Swedish director Roy. Anderson made two feature films in 1970 and 1975, and for the next 25 years he was in a state of silence, devoting himself to advertising, and in 2000 he began to launch a "life trilogy" with a seven-year frequency that changed the style of the previous two films. Under this premise, it is difficult to position this "About Infinity" (which won the Golden Lion Award for Best Director last year) in Roy Lee. The meaning of Anderson's works in the sequence cannot be removed from the suspicion of self-repetition. Therefore, based on the text, I see it as a popular interpretation of the worldview of the trilogy of life.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > visual style</h1>
There are only about 30 scenes (shots) in About Infinity, and the only scenes that make up the plot are five shots of a priest who has lost his faith and is terrified, interspersed between other scenes, like the two men in "Cold Branches and Birds" who carry suitcases around to sell small toys, and this mixture of centrifugal and centripetalism points to the small but unique complementary individuals while hinting at a certain homogeneity of the human condition.
Similarly similar to the life trilogy, "About Infinity" is still made up of situations that have no logical connection or very subtle relationship with each other, most of which use fixed shots, static scene scheduling, gray or gloomy environments, cold tones and minimalist settings that fit the characteristics of the Nordic climate, and various characters with tragic white action machinery, so as to set off a certain ineffable state of mind and comedic effect, in order to express the pressure and unfreedom of modern human spirit, as well as the empty and lonely rhythm and interpersonal relationships of life.
In order to strengthen the psychological effect of coercion, indoor framing often adopts a "three-prismatic" spatial composition, that is, the camera is filmed in a corner, and the characters are in the corner, forming a sense of oppression. In the second shot, a pair of men and women sitting on a bench with their backs to the audience looking at the sky in the distance (albeit on location), the terrain they are in is the shape of a triangle, and behind them includes the waiter pouring wine in the restaurant on the ship, the small space where the priest works, the restaurant where the man finds the wrong place, etc. The director is using the visual shape of the "triangle" to construct the space.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > scheduling style </h1>
In traditional films, because of the inevitable deviation of the plot from reality, the director must make some points and regulations in the narrative in advance to guide the audience to understand the innate settings of the plot and characters, which is reflected in the arrangement of picture elements and the emphasis on key information. And on Roy. In Anderson's picture space, everything is naturally occurring, and there is no unique, pre-set viewing center of gravity, and any element has a reason to grab the audience's attention. For example, the scene of the seafood market is a "U" shaped space with an opening facing the lower left, the foreground is the fishmonger's back to the camera, his opposite is three or two scattered standing customers, a customer selects a fish, the boss helps him cut the fish, the whole process the audience's attention will focus on the boss's action, until the really ambitious man begins to slap the woman who enters the center of the middle scene, the audience's attention begins to shift with other people in the scene, and this depth of field use mobilizes the audience to participate in the scene scheduling. Indicates the randomness and disorder of the real world.
By means of the same nature, the scene of the railway station, people continue to get off the train until a man gets off the train and meets his wife and children and makes love to the child, and finally leaves, at this time the platform is sparsely populated, and the audience wonders if the scene is going to end, and when a woman walks down the train, sitting lonely on the bench.
The scene of the restaurant, the foreground sits a woman, and then the man comes in through the door on the right, asking if the lady is the person he is dating, the lady denies, another man enters the painting from the left side and sits opposite the lady, this whole process, the corner of the back scene is always back to the man in black who is sitting very dazzling, this abrupt design will let the audience guess his experience, his mood, Roy. Everyone who appears in Anderson's picture has a story. He deliberately breaks down the hierarchical relationships of the characters in the drama (which is normal in art films, of course), giving each character an emotional dimension, where the waiter who pours wine for customers in the ship's restaurant becomes a "person", he also has a heart, he will also be in a daze.
This de-deviance treatment is naturally not (and unintentionally) absolutely true, they of course come from the director's ingenious design, and resonate with the overall non-linear, discrete plot composition, to achieve a kind of observation of sentient beings, with a limited expression of endless image style, just like the last scene of the man's car in the suburbs, a team of geese in the distant sky flying into the distance, and the opening imagery reflects each other, the cycle is endless.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > thematic orientation</h1>
Roy. Anderson's film is mixed with joy and sorrow, and more importantly, whether it is joy or sorrow, some emotions are insufficient, female executives face the window to feel the emptiness; the mother pushing the stroller simply takes off the broken shoes into pairs; the boys at the door of the country shop watch the girls dance... Insignificant sorrow, insignificant embarrassment, insignificant joy, but aren't these insignificant not worth discovering and being watched? In Roy. In Anderson's view, it is these insignificants that together make up life.
The reason why the embarrassing situation of "About Endless" can only be regarded as a shallow variation of the life trilogy is because, compared with the ambiguity and obscurity of the previous work, this film has too obvious directions and meanings in terms of emotional expression and thematic expression, under the guidance of the female voice narrator, including the lamentation of industrialized society, the criticism of human indifference and selfishness, and an overly complete logic of war (parents who sweep the grave, the person who was executed, Hitler's rout, and the prisoners of war were taken to Siberia). Plots like publicly pouring out pain are also repetitions of the previous game. If you watch it continuously with the life trilogy, it is difficult not to produce aesthetic fatigue.
Nevertheless, we will still look forward to the director's work, and we will follow his creative trajectory, except for Roy. In addition to Anderson's extremely prolific creative rhythm, but also because he can finally grasp some of the realities in reality that are difficult to detect due to daily paralysis and ignored by consciousness, we are like using a special absurd perspective provided by the director to withdraw from the flesh to watch our own lives, but we are in a state of unconsciousness in numbness.