And this may partly explain why the financing of Hungarian director Laszlo Gerais’s debut work "Son of Sol" is so difficult, even though he almost has a perfect resume of a newcomer in the film industry (born in a film family, graduated from a prestigious French school, Bei Assistant to La Tal, three short films won a bunch of awards in Europe, and the script entered the writing project of Cannes Film Cornerstone). Of course, the producers will not move out of Adorno to reject Jelles with pretense. For them, the biggest risk of the Holocaust as a sensitive subject comes from the "Claude Lanzman" masterpiece "The Catastrophe". "as well as" Schindler's list "after the Oscar stage epic like this, how can filmmakers tell Aosiweixin? reproduction of this original sin of modern human society?"
László Nemes indeed in some To a certain extent, this impossibility is reproduced with a camera. Even if you don’t like the form of "Son of Sol" and don’t agree with the narrative logic of the script, you have to admit that this is a deliberate and ambitious debut. The director uses a systematic audiovisual system to provide a new His historical narrative perspective has reopened the door of hell, leading the audience back to that dark history.
The entire film of "Sor’s Son" is basically composed of long shots. Except for intermittently returning to the subjective shots of the male protagonist for a short break, the camera always focuses on the head of the male protagonist in the foreground and carries the camera on his shoulder for a long time. The movement followed by filming made the whole film a day and a half without respite within the concentration camp. The audience is like going deep into a third-person shooting game, becoming a concentration camp teammate who lives and dies next to the protagonist. The use of shallow focus under the 40mm lens artificially cancels the traditional depth of field, but this cancellation, this limited clarity and visibility, in turn, points more sharply to the evil that occurs deep in the background. In other words, history surges at the blurry edge of the lens, torn apart outside the frame.
It is precisely under the guidance of such a shallow focus movement and long lens aesthetics that the film has reached another shock under limited production funds. It starts from a way that is extremely close to the individual's perceptual experience, and achieves it with the seemingly narrowest perspective. The most realistic viewing experience. What the audience witnessed is no longer an orderly butchery factory from the perspective of God, but a bloody memory starting from a small individual.
In fact, as early as when Jelles was an assistant to Bella Tal, he had already brewed what he called an aesthetic of observing terror from the "inside" of terror. A memoir of a personal witness of the Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner detachment (Sonderkommando), "The Voice in the Ashes" inspired him to rethink the way people "watched" the Holocaust. This book depicts the world inside the concentration camps in such detail. They eat, sleep, lead Jews into gas chambers and mass graves, carry and cremate corpses, and dispose of ashes, just like living in a closed sweatshop in modern society. Here, the numb and habitual struggle continues day after day. Until death becomes the norm of existence, being alive is an exception. In this sense, the scale of the Holocaust, its organizational, systematic, and batch nature, can only happen in a modern society under the domination of instrumental rationality. But what really attracts Ledgers is precisely the opposite of this systematic and rational order, which is to reorganize the daily life of this massacre factory from an individual and subjective perspective, and reflect from a state of human survival. The depth of existence. Starting from a memoir, rather than making a macro statement of history, seems to coincide with the trend of increasing emphasis on the history of memory in the development of history. In other words, after Auschwitz, which modern person is qualified to overlook this history from above? Even further, is Auschwitz a past history? It is the thorn that everyone will bear at this moment and in the future, constantly reminding us that the worst part of human nature may escape at any time.
It is true that the establishment of this kind of perspective lays the most solid formal coat for the success of the film, but it is not enough to really outline the depth of the director's desire to strike at the level of existence. As the director has repeatedly emphasized, Holocaust movies like Schindler’s List are about the opposite of this history, that is, those survivors, those who have memories of "life"; and he is trying to tell the big story. The essence of massacre is "death." Because Auschwitz has no hope, looking for the hope of humanity in Auschwitz is a wishful thinking, hypocritical and even shameful business behavior. It touches the most painful scars of mankind, and at the same time, it fills the audience one by one to relieve the burning wounds. The candy of feeling, a statement that goes back to history and even betrays history; Compared to hundreds of thousands of corpses, Schindler’s list is not enough to save or even project any light into the darkness of the deepest part of human nature; Auschwitz only It may be a black hole in human history, where despair spreads and swallows everything. So, in the movie, Sol said to his companion, "We are already dead".
In the movie, this dead man has to risk killing another group of living people (dead?) to bury another dead person. This is the story of "Son of Sol", and he is also living in Auschwitz. The only way in the city that can sound the depth of existence is our belief, that is, to believe in the determination to save in the most impossible and desperate abyss (Kierkegaard). In this sense, the focus of "Son of Sol" is not on why or how Sol buried his son, let alone whether it was Sol’s son, but the light of faith witnessed by Sol’s act of burying his son. The biographies of saints who still hold faith in a place where humans cannot exist are looking for the dim flame of faith in the darkest place in human history. Therefore, the dead child cannot be Sol’s son, because any attempt to use blood logic to reinforce Sol’s motives and rational logic to accuse Sol’s “fascism” to his companions is all using secular rationality. Relativity tarnishes the absoluteness of religious beliefs.
If Deleuze is the most insightful, it shows that the film lens has the duality of the transcendental subject and the empirical subject, and has a way of gazing at the world from a perspective other than "I". While "Son of Sol" provides a new perspective on narrative history, it also faces a fundamental difficulty. In this exhausting and exhausting movie that has always undergone the test of life and death all the time, the audience enters this hell as a camera to follow the male protagonist. If the audience buys tickets to watch the movie, it has shown his determination to actively intervene in this memory, then the creator is bound to provide a sense of argument for the camera movement, that is, the audience's perspective. Since the camera is always following the Saul who insists on burying his son, this following has potentially required the audience's approval and even sympathy for Saul's behavior. Generally, a movie needs a considerable length of plot to establish a sense of sympathy between the audience and the subject of the narrative. But "Son of Sol" just throws the audience into such a situation in a very embarrassing situation, and because of its formal requirements, it is difficult to fully develop the level and depth of the drama. The result is also obvious. For modern audiences who are accustomed to rational thinking, it becomes extremely difficult to realize the belief theme of the film through such limited information. More viewers will be troubled by secular thoughts time and time again, will be entangled in blood relationship and Sol’s dragged down by the behavior of their companions being harmed, and in this state of confusion and isolation from the belief, they will still be one. This kind of thrilling way witnessed a kind of micro-history embarrassingly.
But for Sol in the movie, when the blond child (Polish) of Germanic descent appeared alive in his gaze at the end of the film, the miracle was finally witnessed, just like the child himself who survived the gas chamber. Like the miracles revealed, the true miracles eventually surpassed the enemy, the nation, and even the faith itself, and Sol was finally redeemed. However, it was here that the camera's point of view moved away from Sol for the first time, and we followed the actions of the blond boy to gain insight into the true ending of the story, that is, after being exiled from the world of faith back to "God is dead", Reason overturned this sinful modern society: the faint flames of faith are instantly destroyed on the wasteland of reason, and the lens finally points to an empty forest, the traces of human beings are finally erased, and drips of drizzle hit the leaves. There was a crackling sound from above—I think this might be the nature before the human, no, it should be the nature after the human.
Reference reading:
"The Book" x "Son of Sol" director Jelles: I want to talk about death
"Deep Focus" (Deep Focus) is a Chinese fan movie manual established in Paris with members all over the world, provided The latest movie news and criticism in Europe and North America. At the same time, we are also in-depth observers of the world's major film festivals and the film industry. Whether you are a critic with unique insights, a translator who is proficient in foreign languages, or a public relations expert who promotes and maintains the platform, "Deep Focus" welcomes you to join us to create the best light and shadow text. We will also wholeheartedly recommend your labor results to the Chinese-language media! Welcome to subscribe to the WeChat public account deep_focus. If you have any intention of cooperation, please leave a message directly on the public account.
View more about Son of Saul reviews
