<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > preface</h1>
In the theater, we are spectators of the action, and we are not involved in it ourselves. By analogy, the theorist—philosopher or pure scientist—observes existence with a detached attitude, as if we were looking at sets and images in a theater. （Barrett 1958: 91）
As william Barrett, a scholar of existentialism, proposed in Irrational Man the "observation" of the differences between Hebrew and Greek civilizations: the Greek of observation derives the word "theory" (theory is the foundation of Greek civilization and the foundation of Western civilization) and "theater" The root of the word theater (Barrett 2013: 91). Roy. Roy Anderson's About Endlessness is fulfilling Bradd's observation and argument: the entire film is made up of 33 fixed shots—if we take into account the slow camera movements in the dynamic Marc Chagall's Over the Town—each shot has its own seemingly separate narrative. We also found that each shot is equivalent to a single scene, a single scene, like a narrative in the form of theater.
When we are restricted to viewing the characters in the film from a certain distance, removing close-ups depicting mental states, we are alienated from them and deprived of the ability to identify; everything that happens to them is no longer close to us, and we can no longer empathize. Such a dramatic approach is what the playwright Bertolt Brecht calls the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt): the viewer is forced to withdraw from the plot, the emotions and emotions of the characters, and becomes a bystander. But is that really the case? When Anderson shows the viewer the existence of all the characters in a theatrical narrative, can't we really empathize?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, existentialism and "About infinity"</h1>
Before we dive into this issue, let's return to Brad's statement. Brad expanded on Matthew Arnold's conception of the world as a pole that wandered between the poles of the Hebrew and Greek civilization spectrum (Barrett 2013: 82), arguing that the two forces were related to the emergence of existentialist ideas in recent history, and in doing so arguing that the development of existentialism did not come out of nowhere. Arnold pointed out that the most fundamental difference between the two civilizations is their respective views on the existence of human beings themselves:
Deep within the Biblical man, there is a certain uneasiness that cannot be found in the great Greek philosophers' conception of man. This uneasiness points to another, more important category of human existence, not just the difference between knowledge and action, between reason and morality. [...] This sense of guilt permeates the entire existence of man: the biological sin of his weak, limited nakedness before God is actually the existence of man. （Barrett 2013: 84）
By extension from this, Brad argues that the Hebrews (biblicals) realized that human existence as creatures of time is limited (Barrett 2013: 89); however, this finiteness is broken by the eternity of intellectual pursuit in Greek philosophy, especially in the philosophical tradition after Plato. Plato believed that man's practice of this belief could make him "a bystander to all time and all existence" (Barrett 2013: 90).
In sum up, when man attains eternity through reason and exists in eternal form, he becomes a spectator—and such a spectator, just like the audience watching the play, does not involve or participate in it. Nothing that is staged in the play can affect the audience; correspondingly, all the rituals of life—new life, sickness, death—cannot affect the transcendent bystander.
After clarifying Barred's point of view, we return to the narrative structure of "About Infinity". Indeed, the dramatic structure of About Infinity forces the viewer to look at all the theaters from a fixed distance, creating a sense of alienation. But even though the form of the film requires us to watch, the content reveals that it has other intentions—the priest who preaches for believers dreams of carrying a cross and being whipped along the way; the priest questioning faith to the doctor; the pale face that sobbs because of the obscure meaning of existence; the man who twice proposes to the camera to define himself as an achievement—through these situations, we can find that they all show the fundamental problems discussed by existentialism: the existence of man, the meaning of life, the feeling of emptiness, Uncertainty about everything, faith, and God's betrayal of man. Even when the end of the Third Reich was imminent and the army collapsed as a prisoner of war in the distance, these seemingly only about the rise and fall of the state and historical events showed the individual or collective face of its own fate and destruction; as we see in Downfall, Hitler faced not only the ultimate failure of the Nazi vision of the nazi state, but also the projection of his own achievements in the recognition of his own existence.
In short, the form of "About the Endless" is a neat, detached, bystander structure, but the content that fills it is disturbing, mutilated, incomplete, and with this opposing quality, it confronts the rational structure in which it is located, and the form and content conflict with each other. So, in response to the question we asked earlier, does Anderson's narrative approach make us empathize with the characters' situation? --, we can find the paradox of this question. Since the structure of "About infinity" is rational, orderly, and symmetrical, what is the function and meaning of the uneasy substances placed in it? What are the implications of the structure and content that constitute the conflict?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > three, yesterday's existentialism, today's Igerton</h1>
First, we must recognize that the human question of existence, religion, and death in About infinity is not the first subject to be included in the film; just as existentialism, before it became popular in postwar Europe, it can already be found in the minds of People like Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, near the time of existential philosophy, Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal. Works such as The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander have dealt with the issues of death and faith.
In response to the current atmosphere, Bergmann's work is obviously unprecedented, and may even encounter criticism of contemporary art by traditional art:
It (contemporary art) is too bleak and bleak, too negative and "nihilistic", too crude and despicable; it lays out facts and facts that are difficult to swallow. （Barrett 2013: 52）
The enlightenment of contemporary art lies in its true depiction of the human condition: human beings feel wandering about their own destiny, anxious about existence, and unable to find the meaning of life, and the things exposed by contemporary art are obviously closely related to the issues discussed by existentialism. Similarly, as a film director in the context of contemporary art, Bergmann constructed the human form of his time through film.
In contrast, "About Infinity" is nearly half a century away from the era of existentialism and Bergmann. Thus, the ripples that the things it explores can provoke in the contemporary era are no longer the same as those of the period when existentialism flourished. And, as Brad argues, existentialism did make waves in Europe, but its popularity was short-lived; after the 1960s, very little talk was said about existentialism (Barrett 2013: 9), and as we do today, we rarely talk about existentialism.
However, we should note that these problems with respect to problems will never be outdated or outdated. For example, "existentialism" died after the existentialist trend, and now Terry Eagleton also says that "postmodernism is dead", the fringes of postmodern theory and the objects of its criticism are no longer in line with the social phenomena we observe today. After the rise of postmodern theory and the development of cultural theory to the extreme by scholars in a short period of time (1965-1980) (Eagleton 2005: 38), what used to be regarded as taboo, authoritative, and demanding our rebellion has long ceased to be a problem; cultural theory has largely stagnated after its climax (Eagleton 2005: 31). Examining the reflections in classical, modern, and postmodern theories about us and the other, the majority and the minority, the center and the periphery, Igerton says:
In the world of disintegration, it is impossible for us to return to the concept of the collective of the past. Human history today is largely a combination of post-collectivism and post-individualism; this may feel empty, but it can also be an opportunity. We must imagine new forms of belonging, and in our world, these new forms of belonging are necessarily multiple, not single. （Eagleton 2005: 35）
According to Igerton's vein, we can see a world that has been ravaged by capitalism after world wars, the Cold War, atomic crises, and the rise of existential, postcolonial, and postmodern cultural theories.
In contrast to the foundations on which existentialism rests—away from the philosophical construction of human experience from pure concepts and theories of the past (Barrett 2013: 21)—and the effort to bring the categories of philosophical discussion back to the human state, we find that the ideas of the two coincide in essence: after these historical developments, we can no longer return to the naïve and optimistic world of the past, such as Oscar Wilde dreams of a future society in which everyone is free to be the self they want to be, and there is no comparison between these selves (Eagleton 2005: 27). The most important issue today is how to reconstruct the broken image of humanity and how to face the world with a new identity.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Fourth, is there a need for existentialism in the contemporary era? </h1>
We have discussed the structure and content of "About Infinity", and even the possible significance of existentialist ideas to the contemporary era, and we can also find Anderson's own call for new theories in the film. Continued with a man's questioning of a woman with whom he apparently had an intimate relationship in a store—when a man desperately says to a woman, "Do you know I love you?" The woman replied, "I know," a sight that also corroborated Martin Buber's belief that the meaning of life takes place between people (Barrett 2013: 19) and the discussion that Igton had proposed—after a boy spoke to a girl about "energy" in the room. "It [energy] is infinite. You are energy, I am energy that never goes away. We'll be something new. Our energies can meet again. We may later be a potato, or a tomato. The girl was stunned and said, "But I want to become a tomato."
What the boy says amply shows the existential idea of revealing the contingency, ephemerality, and uncertainty of all things, but this "chance" and "transience" are only temporary. Formally, we and matter never cease to change; in the eternal dimension, our essence is unchanging, whether we are potatoes or tomatoes, we are "energy", and energy does not disappear. On this level, Anderson continues the central idea of existentialism, but at the same time subverts existentialism with the concepts that existentialism abandons—eternal, unchanging.
What cannot be ignored is that the coexistence of dualistic concepts in this passage makes us have to come back to the structure that makes up "About Infinity" and what is stuffed into it: Anderson presents opposing elements in the film, and its purpose is not to ask the viewer to choose one. Rather, he presents a whole new possibility, and at the same time a new form of existentialism, motivated not by the overthrow of Plato's classical tradition, but by showing how we are going to face the world of indifference and absurdity outside the protective shell of religion; that is, when we are aware of our own finiteness, grandeur and force majeure fate, such as the fragments of life of Osiris's scattered limbs (Barrett 2013: 73), How should we face our own lives and deaths.
As Thomas Fuchs borrowed the concept of "Grenzsituation" proposed by Karl Jaspers in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen to describe the global situation of COVID-19 today:
Jaspers describes the "border state" as an experience in which the ground is sucked out from under our feet. In this state, the "shell" (Gehäuse) we construct with reliable faith and certainty is broken. This is exactly what we are experiencing now: existence itself, that is, life with inevitable conflict; it becomes clear and reveals itself to us. Pre-planned plans can no longer help us. We have to go back to ourselves and reflect. （Fuchs 2020）
Whether it is after the end of World War I, in the 1950s, when Igerton or Fox again quotes the concepts of nearly a century ago, even if we are far from Nietzsche's judgment that "God is dead", or the images and worlds we see today are no longer the same as what existentialism saw in the 1950s, we can still summarize the most fundamental commonalities in these ideas: when we first realized that our beliefs no longer existed—historically, people have converted in order to religion, science, reason, capitalism., After recognizing the ruins behind faith, how to reconstruct life and recognize one's broken existence. For example, "Over town", the lover who flew over the German city of Cologne, which was bombed by World War II, and now also flies over the empty city that has been blocked by the virus and emptys the streets; experiencing the suffering of Jesus in dreams (the sacrifice of the spiritual leader), and going to the psychiatric clinic (the scientific method to reject the problem of the mind) to ask for help from the priest, suggesting that the certainty established in the past is about to leave us.
Thus, Anderson uses his own way—in contradictory, but also symbiotic conceptions of thought—to reveal the central idea of The Endless, the commonality between the aforementioned modern ideas. Thus, we can confirm that "About infinity" in whole or fragmentation is not simply to show us the state of human existence today—as we have repeatedly listed earlier, such an issue is not the first time—but also points out that existential dialectics, a rethinking of "man" and all certainty, is necessary for the present. Although the process of certainty and belief destruction is painful, it represents the search for freedom and the possibility of self-responsibility (Fuchs 2020).
Unlike Bergmann's films and the era of their production, the revelations of About Infinity are not limited to their connection to existentialism. The collision between the structure and content of "About Infinity"—its exploration of human instability, which counters the neat theatrical structure—corresponds to the world in which we live, thus forming a kind of existentialism suitable for the present.
Finally, the term "distance restriction" (Abstandsbeschränkungen) provides an overview of how contemporary issues affect the state of humanity: at the time of the epidemic, the "social distancing" that has emerged in the epidemic policies of various countries has physically presented the "distance restriction"; the long-term implementation of distance restriction will change people's behavior and lifestyle (Fiedler 2020), Eventually a psychological distance is formed. We no longer want to enter into the lives of others, we do not want to get involved in the lives of others, and we pay no attention to what happens to anyone or ethnic group. Like the man on the bus who was weeping about his life, one passenger impatiently responded, "Can't you go back to your own home and grieve?" This is precisely the reason why there is an urgent need for existentialism in our contemporary times, so that after everything is shattered by external forces, we lack the will to rebuild, and gradually no longer know our own image and the presence of others.
Leaving aside Nietzsche's controversy over misogyny and militant thinking, Nietzsche's claims are just as important as The Endless as a contemporary existentialist:
Nietzsche declared that we must become "poets of life." Superman improvises his own existence every moment with great power and high spirit, imposing forms on the flow of the world and making chaos a temporary order.