"Ge Chu" in 1962 is Dreyer's last work. The original work is adapted from a drama script. It tells a woman's four emotional experiences, and she is finally accompanied by loneliness. Pursuing Ge Chu's journey, the almost broken whispers, from the breakdown of the marriage to the end of a few emotions, I still tried to clarify how the light it radiated could not help but capture me.
In his later years, Dreyer's plan to photograph the color version of the Bible was not implemented, so he chose the more common human love in Ge Chu as the basis of experience, and his perspective was almost mysterious and religious. The face under the camera becomes a window to reveal the character’s inner heart. The non-interlaced eyes and distant eyes of the characters complete the paradox of love silently: the absence of love becomes a distance reachable by the soul, and women’s pure emotional support points to The real existence of love. In this great paradox, we know that love is suffering-but love is everything.
In the 111-minute movie, Dreyer used only 89 shots. Not only that, judging by the standards of traditional movies, almost nothing happened in this movie, but it aesthetically introduces the space of spiritual thought into a larger external space. Long dull shots and slow dialogue are the core content of the film. Long periods of blankness and pauses guide our perception beyond the need of narrative and explore the meaning of word breaks. Therefore, in the flow of narratives without clear intentionality, emptiness is not an anti-narrative emptiness, but a spiritual space needed to bridge the dialogue between images and texts to jointly create the truths they embody and tell. .
Dreyer focused on soul portraying while pursuing the reality of images. The close-up shot represented by "The Passion of Joan of Arc" opened a new perspective of film aesthetics. The separation between the facial expressions of the character and the surrounding environment makes the face a new kind of divine space. The face under the lens expands the nonverbal space of the image world. Invisible thoughts and beliefs are fighting between the eyebrows, and the divinity gradually becomes tangible. And condensed concretely in the depths of the frame.
In "Ge Chu", Delaire still continues this tension between "visible" and "invisible", mainly by following the stage-style position through the lens, canceling the depth of field to the greatest extent, and gazing. Shown in the pointed space.
The lens always moves slightly to follow the character's position, and then becomes fixed, almost one shot at a time. Returning to a reminiscence scene with the pianist Erlan, it was one of the few camera movements in the film. In the overexposed environment, Ge Chu couldn't wait to enter the room from the corridor. The camera quickly passed through the wall from the outside of the corridor to the inside, but after a few seconds of pause, the camera moved slowly. At this time, the real person gradually appeared from the back of the piano, and the effect sound of Ge Chu's heart was transformed into the active sound of the real piano. . It seems that it doesn't matter who the other party is, what's important is-this is Ge Chu longing and can't wait to welcome love. The anti-visual resistance lens from right to left seems to imply the end of this fruitless love.
In the realistic (and deliberately unrealistic) scenes, the inner activities of the characters are transformed into muttering, and the emotional rift appears as a dilemma where the two sexes cannot see each other. Although Ge Chu keeps telling her view of love, she still cannot be The man on the other side of the camera understands. The enclosed space in the interior and the break of communication between men and women form a strong oppression, and the men and women in the entire outdoor scene are almost forced into the flat space. Men and women are like flattened paper boxes. Squeezed in the foreground, such an intensely flattened space has never been able to achieve eye-catching intersection due to the shortened distance.
Ge Chu’s face and body are often cold and static, and his eyes are always pointed towards the distance (that is, Deleuze’s "absolute space" outside the field). This abstract symbol has long been buried in the film. Foreshadowing, exacerbating the Sisyphus-style tragedy. Although love does not exist in reality, why is it possible to appeal to and hope for true love at this time? For this, we must go back to those moments of emotional rupture.
All her lovers represent different aspects of male rule: the politician Gustav, the poet Lidman, the pianist Erlan, and the literary critic Axel Nigren. Ge Chu could not maintain a relationship with any lover, because of her special requirements for them-the yearning for pure love and intolerance to blemishes.
Ge Chu told the poet Lidman why she decided to leave him. In the bright flashback, she was sorting out the books in his apartment, and then Ge Chu found a sketch of Lidman scribbling her outline with a motto: "Women’s love and men’s work are from the beginning Enemy." She was furious, grabbed a picture of Lidman and tore it in half. This torn photo marked the irreversible end of their relationship, and the same action was repeated at the husband's a few minutes later. They have always been strangers, seeking warmth in physical comfort.
Men desire greatness in their hearts, in other words, money, power and honor. However, their secular success proves their emotional naivety and timidity. They regard the stability of their married life as a sufficient and necessary condition for a happy life, unconsciously The woman is regarded as a prey and a sort of inferior product to be enjoyed after chasing. The poet confessed that his life only existed in the three years when he loved each other, wishing to reproduce the buried good time, and Ge Chu keenly pointed out that the empty place in his heart is the vacancy of "love"-women are not afraid of love. Crazy, women don’t need the curse brought by "greatness". Women’s souls long for warm blood. Women understand that every second of love is suffering and sorrow, but they have no hesitation to burn their madness. And men don't have such courage (always ask for too much, pay too little), but they also put various reputations on themselves. Ge Chu must not be able to find a kind of equal passion to burn, so she took the initiative to extinguish the fire on the candlestick, completely cut off the luxury of love in her heart, and since then became company with transcendental love.
The most important metaphor of the film takes place in the banquet room. The tapestry depicts a forest landscape. In the center stands a naked woman, attacked by a group of hounds on all sides. This is the scene Ge Chu dreamed of the night before.
The theme of the tapestry is taken from the eighth story on the fifth day of the Decameron. Boccaccio tells the story of the noble gentleman Nastaccio in Ravenna. One day, while walking in the woods outside the city, Nastacho saw a terrible sight: a knight in armor chased a naked girl, and the knight's hound killed and bit her. The knight explained that because he fell in love with this ruthless woman, he committed suicide. Both of them are now sentenced to repeating this scene of hell every Friday-the knight punished him for sacrificial suicide, and the girl punished her for her cruel and ruthless heart. When Nastacho returned home, he decided to hold a feast in the forest and invited the woman he loved. Sure enough, the ghost reappeared, and she, who had never been emotional, immediately understood the moral of the story, and agreed in horror to marry Nastaccio on the spot.
Both the tapestry and Ge Chu texts took place at the banquet, but they formed completely different allegorical interpretations. Although the scene of violence on the tapestry and the scale are huge, the images it presents are extremely calm, completely different from the fierce pursuit described by Boccaccio. In Boccaccio’s case, this is a moment in the narrative of marriage. The scene of murdering a woman was first imagined by a man and then used by another man to facilitate an impossible marriage; in Delaier's case, this moment Becoming a symbol of the heroine's divorce promise is that the woman first sees all this, as the internal vision of the dream, and then confronts it directly in reality. The story presented in the tapestry is a portrayal of Ge Chu’s reasons for divorce. Ge Chu travels through the text through her dreams to understand the dangers of marriage itself, instead of being stared at by men and abiding by the marriage as in the old stories.
Although Ge Chu always admits his desire for men and intimacy, we can still regard Ge Chu as a feminist narrative of independent women, touching the true desires of women and achieving the solitary joy of sacredness. The woman on the tapestry did not try to escape or break free from the hound, but raised her left arm to her face, her eyes calm and motionless. At the moment when she was dismembered and died, she refused to see the scene in front of her. Instead, she showed a calm gesture of mourning, directing her gaze to the heart, just like Joan of Arc in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Refusal of language is the same as communication of images—here, the woman on the tapestry refuses to see her being torn and destroyed. This is a subconscious warning in the dream. For the rest of his life, Ge Chu followed the nobility of love and the uncompromising of the soul. This firm belief in love that surpassed the secular is comparable to Joan’s devotion to God, reducing tragedy to happiness in the pursuit of truth—another one A Dreyer-style woman-achieves great freedom in the soul with the unfreedom of the physical body in this world.
If the stage-style muttering has erected a barrier between "Ge Chu" and past movies, it is better to say that Dreyer is using another image to pursue the purity of psychological space until the viewer falls into contemplation together.
In any case, we can always feel the call of truth in Dreyer's works, and we are constantly thrown into the transboundary experience of "reality" and "reality". The heroism of inevitable tragedy originates from the pursuit of pure sublime. The protagonist in the image touches the boundaries of human beings by constantly seeking the truth of the other side, and then widens the boundaries amidst constant failures. The closed door is the last scene of the movie. That door keeps the audience away for a long time, and Ge Chu will taste the sweetness of love in the world beyond the door.
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