In September 2019, Swedish director Roy Anderson's "About Infinity" won the "Best Director Award" at the 76th Venice Film Festival. Anderson's films have always been more difficult for the audience to understand - it does not use the classic storytelling method, but the poetic way to connect the camera groups, full of a large number of metaphors and symbols. "About Infinity" consists of 32 paragraphs, which is slightly different from the previous "Life Trilogy", the absurd color is weakened, and the focus is no longer on disillusionment, death and other issues, but on the trivialities of ordinary life, such as eternal existence, objective truth, compassion and faith.
Irony and rebellion against the proud and the bully
The English name of the movie "About Endlessness" is "ABOUT ENDLESSNESS". What is Endless or Infinite? Roy Anderson, from the working class, argues that literature, philosophy, and history are not useless for cinema, in which he discusses the existence of the invisible soul and the eternity of a certain essential existence from a physical point of view. In the 24th long shot of the film, the young boy in the bedroom gives his female companion a slow and logical push forward the first law of thermodynamics. He said thermodynamics holds that everything is energy and will never disappear, and that because of its infinity it will only transform from one form to another. This means that man is energy, and that man's energy never disappears, but is transformed into something new. So theoretically, the energies of two familiar people can meet again, and after a while or millions of years they appear in another form, either a potato or a tomato, but their essence is still that essence, energy or the will to life and some other eternal existence, as in Socrates' "soul" hypothesis or Plato's "sun" metaphor.
Roy Anderson loves to paint, and many films use painting-related elements. Bruegel and Repin liked him, and he also liked the mystic painter Delvo, the satirist Dumière, the surrealist painter Magritte, and especially Otto Dix and Georg Grotz of the German New Objective Society, who advocated a clear and true reality of faith. Roy Anderson was cautious in his use of these elitist surrealist or expressionist techniques, paying attention to maintaining a new objective style of reproducing social reality. In order to achieve the effect of real reality, he adjusted the concept of abstract art and condensed, purified and erased the social reality of reproduction, and Anderson used "merciless light" to make everyone illuminated, so that the visible reality was naked. He lets the characters look directly at the camera, directly and realistically recording their voices and external objective existence.
The middle-aged man muttered about his loss and troubles to the camera and the audience: he wanted to make a delicious dinner to surprise his wife, to locate his happiness and existence with the trivialities of daily life, but he did not expect to destroy this happiness because of the loser he had hurt and bullied; he refused to believe that the loser who was not outstanding or even hurt by himself when he was a child now had a doctorate and seemed to have been promoted, which made the narrator unable to let go and like a fish in his throat. Instead of making the character hypocritically repent of past hurtful acts, the director allows him to enter into another sin and trouble: although he surprises his wife and has a rich dinner, pride and jealousy make it impossible for "he is him" to complete the transcendence of man, still in what Kierkegaard said, unable to improve the meaning of his existence, and he will face new pains and troubles. This is Roy Anderson's irony and rebellion against the proud and the bully in the film. As a child, Anderson saw his grandparents, as the "losers" of the world, fall into a humiliating situation in front of various people, they are "insulted and damaged" people, and since then he has decided to start rebelling. Of course, in the film, in addition to irony and resistance, there are also directors' pity and sympathy for men, Anderson once said that he was like the poet César Vallejo "with compassion to love mankind", in the face of the rise of "losers", the once arrogant man was unbalanced and troubled, he wanted to cry because of this "annoying" emotion, but he was an adult, he could not cry, he could only murmur to the audience, full of the director's irony, sympathy and pity for him, but also showed the infinite development of the "failure-success" movement.
Touch the ultimate confusion of modern man
Roy Anderson's film, due to its extensive use of defamiliarization effects, severs the audience's imagination of the "foreseeable" continuous plot, and can only follow the female monologue of the film " I see ..." to watch many beings in daily life and private space: priests who no longer believe in God come to the rescue of psychologists for their nightmares, priests who are intermediaries between humans and churches are torn between nightmares, alcohol, scientific knowledge and faith, unable to "jump" into the belief of the highest passion. It is also painful and repressed because you can't believe what you say. He kept asking the psychiatrist, "What should I do when a person loses faith?" The psychiatrist tentatively responded, "Is it possible that God does not exist?" "But the pastor thinks it's going to be terrible, and that people always have to have something of faith on the altar, just as people used to trust the state and the bank." If "There is no God, then what should we believe?" The psychiatrist replied that humans should have been happy to be alive. But the man who lives in the "work away from home - home from work" model is not happy because he is alive, on the contrary, he even cries in the crowded public space, telling strangers in frustration about the sadness of "not knowing what to want", and the model of "working away from home - coming home from work" in modern society makes him feel empty and lost, he does not know the meaning of his existence and what the ultimate pursuit of life is. In the model of modern civilization, modern people do not know where to come from and what to do, like priests, do not know what to do, they can only cry, the director as the poet Vallejo said, "love the child who falls and cries / also love the adult who falls and no longer cries", he recorded the "crying of the adult" truthfully and lovingly.
"About Infinity" begins with a couple sitting in a park resting, they look at the flying geese flying away above the city building, the wife says "It's now September", the husband does not turn his head back to "um" a sound, their ordinary and trivial daily dialogue, both meaningless like lovers' words, and like lovers' words, deny the ultimate meaning of language and emphasize its infinity. Just like the "hello" in Ozu Yasujiro's movie "Good Morning", it seems meaningless, but it is full of meaning and role in life, which is the same as the "nothing" in "Lao Tzu": "There is profit, there is no use". But when this Morandi gray-like ordinary, quiet and calm goes to the extreme, there will be infinite coldness and cruelty, and even the reality of the priest's nightmare. In his nightmares, the priest subconsciously predicted the future end of the world, because of the loss of faith, the people were barbaric, cruel and violent, dragging a heavy cross of Jesus, wearing thorns, beaten, whipped and kicked by people, terrible and endless, how cruel and similar to war.
Revealing the cruelty and hope of humanity
Five passages in the film are related to human warfare: the execution of comrades in the same barracks, the disabled soldiers who make a living by begging, the couple who lost their sons in the war, Hitler who failed to conquer the world, and the rout army that went to the distant Siberian prisoner of war camp, showing the cruelty of the world. Similarly, Anderson also shows the trivialities of daily life as cruel as war: no one pays attention to the young mother who has a problem with her shoes; the grandmother uses her little grandson as the subject of her camera portrait; in the market, the wives in middle-class families always maintain social distancing with their husbands, and the husband uses not only verbal violence but also physical violence against her, and she can only fight back with cold violence, but more unfortunately, the husband and wife love each other. They show the cruel side of life in a violent way. The man stabs his wife to death to save the family's reputation, but soon he lets out a cry of pain and remorse, recreating the same fear and despair as Ivan the Terrible, like the end of the world, which is also the theme that Anderson's films never avoid. The city where a pair of lovers floated "once famous for its beauty, but now it has become a ruin", it allegorically shows the future direction of modern civilization, as repeatedly explained in "The Matrix" - two hundred years later, the urban space within a radius of hundreds of miles has become ruins, and urbanization has brought beauty or destruction to human civilization?
Compared with cruelty, indifference and horror, the director also presents beauty and hope: three girls walking outside the bar, after hearing beautiful music, dancing, beautiful and wonderful. Men in bars remind people from time to time "Isn't that beautiful?" All, everything, everything is beautiful..." He asked persistently until he was affirmed by others. A man and his daughter are going to a birthday party, and in the pouring rain, the man crouches down to tie the shoelaces of his four- or five-year-old daughter, which is a natural and simple direct writing of human emotions, although small and unfinished, but like a spark full of infinite possibilities. At the end of the film, the man in the wilderness who breaks down his car shows the ultimate problem of humanity: where should modern humans, who are overly dependent on technology, go on a long road?
Source: Beijing Daily Client | Author Zhang Chong
Editors: Li Jing, Jin Liwei
Process Editor: Wu Yue