Speaking of tributes, all moviegoers should know that The Grand Budapest Hotel was inspired by Austrian writer Zweig. In 1942, when fascism ravaged Europe, Zweig, a Jew, left because of the fall of Europe, and finally committed suicide in a foreign land because of the disappearance of the old world and the destruction of human civilization. But if you want to really understand "The Grand Budapest Hotel", you still need to know one person, and that is Walter Benjamin. Like Zweig, he was also a Jew, was persecuted by the German army during World War II, and even Benjamin, who finally committed suicide in despair for the disappearance and destruction of traditional civilization.
Walter Benjamin, regarded as the most important German literary critic in the first half of the 20th century, "the last European literati". He was deeply influenced by Judaism since childhood, influenced by Neo-Kantism in his youth, and later by Marxism. He dabbled in many academic research fields in his life and left a rich and diverse academic legacy. Such as "Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", "The Storyteller - Capriccio de Nikolay Leskov's Works" and so on. Many of his works bemoan the loss of traditional aura. "The Storyteller - A Notebook on the Works of Nikolay Leskov" sighs the disappearance of the traditional way from the storytelling technique, and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is a tribute to Benjamin's thought.
From the content of the story of this movie alone, it does not seem to be very attractive, but Wes Anderson told this little story of escape in a big format, and matched it with a nesting doll structure, with four layers of stories peeled off layer by layer. Open, subtly reproduce the world of yesterday. From the beginning of the film, the subtitles reminded the audience to adjust the screen to 16:9. At first, they did not understand. After watching it, I suddenly realized that the director probably used the screen size to make the viewing effect more appropriate to the era at that time; Identity, we and the story, one in front of the screen and one behind the screen. Then Wes Anderson opens the film with a fresh and artistic girl who walks into the cemetery with a book, walks to the author's statue, and opens the book. Here Wes Anderson seems to remind us that the film is here told from the perspective of the relationship between the reader and the author. The reader is reading the story written by the author. This is the first layer of the film's nesting doll structure, the beginning and the end. Then the film turns to the writer's picture through the close-up of the book. He begins to tell his own story, which is the writer's self-narration. Compared with the previous structure, the writer is no longer writing someone else's story but a story that happened to himself. The second layer of the film. Then the picture moved to the Grand Budapest Hotel, where the writer and zero met and communicated face-to-face, and zero told the writer his story in person. This is the third layer of the film's structure, in which the writer is the one who listens to the story and zero is the one who tells the story. So what about the story, as far as the fourth layer of the film is concerned, zero and Gustav or rather Gustav's escape story. The film unfolds layers of narrative in such a nesting doll structure and gradually unfolds in front of the audience.
In Benjamin's "The Storyteller," he says: "The storyteller is nowhere to be found." To lament the demise of traditional storytelling techniques. So what is traditional storytelling? In Benjamin's view, the traditional storyteller is a way of telling stories through oral experience, word-of-mouth communication between people. It was a time when people communicated face-to-face, and the storytellers told their own stories or the stories of others they had heard. Even the stories you hear are subtly immersed in the life of the storyteller. With the memory and retelling of the story, there are traces of the storyteller's own life when telling other people's stories. But today's storytellers are waning. What is the reason? According to Benjamin, the root cause of the gradual disappearance of storytellers is the development of modern industrial technology. The development of communication technology has enabled the printing and dissemination of novels to prosper, and novels have gradually lost people's oral experience, which is the basis for retelling stories and even epics; novels make people who read stories familiar with each other. The person who listens to the story becomes lonely, and the novel not only makes the reader lonely, but the writer is also lonely and isolated when he writes. The storyteller tells the story to the listener, and the listener listens carefully to the story in order to continue telling the story to others, and interacts with the storyteller in the process of listening to the story and puts forward his own suggestions for the story, here Benjamin called it "advisement." It is a pity that such "advice" is no longer found in the novel. Of course, the development of industrial technology has brought not only the prosperity of novels but also the rise of news. News has made people lose interest in stories, and he has introduced people into a fast-paced information transmission platform. As Benjamin put it, “There is no one thing that favors the art of storytelling today, but almost every one that favors the development of information.” News imposes a series of psychoanalytics on the information that the retelling of the story does not have, and it is also news. The reason for the ephemeral value. I remember Yang Lan once said, "The opinion provided by the media may only be an opinion, so the opinion is just a prejudice." The old way of telling stories without any personal touch is just a natural retelling of the story, which makes the story endure and fast-food journalism is very different. In Benjamin's eyes, the disappearance of storytelling skills is seen as the disappearance of a craft, a craft alien to industrial technology. Perhaps in the history of human development, industrial change is a great process, but in the eyes of Benjamin and Zweig, it is the demise of an era and the disappearance of the last civilization of mankind.
In Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel", the writer can sit across from zero and listen to his personal experience; while the girl at the beginning of the film can only sit in front of the writer's grave and read the writer's novel alone, and the director arranges the girl In fact, an obvious hint was made in front of the tomb. The girl wanted to find resonance with the writer and experience the story with the writer, but the reality that the two were separated between life and death could not help but make us lament. When it comes to us, the distance between the story and the audience is not just the distance between the audience and the screen. This is the insurmountable gap between the modern industrial development and the tradition, which brings development but sadness. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is such a seemingly uncomplicated little story, but it reveals the nostalgia for the old world.
In fact, whether you are reading a novel or watching a movie, you are reading a story. For stories, the focus seems to be the plot, content and subject matter of the story all the time, but the method of storytelling has never been considered, not to mention the deep meaning of the film. From the storytelling method alone, the director is quite attentive. . As for the narrative structure, most of the ordinary movies are used to the straightforward narrative, which makes us numb to the structure. This film not only uses the nesting doll structure to increase the diversity of the film structure itself, but also pays homage to Zweig and Benjamin of that era through this very Middle and Eastern European-style structure. In a restaurant, time has passed, old and new have changed, and things are different. The retro tone soundtrack and the Muslim-style bathroom make people nostalgic for the cultural charm of old Europe and a story at a slow pace.
View more about The Grand Budapest Hotel reviews
