In 2011, Lars von Trier once advocated "Nazi" speech at the Cannes Film Festival, which led to his long-term "ban" from Cannes. However, this year, he returned to Cannes with his new work "This House Was Made by Me", and Cannes seemed to be open to the director who was full of authorship, and then set off a new wave of craze. Before I start this whole article, I need to clarify one thing: I am an architect. From the first day of school, we are taught to consider materials when designing our own homes. Reinforced concrete is too heavy, glass is too fragile, and wood is too light. But the human body, an organic life full of love and warmth, has never been tried. In other words, no one dared to try. But we still list our victories like obsessive-compulsive patients, just like Jack.
The whole film takes twelve years as a span, and we have experienced five cases successively. And these few scenes are just selected by the narrator Jack from many cases. There is no fixed reason, just random. In the first case, the woman talks to herself about whether or not Jack is a serial killer, and the tedious elaboration even annoys the audience. And it is this maddening character who started Jack's serial murder case. The bloodthirsty Jack realizes that the decompression of blood can make an obsessive-compulsive patient way. In the second case, Jack follows an old woman who goes home from grocery shopping. First, he pretended to be a policeman with clumsy acting skills, and then he was admitted into the room as an exaggerated salesman. When the woman was not completely strangled and came back to life, Jack cried and apologized and fed her water. Then he strangled the woman to death. It can be seen that in the first two games, Jack will still be entangled by reason and morality. Immediately afterwards, Jack shot and killed the mother and son at the shooting range. He believes that the disappearance of love will make people understand love better. Even in the next case, he attacked his little lover, cut off her breasts, nailed one to the police car window, and made his own wallet. This seems to be a violent blow to the values of ordinary people, and a tribute to female castration. The last one, when Jack was imitating the Nazi's way of killing a group of people with a single bullet, the arrival of the police made Jack give up the idea and build a building made of human bodies.
Lars von Trier's films have always been eerie and thrilling, and the source of this horror is not limited to sight and hearing. It is a story background that can support the discovery of the entire plot. In this film, this background has evolved into a unique artistic philosophy, or aesthetic philosophy. On the black-and-white negative that Jack is holding in the film, all the places that should be bright have turned into a black mass. This is clearly a feature of negative film. But it is such a scene that confuses the difference between good and evil for a moment, it seems that the contradictory body can be transformed into each other to some extent. During Jack's conversation with Virgil, Jack transmits his values to the audience in front of the screen. Art is art about beauty, but this kind of beauty seems to have nothing to do with love. It has nothing to do with life, but supports it with death. Any building is an extension of the designer's self-idea, and attaches his own ideas to the building. When Jack conveyed his thoughts to Virgil, he mentioned William Blake's "Tiger" and "Lamb", and believed that God had divided the roles of American creatures from the day of creation. Tigers prey on lambs, it is a talent, rather than evil. Similarly, the director interspersed with the childhood video of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould between each murder. The visual alternation of classical music and evil is reminiscent of the composition similar to "Dante's Boat" at the end of the film. . From the speech at the beginning of the film to the final fall, the debate about beauty and evil in the classical sense is heading in the opposite direction of heaven - hell, falling step by step. Then the whole film completes a successful "hell in progress".
In the film, we have to marvel at the architectural talent that Lars von Trier gave Jack. But this talent seemed to have nowhere to go at first. After experiencing brick and wood. Under the induction of Virgil, a construction of the human body was completed. Architecture has emphasized humanistic color since ancient Greece, and in the period of modernism, the human scale has been raised to a higher level. When Jack's house is completed, from a close-up to a large panorama, what we see is exactly the concept of the human body in the distorted architectural design. People are no longer the service objects of architecture, but instead serve architecture. These values, which are contrary to the world, are the justifications for evil that Jack presents throughout the film. Jack cites numerous examples in the film to prove his philosophy, such as grapes hanging on racks waiting to be dried to make wine. My mother looked at the moldy and dried bacteria on the surface of the grapes, which were no different from the frost and corpse spots on the outside of the corpse in the freezer in the film. Moldy grapes can be transformed into delicious wines, and people, in Jack's perception. It was he who helped them complete a sublimation. So, there is talk that wine means the blood of Jesus in Christianity, so what does corrupted human blood mean?
On the movie poster, Jack hides behind a translucent curtain and looks at the camera eerily. Reminds me of the curtains and barriers in "Shadow". One more layer of occlusion means one more layer of distance. At the beginning of the film, the director seems to have conveyed the sense of distance to the audience. The film is mostly hand-held, and the violent shaking and unstable shots convey Jack's own sense of subversion. Buildings in the small alley, turn into two iron gates, followed by an iron gate that cannot be knocked on. At the same time that the last iron gate opened, Virgil officially appeared. This actually confirms Jack's official connection to Hell's Gate at the end. There is no liberation and light of relief, but a road of no return in the dark. Jump into the hole inside the human body building, pass through the damp underground pipe, move down the cliff full of people, and reach the broken bridge that divides the two worlds. The scenes at the end are filled with the rich tones and light of the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, distinguished from the cool tones at the front of the film. At the end of the film, Jack's two-story building frame stands on the edge of the bare trees, the empty idle implies the absence of humanity, and the erected pillars seem to be barely able to support his theory. On the roof of the topmost floor of the stairwell, we found that it has a cavity that is consistent with the interior of the human body in the cold storage. Everything is reversed. The progression from the first floor to the third floor roof seems to be getting closer and closer to heaven, but in fact it is falling deeper and deeper in the direction of hell.
Jack, this perverted murderer with cleanliness and obsessive-compulsive disorder. After an impulsive murder, he found that murder could relieve his illness and anxiety, and then, like the serial murder cases in some movies, he went to a point of no return. A lot of media fled the theaters during the screening of "This House Was Made By Me". Metamorphosis, heavy speech, and anti-values are the main reasons for its arousing public opinion, but it is these reasons that constitute the director's creative style with such a bizarre color and the unique technique of the film. At this point, we can, like Jack, put aside the right and wrong of the mundane concept and appreciate another bleak and absurd beauty of the film from an objective point of view.
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