1. The theme of "Eavesdropping Storm" is the story of the secret police eavesdropping on the artist's life and destroying the artist's life. However, in the film, it is quite regrettable that a story of eavesdropping is not a story that attempts to explore the sound potential of the film, nor is it a story dominated by the auditory language of the audiovisual language of the film.
2. The betrayal in the story is a betrayal of the theme of betrayal in the 20th century, and a re-endorsement and confirmation of today's ideology as a common sense system. This betrayal no longer has positive betrayal value.
After the release of "The Storm", it swept almost all the awards of the German National Film Awards the following year, and it won three awards at the 2007 European Film Awards. The European Film Award is not an award in the general sense. It has a strong cultural consciousness. It awards awards to those films that can represent European culture, represent European spirit, or face European problems.
The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film has always held an extremely special position in the Oscar series. It is different from the main Oscar awards, which represent the mainstream American film market and the values of the mainstream American society. It is usually more artistic, more political, and has a certain attitude and position relative to mainstream society and mainstream values.
In the world, and also in our Chinese world, the love and passion for this film comes from, everyone agrees that this film shows us the light of human nature, shows us the sublime of human nature, and shows us It shows the brilliance of humanity's victory over violence, humanity's victory over machines, and humanity's victory over a political hegemony that harms and destroys humanity.
The so-called "life of others" is the life of the artists relative to Whistler, but soon, in the film, everyone sees that their identity is not just an artist, their identity will be the so-called real people.
A height of humanity, the wisdom of humanity, the brilliance of humanity, symbolized by Dryman, finally illuminates Whistler's dark, boring, perverted, ugly police world, and then, finally, Whistler comes out. But for real people.
The theme of Wiretap Storm is the story of the secret police wiretapping and destroying an artist's life. However, in the film, it is quite regrettable that a story of eavesdropping is not a story that attempts to explore the sound potential of the film, nor is it a story dominated by the auditory language of the audiovisual language of the film.
Film art is built on a parallelogram, which is "audio-visual space-time", and we often say that film is audio-visual art. But cinema is a lame art because the visual language is constantly being tapped and the auditory language is always repressed. The story of an eavesdropper seems to be a very good opportunity to tap the auditory language of the film, but obviously from the director, screenwriter, to the whole setting process, they have no intention of taking advantage of this opportunity, to take advantage of this opportunity.
In the movie, every time we see the eavesdropper Wiessler put on his headphones, the screen immediately switches to the scene where the sound he heard happened, that is, the picture. Then it objectively has a very peculiar effect, that is, for Whistler, the life of others is the life displayed in front of our audience, but this life is completely impossible for Whistler, and has never been able to truly see life.
If this is not the life that Whistler saw, is it the life that Dleiman saw? Obviously not, because in this story, this highly human writer, Dleiman, is set as a fully innocent, pure, almost alien character, because as a former socialist country he has received much attention. The popular artists who value them seem to know almost nothing about the political situation and structure of their own countries. In the story, he is unaware of the fact that he was being monitored, and he is completely unaware and ignorant of the fact that he was monitored and betrayed, that he was saved, so he is not a viewer in the story.
For a feature film, even if the protagonist is not only the main line of the story, not just the bearer of meaning, the most important thing is that he must be the center of the vision.
As an art dominated by visual art, or we can say that the real text of the film is the picture, but in this story, none of the three protagonists are dominated by vision, so an extremely peculiar situation is formed.
The biggest secret of a feature film is to hide the camera, and the most important way to hide the camera is to disguise every shot, the position of each shot, as the position of the characters in the story to see the world, the angle of viewing the world, the viewing angle of the world. Therefore, in the film, the point of view lens has become the most basic way of telling, speaking and narrating in the film.
Going back to this movie, none of the three characters have the psychological and realistic possibility to watch, so who is watching? An answer that may be directly extended is that the secret police are watching. This is called "Matrix is watching you" (the matrix is watching you) as we said in "The Matrix". Of course, it will definitely be extended to "big brother" is watching you”, because in this film it was very clearly chosen that it was told in 1984, it would be reminiscent of the famous dystopian work “1984”, which also It's a political fable, a political story, no doubt, but what's fascinating about this film is its success in depoliticizing a highly political story.
We directly infer that the secret police are watching, but are they really watching? Because the whole story is about the victory of pure humanity over the darkness of tyranny. Such a viewpoint is obviously not something that the secret police can see. So who is watching? I'll give a very theoretical answer called "The Big Other is watching," which, of course, I find myself a little ridiculous.
An important theme in this story is betrayal. Dryman eventually betrayed his naive delusions and beliefs toward enemies who identified with the political system to which he belonged and his state. And the betrayal that Whistler completed was that he finally betrayed the secret police, betrayed his respect for the secret police system, and turned toward the truth.
All three protagonists in the story have experienced betrayal, but in the context of this story, there is only one character whose betrayal we cannot identify with, and that is Christine. As a woman, I can't fully agree with this movie for an important reason, which is that in this story, Christine is an important character, a central point that guides the relationship between the characters in the whole plot. , but we can probably only use a Shakespeare quote for this character, called "women, your name is weak".
In this story, Christine is always in the position of one of the oldest female destiny, the subject of desire to become a man. She is Dryman's object of desire, but like all mainstream narratives, the good and evil of a character's desires are determined by the good and evil of his identity. Because Dryman is a righteous person and a brave man, his desire is also pure love.
She is also the Minister of Culture in the story, the subject of desire of the dirty, evil character who represents the power machine, and the dirtyness of his desire is determined by the dirtyness of his humanity or the dirtyness of his personality .
Schlondorff once said: The Cold War is cold war, but like all wars, when it ends, there are winners and losers. And I said: Also like all wars, once there are winners and losers, it faces a process in which the winner writes history, and the history of the winner is the trial of the loser. The history of the victors trying the losers does not mean that the history of the victors is a lie, but that the facts of history are effectively chosen by the victors in order to form the smoothest and most logical narrative within the logical context of the victors , and that's a big reason why I've always held back or kept my distance from what I've said about this film—because it's history written by the victors.
That's why I value this film so highly because it doesn't look like a winner's story at all, because the protagonist of the story is the ugliest of the rival camps, the Stasi. It's the Stasi's secret police who represent the light and height of humanity, and that's what makes the film interesting.
It is at this level that I investigate the visual composition of the film, and how it successfully, smoothly, and charmingly achieves such a mainstream narrative effect after multiple contraventions. The three protagonists we just talked about have no place to watch, and none of them have the ability to watch. It is already an important rhetorical strategy. Because they don't watch, because they don't dominate, they can't and don't have to take responsibility for this history. Responsibility.
Throughout the film, Whistler, as an eavesdropper and the protagonist of the film, is always in a visual structure to be seen. We noticed that in most of the basement eavesdropping scenes, Whistler never had a point-of-view camera, and a lot of the footage was shot from behind him.
Several of the most striking scenes in the film are overhead shots from the ceiling, shot with a high, impersonal lens. The scenes in Whistler's uncluttered but inhuman, lifeless apartment were all shot with a composition from outside the door, from outside the window with a lot of foreground, because through the window, through the door The picture will cause the frame in the frame, in most cases, the frame in the frame will highlight the character and become the accent mark of the movie, but in this picture, it is more prominent in the foreground visible to the audience, which constitutes the protagonist. Therefore, the possibility of this being the protagonist's viewpoint shot was denied in the first place.
In this scene, the camera is placed outside the elevator door, and the elevator door and elevator frame form a clear foreground, which cancels the premise of Wiessler's vision as a viewer. He acts as a listener, but He is also a person to be watched, so he is not a wheel of power, at most he is a cog or a screw on the wheel of power.
The entire modeling space of the film has been set up with a dual modeling system between prison and factory space, which happens to be a kind of modeling that imagines non-Western countries or so-called former socialist countries in the Western mainstream movies of the Cold War era. system, and the character of Whistler is gray from beginning to end, and this gray-colored clothing always has a tooling effect, in other words, he is in such an inhuman and anti-human space. Professional workers.
Two basic tonal systems are set up in the film, namely warm tones in Dleiman's space, and cool tones in eavesdropping space, thus forming the contrast between warm tones and cyan and blue tones. The visual adjustment of the cut shots, one cold and one warm, makes the audience seem to have a psychological gap, and there will be a scattered and pleasant viewing feeling, but it also forms a basic meaning expression. About machines and people, about art and politics, about space for emotion and space for persecution, squeeze, power.
In my opinion, a very prominent and fascinating narrative feature of this film is the successful use of lens language, camera positions, composition, and mise-en-scene throughout the narrative process of the film. The process of rescue and pardon of hostages in history.
The reason why it won the German Film Award that year is because the year before the film, the German Chancellor said in his speech that it would take more than a generation to bridge the divide between Germany and Germany, and in this film In the film, it achieves this bridging in the time of one film. This is a moment of great reconciliation in history.
Another reason I have reservations about the narrative in the film and the social effect it achieves is that, as part of a new mainstream construct, it has successfully accomplished the exposure and revelation of the dark and evil in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War , but this singleness of exposure and revelation will in fact inevitably bring about a consequence, that is, it obscures that throughout the Cold War era, the two camps actually used the same means and shared the same Cold War logic. It persecutes people and persecutes society.
For me, movies are never simply entertainment. When we consume and entertain, we must experience some kind of cultural, social, political, historical, if not educative, at least softly. Whisper warning. The significance of history is not to tell us that there is nothing new under the sun, the significance of history should just be to let us remember, so history should not be a machine that blocks memory and blocks the reality of history, and the same is true for movies about history.
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