This article is from Douban Number: Night Chapter 7, reproduced from the WeChat public account: a little bit of Wugan cuisine (ID: NarratorZhang), Weibo: a little Wugan cuisine, author: charter, the title picture from: the original text
1. What is the complaint?
Polanski
At the end of The General in the Labyrinth, Márquez writes: "His frantic chase between adversity and dreams has now reached its end. All that's left is darkness. ”
When I finished watching all of Polanski's films, and after reading his memoirs and the biographies of Christopher Sandford for him, I always came up with the image of General Simon Bolívar in Márquez's pen. The twilight general, with gray hair and a sad face, imagined a god in the scenery of the Maglena River, like groping in a dream. Eighty-six-year-old Polanski, too, could not get out of the labyrinth of fate.
"I Accuse"
On February 29 this year, he won the César Award for Best Director for "I Accuse.". The departure of Adella Hahnel and the feminist boycott of the film have pushed him to the cusp of the storm again. Unable to go to the scene to receive the prize, he sat alone on the steps of the country to reply to text messages. Glory and loneliness coexist. I wonder if he will remember himself in Poland more than seventy years ago, feeling "a masochistic pleasure" from frustration, believing that one day he will succeed, and fantasizing about living a life of fame and adventure. At that time, he did not know the price behind the prophecy of fate: coronation and ridicule, both with absurdity.
Treating authors separately from works has become a kind of "correct" consensus at present. But I had a hard time convincing myself to believe in this perspective. For example, I can't imagine paintings without the "Picasso" label that could be found in the capital markets such as Bi Sui Zhu. The lives of some creators and their work have always constituted a striking consistency. And this consistency makes me prefer to think of the work as some kind of extension of their self. Of course, a good artist can be completely unlikable in life, because the self is always complex, covering what is hidden and what is manifested, and no one can see through it thoroughly. I maintain the same interest in the work of the artist as he does for himself, and even more so for Polanski. In him, the devil and the genius dominate the circumstances of a lifetime.
No director is better suited to make the "Dreyfus case" in "I Accuse" than him, emotionally intertext, subtle and complex.
Polanski and Sharon Tate
In 1969, Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, a two-week-old child, and Sharon's friends were all killed by the Manson family. In "Wanted and Desired," there is a video of him interviewed that year, and he choked up the statement: "The last few months, and the time we spent together in recent years, was the only happy time in my life." Sooner or later, things will come to light, and you will humiliate yourself by the journalists who slander my wife for their own sake. He ignored most of the rumors, but couldn't stand the slander against Vanity Fair magazine: it wrote that he hooked up with a Swedish beauty after Sharon was murdered. He thought it tarnished his feelings for Sharon. In 2002, he sued Vanity Fair, interrupting his life for three years. In 2005, he won the London trial. But no one cared about the verdict, and the news of the lawsuit was quickly lost in the news of the London bus bombing that year.
The U.S. media described him as an "evil dwarf," and the 1977 sexual assault made him a wanted criminal. From then on, he could not set foot on American soil and could not go to the grave of his deceased wife to mourn. "Wanted and Desired" records the whole story. His charges are long in the making and need no justification. But after Sharon's death, he and the media continued to have a holiday. In his trial, the gray relationship between the media and the judiciary is like "Richard Jewell's Lamentations." In an era of media bloat, public sentiment is more important than the truth. It is also worth thinking: how much can we accept mediocrity in the era of equal rights?
At the end of I Complaint, Dreyfus raised a grievance against the general's rank because it did not take into account years of imprisonment. The general replied that this was impossible. No matter how thrilling the events are, under the lens of Polanski, they have always been calm, classical and elegant. Anger was built up and didn't erupt. He no longer had any luck in the world. He never lived a moral life. In terms of character, he has too many bad deeds to blame. This is not the prerogative of the artist, and the most ordinary people, if carefully examined, can be found to be "abnormal". It's just that the former's life is over-displayed. Good morality does not seem to lead to a better life, and God uses evil to punish people and good to destroy people.
In "The General in the Labyrinth", Markles described General Bolívar's words to people talking about him, "whether true or false, they are very sensitive, and they have always been angry about rumors and slanders." But he was very careless in avoiding giving them a handle. Polanski is similar. During the sexual assault storm, he was recalled from Germany to the United States and imprisoned, because of a photo of him at the Oktoberfest that made the outside world question his rehabilitation. He was trapped in bad reputations and misunderstandings.
This person, who has too many broken places in his emotions and life, may have long since lost love with human beings, and it is difficult to love people anymore.
2. Death Fugue
The Pianist
In my writings on Auschwitz, I favor Paul Zellland's poem "Death Fugue."
It is gloomy and eccentric, with no beginning and no end. The history of human insanity is too heavy, and even if it is waxed, few people can get out of it with peace of mind. Paul Zelan, the Jewish poet from Eastern Europe, drowned himself twenty-four years later on the Vaine River in seine, France. Polanski, who also grew up in Eastern Europe, is also a survivor of that history, which brought him the earliest experience of death, like a "death fugue".
Polanski's childhood experience can be contrasted with "The Pianist". The Pianist was originally written in Władysław Spielmann's autobiography The Death of a City (later renamed The Pianist: Surviving Warsaw during World War II). When Polanski read the book, he excitedly declared, "This is exactly the story I've been looking for for years." ”
At the age of three, his parents took Polanski and his family out of Paris and returned to Krakow. Krakow Jews lived with the local population for more than five hundred years, counting as many as six hundred thousand. After the German invasion of Poland, the Jews were in a difficult position. In his book Auschwitz: A History, Lawrence Rees argues that the evolution of Auschwitz was "cumulative radicalism": the extermination and purges of the Jews was not an overnight order, but "the dedication of many Nazis to this end." The initiative and fueling of the lower classes are an important reason for the extinction to develop in an increasingly radical direction." In Poland, there is the "Yedwabnay massacre".
In order to "rationalize" the resources within the city, Poland was divided into German, Polish and Jewish ghettos. The separation of space is also a complete deprivation of discourse power and political identity. Initially, Jews were able to move freely in and out of the ghetto. Soon after, however, anti-Semitic operations escalated and a wall began to be built on the border of the exclusion zone. Polanski wrote in his autobiography: "I could not suppress the heaviness in my heart, and tears welled up. The Germans moved really, and that was the first proof. ”
They began to live in panic, and when they heard someone shouting on the stairs, they would hurry to turn off the lights. The Germans would come and search at any time, and there was no way to store food. What pained him most was that his mother was taken away. He desperately wanted to know where his mother was being held, what she was being treated, "whether she had enough food, enough soap, and when she would bring us letters." At that time we did not know that the Germans already had gas chambers. "After his father was arrested, he lived alone in different families. They were willing to help, firstly because he didn't look like a Jew, and secondly, out of money.
Polanski's biography records an incident in which he fell in love with a simple projector made with a flashlight and tea can. One day, while carrying a projector on the tram, he heard two German officers talking about the death of the exiled Polish Prime Minister, General Sikorski, and they said, "There is one less Jewish rat in the world waiting for us to slaughter." He suddenly felt extremely vulnerable and hurried to get off at the next stop. The teenage girl in the family who adopted him threw his projector out the window. His asylum came to an end. He was constantly abandoned and lived in the village of Vysoka. He wrote of Vysoka's winter that deepened his loneliness, "I knew I had been abandoned by everyone, and I couldn't imagine any reason that would change my current situation." "These are the root causes of his lack of security as an adult.
Polanski had turned down Spielberg's offer to make Schindler's List because "the film on the Jewish ruins of Krakow was too painful for him." He chose to make Spielmann's experience "The Pianist", in addition to seeing his own experience, but also because the film can be filmed in Warsaw.
Polanski admired the moral ambiguity in Spielmann's autobiography. The people who helped Spielmann were not morally flawless. Assisting the Nazis' Jewish accomplices, he escaped being sent to concentration camps. Wayne, a Nazi officer, provided hiding places and food. After the war, Wayne was imprisoned in the Soviet Union as a war criminal, and Spielmann tried to rescue Wayne, but failed. Wayne died in prison in 1953. This experience makes people sigh. I would think for no reason that Lawrence Rees, in Awwitz: A History, chronicled the love story of a Jewish woman Helena and the SS Winsch in a concentration camp, and Winsch protected Helena and her sister until Auschwitz was liberated. Certain emotions have nothing to do with ideology, national borders, race, or education.
The Polanski biography speaks of Spielmann's biography, "which describes not only the horrors of the Nazis, but also the terrible acts of native Poles against the Jewish minority, and even the discord within the Jews." Thus, Spielmann's biography was banned in Poland. In the earliest post-war adaptation of this film, Soviet prosecutors deleted the rescue of German officers and "replaced it with a shot of the Masses in Warsaw warmly welcoming the Red Army." "The Pianist retains this passage. Looking back at Polanski's own experience, it is difficult not to be surprised that he did not deal with the ending with a little bitterness and vengeance, and avoided any sadness and sensationalism.
Perhaps the restraint of distance from suffering is his way of protecting himself. Even in the Jewish ghetto, where tensions were growing, he still believed that terror had not completely enveloped life, saying that he "could still play." "He still has innocence in his bones. This innocence allowed him to survive in harsh environments without being swallowed up by darkness and despair, but the resulting vague sense of morality also led him to repeatedly violate taboos in adulthood. His films, once described as "innocence and evil, meet on water." ”
I love "The Pianist", in which Spielmann sits at the piano in a room of refuge, flips the lid and plays the music imagined. Not only music, but also art, literature, etc., there is nothing weaker than them, and there is nothing stronger than them. They're like the sugar that the Spielman family ate in the movie. For those who have suffered too much, these fragile beauty is a little sweet that people can be saved.
Polanski, who was able to make "The Pianist", no matter what he did, mentally, he was always a lion.
Three, a generation
Roman Polanski/Stills from Two Men and a Wardrobe
The young Polanski grew up almost barbarically.
Chesław Milosz wrote in the Milosz Dictionary that the entire Polish intellectual community was a follower of Western culture. He argues that "France—not Germany, not Italy, not Britain—is synonymous with Western culture." "At that time, Poland had little understanding of the West, and any newspaper or magazine in the country never introduced Western information, so they could only try their best to collect it.
Polanski also loved the West. He studied at the Krakow Fine Arts School, which at the time was a special zone where "Kafka could be read instead of the Communist Manifesto." He read Chaucer and Russell, listened to the "Voice of America" and the jazz music broadcast by the American Army, often went to the theater with his friend Adam Fiuth, followed the Berlin theater troupe that had come to Poland to tour, walked to one place and saw one, he said: "We were completely conquered by Brecht's plays and his talent and originality." After being expelled from school, he transferred to a school in Katowice. After receiving his high school diploma, he failed to apply for college one after another. What awaited him was three years of enlistment. He and his friends made plans to flee to the West, but jumped in front of the border station and returned to Krakow. In 1953, he was admitted to the Rhodes Film School. He wrote: "This is a real victory for the city of Krakow that feeds us. ”
Andrey Vajda studied at the Rhodes Film School and confessed that he watched a lot of films during his schooling, and was particularly impressed by the films of the French avant-garde and German Impressionists. The Rhodes Film School also changed Polanski, and when he wrote about the experience in his memoirs, there was always a lot of joy in his writing. In those five years, he and his friends watched a lot of movies in the school screening room, discussed and argued. He confessed that it was their "main spiritual food."
In 1957, he finally went to Paris. "For the students of the Lodz Film School and all the Polish youth of my age who have chosen my path, Paris is the cultural center of the world," he said. "This trip to Paris means a lot to him. For the first time, he really went to the West, which he had in mind, and everything had an unrealistic beauty to him. He visited museums and art galleries in Paris every day and became a regular visitor to the Paris Film Archive. During this time, he also encountered a brief love. Before leaving Paris, he went to the Cannes Film Festival, met Vajda, watched Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and even met Abel Guns.
Roman Polanski & Jerzy Lipman / "Knife in the Water" set
In addition to Vajda, another Polish director who had a significant influence on Polanski was Andrey Munch. He is also a graduate of the Rhodes Film School. Munch's influence can almost be seen in several of Polanski's early short films, from Two Men and a Wardrobe to Mammals. Before making the cold feature film "Knife in the Water," he was used to making farces with a sense of humor, like Munch's "Bad Luck." It's not surprising that forty years later, what he most wants to make is "The Master and Margaret." In Bulgakov's novel, Satan's visit to Russia creates a series of chaos that coincides with Polanski's early studies.
Bitter Moon
The growing experience of life may have made him more able to understand the value of pure love between the master and Margaret: Margaret was willing to preside over the Satanic Ball for love. The sadomasochism in "Bitter Moon" is nothing more than an extreme form of this love. He had a similar love affair with Barbara Russ. He described one day at dawn that he "greedily admired Barbara's impeccable back standing in front of the window, feeling that he was the master of the whole world." This memory reappears in Bitter Moon. When Emmanuel Senier got up, her lover, looking at her behind her, confessed, "I am like Adam in the Garden of Eden, and the taste of the apple remains in my mouth." Unlike The Master and Margaret, in reality, even the most passionate and extreme love will always wither away. This is true of Bitter Moon, and so is his relationship with Barbara.
In 1962, after the filming of "Knife in the Water", his life in Poland also came to an end: the feature film failed miserably, the marriage ended hastily, the best friend was lost, and the skull was broken due to a car accident. After getting a passport to live and work abroad, he traveled to Paris. Penniless and uncertain, he felt that his past was "full of negativity and nothing positive." ”
But life is always like this, not broken, not standing, every experience is counted. The Bolshevik boy's later success could not be separated from the twenty-eight years of his life in Poland, as Vajda wrote in his autobiography The Rest of the World: "We still cannot completely deny that era." Because we have used our pens, our films to express and reflect the hearts, spirits and aspirations of the Poles, we should be thankful for freedom, always hidden, waiting for the right moment to come. ”
The right moment for Polanski is not too late. In his early years, he participated in Wajda's "A Generation", which is the growth history of Vajda's generation. Polanski's generation, who grew up under the Iron Curtain, is also disillusioned or reborn in different choices. Compared to his contemporaries, he was fortunate enough to gain recognition in the West very quickly. But his life is too much: all gifts are accompanied by the ghost of calamity.
Stills from Roman Polanski/A Generation
Walk on the roof of hell
Polanski described Sharon's death as a watershed moment, and from then on he was drawn into stubborn pessimism and was forever dissatisfied with life.
In the summer of 1966, he fell in love with Sharon. The success of Rosemary's Baby in 1968 made Polanski hot. In the same year, he and Sharon completed their wedding. But fate was happy to play tricks on the director, and in 1969, the Manson murder occurred. "Before that, I was racing across the ocean of hope and optimism," he said. After that, whenever I want to have fun, I feel a sense of guilt. After Sharon's death, he met a psychologist who said he needed at least four years of mourning to get rid of this psychic pain, "In fact, I spent more than four years." ”
Sharon's death completely destroyed him. After that, in order to avoid pain, he no longer invested too much in his feelings. "Any relationship is bound to be dangerous and insecure, and any affection contains sadness," he said. Even owning a dog is potentially unfortunate because people have different life spans, which will make life and death between people and dogs inevitable. Years later, when he saw a sunset, an old house, and learned something good, his brain would tell him that if Sharon were still alive, she would love it.
Macbeth
At the beginning of "Knife in the Water", Polanski was depressed and lonely enough, cold-eyed, and horribly restrained. "Macbeth", made after manson's case, is bloody and cruel to the extreme, and it is completely resentful. In the film, McDuff's wife and children are killed by the mob. This brings one to mind the Manson massacre, or Polanski's mother, who died in a concentration camp, who was pregnant at the time of her death. On set, when Terrance Baylor, the actor who plays McDuff, read the script, he carefully asked Polanski: "When I learned that my wife and children had been brutally killed, should I walk a little dizzy?" He said, "Yes." I know exactly how it feels. ”
At the end of the film, McDuff and Macbeth duel, and Macbeth is decapitated. This is a rare plot in Polanski's films in which justice is done, and he seems to have accomplished a person's revenge. But life is not a movie after all, it is crueler than a movie. The prisoners in Manson's case were not sentenced to death, and Manson still had no shortage of believers outside the prison. Macbeth, on the other hand, was described by the media as "a Manson-style work of art." "The media is too good at killing people twice.
The success of "Chinatown" brought Polanski back to Hollywood. But as a Polish-American director, it is difficult for him to fully identify with other cultures. This identity crisis has become a nightmare in "Strange Tenant". Polanski plays the alien Trikuski, sensitive and gloomy, full of vigilance and fear for the living environment. The film is like Kafka's novel, which is the embodiment of psychological signs. All the absurdities are real. In the movie, Trikuski says, "You murderers, I'll show you blood." This may be seen as what Polanski himself wanted to say to this cold and alienated world, full of sin and pain.
"Strange Tenant"
Like Kieslowski, Chesław Milosz, and others, Polanski, though no longer a Polish citizen, remained a wanderer with roots. In 1981, he accepted Antsky's invitation to re-appear on the theater stage in Warsaw as Mozart in Peter Schaeffer's Biography of Mozart. Between performances, he returned to Krakow, the city he had sneaked away like a fugitive. He knew the place better than anywhere else. He searched the apartment of the Winoewski family who stole the forbidden fruit, and every street and every street corner in the city, all the sounds and smells, evoked his memories of thirty years ago. In that era, they "vented their dissatisfaction with society through satire, depravity, idleness, and even rock and roll." ”
I imagined a picture of the precocious Bolshevik boy descending at dusk, surrounded by voices and faces, immersed in fascination. The sky was dark, the moon was hidden in the sky, and he fell into melancholy, and his expression gradually darkened. Dramatic fate is already predestined. Everything is about to disappear, and everything must be accepted.