At the 2019 Venice Film Festival, 70-year-old Swedish director Roy Anderson won the Silver Lion for best director for his latest work, About Infinity.
Roy Anderson is arguably one of the most personal and irreproductive author-type directors today.
Roy Anderson
Throughout Roy Anderson's career as a director, it can only be described as legendary. From 1970 to today, he has only 6 feature films. Roy Anderson's "Life Trilogy" ("Songs from the Second Floor" (2000), "You're Alive" (2007), and "Cold Branches" (2014)) in the 21st century established his position in art films and even in the world film world.
Among them, "Singing from the Second Floor" won the Grand Jury Prize of the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, and "Cold Branches and Birds" won the Golden Lion Award of the 71st Venice Film Festival.
It is worth mentioning that after the encounter with Waterloo in 1975, the second novel "The Journey of The Prisoner", Roy Anderson did not make another film in the next 20 years. During this time he began to work on advertising, and most of his advertisements were fixed long shots, lacking movement and life tension. Gradually, Roy Anderson abandoned traditional linear narratives and began to shift to absurdism, focusing on sets, scene scheduling, and deep-focus shots. It was this experience that allowed him to establish a unique personal style in the future: fixed long shots, fragmentary structures, perspective lines, cold tones, etc. These elements cast a layer of realism and surreal absurdity over Anderson's films, and they are also his struggle against the morality and sexuality of traditional films.
Roy Anderson has previously been adept at criticizing and satirizing the darkness and indifference of reality in films. In contrast, "About Infinity" is like a prose poem, more obscure but also more romantic.
About Infinity by Om det oändliga (2019)
Since "The Song from the Second Floor", Roy Anderson has liked to use fragmentary structures in his films to connect many trivial fragments together. Some of these fragments recreate historical events, and some depict scenes of people's busy lives. Although it seems to be unrelated on the surface, under Anderson's work, the parallel lines of different time and space have become particularly natural and smooth, and the thematic expression is also progressive. In his films, Roy Anderson often uses large areas of grayish tones and unnatural light, which also makes his world seem particularly desolate and unreal.
This sense of texture and design is reminiscent of the work of the American painter Edward Hope. The difference is that Hope's paintings are more vivid and full of color, the characters in them seem to be waiting for something, and people can feel a kind of inner loneliness through the frame. But at the same time, both show a sense of distance between people. The characters in Roy Anderson's films rarely communicate, and language acts like a barrier between people, pulling people farther and farther apart. On the contrary, only silence and indifference can outline the inner world of each person, and the loneliness is about to come out. People who have lost their daily communication, like the walking dead, have long since become numb but unaware.
Daylight in the Coffee Shop by Edward Hope
Roy Anderson favored fixed lenses, and cameras in the corners created an "Anderson-esque" deep-focus lens. He rejected camera movement and montage and insisted on bringing the idea back to the character-space relationships of the early days of the film. The lines of streets, walls, and trains outline a series of perspective lines, limiting the range of the characters, showing a confrontation between the characters and the environment, and creating a sense of oppression. In "About Infinity", the camera is more rigorous, making the trajectory of the characters in the lens more neat and mechanical. A middle-aged man who distrusts the bank and hides all his savings under a mattress, the man crouches down, pulls out the mattress, stands up, turns off the lights and goes to bed. The lack of normal dramatic action, so, to the characters in the film to add a kind of "picture frame" of imprisonment, increase the contrast between dynamic and static. Audiences never have a rich visual experience in Roy Anderson's films, but the bitterness and tedium of life go deep into their hearts.
Stills from About Infinity
Roy Anderson likes to give actors a heavy foundation, which he sees as a symbol of death. With a grayish tone, all the characters look very fragile and decadent under the camera. In "About Infinity", Anderson deliberately reduced the dramatic movements of the characters, making everyone more "puppet", speaking at an extremely slow speed. There is a clip of a group of people sitting in a bus and a man suddenly crying as he tells strangers around him "I don't know what I want". Instead of comforting him, the people around him began to complain, "Why are you sad here?" ”。 Everyone's face is full of vicissitudes, and they are also full of despair, as if they have been devastated by the trivialities of life, but they are powerless to change the existing situation. This is a humorous satire by Roy Anderson to show that people in industrial societies lack freedom and gradually become lost and empty under pressure.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 About the faith of the pastor</h1>
Similar to the "Life Trilogy," all four films explore existential issues. But in contrast, the drama and plot of "About Infinity" is even weaker, and the only thing that can constitute the plot is a story of a priest who doubts his faith.
The pastor exudes a strong sense of self-loss, and Roy Anderson abandons the use of dialogue and action to portray the character, choosing to show the opposition between the character and the space with a deep-focus lens that he is good at, so that the priest image shows a kind of loneliness and helplessness. The pastor repeatedly dreamed that he was carrying a cross and being mercilessly banished to march through the streets, so that he doubted the existence of God and could not sleep at night. Facing devout believers in churches, pastors need to rely on wine (which in the Bible refers to the blood of God) to sustain their long-crumbling faith. But for him, the "priest" has long become a subsistence job, and his own contradictions have led him to collapse step by step. He went to a psychiatrist for help, but the doctor could not help him solve the problem of whether God was in question, and only said, "Live, you should be satisfied."
In all 33 shots of the film, the priest is the only character who helps others. Roy Anderson gives "goodness" to the pastor, and many of the characters stand on the opposite "cruelty", making the role of the pastor even more tragic. Roy Anderson captures those absurd moments in life, using the hustle and bustle to set off everyone's loneliness, lifting weights and reflecting a kaleidoscope of humanity. In the face of the priest's revisit, the psychiatrist is more concerned about catching the bus home; a woman is in trouble at the train station, but the person next to her pretends to be fine; the wife is bent on traveling the world and ignores her husband's complaints; the dentist cannot treat the sick because she is in a bad mood at the time.... These seemingly absurd shots are actually a critique of the indifference of the world.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 about painting</h1>
Roy Anderson himself has said that his style is heavily influenced by painting. In the previous film, Cold Branches, some of the shots were inspired by Peter Borugell's Snow Hunter. Roy Anderson grew up in a working-class family and was heavily influenced by Italian neorealism. After fifteen years of experimentation, Roy Anderson grew tired of shooting realism. He began to find inspiration from the accumulation of painting art he learned as a child, and boldly tried the current abstract style.
The most shocking shot in the whole film should be the opening and middle scenes of a couple flying in the sky embracing each other. The inspiration and design of this shot came from the painter Chagall's "Lovers in the Air".
"Lovers in the Air" by Mark Chagall
It is worth mentioning that this is the first moving lens used by Roy Anderson in nearly half a century. The camera slowly follows the couple's movements, hinting at the "endless" change of the day, but also pointing out the eternal infinity. The couple was floating over the city, the city below them had long been devastated, perhaps devastated by the war, lifeless, or perhaps the couple had lost their lives here, their souls embracing each other in the air. Under the dark sky, the couple is like angels descending from the earth, examining this lifeless world. With the movement of the camera, it creates a desolate romance.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 about infinity</h1>
Titled "About Infinity", Roy Anderson illustrates his understanding in the 24th shot of the film in a boy's tone, with the help of the first law of thermodynamics: "Energy is eternal, only from one form to another, and the cycle of eternal existence." ”
Another Chinese translation of "About Infinity" is called "A Thousand Days and a Thousand Nights". Director Roy Anderson also said in an interview that the concept of the film's title is derived from the story of "Sherkh Ratchada".
Legend has it that King Shanluar, in revenge for the woman who had hurt him, married a bride every night and executed her the next day. On the night of her marriage to the king, the maiden Sherkh Ratchada told him a bizarre story. Every dawn, the story is at the heart of the matter. In order to continue listening, the king did not execute her. Sherkh Ratchada spoke in the same way about one thousand and one nights. In the end, the king gave up the cruel idea and wanted to grow old with her.
It was also the first time Roy Anderson had chosen narration. A gentle woman kept saying "I see... I see... I see...", like an angel full of mercy, in this gloomy world, bringing a little light to every lost soul.
In fact, about the title, about the movie, it is like the horn of abundance in classical Greek mythology. (Legend has it that zeus, in return for protecting the fairies who protected him as a child, gave them the horns that the mother goat Amalthea had broken, and promised them an inexhaustible supply of the contents of the horns.) ）
Roy Anderson said he wanted others to watch his movies like a king listening to a story and never stopping.
And his films are like "Horns of Plenty", made up of many tiny pieces.
These fragments are either small or large and contain hundreds of states.
Before the defeat of World War II, Hitler looked at the drunken officers and gave up resistance; the father killed his daughter by mistake, holding the corpse and crying bitterly; the teenager secretly paid attention to the girl he liked every day in front of a store; a man who did nothing thought of making a big meal for his wife every day; the girl sat frustrated at the station, thinking that no one would come to pick him up, and finally waited for his lover.....
Jump out of the screen, and it is these "fragments" that make up life
These emotions are also what each of us will experience in life.
Happy, sad,
warm, lonely,
Joys
The cycle continues, the cycle continues,
Maybe that's endless.
See here, click a note :)
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