I've heard a saying before: When you feel that someone is making an enemy of you, you might as well think about where you are three hundred years from now.
I have always felt that this quiet meditation that exhorts people to let go of anger, although well-intentioned, is full of pitfalls.
As long as people live one day, they cannot let go of existence, so they think about three hundred years later, just to change, cherish or alleviate the feelings of the present, and even affect the decisions of the moment. So looking at this sentence, I didn't think about the future, but thought, except for now, I can't be anywhere, I can't escape or avoid it.
Three hundred years is a fully grasped number. At the age of thirty, you have children, and when you are sixty, and when you are sixty, your grandchildren have children, and they point to pictures and say to their children, to their grandchildren: You see, this is your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather... They go to your grave to incense. But after three hundred years, there is a great chance that all those who have loved you, who know your name, will die, no longer remembered, in the true sense of the word.
Ghostly Floating Life is the work of director David Lowey in tribute to the short story "Haunted House" by writer Woolf.
Wu Erfu's ghost has no form, a pair of ghosts, shuttling through a house inhabited by a pair of living people, closing and opening doors between porches, trying to remember what they were looking for and doing, trying to continue their lives in the memories accumulated by the living body.
In the movie, the ghost of the wind becomes a character with a white sheet, experiencing this hundred years of loneliness with a half-dreaming and half-awake consciousness. Director Rowley said that at first he just had an idea that to make a movie, the protagonist would be such a ghost with a sheet, which seemed to be a joke, but it gave Woolf's stream of consciousness writing a skin.
The bed sheet acts as an intermediary, so that the ghost seems to be touchable, but always separated by a layer of distance; so that he can almost see the sight of the living, but there is no common shape, and the helplessness of the eternal separation of heaven and man is highlighted through intimacy.
Intimacy is the relationship between lovers. The juxtaposition of the living couple and the ghost couple by Wu Erfu are fused into the same couple in the movie.
The interchange of the opposing concepts of life and death in the novel is when the ghost looks at the sleeping living person, who is alive and who is dead? In the film, it is shown as a character. They also live in a house full of history, where women want to move and men want to stay.
The controversy was over, they decided to go, but the man died at this time. Turned into a ghost, across the sheets, he tried to soothe the sad woman, and when the woman felt the loneliest, he was a few centimeters behind her.
He watched her cry and fall asleep, take a shower, wash the sheets, wash away the smell that had once left his body.
The feeling of the last time is conveyed through the image. The two people who were once intimate, because of their different feelings about time, the connection gradually disappeared. It's all manifested through things, through the houses where they once lived together, because things are attached.
The house is also the focus of Woolf's novels.
Sometimes the couple alive in the house describe the ghosts that run through the house like the wind, sometimes the ghosts look at the sleeping living people, and finally the house itself.
What is the treasure? The treasure is the common memory of two ghosts telling each other.
What is kept safe by the house is shared time, and we often use the word "love" to refer to it as if it were an abstract process.
In fact, with the participation of things and space, time is time. The garden remembered by the ghost lovers was still there, the apple in the attic was still there, and when they found each other in the lost, they were passing through these things.
In the film, the treasure is transformed into a small note hidden in the cracks of the door frame.
In the opening scene, the heroine laughs at a wave of fear, and she doesn't know why she's scared. She began to say that when she was a child, every time she moved, she would leave a note in the old house with the things she wanted to remember about the house, which was like translating the ownership of the home into words.
The house dwells in the words with the people in it, including part of herself, and is always safe.
What is the heroine afraid of, is it death?
Death is the intersection of transition from one state to the next, like changing jobs, moving houses, like leaving a relationship or leaving a city.
In the midst of the transformation, we produce indescribable emotions, almost fearful, and a little irritating, like after a rush, a traveler gets on a plane, a cruise ship, a bus, in his seat, a sudden sense of serenity, a certain premonition that he is about to die.
We feel lost with every transformation in our lives, and we wonder why things have to be the way they are, and who took away what we had before the transformation?
So death is stigmatized in this way, it becomes the target of everyone, because it strikes black and oppressively, playing the role of a predator, so it is easy to blame. But the real culprit is change, and that's time.
If we insist on being afraid of death, why not be afraid in such a nuanced pattern every minute and every second? Why are we so relieved to let cells die, to make 8:50 become 8:51 without fuss?
Because we are not afraid of what will change in this minute, or, no matter how scared, it will always pass, but the moment of death may bring about a complete change in the present state.
"Death is the enemy, and I will throw myself firmly and unyieldingly at you. The sea rushes toward shore and shatters into waves; death is the enemy. I will fight you, steadfastly, steadfastly to die! Waves broke out on the shore. ”
This is the epitaph selected for her by Wu Erfu's husband, from her novel The Waves.
There are seven characters in this experimental novel, except for the silent one, and the monologues of the other six interspersed throughout the book, between the constant reversal of personal names, and finally back to the narrator of the story, Bernard.
At the end of the novel, he seems to be aware of the first-person lie, realizes that self-consciousness can never fail to mix with the other, and that the familiar environment he sees in front of him is another day as always.
In this cycle, he saw the infinite extension and repetition of eternity. At this point, he said the above to the beach that was already so familiar. This is Wu Erfu's clear understanding of death, and its essence is change.
But clarity is always fearful, and when her best friend Roger Elliot Frye died of a heart attack in 1934, Woolf wrote about her fear of death in her diary, and even if she feared, she ended up knowingly, strong and unyielding, throwing herself into the Uzi River near her home.
But in the haunted houses, Woolf writes more about more than death.
She wrote —Death is the glass. In addition to the wind that routs in the house, there are also windows where light enters, what is the glass reflecting on the reflection? In "Ghost floating life", light and shadow can be seen everywhere, on the wall, on the living. All light and shadow, consciously or unconsciously, are proof of the existence of ghosts, and that death reveals the image of reflecting the light of life.
In the minimalist plot, the director also tries to make the nineteenth-century text have a more modern interpretation, and it can also more arouse the loneliness in the hearts of people in the 21st century.
The male protagonist's profession is a musician, and through the lyrics of popular songs, the director points out another kind of ubiquity of ghosts.
Between the glowing screens, the lovers disappeared, as if as long as they did not stare, the people around them would disappear at any time. Through this lyric, the male protagonist expresses the fear of disappearing to the female protagonist. Death then does indeed accompany us in an existential form.
After the heroine moves away, a single mother lives in with two small children, and the ghost smashes the belongings in the house in an attempt to show his presence, but in vain, a classic haunted scene, but also the helplessness we feel when we ask for the eyes of important others.
Time has passed again, the party scene in the house, the noise of the crowd, no one in this "haunted house" can see or hear the ghosts anymore.
A world-weary young man threw away the empty beer can in his hand and began to make a long speech to Beethoven. Put together with the tranquility and withdrawing perspective of the whole film, this monologue seems to pull the audience back from the poetic imagination back to reality.
In fact, of the five pages of the script lines, it occupies four pages. I think it's a smart choice, after all, after watching a philosophical film about death, or after reading a Woolf, people still have to go back to their daily lives, and most of the daily life has no ghosts, only people's long speeches after drinking.
What did world-weary Wenqing mouth Beethoven? A passage from Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zivago, is probably a good annotation:
What is history? It is mankind's systematic exploration of the mystery of death for centuries, the expectation of conquering death; it is the reason why mankind discovered the infinitesimity of mathematics and electromagnetic waves, and it is also the reason why people compose symphonies.
Wen Qing said, I don't know how many years later, history destroyed human civilization, a group of only people ran to the cave to live, thinking that human beings are almost finished, someone hummed Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony", no one knows who Beethoven is, but this song makes human beings want to continue.
However, no matter how it continues, there is an end, because the universe will continue to destroy and create life in a constant back-and-forth between expansion and contraction. So you can write symphonies, you have to write books, you have to build a house, but don't be under the illusion that it is a hope that will leave you with something after death.
This is only a continuous extension and deformation of nihilism, but it is also a kind of life representative of our generation. The director makes it very clear that the will of human beings to try to leave various relics to fight death is too clear, without wu erfu's "emptiness", but it belongs to the world-weariness of our time.
We understand the Big Bang, we understand from a factual level that everything is going to die, but the conundrum is the same.
Afraid that the relics of your past will disappear, even if it is insignificant.
But that desire to "own" the relics could be broader. The ghost travels back in time to the days before the house was built, and a nineteenth-century little girl is humming a song he wrote, and she also leaves a small note under the stone.
When constructing relics in this lifetime, we always think that it is for ourselves, as an independent result of consciousness, but these ideas, or any house built, are some kind of intertextuality between human beings over a long period of time, that is, the notes we leave to each other.
Wu Erfu wrote the treasure, the director wants to answer through the film: what we need, to continue to walk in life.
The director told a ghost story with the intention of bringing calm to the audience. But calm may be the horror of this film.
Calm is to know how to be a ghost, but what is a ghost? The beginning of the film is also the first sentence of Woolf's novel: no matter when you wake up, there is always a door that is closing.
This image contains sound, dynamics, invisible winds. Because you can't see, you can always say it's just the wind.