Phase 3 is on!
Blueberry Institute Phase 1: No Reason! Without watching "The Voice of China", I was excluded by my colleagues!
http://n.cztv.com/news2014/1027300.html?clearcache=1
Blueberry Research Institute Issue 2: What kind of idol will Ning Zetao be "shaped"?
http://n.cztv.com/news2014/1032254.html?clearcache=1
What is war? It is not only the commanders who talk and plan, nor are they just medals and monuments, but also a disaster like a swamp devouring beautiful life. Historically, Europe has been the source of the two modern world wars, and it is also one of the regions that have the most profound feelings about the tragedy of war, so there is a rich reflection on war culture here. Director Lan decided today to open the back window of the defeated countries in World War II and explore whether they have reflected from the perspective of the movie. Movies are small, but whether directors admit it or not, it's also political. Even if you are not coerced, you will actively attach yourself. Although reflection is a matter for all mankind, the film does not have to bear this responsibility. But there is no doubt that the three former Axis Powers had a clear difference in their descriptions of World War II after their defeat, as can be seen from their films.
After World War II, Germany was in ruins, and German cinema also started from "zero point" and began a difficult trek. How to look at the black history that has just passed; how to express the relationship between the current society and history, etc., has become the first embarrassing question in front of everyone. German filmmakers at this time still relied on government incentives and funding, and many directors were reluctant (or afraid) to publicly express their political leanings. Therefore, german films in this period rarely touched on the theme of the "Third Reich", and even if they did, most of them focused on "war is so cruel, afraid!" "Pan-humanitarian lyrically.
After the 1950s, Germany's economy and national strength grew rapidly, the middle class rose rapidly, the right-wing conservative forces were weakened, and the public opinion environment became loose. In September 1951, Federal German Chancellor Adenauer publicly apologized to the victims of the Nazi regime and called for "moral and material compensation", kicking off Germany's "culture of confession"; 20 years later, the famous "Kneeling in Warsaw" pushed the culture of confession to the peak.
In the past two decades, there have been countless German literary and philosophical works on historical review and Nazi criticism, and filmmakers have not been idle, and more and more directors have focused on the "Third Reich". Bohart Vicky's "The Last Bridge" and "The Longest Day"; Wolfgang Stoed's "Bazaar" and "The Journey of gentlemen" were all filmed in this period. The former depicts the meaningless resistance of German soldiers at the end of World War II; the latter shows the devastating effects of war on the lonely individual.
The real climax began with the rise of new German cinema. In 1979, Schrondorf made Glass's novel The Tin Drum into a movie, which caused a huge reaction. The film depicts a dwarf who, from the age of three, is determined not to grow tall, and what he sees and hears in 1924-1945 retrieves a process of totalitarianism from the rise to the decline of centralization from a sharp and subtle perspective.
"Tin Drum" puts the abnormal state of the country on the screen, showing a rare calmness and sincerity
Fassbender, another new film director, rarely touched on the war itself, but most of his films tried to connect World War II with post-war Germany. Four of its most famous films: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Laura, Veronica Foss's Desire, and Lily Marlene fall into this category— and you'll find that all the tragedies of the heroines of the four films boil down to the tragedies of a country that was once ruled by the Nazis.
In 1993, The Battle of Stalingrad became the epitome of German anti-war cinema. Director Joseph Wilsmer focuses on the Wehrmacht soldiers, who go from the initial excited bets, to the fear of the coming of winter, to the desperate discovery that "we cannot win", without too much narration of the fierce confrontation of the steel torrent, but from the perspective of the Germans, they recreate the hell of war.
As a digression, the film makes Germany the only country to show the enemy in the film (the pro-people Soviet Red Army that appears in the film).
Many people look at the Germans with seriousness, introversion and steadiness, "even if they know that the whole world will be destroyed tomorrow. Today I still have to plant my vines", a national character that sets the tone for the seriousness and sincerity of Germany in the face of history. In the decades after the war, Germany's understanding of the history of the Nazi period, including World War II, gradually matured, and self-denial and introspection made Germany undergo a metamorphosis in pain and win the respect of the world. In the square of Berlin, Germany, there is still a solemn statue of the Soviet Red Army.
admire! admire! The coolness of the Germans is really not covered.
During World War II, there were countless "legends" of the Italian army. For example, in a battle in North Africa, Italy fired two or three minutes to wave the white flag to surrender, and then the British asked the reason, the Italians answered with a straight face: the ammunition box was not opened with a crowbar... In the entire battle involving 90 million casualties, Italy's presence is very low, as if it is responsible for funny and adjusting the atmosphere – although this is most likely a partial interpretation. But as one of the "Axis of Evil", it is also an indisputable fact that Italy paid the least cost of war. After the end of World War II, due to the needs of the Cold War layout, the United States promoted the "Marshall Plan for the Revitalization of Europe", and Italy became the largest beneficiary country, thus starting a 20-year high-speed economic growth.
It is probably from this kind of snickering that Gabriel's "Mediterranean". The film is about eight Italian soldiers with a mule ordered to garrison a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. The local area is like an isolated paradise, and the residents of the town do not feel the atmosphere of war at all. Soon after, the army also forgot their mission, mingling with the townspeople, holding football matches as a pastime, or painting murals for the village church, or pursuing love, and so on. It was not until near the end of the great war that a warship came to pick them up and returned home that they were shocked to learn that they were reluctant to leave this paradise on earth.
It seems difficult to characterize this film as a "war reflection film" because it has not shown the cruelty of war from beginning to end, and only a few soldiers have escaped from war, including the "spring dream" of a donkey. Who's to say that this is not a different kind of reflection, anyway, Italians can do anything...
For Italian filmmakers after the 1970s, war is cruel, dreamy, or flour after all, and it must be added with a little more than realistic romance to be pasta! - Although "romantic" is a neutral word, it can also be extremely cruel. The internationally acclaimed "Beautiful Life" is a model. A Jewish father and son are sent to a Nazi concentration camp, and the father tricks his son into playing a game in which a person who follows the rules of the game ends up scoring 1,000 points to get a real tank home. All along, my son thought that concentration camp torture was a game like "run, tank" or something.
Every time I saw this scene, Director Lan's tears were all rattled!
Of course, Italian filmmakers are not always "unorthodox", and have also made many deep, deep and in-depth war reflection films. For example, the war comedy "Seven Beauties" portrays the "war reflection" of small people deep into the marrow. Looking back, neorealist anti-war films are even more numerous. At that time, Italy was also one of the most active capitalist countries in Europe, and most of the relevant films came from the camp of left-wing directors, such as Rossellini's "Rome, the Undefended City", "Guerrillas", "German Zero", Bertolucci's "The Man Who Goes with the Flow" and so on. In addition, although many people regard Pasolini's "120 Days of Sodom" as synonymous with heavy taste, another important label for it is actually "the exposure of the evil rule of fascism." Italians are generally not very serious, and they are not people seriously.
Like egg fried rice, Japan's view of World War II was the simplest and most complex. Unlike Germany and Italy, which believe in God, Japan in the East did not have a deep national "sense of judgment of the last days"—repentance was a baptism before seeing God for Europeans (such as the kneeling of Warsaw); for The Orientals, repentance was confession of mistakes, confession was surrender, and surrender was submission. During his visit to China, Tanaka described the war of aggression against China as "adding trouble" to China, causing Zhou Enlai's dissatisfaction. And the characterization of these four words seems to be arbitrary, but in fact, it is particularly cunning. In fact, "war of aggression" is a sensitive word in Today's Japan, and successive Japanese prime ministers have rarely publicly used it to refer to World War II, otherwise it is easy to cause an uproar. They mostly refer to "colonial rule".
As a "top student" in Asia, Japan was the first to promote democratic universal suffrage. But 60 years later, the late-developing South Korea has already achieved many overlapping regimes; Japan has only been in August 1993 for less than ten months; and in the three years that began in 2009, both times, and both have failed. To some extent, Japan is not a democracy in the true sense of the word, but a highly simulated democracy, and it is the supporters of the War II war criminals who firmly grasp its economic and political lifeline – in contrast to the situation in Germany, where the country's rulers are almost all anti-fascists.
In fact, there are a large number of anti-fascist people in the Japanese folk, no wonder Japanese filmmakers, in the public opinion environment there, it is almost impossible to make movies "freely". In 2014, there was a "Forever 0" in Japan that grossed extremely high, but it was not a movie about same-sex love, but a movie that kneeled and licked the Japanese kamikaze and shamelessly wanted to "wash white". Although this makes us as Chinese people very angry, we think on the other hand: if we do not kneel and lick, the current industrial environment of such a pattern will be difficult to achieve, and I am afraid that we will not even be able to get investment.
Well, Shinzo Abe has watched "Forever 0" and said, very moved.
Of course, Japan also had anti-war movies, but almost invariably they said, "The war is too bad, which has caused trouble for the Yamato people"; or "Atomic Bomb Division, war maniacs are terrible (generally referring to war maniacs all over the world)". Even Akira Kurosawa, who has participated in the underground activities of the Communist Party, is no exception ("Rhapsody in August", "Record of the Living", "Eight Dreams"). Such movies almost grab a handful, such as Ichikawa Kun's "Burmese Harp", Shinto Kanehito's "Son of atomic bombs", Hara Kazuo's "Forward, Divine Army!" "Meat Bomb" by Kihachi Okamoto, "Dancing Army Flag" by Shinji Fukasaku, "Little Home" by Yoji Yamada, "Wangxiang" by Kei Kumai... In fact, almost all of Japan's famous directors have made similar films, and they have become the exclusive film genre of "Japanese humanitarian and political correctness".
Others, or focus on the efforts of the Postwar Japanese people, are full of positive energy. Or take the pre-World War II Japan, pinning on a beautiful era of ancient folk customs. In 2013, animation master Hayao Miyazaki filmed the masterpiece "The Wind Rises". There are no crazy monsters, no bizarre worlds, no absurd adventures, just a little engineer trying to live for his dreams and love.
The sentence "Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre" in Paul Valery's long poem "Graveyard by the Sea" (although everything is dusty, but as long as the wind blows, people still have to try to survive)" repeatedly appear, setting a fresh and bland emotional tone for the whole film. Everything is so beautiful that it's easy to forget that the protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, has a special identity: the developer of the Japanese Zero fighter. In the protagonist's dream, the big white birds that soar freely in the blue sky will fall in the war. Why the man who makes the tools of murder? The master replied, "I'm not sure if Horikoshi Jiro should take on some kind of responsibility, just because he was born in that period... I decided I wanted to shoot a work that showed people who had done their best for their dreams. There is a saying about it: "The individual is small in the face of the times, but no matter how small it is, it is also part of politics." Even if you don't actively cling to it, you will be trapped in it. "What the artist thinks is simplicity.
The 1970s was a diplomatic honeymoon period between China and Japan, and there were three successful japanese films in the same era, namely "Human Witness", "Instrument of Sand" and "Hungry Strait", although the story and theme crashed.
"Hungry Strait" expresses the good and evil of human nature in only a moment, and it is difficult to explain human actions clearly.
What they all have in common is that there is a criminal who wants to erase the past and start over, and all three criminals have been "troubled" by World War II, with a difficult history. The infinite amount of sympathy that the creators have given them represents the voice of Japan to some extent - why can't we cut off the past and become a good person again?
As people often say, history is written by the victors. Obviously, the merits and demerits of World War II cannot be clearly distinguished between "allies" and "Axis powers". The Soviet Union, which was more brutal than the Nazis at the beginning of World War II, the United States, which sold weapons and sheltered war criminals, Poland, which was belligerent and self-defeating, France, which helped Germany send Jews to the crematorium ("Round-up", "Sarah's Key") ... Even the small religious center, the Vatican, was more than just a spectator of events (secretly assisting the Nazis in their escape).
The seeds of evil don't just grow in a few countries or even a few people, so reflect on it, so let's all come together!
"Sarah's Key", filmed in France, is set against the backdrop of the "Winter Arena Incident" and unveils the darkest page in modern French history.