Open an Earth | "Aesthetics of the Earth" in "The Sacrifice" and "The Antichrist"

Christelle 2022-04-19 09:02:55

Earth, isn't this what you expect: in our hearts

Invisibly resurrected? - this is not your dream,

An invisible existence? earth! Invisible!

- "Duino Lamentations"

At first glance, "Sacrifice" and "The Antichrist" are two films with different picture styles and narrative structures, but they have isomorphic contrasts on the themes of civilization and destruction, rationality and madness. I think the end credits of "The Antichrist" - "To Tarkovsky" are von Trier's playful and inherited "homage" to the old tower.

In both films, the image of the house appears , which can be said to be the most important "big image" of the two films. In some themes, the two houses have the same reference, such as the shelter of modern civilization, the opposition between technological rationality and nature, etc., but in the aesthetics of visual presentation, they are two different paths. The main argument of this article is that these two houses, in two almost opposite visual presentations, jointly discuss a topic: man's control of nature will eventually turn back on himself, and the solution is only the "sacrifice" of man himself. The "people" here generally refer to rational subjects, modern civilization, and science and technology. "Nature" refers to mysticism, the living world, and "pre-human" nature. The "sacrifice" caused by "backlash" can be directly related to the last "sacrifice" in "Sacrifice", and it can also be considered as the "sacrifice" of the hero to nature at the end of "The Antichrist". This sacrifice or sacrifice is based on a stable earth , which I call "earth aesthetics". Each point of view will be described in detail below.

The earth, the emerging sacred work

The concept of "Earth" (Erde) is borrowed from Heidegger. In his conception, the earth is a stable shelter in which existence (Sein) lives peacefully, but this enclosed dimension, under the "mediation" of (art) objects, calls out to the sky and connects Man and God, the world (Welt) emerged from it, and finally, in the dispute between the world and the earth, the truth dimension of "uncovering" was opened, and all of this reflexively sank into the earth as the emergence of concealment. This is fully reflected in Heidegger's later discussion from "tool" to "work" and taking the Greek temple as an example.

The "earth" used in this article, that is, the thing that reproduces the invisible in the sense of Rilke and Rancière, speaks the thing that is forbidden to speak.

Heidegger uses the word sacrifice (heiligen) in describing the emergent concealment of the work:

"In establishing the work, the divine is revealed as divine, and God is called into the opening of his presence; in this sense, devotion is the sacrifice of the divine." - The Origin of the Work of Art

When Zizek discusses the burning house at the end of "Sacrifice", he believes that this human self-sacrifice is the original pleasure dimension (that is, the side of desire for death) in the game with the Big Other, but this game It is illusory, unconstructed, an authentic dimension of scarcity.

Leaving aside whether the so-called old tower in Zizek's discussion successfully "traversed the illusion", the focus is on the visual presentation and aesthetic dimension of the earth and sacrifice in the film. However, Zizek's Lacanian concept of original music helps this narrative.

light weight

- The Burning House in "The Sacrifice"

The house at the end of The Sacrifice, as a work, a thing, was originally built as a man-made structure firmly on the ground, and at this time there is the emergence of what Heidegger calls the world, because in the scene of the old tower , the vast and calm seaside, the chalet standing on the empty and lonely grassland is undoubtedly a work of art, but the old tower is not reconciled (or I am not reconciled), he wants to let it burn, let it burn up , let it burn for a 6-minute long shot, so this stable hidden thing "sacrifices" itself here, the flames and smoke rise from the earth, the heaven and the earth are connected, and the holiness is here. descend on this earth.

True, it is no longer solid, because after burning out, this fragile house collapsed with a bang, it was pure deconstruction, pure sublime, and pure death. But then a scene at the end recreates the intact log cabin at the beginning of the film, so this burning lightness, through a phenomenological integration of time, re-sinks into the stable earth, which is obviously no longer stable at this time. "Absolute stability", but after burning and collapsing, after the struggle between weight and lightness, the earth and the sky, the stability of the world emerges, and the stability of its own is revealed.

This stability is naturally inseparable from the use of the old tower's lens and scene settings. In the first 10 minutes or so, the wide-angle long shot covers a large area of ​​grassland and sea. An old man is righting a small dead tree. A little boy enters the lens from the left, a cyclist enters the lens, and then three The people walked to the left together, and the camera started to move slowly and parallel to the left, and then stopped again. At this time, a large area of ​​grassland remained in the picture. At the end, the scene at the beginning and the movement of the mirror appear again, but in the end the camera stops on the dead tree and moves up slowly, reflecting the bright blue sea surface reflecting the mottled sunlight, and the whole film is finished. At the end, the emerging stability is hidden on the light and upward dead tree, which confirms the stability of the struggle after the burning of the above-mentioned house.

Therefore, after the collapse of the house, that is, after the collapse of human reason, technology and civilization, the sacrifice is completed. However, due to the steady use of audio-visual language and the return of the ending of the old pagoda, the stability in the film is not deconstructed. Instead, a new construction is formed and reinserted into the work, that is, the object in the sense of Heidegger. The house thus acquires the status of an autonomous art object.

When talking about technical issues in the modern world, Heidegger called technology "Ge-stell". Technology as a pedestal sets nature as an object in front of human beings and makes the world an "image" , and obscures the possibility of poetry (i.e. truth) that will eventually reflexively control humanity. In today's world of globalization and "speedism", technology is the embodiment of this, with biological sciences being an extreme example.

How are human beings saved? Laota said this passage through the mouth of Alexander in the movie (this passage is a declaration-style confession to God by the character looking directly at the camera):

"After this, there will be no winners or losers, no towns, no grass, no trees, no wells, no birds in the sky. I can give all I have, leave my beloved home, destroy it, and give up my son, I will remain silent from now on, I will no longer speak, I will give up everything in my life, I just ask you to restore everything to the way it was, like this morning or yesterday, let me get rid of this deadly, beast-like fear, yes, everything! "

Judging from the "return" at the end, from the child watering the "tree of life", and the above passage, this film is not what Zizek said, "finally destroying his ideological plan in a playful way" , or a false dimension of original joy. Instead, through lines, editing, camera usage and scene scheduling, the old tower reconstructed yesterday's "nostalgia". A bolder statement is: human beings get rid of the control of technology and atone for nature, and the way to alleviate their own crisis is to "go back to the past", "go back to the past" at a new historical node, and "go back to the past" with the eyes of returning to the present. past", "going back to the past" from the dimension of the future. This is the real "sacrifice".

At the end of the film, the woman rides a bicycle chasing the ambulance that houses the madman Alexander, while the aphasic child, reclining peacefully under the freshly watered tree, says the first words: "In the beginning there was a word. "

The Faceless Daughter and the Final Sacrifice

--The House of the Jungle in The Antichrist

Unlike "Sacrifice", the wooden house in "Antichrist" leans toward another dimension of the earth, the firm opposite—emergence.

When a wife who was traumatized by the loss of a child was being treated by her husband who was a psychiatrist, the husband asked the wife what she feared the most, and the wife replied: Can there be no fear? Then, under the "force" of her husband, she compromised: Forest. The husband replied: Strange, your favorite thing is to run into the forest. Which particular forest? Wife Answer: Eden (that is, the one with the House of Eden). The husband then put a question mark at the top of his wife's "Pyramid of Fear" drawn on paper, and wrote "House of Eden" on the second level and "Forest" on the third level. Afterwards, the husband uses "exposure therapy" to let his wife walk into the forest, not to hide in the house immediately, but to experience the fear. In the imaginative shot, the wife gradually blends into the grass in the forest and looks like one. After several real-life exposure treatments, the wife no longer fears the forest, but her psychosis has not decreased, and has reached the level of hysteria.

So the complacent psychoanalyst husband repeatedly failed. He wrote "NATURE" at the question mark at the top of the "Pyramid of Fear" drawn on the previous paper, then crossed it out, then wrote "Satan", crossed it out, and finally wrote Got on "ME" (wife herself) and was knocked down from behind by a mad wife.

In this repeatedly altered writing, the wife's subjectivity is gradually hidden in nature, she can only fear herself, because she is nature, narrowly speaking, the forest. This was fully expressed in the previous shot where the frightened face of the wife, which was reflected on the window glass of the train, merged with the forest passing by fast outside the window. So the wife-forest-mysterious nature and the husband-chalet-rational subject form a sharp contrast. Interestingly, this is also the contrast between the patient and the doctor. The anti-rational wife is the first to oppose the husband, that is, anti-psychoanalysis. "Modern psychology is not interested in dreams. Freud is dead, isn't he?" This sentence came from his wife's mouth.

Perhaps the only suspect in this control group was the wobbly image of the wooden house. Both in terms of the symbolism of Freud's dream (that is, the house represents a woman, and entering the house is inserted), and in terms of the film's vision and narrative (that is, the house, as a shelter for the wife's long-term writing, also blocks her from the forest. fear), the huts may all be on the side of women. However, as an artificial object, the wooden house is an uncompromising hard, dry, erect "penis" relative to the flowing, damp, outreaching jungle. Human objects such as books and papers have undoubtedly become the "rational subject" of the husband. It is this vague image of the house that gives it a pose that emerges towards the forest.

After the "irrational" wife "castrated" her husband's penis with a hammer and tied her husband's feet, she started a full-scale abuse of her husband, who was also reduced by the "rational subject" psychoanalyst For the battered, maimed, and castrated, "nature" begins to devour the human subject. After sobering up, her husband dragged his crippled leg and struggled to crawl out of the house and hid in a tree hole in the forest. Later, he was found by his wife and brought back to the house. The husband who found the wrench unscrewed the shackles on his legs and strangled his wife to death. Finally, a pyre was built next to the wooden house and his wife was burned to death.

The psychoanalyst ends up burning the irrational sick wife with a Prometheus-style fire, a ritual that echoes the religious persecution of women in pre-modern societies that see women as full of witchcraft and evil. However, this is not the final "sacrifice". The final "sacrifice" takes place in the final chapter of the film: in an overhead shot before the final chapter, the husband walks slowly through the forest on crutches, dragging his stump leg, and then emerges from the bushes, showing a large number of beautiful and beautiful shadows. naked female corpse. In the last shot of the final chapter, the husband looks at the gentle cliff below, and a group of women with blurred faces walks towards him. The camera point of view switches to the bottom of the cliff. These women gradually occupy the entire cliff, and the background music is placed on the "I long for freedom".

This is the ultimate "sacrifice", that is, after "killing" and "burning nature", nature's self-resurrection and total revenge. This is a tender and deadly "revenge" that is the real "Antichrist". Before the male protagonist saw these women, three beggars appeared in front of him: the fox (pain), the crow (despair) and the deer (sorrow). The wife said that whenever there were three beggars, they would die. They appeared before the wife died, so will this appearance cause the husband to die?

The three beggars representing human nature, as a kind of "big other", complete the "dehumanization" of rational subjects and even human beings through the generation of "desire/emotional machines". Ladies, the earth begins to shake. The wooden house has disappeared in the last few black and white shots that echo the title. Compared with "Sacrifice", the composition stability, distance from the subject, movement intensity and switching frequency of these shots are more inclined to the outside of the hard wooden house. The wet and dense jungle is inclined to the emergence of the earth to the sacred world, to the inundation of reason, technology, civilization and the human subject by nature, mystery, death and sublime. The earth resurrects itself from the unseen and opens itself to God and the world.

(This article was originally published in the public account "Wooben Zaxue")

View more about The Sacrifice reviews

Extended Reading
  • Velva 2022-03-29 09:01:08

    Destroy before being born...

  • Murray 2022-03-29 09:01:08

    A film that changed my mind about Tarkovsky. I saw Bergman's shadow, but the difference is that Laota uses the lens to give objects/materials a very unique appearance and meaning, light and heavy, soft and hard, light and dark. And, in the interrogation of life and death, I saw lust. So I finally fell in love with the old tower, which I thought I could not see for ten thousand years.

The Sacrifice quotes

  • [last lines]

    [sub-titled]

    Gossen: In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?

  • Alexander: I studied philosophy, history of religion, aesthetics. And ended up putting myself in chains. Of my own free will.