, love, and even the melancholy of the hometown. The characters in An Zhe's lens are taciturn, but there are thousands of words hidden in their hearts. He presents politics and writes about migration, not for politics and migration itself, but for how people who were originally peaceful are attacked by external power, Driven out by ideology, how their fates were divided and scattered to the point of nowhere to go, and eventually they became homeless people in a substantial sense. Just like the couples in "Dust of Time" who were separated just after falling in love, one went to Siberia to reform through labor and the other was imprisoned. The political whirlpool made them separated on one road, and they could only accept it passively.
In the Soviet Union at that time, and even throughout Eastern Europe, such partings were perhaps happening every day. In that era, there were both the Great Patriotic War and the advanced industrial system, as well as exiles in the ice and snow, and poor people queuing for bread. The political system and social landscape of the Soviet Union are extremely complex and cannot be repeated here, but to a certain extent, Stalin is a symbol of the great power of the Soviet Union, and the embodiment of many Russians' yearning for "power". The Orthodox Church has shaped their character and worldview. They consider themselves noble and yearn for spiritual freedom, but they believe in a great god and are willing to obey "greatness" unconditionally. Inspired by the "Messiah Consciousness" in the Orthodox Church, the Russians identified themselves as a "God's Chosen Nation", and they looked forward to a strong leader - a spokesperson with a strong father's temperament, shocking many parties, and firm decision-making to lead them. And Stalin was such a representative. But Stalin also had to die one day. When Stalin died, the faith of a group of people was shaken. There is a clip in the movie "Dust of Time", just above the chilling square, a group of Soviet people silently faced the news of the leader's death. They parted dejectedly, eyes full of vain.
On the other hand, the protagonists of the film—Spiro, Jacob, and Elene, gradually lost their so-called greatness to support their lives. They seemed to be more concerned with skin-to-skin love and more cherished the long time spent in their own life. A person who is full of ink and color. Spiro was the name of Angel's father, whose father was sentenced to death in the 1944 Greek civil war and killings. "That year, Spiro was arrested and sentenced to death by his cousin, a member of the far-left "People's Army for the Liberation of Greece", for not supporting the organization during the German occupation." Because of the shadow of childhood, Anzhe said : "Greeks grew up touching and kissing those dead stones, and I've always tried to bring those myths down from their supremacy to express the people."
In 1995, An Zhe was asked: "Do you like your life as a director?" He said : "God gives people their own death, and each death has its inevitability, its rhythm, and its feeling. If you are fortunate, Being able to choose my own death, I am willing to die in the process of filming."
He didn't know then that he would die in a winter accident. When the Greeks were immersed in the joy of the New Year, Anzhe fell in a pool of blood. Many days later, at his funeral, the ballad of the film "Reconstruction" sounded again, and in the wind and rain in Greece, someone seemed to sing repeatedly : "You weeping by the water, whispering sad songs and bitters. The sea on the blue sea. The birds groan, and there is no sadness like you." In Athens, citizens, politicians and filmmakers of the whole city fell into grief. In the crowd, there were even fans from Paris and Moscow. His wife Phevi and daughter were under the umbrella in the dark night. Weeping in a low voice, the crowd sang the Greek folk song "Kontoula Lemonia". He was the only one who was the most silent that winter, and when he left, the whole of Greece wept for him.
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