Fear of scarcity and inflated power

Sidney 2022-03-09 08:01:34

(Text / Yang Shiyang)

When Chinese audiences see this "Female Teacher", they always have a wonderful feeling, a little kind and familiar memory, stirring the lingering and indescribable sadness. In a way, we're not watching the movie, we're staring at something we've all been through. We watch them, we think of ourselves.

"The Female Teacher" has a unique style, weird and humorous, and behind the light and loose expressions are unspeakably heavy themes. Repression with nowhere to escape, diffuse evil, arrogance of power and weakness and helplessness on a personal level when all private life is in the hands of power. It's all condensed into one classroom, several families, one poll. It knows the book at a glance, and people can see the whole leopard at a glance.

This is Czechoslovakia in 1983. Female teacher Damari came to teach at this elementary school. When taking the call, she asked her classmates to report their parents' occupations. This wonderful and light opening, only those who have experienced it will have an instant insight into the purpose behind this act. This is an undisguised "bribery" foreplay, a kind of trivial corruption that is not surprising. The expression and demeanor of the teacher, Damari, are performed with extreme precision, her performance is upright, and her face is mixed with seriousness and kindness, as if she made the children do everything for granted. Soon, the parents used their specialties and division of labor for their own use. Some ran errands for themselves, some helped repair electrical appliances, and some bought more sticks for themselves. She pretended to beg, pretended to thank, and then silently wrote down those rejections. The names of parents who serve themselves, and in the end, reckon it all on their children. Let the grades of those students plummet, humiliate their self-esteem in all directions, and pronounce their bleak future in a resolute tone.

Obviously, "The Female Teacher" doesn't just want to show the low quality of an individual, it quietly depicts the environment that stimulates and exacerbates the evil secretion of human nature. The overall scarcity and the cramped living conditions make the power become arrogant. This small school environment is enough to symbolize everything in the wider world. When people can't shake it, they can only choose to crawl.

The interesting thing about this story is that everything the teacher asks the parents to do is "little things". You feel that it's not worth fighting hard, and you feel unwilling to resist if you don't resist. Compared with specific "things", it makes more sense. What people suffer is actually the deprivation of dignity. She seems to be showing weakness, but in fact she is bossy.

On the one hand, parents educate their children to be honest, fair, and trustworthy—that is a common consensus in human nature, and a norm in human moral instinct. However, in contrast, in this small reality, everything deviates from it. Those who preach, bribes, and those who obey get benefits; those who are innocent, those who resist are degraded. In front of the ignorant and pure children, this scene of division makes parents who still have dignity feel guilty. Those adults who wandered in the filth, just accept their fate, but seeing their children still unable to escape from such a fateful vat, they have no intention of witnessing a spiritual strangulation.

From the very beginning, "The Female Teacher" transitioned again and again between the parents' party where they voted to dismiss the teacher and the daily classroom. The parent-teacher meeting is actually the climax of the story, but because it is cut, cut, retraced and connected again and again, the climax is also consciously delayed and delayed. Adults sit in the seats of children, and it becomes a spiritual overlapping of images. Those children, if they continue to walk in such an environment, will eventually become the appearance of this group of parents, some people in suits, but morally Lost, greedy and shameless, they recognize that set of unspoken rules, obey, enforce, reinforce, and integrate into it; while the other group of people, poor, stubborn, and cowardly, have nothing to do with all injustice. Parents are divided into two camps on whether to dismiss teachers. Some see themselves as vested interests, while others see themselves as deprived, but overall, all of them are victims of the system? But who can say out loud that he never participated in and condoned the system?

It was the most moving scene when people walked back silently and signed their names on the joint letter. Even though everyone had succumbed to fear, they still chose to resist in the end. The director is not an optimist, and he is not willing to give people a happy and perfect ending. He makes the teacher who has been defeated here change a place to re-manage everything he is familiar with. Of course, the system itself is not changed, how can the specific individuals attached to it change. Toxins are diffuse, persistent and deep. But no matter how deep the fear, depression, threat and despair are, the pursuit of purity, justice and fairness in people's hearts has never been absent. It may be suppressed, it may not be expressed, or it may be diluted, but it will never disappear.

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