"The Man Without a Shadow" is a very famous animated micro-film, which immediately won many awards once it was broadcast, and also triggered a hot discussion. This eight-minute micro-film is very distinctive, the whole film does not have a single sentence of dialogue, and the painting style is also very abstract. In the film, there are only fast-switching shots and dizzying colors.
What does this micro-film want to tell us? I think there are two kinds of thinking in this: First, which is more important than money and soul? Secondly, should promises be kept? Many people think they have a bottom line and will never betray their oath. There are also many who believe that oaths are not true and that they should be considered according to the actual situation. In fact, from the entire history of human cultural development, keeping the oath has been derived into a good quality, whether in literary works, or film and television works, there will always be an image of adhering to the bottom line to maintain the oath.
So should we uphold our oaths? In fact, when a person decides to do something, or agrees to certain conditions of others, it is a manifestation of an oath. But the problem is that if this is just an inconsequential vow, self-interest is certainly good. If you find that the vows you have made, the promises you have made to others, if you continue to cause losses to yourself, then will you still choose to stick to them?
The same is true of The Man Without a Shadow, which shows us two very important points, one is the value of the soul and the other is the consequences of betraying the oath. Since the development of human culture, life is inseparable from money and power, and it is also inseparable from the spirit of contract. The two are not two separate problems in themselves, but materialistic, often lost in them and unable to extricate themselves.
In the face of the temptation of the devil, will you choose money or shadow?
The protagonist in The Man Without Shadows is a man, or more precisely, a man living at the bottom. At the beginning of the film, the man walks out of a building, and we have no way of knowing his identity, the destination. However, the beginning of the film is depressing, and the highly switched perspective and gray and dark colors have a great impact on our visual experience. It is precisely because of this impact that it is very easy for the viewer to fall into the uneasy, gray, and fearful emotions created by the film. It can be said that at the beginning of the film, the director uses such a lens technique to achieve the emotional tone of the whole film at once.
The man soon went out, and the outside world was no different from the house, and it was also gray. Unconsciously, the man came to a courtyard, the courtyard was magnificent, and the picture began to color. The man handed an invitation to the waiter at the door, who signaled that the man could enter. The yard is full of flowers and trees, lush, above the red carpet, men and women are in pairs, staggered, typical of high society. Why is the world across a wall so different? I think this is the contrast and symbolism that the director uses in the film. The gray world represents people living at the bottom of society, busy for money, no happiness, only gray and dark day after day. And doesn't the world inside the wall symbolize the world of money? And that invitation is actually the key to the upper class.
At the beginning of the film, the music is low, as if to hint at the man's inner inferiority. However, since he stepped into the courtyard, the music suddenly became light and bright, and there was more laughter in his ears, and it was not difficult for us to see the yearning of this man at the bottom of society for the upper class. It is worth noting that these cheerful people are in pairs, chatting and drinking, while the men are alone, can only walk quickly through everything in front of them, and gradually move away from the crowd.
Just then, the man met a man. The figure of this person appeared very abruptly, as if out of thin air, and suddenly appeared next to the man. He was wearing a red shirt, red pants, a red hat, and red shoes. Only to see him take off his hat, conjure up a lot of money from it, and signal that men can exchange money for shadows.
Who is this person? Where did it come from? Why is it all red? This is related to Western culture, where red symbolizes violence, terror. As for the shadow of the trade, there is a similar description in Faust, where a German alchemist sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and youth, and this man dressed in red is actually the devil described in Faust. Faced with the temptation of the devil, men are caught up in the choice between money and soul.
In fact, in a materialistic society, whether a poor man chooses to trade shadows for money or chooses to refuse to trade is a matter of reproach. Perhaps, according to traditional moral concepts and the spirit of Christ, trading with the devil is a great injustice, not to mention that the weight of the transaction is actually one's own soul. Moreover, the pursuit of money is also very easy to be spurned by traditional cognition. It's just that I think that even the devil, he's not forcing men to make any deals, it's just providing a contract for men, and the choice for men as an independent person is up to men. From this point of view, why is this not an ordinary transaction in itself?
The man knows the consequences, he understands that he will lose his shadow, but at the same time he will gain money, power, beauty. And under this trade-off, the man ultimately chose money. In fact, if regardless of some traditional values, this transaction man is not a loser, it can be said that they have their own needs. The man originally lived at the bottom of society, the whole world was melancholy, and he longed for money. And the shadow from a certain point of view, for men is actually not much use, naturally can be exchanged, this in itself is not a loss-making business. In a materialistic society, such a choice is far from wrong.
However, since the consequences have been considered and the choice has been made, why is it painful?
How to choose between money and shadow? Different people must have different opinions. For a wealthy man, money is just a number. Just as Ma Yun once said that he doesn't like money, in fact, it is true, maybe after a certain amount of wealth, he really has no feeling for money. But what about a poor man who can't open the pot? Seeing that you are going to starve to death, where you can take care of other things, food and clothing is the most important thing. Therefore, for the temptation of the devil, no matter how you choose, you have your own considerations, get what you want, and it should be a thing that satisfies both parties to the transaction.
However, the man in the film is not like this, when he was initially poor, he longed for a life of wealth, so he resolutely chose to exchange. But after a while, when he found that even if he had a lot of money, he still couldn't squeeze into the circle of life in the upper class, and the regret began. In the moonlight, the man took the wrist of a magnificent girl and danced. But suddenly, the girl found that the man had no shadow, and in a panic, she ran away in fear. Men walk into the dinner party of the rich, and all the rich man points fingers at the man and excludes the man from their circle. Men feel very much pain, and these feelings really motivate men to make up their minds to find their own shadow.
Life is one life, grass and trees are autumn; life will not come again, time will not stay. There is no such thing as a free lunch, nor is there happiness for nothing. On their own path, no one can finish it for themselves. The road under your feet must be walked by yourself, the road is difficult to break through, and all the suffering must be carried by yourself.
A free lunch, a pie falling from the sky, a man would not be unaware. In fact, the reason for the pain of men is ultimately because of his change of mentality. From the initial desire for money to the mentality of "fish and bear paws". It's not impossible to think of the best of both worlds, but you must know that other people's lunches come from your own labor. And men's lives can be said to be much better than most people's, but in the end they still can't hide from regrets. What we often call "depression" is actually dissatisfaction, because we have set too high goals for ourselves, or hope to get something for nothing, and many people are unhappy about weight, baldness, and promotion,... For these people, unhappiness is a state, an intolerable thing.
So the man decided to find his lost shadow, he turned over the mountains and rivers, walked through Arabia, China and other countries, and finally stopped at the local indigenous tribes. The locals' entertainment was to watch shadow puppetry, so the men were involved in them. The shadow puppet play performed by the man does not have his own shadow, and in this way, the man has been performing there, which is also the end of the whole film.
I think this is a big highlight of the film, and it is also a very profound place. Perhaps when we see the first half of the film, we have already guessed that men will exchange their shadows for money, and we will definitely find ourselves incompatible with their surroundings and eventually embark on the road to find shadows. But the plot that most of us guess should be that the man spent a lot of effort, lasted for many years, and finally found his own shadow and cherished the story of life. But actually? The man did not find his shadow, he met the devil for the second time, exhausted everything but only changed into a red shoe, and the shadow did not return.
What is this trying to tell us? Perhaps, the film conveys more of the universal values of the Western world for the spirit of the contract - to break the oath is to accept the consequences. When you make a contract with anyone, then you should not repent, and if you insist on going your own way, you will only be punished. Men exchange shadows for everything, but in the end they lose everything, and what is not the consequence of breaking their oaths?
Men are tempted by the devil and indulge in money for a while. But in the end, he could have had no worries about food and clothing, why did he have to find his shadow? In fact, the shadow is showing the most direct sign of a person's reason for being a person, which is the most fundamental attribute of a person. Because of the shadow, you can be seen as the same kind by others without any doubt. Once the shadow is lost, although the body is still there, it is no different from having died. The shadow represents the soul, but not only the soul, which is the most basic thing of a person. The many transitions in the film are actually men looking for their own basics as human beings. Because of the "nothingness" that people reject, he can only find self-worth in shadow puppetry.
Material deficiencies are easily remedied, while the poverty of the soul cannot be remedied.
Despite the man's efforts to find the shadow, the shadow puppet scene at the end of the film still reflects a kind of sadness. The people in the audience were bustling and bustling, but all this had nothing to do with men. Here, the director seems to want to use people's cheerfulness to set off men's sadness. We can see everything a man does as compensation for the soul, whether it is crossing the mountains and seas, crossing the thorns, or performing shadow puppetry, which is actually the salvation of the man's heart. It is just that the soul has passed away, and it is ultimately in vain.
I think the reason why micro-films are fascinating is that the ideological connotations they want to express are extremely rich. The same is true of The Man Without Shadows, which, although there is not a single line of dialogue in the entire film, is precisely what makes this short film rich in ideological extensions. Different people's interpretations of the same micro-film must be very different, which is its unique charm.
Therefore, this work can be called great, it relies on a slow narrative, telling the story, without verbal modification, but can make the plot and emotion of the story feel empathy to the viewer. Without the creator's self-statement, any uniformity in the interpretation of the work is dispensed with. At the same time, it also leaves us with more room for imagination. In the seventh art, this can be called a great work.
So, in the face of the temptation of the devil, how do you choose?