preface
The Bruggerman brothers and sisters in 2014, abandoning the previous light-hearted and humorous comedy style, imitated the 14-act structure of the Passion of Jesus, and brought a contemporary "holy woman" who was martyred for the Catholic Church to the screen. The protagonist Maria lives in Germany, where democratic consciousness is highly developed, but she and her family abide by the catholic fundamentalism, in the cracks between secular rules and doctrines, where to go, the people in the play are as confused and confused as the viewers. In the face of the final Maria hunger strike and sacrifice herself in exchange for the miracle of the recovery of her autistic brother, the director shows an embarrassing reality in an objective and calm lens language, not ironic or praiseful, but only compassionate. With its rigorous script structure and poetically smooth narrative style, the film won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival that year.
"Motherly Love Is Full of Grace"
Like most troubled teenage girls in reality, Maria has a family with frequent illnesses. Mothers are usually the initiators of tragedies, and fathers are generally absent. Maria's brother was suffering from autism, and her hunger strike sacrifice, scientifically explained, was anorexia. While there is no evidence that autistic children come from "refrigerator families," Maria's religious beliefs stem largely from the circumstances in which they grew up.
The mother shown in the film is always in a state of anxiety, completely unable to listen to any objections, and often appears less than two or three sentences, and will roar and jump like thunder. The mother was actually more secular than Maria, caring about the eyes of others and the appearance of clothing. In her opinion, she has a "happy home where she should be able to have dinner in harmony" and needs to send smiling family portraits to relatives and friends from time to time, which are the costs of her worldly life to prove her existence. The religious rules she strictly abided by were more like finding excuses and relief for a chaotic life. Under the patronage of religion, it also gave her tyrannical hegemony a sacred cloak. To bring forth the will of God is inviolable and unquestionable. In this way, her relationship with her children was also sacrificed to the altar of religion, but perhaps more out of selfish instinct. When Maria confessed that she had lied, her mother was furious, not understanding the changes brought about by the confession, the doctrine behind the confession, but only reprimanding her daughter with rigid and unchanging rules, and the focus of her anger was only on being challenged by authority. And the daughter's crying is not because of the mother's reprimand, but more from not being understood. She considered herself closer to God's will than her mother, and even better than her mother could take care of her sick brother.
Yet sin is in between. For maternal love is endowed by God, full of grace, unquestionable, and sacred. So the girl felt ashamed, afraid that because she had done something wrong, she would no longer be able to get her mother's love. Maternal love is here equated with faith, which is conditional, first of all you have unconditional obedience, and secondly whether you can obtain it depends on whether you are good or bad. Maria is like a lost lamb, afraid of being abandoned by shepherds, full of loneliness and world-weariness.
Sacrifice or kill yourself
Religion can give people a sacred aura, and they can be famous in words and deeds. "You are the one chosen by God!" This chain of superior contempt, endowed by religion, not only appeared in the hands of believers over non-believers, but also persisted in widespread Western societies and large religious contexts, with the old-fashioned catholics of the Catholic Brotherhood scorning Luther's reformed Protestantism, and Maria and her mother looking down on punk, jazz, and music.
Maria had a world-weariness that transcended her age and experience, and this yearning for death and canonization even transcended the religious spirit. She spoke to the priest many times about her ideas, but never received recognition or encouragement, and was transformed into a more secular way: to enter the monastery and become a nun to serve the Lord. And these, in her opinion, are vulgar and external, and they do not care at all. Maria did not possess all the universal values, could not fit into the rules of secular life, and even questioned the church in real society. She focuses only on the metaphysical dimension—the other world, and the redemption of the self—the pathways into the other world. In her eyes, people in secular life are alive but dead, and she is a person who is truly alive in the teachings, but she doubts the meaning of living and yearns for death all the time.
The yearning for the other world stems not only from Maria's understanding of the religious spirit, but also from her rejection of real life. In real life, whether at home, at school, or in the church, she is neglected and even ostracized. The secular could not be understood, and the family and the church also misinterpreted her passion for religion. All people must live on earth, and even priests and mothers cannot leave the ground on both feet. The film shows Maria praying with her family boarder twice, once on an outing and once in the hospital room. The boarders' prayers were interrupted by interference, and only Mary had been indulging in them and forgetting her prayers. So Mary, who longed for a feathered flight, was destined to become a heretic, a thorn in the other end of the world, a tip in the religious end. She does not belong to this world, and only God, who is completely at the top of the other end, can truly see her, look at her, and fully understand and accept her. So she desperately yearned in that direction, into that embrace.
The yearning for the world on the other side also needs a sacred reason, otherwise, self-murder is a great sin! In this sense, Maria is also just finding a reason for herself to get out of secular life called religion. Maria's hunger strike takes the form of hidden lines, even forced, in most of the first paragraphs of the film. Trying to get dessert after a religious school lesson and dinner at home were terminated by the priest in the name of sacrifice and by the mother's wrath. Everyone just found that she was getting weaker and paler, and gradually the hunger strike had become her conscious and active behavior. On the one hand, as mortals, we have no right to choose our own life and death, and can only be decided by God. On the other hand, how to define whether one's actions are motivated by sacrifice to God or self-sacrifice to avoid responsibility, the film gives a clear definition. When you look at a beautiful view, you have God in your heart and want to offer it to Him; to list the things you love, to give them up, and to make room for your heart to dedicate to the Lord is sacrifice. Sacrifice must first be a conscious, conscious act, and secondly it must be beautiful. Mary, on the other hand, wanted to give herself completely to the Lord in a way that went to her death, but in the eyes of the priests, she was evading the responsibilities that God had given to secular human beings, which was tantamount to self-destruction and a great sin. So Maria's surrender was desperate. She had nothing left but to give herself completely to God's salvation. However, whether this kind of action is merit or sin, in fact, she does not have a clear understanding, and her judgment is based on whether there is a miracle happening.
About "Tolerance"
In physical education class, Maria refuses to run because she feels that the accompaniment music is the rhythm of the devil. The teacher stopped playing the music and let him return to the team to exercise, which caused dissatisfaction among other students. Why does Maria not like it alone, so that everyone can't hear music! But can maria be intolerant? The teacher reiterated the concept of tolerance to everyone... The subtle meaning of these two words does not only contain the essence of the western democratic spirit — that all people are born equal, enjoy equal rights, and are sacred and inviolable. Yes, Maria's personal preferences cannot be taken away from others; likewise, how can Maria's rights be protected? There is a deeper religious implication: God lost a sheep as a shepherd, and He abandoned the whole flock in search of the lost Lamb... In God's eyes, there is no distinction between big, small, or widowed. Here, the secular masses are the whole flock, and Mary becomes the helpless lamb.
If you look at this movie as a youth drama, looking at the external causes of the tragedy, her grumpy and harsh mother is very much like the initiator in the open and the dark, but what needs special attention is that the depiction of her father is not an absent state, and others such as teachers and doctors also have enough writing. In a democratized and welfare-highly developed country, society's tolerance for vulnerable groups and dissidents has reached a fairly high level, and the care of the overall atmosphere can greatly reduce the occurrence of social tragedies. Despite this, however, personal tragedies are not uncommon. Maria's tragedy cannot be easily attributed to the lack of love, the lack of understanding, or the absence of some important figure in her upbringing, or even the religion for which she dedicated itself. Even if the subject is stolen into some other art category: Fauvist painting, rock 'n' roll, sculpture, or just love, tragedy can happen. Gifted with talent, a lonely temperament, living in the high pressure of the family, relatives and friends do not understand, she is tired of worldly life, bent on death, seeking liberation and dedicating herself to it. It can be said that Maria's behavior is like a real-life mass syndrome, which is staged in a different guise every day. The film uses religious themes to reveal the essence of reality.
However, neither Maria, nor the film nor real life, can be "Rodin's lover", "White Wedding", or "Skate park". Today, when Western democratic consciousness is highly developed, religion, especially the Catholic conservatives who adhere to fundamentalist principles, have become something that is more marginalized than any art discipline, even the DP. In a high-speed society, where the whole people believe in religion, "God bless" has become a mantra, and God has relegated to a distant existence, and the boundaries of its existence lie in the fact that it cannot affect people's daily lives. People no longer believe blindly or be foolish, and the foundations of religions such as eternal life, commandments for salvation, repentance, and redemption are increasingly shaken in the new age. The decline of religion is precisely because of the weakening of the faith of the congregation that Satan can run rampant and the demons in people's hearts are out of the cage. In a secular way, Maria's lack of understanding and tolerance is more like the inferiority of human beings, "If it is not my race, its heart will be different." This kind of thinking has a long history and is deeply rooted in secular society; if it is interpreted in a religious way, it is the "Tower of Babel."
In the tug-of-war between secularism and religion, life and death, Mary has also cast a warm gaze on secular values, she envies the mature and beautiful style of the host students in her family, and yearns to contact with the teenagers of the opposite sex, but she cannot get rid of the inherent religious shadow in her, and the secular society is not willing to give her a tolerant acceptance, so she must completely turn to one side. The war between religion and the secular is shown calmly and softly in the film, but it can be seen everywhere, such as Maria's prayers with constant interference; since she entered the hospital, her mother and doctors have frequently argued to direct this confrontation; when she is in the intensive care unit to receive communion, the last piece of food sent to her by the priest kills her, the brother actually speaks at this time, and the paradox between religious spiritual miracles and modern empirical science is pushed to the extreme.
Just as the pain of the loss of a child and the joy of canonization can only choose one, and sorrow belongs only to the worldly living people, Maria's spiritual world has been completed. Whether it is self-murder or sacrifice, the director has given a miracle at the end of the play. This section is controversial and its intentions are vague. The author does not think it is ironic, but more reasonable to say that it is reflective or more reasonable. The director is also trying to explore the awkward situation between religion and the secular, under the language of calm, silent lenses, which is not so much irony as compassion. And the Bruggerman siblings who watch from the sidelines must understand that whether it is a complete devotion to secular science or religious spirit, it is no different from the people they describe in the play.
The Eye of God
The film consists of fourteen acts, with the trajectory of The Crucifixion of Jesus as the inscription, using a fixed camera length lens to place the characters in the frame all the time, giving it a classical oil painting-like beauty. There is no soundtrack in the whole film, only a black screen and a white screen, the theme is switched, the scene is formed, and the stage drama-like structure is unfolded like a poem. The audience listens to sermons and participates in various religious ceremonies with the people in the play, strengthening, confessing, communion, and sermons. The film only uses a overhead shot at the end of the play, and the rest are all the same perspective. There is no omniscient and omnipotent place inside and outside the camera, and what we do not understand is the confusion of the protagonist, and no party can provide an answer. Death came so quickly that the methodical rescue was soon declared a failure, and the calm was terrible. To find comfort and relief from life and death in religious beliefs, I don't know whether it is sustenance or appeasement, and even sadness is not necessary. The world changes too quickly, the maiden's new grave will soon become lonely, and the sad boy offers his own brief pause; God has cast only a glimpse above the nine heavenly peaks, and everyone looks as far as he can in the direction in which he is, but his perspective is missing, only at the end of the play, he is leaning down to the earth, telling us that he has always been there.
The original manuscript of the sill on the | was published in Midnight Field on December 10, 14s. in Beijing