The painted bird and nabarvené ptáče, the language of writing and cinema. The film is one of the most controversial Eastern European World War II novels of the last century adapted by director Wenceslas Malhall, which tells the story of a child whose parents sent him to the countryside to escape the war, and who is discriminated against and persecuted because of his different skin colors. The plot itself is actually very simple, the key is how to persecute and the essential mentality of the Eastern European people hidden under the surface. Written by Yezh Kosinski, according to his personal description, all of these ideas come from the many years of escape experience he had survived the Nazi Holocaust in his childhood, and the author immigrated to the United States and abandoned his original native language in favor of English for calm and objective writing. Talking about the original work itself is actually an ordinary, complicated, and calm explanation that dares to write, but the author's idea is indeed suitable for expressing the language of the film, the cruel image of aphasia from the perspective of God. The Czech-born director also wanted to use his native language to illustrate the story of his home country, so in the process of visualization, the language was returned.
From village to village, meet a group of people to another, and use the objective reflection of the population in the marginalized areas of war to show the daily life of the cruel times. The repetitive and similar chapter structure is also used in the film, but the length is limited, and the director refines the script, merges the characters with similar characteristics, and adjusts the order of the story (such as the revenge of being bitten by the rats in the cave is transformed into Gapos) to suit the rhythm of the film's dramatic conflict. The "stained bird" was actually a kind of entertainment that people would use at that time, applying the paint of the color box to the caught birds and then releasing them into the population, so that they were regarded as threatening aliens, and the impact was torn until the bird was killed. It is also an easy-to-see metaphorical symbolism, the protagonist comes from a northern city, has a skin color and language that is naturally different from the local inhabitants, and is considered a gypsy-like demon and treated rudely, similar to the persecution of Jews in the general environment at that time. There is a saying that "since the Gypsies and Jews are both black-haired and dark-eyed, and both are doomed to the same tragic end, what is the difference between the two kinds of people?" ”
The protagonist's psychology is from fear - believing in God so frantically praying - making a pact with the devil - inspired by the Soviet red spirit - recovering the disappointment of his parents, a series of psychological changes, there is not so much explanation in God's perspective, just externalization of the reaction to reality, successive expressions of revenge/some aphasia. Compared with another kind of narrative that uses memoirs to be subjective, the evil that is directly displayed in front of the audience without explanation is more simple and unpretentious, and can only peek into the protagonist's heart through the details. The universal problems that the film raised with a group of children who were not directly harmed by war still seem relevant today.
I heard that when this film was screened at the Venice Film Festival, because the plot was too bizarre and frightening, a large number of media audiences left the scene. In fact, it is just that the author is very dare to write, the director is very dare to shoot, and the points of great dramatic conflict are retained. Whether it is the original work or the movie, it is precisely in such a situation that the characters are not demonized, but the real show after being "evil". It's just unfortunate that I watched the deleted version of the EU Film Festival, and the most amplified "Flower of Evil" feeling was realized when I looked at the novel and the second brush.
Image language is difficult not to think of Bellatar, Tarkovsky and other European masters of the last century, can be said to be a kind of imitation, this film as a new century black and white film, deliberately get rid of the interference of color, anyway, the world is ugly and devastated, it is better to calmly use black and white language. The director's method is just using the technique, the essence is still a documentary narrative, but this is the most suitable expression for me.
Films with original scripts always need to explore whether the emphasis is on "adaptation" or "visualization", and Wenceslas Malhall, who loves literature, is deeply influenced by the original novel and strives for copyright and shooting possibilities. The adapted text of the film is only slightly adjusted to cater to the film script, which is appropriate, otherwise it will be more verbose and complicated, consuming the patience of the audience. "Adaptation" is more embodied in the form, the perspective from the entire first-person narrative to a complete third-person perspective, coupled with a small number of protagonists to explore the details and tell the heart. Moreover, in the framework of the whole worldview, set by specific Czech locations, it becomes empty, according to my later inquiries, of the few dialogue languages, only the little boy speaks Czech, and the other characters in the film speak fictional Slavic (an artificial language developed by vojtěch merunka), and the two languages can communicate, Czech as the foreign language of the film, and the little boy as an outsider in this world. In this way, the film uses this method to empty the specific positioning of the present world in the novel, a fictional state that cannot be judged. The director is actually reasonable and not too much for the idea of "adaptation", the main idea and attention are similar to the original work, he just wants to shoot this story, the original will cause the audience to restore the space of the realistic theme of the work, the image is of inevitable significance, but also appropriate.
I have reservations about the fact that there are too many characters and all of them are mediocre and not have great shaping and explosive power, but I think that since what I want to show is an evil that is manifested by evil, it must be collective and universal, and there is no need to give a longer period of shaping to an exploiter, and the protagonist's contact with each person is still shallow, and it is most appropriate to describe it with an apparent reaction, focusing on the "evil" of the group, not the degree of "evil" of a person. The repeated "evil" of the film is opposed to the precious "good", and in the end, the "good" fails to compete with it. The protagonist's psychological changes repeatedly to the end, only indifference remains, what needs to be shown is not explosive evil, but a mechanical expression of the dead heart after being destroyed, and fundamentally, everything experienced is illusory.