Melville's horrors and horrors of the war years shaped Melville, and none of his films had the real sense of experience of Shadow Army, which not only created the height of cinematic aesthetics, but also became a particularly great and comprehensive archived record of the tragic years of human history at the level of documentation.
In the original novel", "Tin Drum", Günter Glass uses absurd brushwork to metaphorize sensitive political issues in small daily details, and Schrondorff's film adaptation uses surreal, symbolic fantasy audiovisual means to show the human world of a special era, with a strange and terrifying abnormal rhythm and a rare calmness transcendent to justice/unjust moral judgment.
In "Ivan's Childhood", the traumatic narrative of reality and dreams torn apart, there is neither cheap escapism nor pessimism, Tarkovsky has always emphasized that the essence of art is confession and prayer, then "Ivan's Childhood" is directly confronted with the pain that people are unwilling to discuss after victory, it explores the cost of history.
"Lily Marlene"
On the day the Red Army captured Berlin, the soldiers rushed into the consulate, and an officer found a roster in The Dark Grid with the names of the people executed by the Third Reich, with photographs attached. The officer found the name of a child, Ivan, 12 years old, who was hanged. This is a scene from the movie "Ivan's Childhood". Victory had come, and there was a sea of jubilation all around, but the boy's face was like a pinprick that pierced people's eyes and hurt. Not to mention ivan, but on the battlefields of Europe alone, 40 million people died like this child in despair, pain, fear and hatred. Those who survived achieved the goal of freedom, and the thousands of dead were crushed by history like humble straws, they were the price paid by history, and the ecstasy of pursuing a new life could not soothe the suffering of individuals, which was a black hole-like existence.
The films we look back at, they are not proud of sacrifice, they are concerned with the fate of being torn apart by war. Talking about the tragedies of history, about pain and blood, is not out of pessimism, it is a search for the real price. Only by soberly understanding this can freedom and security be discussed in times of peace.
"Shadow Army", the immortal hope in the heart under the weight of fate
In 2006, when the underrated and long-buried restored version of Shadow Army was released in the United States, a comment by film critic Roger Albert best illustrated the significance of this French film completed in 1969 in our time: "It is rare to have a film that can express the place of hope under the weight of fate so accurately in the heart." ”
Director Melville, after his first feature film in 1949, Silence of the Sea, and Father Leon Mohan in 1961, Shadow Army is his third and final film depicting France during german occupation, his first and only film about the French resistance. There is little research on Melville, who in an interview described joining the army in 1937, three years in the army, and two years with the Resistance. Another version of the theory is that he joined the Resistance between 1941 and 1943 as a Jewishman, was arrested in Spain at one point, his brother died of the Gestapo torture, and he himself escaped death and joined the "Free France" in North Africa. The two versions of the testimony differ greatly in time, so even Schrondorff, who had been his assistant director, expressed doubts about his true relationship with the Resistance. But one thing is certain, the horrors and horrors of the war years shaped Melville, and none of his films has the real sense of experience of Shadow Army, which uses his own painful youth as a soil to show his observations and experiences: "Tragedy is that you are in an extraordinary period when death comes at any time." It is precisely because of this that "Shadow Army" not only creates the height of film aesthetics, but also becomes a particularly great and comprehensive archived record of the tragic years of human history at the level of literature.
Audiences expecting romantic heroes and thrilling action scenes must be disappointed in the face of Shadow Troopers, as Melville deals with the repression and humiliation of an occupied people, a sense of personal pessimism and despair that haunts it, and a true picture of the human psyche in the face of death. The film's first and final scenes are of dawn's triumphal arch. At first, the German army marched through the Champs Elysées, and the uniform footsteps of the soldiers fell like a fist on the heart, and the pain, shame and bitterness of being humiliated were overwhelming. The French government was secretive about the occupation and banned actors from walking through the Arc de Triomphe in German uniforms. Melville said that the craziest thing he had ever done in his life was to shoot this shot of the beginning of Shadow Trooper, he spent 25 million old francs for it, and many years later he still remembers the scene that was as shocking as the climax of Wagner's opera, and he was proud to shoot only two shots in his life, one 9 minutes and 38 seconds long shot in "Eyeliner" and the other was the opening scene of "Shadow Army". There were Germans who wanted to buy out this copy from Melville at a high price, because in German literature the occupation of Paris is recorded only in black and white.
The film ends with the Arc de Triomphe at dawn, an empty mirror seen through the windshield of a car, and then a set of concise subtitles appearing that tell us how the people involved in the resistance were arrested and tortured to death one by one. This dark and cold ending makes "Shadow Army" like an impossible wound to heal, across the most obvious position in the history of French cinema. This scene is not found in the original, when the original author, Kessel, published this semi-fictional and semi-documentary work in London in 1943, the balance of war had tilted in favor of the Allies, and the dawn of hope emerged in the sky, so his pen set a cautiously optimistic open-ended ending. But Melville, 20 years later, looking back at history, saw that more people died before dawn, warriors who could never return in the cold night.
The Shadow Army premiered in France in the autumn of 1969, and the situation was so bad that critics, represented by the Film Handbook, defined it as a deliberate glorification of de Gaulle, putting aside the discussion at the film's ontology level and denying the film in the name of values. Ironically, de Gaulle was a marginal figure throughout the Resistance, and Melville portrayed the full-scale collapse of "gaulle-style heroism" when people were in extreme situations.
In his last interview before his death, Melville recalled that he had arranged a private screening for 22 members of the French Resistance, and after the screening, he saw the parties sitting in their seats for a long time, a scene that was an affirmation of all his efforts and compensated for the harm done to him by French critics.
Ivan's Childhood, the terrible child
"Ivan's Childhood", the children and childhood in the title, are not found in the movie, it presents the loss of childhood and the price paid in the course of history. In 1962, Tarkovsky made a splash at the Venice Film Festival with this debut feature film, but the Golden Lion Award was a hot one, and Western intellectuals ridiculed Ivan's dream in the movie: "Backward Young Soviets, we have long stopped playing that set!" The Soviet Union characterized the film as a negative energy work. At this time, Sartre, who was living in Italy, stepped forward, and he wrote an eloquent article to the media, writing bluntly: "'Ivan's Childhood' is one of the best films I have seen in recent years, a profound and revolutionary film. ”
The first two paragraphs of the film are the dreams of the teenager Ivan, the boy who runs in the first dream seems to be part of the Russian rural terroir, the child of nature between heaven and earth; in the last dream, the boy runs from the terrifying waves to the center of the picture, the camera is closer and farther, frozen in his innocent look, seeing the cosmic flood in his eyes. Two dreams define Tarkovsky's later labelly lyrical long shots, which are also chants similar to the song of a swan: a childhood that Ivan longed for but had no chance of realizing. In the traumatic narrative torn apart by reality and dreams, there is neither cheap escapism nor pessimism, Tarkovsky has always emphasized that the essence of art is confession and prayer, then "Ivan's Childhood" confronts the pain that people are unwilling to discuss after victory, and it explores the cost of history.
In Ivan's battered childhood, he was not a normal child, he was not even a normal person, he was crazy, a child nourished by hatred. From the moment he witnessed his mother being slaughtered, he became a completely lonely individual, whether in reality or in a dream, in the world of adulthood or childhood, where he could not find a place to live, where he did not belong. The adults in the guerrillas protected him, loved him, and tried to make up for his less sad childhood and normalize him, but it all came too late. Ivan is hurt by violence and then molded into a mad creature by violence. Ivan's tragedy has a deeper and more painful meaning: war creates something, but even if he did not die in war, he would have no way to live after the war, he was no longer accustomed to living peacefully, he had no future. History has made such an extreme species as him, and history needs people like him, and then makes him suffer and eventually be destroyed. War replaces peace with violence, and once peace is achieved, violent individuals are abandoned.
The 12-year-old Ivan, alive or dead, is destined to be a piercing black hole in the chapter of history: this child, living with hatred, dying desperately, there is always an irreconcilable gap between the collective victory carnival and the individual suffering, Ivan is the price paid in the course of history, as long as there is such a price, there is only a tragic victory, as Hegel said, history is tragic.
"Lily Marlene", an epic poem of a woman
Fassbinder made 41 films in 14 years, and he made films on a small budget, minimalist style, shot fast, and finished in an average of two to three weeks. He lived to be 37 years old, and the only "post-war German blockbuster" that took 47 days to shoot and spent 10 million marks on a "huge" production cost was "Lily Marlene".
Fans who criticize Lily Marlene's lack of "Fassbinder characteristics" probably forgot what he said: "My ideal is to make a film as beautiful as an American film, but the content is to explore different issues." "Lily Marlene" is the best practice of this saying, it is both the sum of Fassbinder's 10 years of work from the ages of 25 to 35, and the aesthetic style of several of his later important works (Lola, Veronica Fusse's Desire and The Sailor of Fog Harbor), but unfortunately he died so suddenly that the new voyage was terminated.
Fassbinder saw Douglas Syke's 1950s melodrama in Hollywood at the age of 25, which became a turning point and watershed in his creation. Syke used emotional dramas within the family to explore the structure of society, which Fassbinder greatly appreciated, and he applied a similar path to his films. Before meeting Syke, his films weakened the plot, highlighted his personal style, and actively drew a line with the Hollywood narrative model with the distancing technique of stage plays. Syke's films made him realize that popular dramas that revolve around women can also bear heavy thoughts. His screenwriter once said: "Fassbinder has a femininity in his heart far exceeds the male instinct." And the release of this part of the feminine component is reflected in his films after the age of 25, with "Mary Braun's Marriage" and "Lily Marlene" as examples.
Fassbender believed in Marxism and was a pessimist who believed that people were always desperately trapped in a closed world. Caught in the grand whirlpool of history, he is concerned with the fragmented feelings and lives of individuals. In 1977's "German Autumn", in response to the suicide of terrorist leaders in prison, many directors expressed serious political views in front of the camera, except for Fassbinder, who talked about the daily trivialities of discord with his mother and tantrums with his lover.
"Lily Marlene" is like this, the torrent of the times that has passed by has precipitated down, and it is a woman's love song. Naïve little singers sang persistently on stage, the SS flag under the stage was the sea of madness, the song was transmitted from the radio to the trenches, the soldiers in the positions of the two opposing sides looked up into the distance in unison, recruiting people to look at the countryside all night, in these cross-edited chiaroscuro contrasts, Fassbinder's undisguised despair permeated it, which was not only for war, but for the chaotic world, which was a more general despair of love and destiny. Real-life singer Lara Anderson reunited and married her long-lost lover in Switzerland after the war. At the end of "Lily Marlene", the wheels of suffering and sadness run over the red dust, leaving the heroine to return to the stage alone, and the Siren is lonely and haggard. Fassbender abandons the high ground to indict war, and this female epic of "love and separation, can not be sought" reflects the strength that history has always seized from the tragedy of the human individual.
In order to recreate the social landscape of wartime Germany, Fassbinder in Lily Marlene refers to the expressionist techniques used by Syrk in the 1950s, such as using exaggerated lights and a large number of contrasting colors to create a drunken, decaying society. The approach he uses in Lily Marlene, which continues into Lola, Veronica Fussy's Desire, and Sailor Misty Harbour, is a strong unnatural means that both participate as part of the narrative and indirectly comment on the situation of the characters, achieving a distancing effect without counter-narrative. So "Lily Marlene" can be seen as a real landing of Brecht's theory of separation in the medium of film: the smoothly told story is not interrupted, but the special visual situation allows us to be reminded and given a defamiliarized eye to look at the tragedy of this woman, which is a different kind of withdrawal experience.
Death Row Escape, a stubborn film about stubbornness
Between 1950 and 1961, French director Bresson made four films, including Escape from a Prisoner on Death Row, each of which was related to incarceration. The Diary of a Village Priest is a short life recorded in the diary of a young priest who went from illness to death in a small, remote parish. Death Row Escape chronicles the escape of an underground resistance fighter from a German prison. "Pickpocket" tells the story of an unemployed man who begins to steal and indulge in it, and finally suffers from imprisonment. The Judgment of Joan of Arc depicts Joan of Arc's imprisonment before her martyrdom.
The "Prison Quadrilogy" is considered bresson's masterpiece, and there is a saying in the critics that Bresson's personal experience is used to illustrate these works, believing that these films originate from his experience of being imprisoned by the German army in World War II. In this regard, the scholar Mark Kázens explicitly retorted in The Story of Cinema: "This statement is wrong, Bresson's works were not driven by claustrophobia or psychological trauma." He does not express inner conflict or passion in these films. The performance style of "Death Row Escape" is super-emotional and completely autobiographical. ”
As early as the premiere of Death Row, Truffaut, as a film critic, expressed a similar view in the review, arguing that the film was Bresson's most beautiful film and the most important French film of the post-war decade: "It reduced the inherent concept of dominating cinema to nothing, it rejected the gimmicks of Hollywood cinema, it rejected the achievements that cinema has accumulated so far, it rejected all cinematic paradigms." ”
Truffaut described Death Row Escape as "an absolutely brave film, a stubborn film about stubbornness." "It's a film in every way that's hard to classify. It is set against the backdrop of war, but has almost nothing to do with war. It has no story, no means of dramatization. The entire filming process was a fanatical reconstruction of real events, and the prototype of the protagonist, the French major who escaped from a German prison, was always on the set, and Bresson asked him to show the actors the details of prison life: how to eat, how to sleep, how to write on the wall. But strictly speaking, it is not a record, because the 90-minute image consists entirely of still life objects and close-ups of faces moving the objects. In fact, Bresson's original proposed title was "Where the Wind Blows Wherever It Wants", with a difficult experimental color, which is not easy to accept in nature. He put aside the inner nature of the characters, and the psychological passion and poetry have no place in the movie. What the director really cares about is something more subtle at the level of abstraction: the inner rhythm of the film, the harmonious relationship between the various elements in the film, and the new and pure emotions that this relationship evokes.
The film focuses on only one character, and he is not a cute character, his escape is not necessarily related to courage and faith, and he escapes, simply because prison is a place for people to escape. The movie is not long, every scene is fast, there are 90 clips in 90 minutes. Through the rigorous and free arrangement and combination of images, Bresson in "Death Row Escape" let the film get rid of the genre, plot, characters, one picture after another like a string of running notes, running to the end with an incredibly light rhythm.
"Tin Drum", carrying sins forward
Director Schlöndorf once explained in detail why he had to make "Tin Drum"; "The Oscar was born at the same time as the Nazis, and he grew up with the Nazi era. The moment he entered school was when Hitler was in power; When Hitler sent a large army to invade Paris, Oscar followed the Nazis to France; Oscar was there when the Allied landings in Normandy. Finally, when the Red Army liberated his hometown of Danzig, Poland, he also happened to return home. We can see that the novel is not based on the growth of the little Oscar, it refers to the time when all important historical events occurred, covering a very important time period in German history, and the events that occurred at these points are closely related to the fate of all mankind. ”
In the original novel, Günter Glass uses absurd brushwork to metaphorize sensitive political issues in small daily details, and Schrondorff uses surreal, symbolic fantasy audiovisual means to show the human world of a special era, with a strange and terrifying abnormal rhythm and a rare calmness transcendent to justice/unjust moral judgment. The intuitive visual impact of "Tin Drum" is very strong, such as the color of Oscar's mother's clothes, she wears pink when she is a teenager, symbolizing purity and nature, as she grows older, she falls into the desire gully of unrequited love, the sins deepen, the clothes gradually change from bright red to dark red, and finally the piercing bloody red. Oscar's birth is a very frightening baby subjective perspective, crawling out of the womb in the face of the 60-watt light bulb, and the world is so cold, strange and terrifying. In Oscar's first class at school, his drums and screams both brought the teacher to the brink of collapse and a sharp tingling sensation spread from the screen to the audience's flesh, his screams shattered the teacher's spectacle lenses, shattered the specimen bottle containing the prototype of the toddler, and the cracked glass and the flowing formalin liquid became a clear metaphor, which was a direct rebellion against the confinement of the system. The creepiest scene is when they encounter fishermen hunting eels with cut off horse heads, eels flowing out of the rotting horse's heads, the father wielding a knife to cut off the eel's head, bloodied, and the mother collapses and leaves, and in an instant, sex, power, violence and death reverberate into an absurd and cruel symphony of horror. The portrait of Beethoven above the piano is replaced by a portrait of Hitler, death ensues, the weak uncle is the epitome of the cowardice and vanity of the entire Polish state, the mother speaks for all the ravaged and trampled characters in the barbaric progress of history, and the German-style power represented by the father, with the arrival of the Soviets, ends in shocking death.
The film ends here, at his father's funeral, Oscar drops the tin drum that has accompanied him for 17 years, plunging into the tomb, but the heavens give him the miracle of growing up at this time, and he seems to have returned to the ordinary era after the war and stepped on the train to run to the unknown far away. This is the first and second volumes of the novel, and in the third volume of the original, Oscar grows into a hunchback and runs to his sister in Düsseldorf, and the time spans from 1945 to 1959. Glass, who co-wrote the screenplay, added content to the script until the fall of the Berlin Wall, incorporating major historical events such as the Cold War, the confrontation between germanys and reunification. However, because the young actors began to develop, there was a lack of suitable candidates, so the film version stopped at the end of the present, and the last picture was the train driving into the distance, and the world was wide.
The film is intense and dignified, but time has stalled in 1945, leaving the film regrettably lacking the dimension of the original. Claustrophobic in the body of a three-year-old, Oscar rejects not only the history of Nazi rule, he rebels against the evil shadows of human nature. The 17-year-old Oscar seemed to have shed his Nazi nightmare and set off again, but at the age of 30 he was once again on the symbolic road to death, when he stood on the escalator and once again heard the song of childhood fear: "Black Chef, are you there?" In ah yes! "The black kitchen lady that children fear is the inner darkness that human beings can never get rid of, the sins that must be borne in the future, until there is no way to escape, until the black shadow of the black kitchen lady is directly faced, until the ugliest side of human nature is recognized, and perhaps a glimmer of redemption can be seen.
Many years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Glass wrote about his experiences joining the Nazis in his autobiography Peeling the Onion, and finally, Oscar stopped fleeing. And these are all stories outside the movie "Tin Drum".