When mentioning the hometown of Anzhe, Greece, the source of European civilization, we have to pay attention to the motif of wandering and wandering from Odysseus. An Zhe's work must be about the personal journey of exile and search in Greece. The film "Eternity and a Day" naturally follows this theme.
The beginning of the film is a zoom slide shot of 2 minutes and 32 seconds, from the back garden of Alexander's courtyard to the window of his room on the second floor. In the infinitely sad Balkan tragic song composed by Eleni Karaindrou, the poetic and elegant sentences are laid out like water layers. This dim fragment of the dawn by the sea came to an abrupt halt in Alexander’s childhood dream. However, in later narratives, the back garden became the origin of his memory and narrative, linking Alexander’s reality and all the past. .
The protagonist Alexander is a terminally ill patient, a writer who has given up writing to find the eternal poems of his predecessors, and a living lonely. His "only connection" with the world is that the stranger on the opposite side responds to Alexander's thoughts with his music. He once tried to visit the stranger, but finally gave up. "Knowing is worse than thinking." "Perhaps she is just a student who has not graduated." She "is lonely like me?" Alexander decided to leave the house by the sea and the growing deathly silence. "Nothing will At the end, everything stays in its rudimentary state." Perform an escape about time.
When he came to his daughter's house, he didn't forget to bring his beloved dog—he was leaving, and he had nothing to entrust—but his son-in-law did not welcome it, and told him that he had sold the house that the old man missed by the sea. The clock on Anna's wall is just an imaginary projection, which seems to be the beginning of a metaphor for time. In the letter from his deceased wife, those long-lasting words began to appear in Alexander's mind, time became smooth, and through the backyard, the old man crossed over to the time before the child was just born. The boats on the seashore come and go, and there is wind. There, the sea level, the sky and the white pergola form a cross in the center of the picture. (Including this cover, it is also a white cross
on a blue background) There is also such a cross in the upper left corner of the Greek flag, which represents the Greek Orthodox Church. The blue and white of the national flag are the colors of the national flag of Bavaria. Blue represents blue sky and freedom, and white means religion and belief. The isomorphism between this picture and the Greek flag reveals An Zhe's subconsciousness to a certain extent—the old man and the child in the pergola together constitute a humanistic care for freedom, religious beliefs, and the process of life.
This white cross reappears in the last eight minutes of the film, but the hut by the sea is no longer there.
"Send you an apple will rot; send you a rose will wither; send you a grape will crush it; give you a drop of my tears." The Albanian teenager hummed such a song. That is poetry, the sentence Alexander wanted.
He took the child out of the trafficker, and he wanted to send the child back to the border. In the mirror, the child started to flee again because of the appearance of the army. (The expression of this mirror also has no meaning) Alexander is chasing the child, he decides to set aside his long journey and talk to the child about poetry. That child has beautiful but losing language. In this way, the old man and the child constitute a pair of strange objects. They are at the opposite ends of the axis of life, yet they echo each other. Such a fascinating scene reminds me of Stephen’s feelings about his students in "Ulysses": "So like me, this child: the shoulders are so thin and so inconspicuous. My childhood was bent over next to me. Far away I can’t even touch it with my hands, even gently. Mine is too far away, and his is as deep as our eyes. In the dark palace of our hearts, we both entangled motionlessly. Silent secrets. These secrets are tired of their own tyranny. They are tyrants who are willing to be deposed." The
old man took the child's hand through the heavy fog and reached the border. The children squatted down to tell how they crossed the minefield—picking up a rock, throwing it out, picking up another piece, and throwing it out again. After such words, the backgrounds of music and patterns are gray, and in the distance are high-voltage power grids and corpses hanging on them trying to escape. Here is a scene where a corpse climbs down. Some people think it is a narrative of Alexander's indistinguishable illusion and reality, or simply because the power grid is not always energized. At this point, I am more inclined to think that it may be just an extra actor wearing a gang for a while.
So Alexander returned to Greece with his Albanian children. Walking along the road by the river, the old man talked about the poet a hundred years ago, why he continued the unfinished poem "The Trapped Freedom". At this time, the camera was pushed along the river, and it was a 180-degree follow-a classic long shot in tribute to Mizoguchi Kenji. They followed the camera into the world of the poet at the time, rotating in one shot in a hundred years Is filled and connected. In Anzhe's films, 180-degree+ shots can be seen everywhere, and in the scene where Alexander saw a Greek wedding, he even used a 270-degree round-robin shot in 4 and a half minutes. Someone said: "Each work of Angelopoulos has at least a 360-degree panoramic lens." Behind his calm, slow-moving long lens, you can feel the uncontrollable surging waves in your heart. It is precisely to insist on this kind of 360-degree panoramic lens and not succumb to the teacher's basic requirements of "forward/reverse cutting". An Zhe once fell out with the professor at the French Film Institute (IDHEC) and was expelled from the school. The director himself Constitute a sense of exile. However, it was this exile that allowed him to return to Greece, the source of great civilization. Many years later, when An Zhe met IDHEC’s old classmates again, most of them had left the film business. Apart from seeing a large number of “forward/reverse” shots in fast food movies, they would think that they had received such basic training. In addition, who can walk his characters in the landscape like a master, using the panoramic lens as a bridge from reality to imagination, time is linked by the passage of the lens, and the characters freely shuttle through the scenery of different eras , Wandering through time in the form of spatial displacement, forming a sense of time and space that is shocking and sighing.
In paying tribute to the great pioneer Greek poet Dionysius Solomos, Alexander led the children through the fields, farms, white stone walls and broken walls traversed by the poet. It has always been believed that the combination of white and rock is the symbol of Greece. Anzhe himself said: "The Greeks grew up touching and kissing those stones." Here, the film finally officially cut into the theme of exile.
If Albanian children are fugitives in space, then the old man Alexander is a fugitive of time. In the following pictures, the old man continues to talk to the past. On the boat, by the sea, in front of the mother's bed, sometimes it is the wife, or daughter, and mother. On the one hand, the old house he loves by the sea has been sold by his son-in-law, which means the end of the past; on the other hand, the mother’s words mentioned about the father "you are still on the road" and "you are never close to him", My mother tried to "take you back from the book", but finally "knows that one day you will leave." Alexander is in the gap between two generations, lonely and helpless. He gave up writing in order to complete the poet's unfinished poem plan, but he was stranded because of the passing of words. The death of a nation’s speech is often a precursor to the nation’s death. The poet returned to Greece, returned to the soil of his native language, eagerly absorbed those lost mother tongues from people, and rediscovered the lost language charm. Alexander's self-exile is also a retrospect to the past, which is about the double escape of time, his personal life, and the double escape with his verbal mission. He asked his mother: "Why do I want to live in exile, why I don't recognize the way home, but I don't feel confident in this place where I speak my own language." He is always looking for lost and forgotten words, he doesn't know. how to love.
"The wandering bird is crying in a foreign land/lucky foreign land, I miss you/Kovra, my little flower." The Albanian child curled up in the corner and hummed softly. "Kovra", Alexander found that this was the language he wanted, the words he was willing to spend money to buy. He told the Albanian child to try a "great journey", but in the end he asked him to "stay with me". Alexander found the child who was the source of the axis of life in the escape, and at the same time the original state of language, the two embraced and wept.
On their way back, the most surreal part of the film except the border grid was staged on the bus. Noisy parade, people carrying red flags asleep in the car, arguing couples, is the improvisational band illusory or real? The yellow raincoats of the three cyclists outside the window were bright and weird. However, the conductor was indifferent to all this, as Benjamin said in "The Lyricist in the Age of Advanced Capitalism", Europe would never have such a scene before the appearance of the subway-people had to last for an hour or even longer. Facing each other, but without any words.
This passage is nothing more than a metaphor in Alexander's heart, a reflection on life and loneliness. Then here, the poet appeared, and he recited the last poem: "The last stars before dawn signal the arrival of the morning sun. Thick fog and shadows cannot be tarnished, the cloudless sky. The breeze comforts all living beings, just like The proverb in the heart. Life is sweet, and life is so sweet."
"Tell me, how long is tomorrow? Tell me, how far is tomorrow?" Alexander asked the poet and Anna for the answer. Eternal or just one day. Perhaps, he already knew the answer.
"I'm not going to the hospital anymore."... "Strangers are always responding to me with music, someone will sell me the words"... "My way is on another river"... "With these words, I will be with you. "Go" "You are there and everything can really be waited for"... The purpose of all escape is to return. Alexander recites the lost words. He faces the sea, just like the three who planned to explore the island at the beginning of the movie. Children.
"Alexander, we are going to the island, are you coming?"
"Where?"
"Island."
"If we want to swim across the water, look at the ancient city, follow us on the reef, and greet the passing ships. "Do you know about the ancient city? Grandfather said that this lucky city has been submerged by sea water."
"She has slept on the bottom of the sea for centuries . She only surfaced once at the full moon, and for a short time. The starlight of dawn left the earth reluctantly, stopped to admire, everything stopped, and time stood still."
"Are you coming?"
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