Movie: Achilles and the Turtle
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Writer: Takeshi Kitano
Starring: Takeshi Kitano, Kanako Higuchi, Rei Yanagi
Release Date: September 20, 2008 (Japan)
In the 5th century BC, Zeno published the famous Achilles Paradox: he proposed to have the turtle start 1000 meters in front of Achilles, racing against Achilles, and assumed that Achilles was 10 times faster than the turtle. When the race starts, if Achilles runs 1000 meters, the time taken is t, and the turtle is 100 meters ahead of him; When Achilles finished the next 100 meters, the time he spent was t/10, and the turtle was still 10 meters ahead of him; When Achilles finished the next 10 meters, the time he used was t/100, and the turtle was still 1 meter ahead of him... Zeno believes that Achilles will be able to continue to approach the turtle, but it will never be possible to catch up with it.
Paradox explanation: It is true that Achilles will never catch up with the turtle. While in reality we know that it is very simple for Achilles to surpass the tortoise, how it surpassed the tortoise in the past has been debated. Modern physics has proved that time and space cannot be infinitely divided, so there is always the tiniest time in which Achilles and the turtle advance together in a spatial unit, and since then Achilles has successfully surpassed the turtle.
The movie "Achilles and the Turtle" uses the Achilles paradox to satirize art as a big scam, fame has nothing to do with talent, and fame and making a lot of money is a metaphysics. For the hungry, the rice ball is more important than Picasso, and for the ordinary people who want to become painters, they are no different from other ordinary people.
Machishou, who loves to draw, finds that his life is like Achilles in "Achilles' Paradox", no matter how fast he runs, he will never catch up with a turtle and never become a painter. He grew up in a wealthy family, his personality was silent and stubborn, he could only paint and did not learn, and in order to paint cars, he stood in the middle of the road to force the car to stop, and did not recognize the danger at all.
Unfortunately, the family went bankrupt overnight, his parents committed suicide, and the creditor took the only valuable items left in the family and took all his paintings, falsely claiming that the paintings were the works of a talented painter who died prematurely at the age of 12 in order to sell to collectors.
Zhen Zhishou was sent to his uncle's house in the countryside, sent to the fence, and had to work in exchange for food and accommodation. He often painted with a beret given to him by his father's friend, and became friends with a low-energy child in the village who was good at painting, and the two of them painted together. After his mother's death, he painted her last appearance on the bedroom wall, frightening his uncle and aunt into beating him up and sending him to the orphanage.
The young Man's True Chi Shou painted while working, but he still wanted to become a painter. He and a group of friends worked like crazy, trying to paint in various radical ways, until a friend died by throwing paint on the wall with his car, and everyone became suspicious of the art he believed in.
However, the beautiful Sachiko admired Machishou's talent, and the two married. They work during the day and paint in the form of performance art at night, such as graffiti on the streets and spray paint, so that as long as the work is innovative enough, they can become famous and sell for money. However, Machishou's paintings have never been sold, and the agent believes that he is always imitating the style of other artists, unable to catch up with the most advanced artistic trends, and should first go to a professional school to study.
The creative method of the Zhenzhishou couple has tended to be deformed and paranoid, breaking through the basic moral ethics and legal bottom line, painting first without saving people at the scene of the car accident, using self-harm and self-destruction to create, and the wife is almost regarded as a murderer. Zhen Zhishou never cared about the life of his wife and daughter, only asked them for money to buy paint, his parents, friends, and daughters left him in a tragic way, he had no compassion, he only wanted to paint, and even stamped lipstick marks on his daughter's corpse.
Some of the protagonists in Takeshi Kitano's films often have to experience a lot of life misalignment and regret, but they seem to have closed their mental pain, no matter what they experience, they are relatively calm, and they insist on doing their own things, whether they can be understood or not.
But Zhen Zhishou went too far for the so-called "art", he only painted according to his own ideas, paying special attention to form, not paying attention to content, lacking the expression of inner complete thoughts, sometimes no different from the "calligrapher" who wrote brush characters with syringes and mops, and his goal was to become a famous painter, not to paint. Machishou is paranoid and convinced of becoming a painter's goal, which is very confusing and inexplicable for those who do not understand him.
Art is a very metaphysical thing, popular this is good, popular that is good, popular that is good, popular trends to a certain extent reflect the changes of the times, it can be people's real spiritual needs, but also can be guided, shaped. Creation is a personalized experience, and the works of a certain creator at that time cannot meet the needs of the times and the market, and cannot be recognized by the public without the appreciation of Bó Lè. Some painters with a considerable level are not bad at painting, but they are not affirmed by those who have the right to speak, what can their evaluation criteria represent? Represent the name and profit.
In the film, there is an art dealer who has not always admired Zhenzhishou, saying that Zhenzhishou's paintings have been imitating and no one will buy them. Ironically, the paintings of Machishou's childhood were packaged as works of early geniuses and collected, and several works from his adult life were used as restaurant decorations. This shows that Zhenzhishou once touched the threshold of art slightly, but only listened to the words of an agent and lost himself, blindly denied himself to try a new way of painting, and may change a person who is willing to package him, maybe Zhenzhishou will succeed.
Throughout the film, Zhen Zhishou chased after the art of painting all his life and lost his true self, he always painted expressionlessly, and never felt pleasure and pain in artistic creation. Achilles did not catch up with the turtle, he believed in a set of false rules, chasing a fake turtle, and for a long time even he was a fake.
It must be mentioned that the treatment at the end can be called the strongest "and thin mud", Zhenzhishou set fire to the painting in the firewood pile to burn himself to serious injuries, and after being discharged from the hospital, he picked up a waste can to sell 200,000 yuan, and at this step he was still ironic, and the next step his wife who ran away from home actually appeared to "pick up" Zhenzhishou and go home. There must be a kind of person like this, but is the wife willing to continue to live with him a psychological comfort to himself? This kind of madman still don't slander the real art, not crazy devil can not live is not really "crazy".