The film "Kaiyama Festival Examination" is about an ancient mountain village in Japan more than 100 years ago, where the environment is simple, the productivity is low, people live in poverty, even the basic food can not be satisfied, in order to maintain the continuation of this race, there is a local custom: all the 70-year-old people, whether healthy or not, must be sent to the mountain gods to worship, the so-called worship, in fact, let the elderly starve to death in the mountains.
In the film, what makes people feel is not only the rationalization of the cruel way of sacrificing life, but also the distorted concept of life and death, the elderly, and survival of the clan.
This is out of place for us in China: "Filial piety comes first" and even today's civilization are out of place. There, they took such inhumane and inhumane things as "abandoning the old age" for granted, and even the entire clan silently observed this moral rule.
This kind of grotesque and cold film, if you use the dangerous aesthetic and moral concepts of modern people, to overlook the people's understanding of survival in the desolate period, it is too late. Because we can't understand the helplessness of people at that time for not eating enough, maintaining the ecological balance of this race.
So, we have to think from the director's point of view to explore the race more than 100 years ago. The film's director is Masahira Imamura, who twice won the Golden Palm Tree Award at the Cannes Film Festival, in which he was praised as an anthropologist. He was, of course, a brilliant anthropologist, who once said, "He will write maggots until he dies." ”
The world is beautiful, why does he have to start from such a disgusting and small creature as a maggot? This may be the characteristic of his films, maggots are compared to those who live at the bottom of society, the most humble, the most vulgar, the most scrupulous, he uses a magnifying glass to magnify these people's instincts and desires for survival.
"Survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest." This idea is instilled throughout the film from the beginning, and survival is the innate biological reflex mechanism of humans and animals. Freud said: "The real driving force for progress is instinct, not external forces. In this way, survival depends on food, and without food as the first chain, emotions, dreams, and other self-actualization pursuits are impossible to achieve. It is even more nonsense to want to eliminate one's desire to survive through rational civilization and moral restraint.
Therefore, in order to maintain the ecological balance of the race, the poor mountain villages have to formulate a series of anti-human rules in order to meet their own living conditions. In the movie, it is not difficult to see that a mouthful of food can buy a daughter-in-law, other men other than the eldest son are not eligible to marry a daughter-in-law, and a theft will be destroyed. The village names regard it as their own faith, devout worship, but in the end they are still precarious, and they compete with animals for the sad situation of mistakes.
When one cannot generate value or even create greater value, sacrifice oneself for more lives with grandiose moral rules. In this way, this seems to be rationalized, and in a broad sense, this is for the collective interest of a race development, which is in line with the trend of social development.
But such rules are too cruel, too bloody, too cold.
The protagonist of the film, Ah Lingbo, is the one who impressed me the most and made my heart the most heavy. When she reached the age when she was about to go up the mountain, she still took care of the housework as usual, and even gave her daughter-in-law Ayu the only cotton kimono she had on the way up the mountain. She still thinks about her children at the end of her life. Selfless rationality and greatness are my final views on her, her rationality is too much, and she is suppressing her own nature of wanting to live until death, upholding faith and respect for this law. She quietly prayed in a kneeling posture in a kneeling posture that the mountain god would bless her people, and a piece of snow fell on her shoulder, peaceful and quiet. In contrast, the old man who was sent up the mountain together, he was trembling, unwilling, afraid, shouting and revealing despair, but what could he do? Their final result can only be turned into a gloomy white bone, buried with the ancestors whose blood has dried up under the snow.
I've been wondering what Shohei Imamura's film is trying to say. He chose the darkest ugly side of human nature, without whitewashing, pointing out what is the purpose of the human heart?
Now it may be clear that, as Hugo said: "Everything in all things is not human beauty, ugliness is around beauty, deformity depends on beauty, ugliness hides behind the sublime, beauty and ugliness coexist, light and darkness are related." ”
He wrote Maggots in order to find the ugliness of human nature and to draw attention to the lack of human nature. Only by facing them squarely can human civilization continue to progress.