On the last night of 2021, I watched Wim Wenders' 1974 black-and-white film "Alice in the City," and on the first morning of 2022, listening to "high-resolution lossless" music with headphones, I recalled the film.
The music flows, and the male protagonist drives his car around the city, taking "Polaroid photos" one by one. "Photos never catch up with reality" "Why are you always looking for evidence of existence" "Talking to yourself is actually more like listening than talking". Long, trivial, rambling scenes, frustrated male protagonist... Later, the male protagonist meets the 9-year-old girl Alice, and accompanies Alice to wait for her mother and find her grandmother, from one city to another city, in towns, streets and alleys , corner roaming. The Empire State Building of the Twin Towers in New York, the hanging tram in Utapur, the grandmother's old house; the mirror image of Alice and the male protagonist superimposed on the photo, the bicycle boy chasing the car... This girl is a naive 9-year-old child, an eight-year-old child. The ten-year-old woman is the angel of "Under the Berlin Sky". The whole film exudes a poetic sense of alienation between people and the city, a touch of sadness and loneliness, but also so warm and healing. It is like a pure land, and the delicate and soft emotions are inadvertently engraved in the bottom of my heart.
The male protagonist can't write, and can only use Polaroid to continuously photograph every moment of the city. The peculiarity of Polaroid cameras is that there is no negative film, so each one is unique and cannot be copied. Just like our life, it cannot be repeated or rehearsed. However, every photo can't faithfully record the reality that the male protagonist sees, or the photo can't catch up with the reality. Loneliness, self-lost, searching for "existence" are questions that we and the world can hardly answer, but cannot escape. The self-lost male protagonist and the abandoned Alice, their city roaming is a process of searching for oneself and searching for "existence".
Kafka said, "How can you be happy in this world unless you escape into it?"
Every shot of "Alice in the City" seems to be meaningless, and the existence of each shot constitutes the meaning itself.
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