Living with the film for the 113th day
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Title: Dead Man (1995), Jarmusch
Nanjing, home
I watched two films in the evening, "The Exodus" and "Patterson", a Jarmusch night, one in 1995 and one in 2016. If there is a relationship between the two, it is something like "poetry". The "poem" of 20 years ago, in Jarmusch, is an image, and 20 years later, it becomes concrete, a part of life.
I've forgotten if I've seen Strangers, and Jarmusch's earlier Strangers in Paradise, which are all black-and-white films. In the 1970s, he also made black and white films, which basically drew a line with the real world. Later people who made black and white films were never for nostalgia, but for the purpose of creating dreams.
I don't remember the films, probably because it was impossible to understand what it was saying at the time. Whether I really understand it now, I am not very sure. But I can now say I like it a lot. Jarmusch always has an unspeakable sadness, but does not indulge in sadness, which makes people very fascinated. Robby Müller's photography, Neil Young's music, and Johnny Depp's eyes have won everything.
People see Stranger Things as an outlier of a "Western" or a "walking road movie" (actually a train, horseback ride, and boat ride). In my opinion, this is also a mirror image of the Western. In the west of Jarmusch, the whites of the industrial age became barbarians and cannibals, while the Indians knew poetry and had spiritual beliefs. The West is no longer a mythical world with heroes, but an empty and pale hell. When Depp came by train from Cleveland, we realized that the West was like an "afterlife."
Johnny Depp's weak image, according to Jarmusch himself, comes from Buster Keaton (the General is also sometimes considered a great Western) – "Keaton made sure their bodies were small and the landscape was horribly large". At the same time, he also believes that Abbas Chiarostami has been photographing the "weak feelings" of people in the landscape.
Depp's character is named William Blake, a name that also belongs to the Nineteenth-Century English Romantic poet, and the verses in the film are derived from his Naïve Prophecy:
"Every night, every morning, some people are destined to suffer. Every night, every morning, some people are destined to be happy. Some are destined to be happy, and some are destined to endure the endless night. ”
Unarmed, Blake, guided by the Indian "nobody", became a fugitive who wrote poetry with a gun. His direction was his own "place of spiritual return." When Nobody asked him where you came from, Blake replied honestly, Cleveland, who had been scolded by the Indians for being stupid. It's a bit like the Poetry Zen Gate Case. Jarmusch loves to strike machine edges, such as dialogue: "It's like looking at the stars on a boat and imagining why everything is moving while the ship is stationary." ”
Where is the "Place of Spiritual Return"? The movie just says, another world. In "The Exodus", the journey of life is just a journey to one death to another.
But Patterson is different, and I don't know if it's because of age, Jarmusch began to patiently depict the life of a poetry-loving bus driver. Jarmusch says it's based on a kind of rebellion: "a revolt against drama, a revolt against tortured women, a revolt against conflict, to behavior, to violence, to overactiveness — a revolt against all overstimulated films." So he made a particularly calm work.
In the first half of the film, the calm is a bit excessive. An amateur poet named Patterson lived in a small town called Patterson, where a poet once lived and wrote a poem called Patterson. Get up early every day, go to work, get off work, walk home, have dinner with your wife, then walk your dog, have a drink at a bar, and come home. It's always like this day after day. Patterson's only passion was to write his own poems in his notebook.
But there's no synopsis that can sum up the film, just as if we summarize our lives in two sentences, it must sound particularly boring and boring. Jarmusch's films tell us not to be fooled by this illusion. Every day, what we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, the temperature of our lovers touched by our hands, the strangers we meet on the road, and the messages that our hearts sense, all bring subtle and infinite richness to our days.
Of course, it reminds one of the famous poems written by William Blake, an English poet of the same name as the departed:
One flower, one world, One sand and one paradise, Holding infinity in the palm of your hand, Suddenly it becomes eternal.
"Patterson" even abandons the mysterious and philosophical, although the theme of the film is to write poetry, but Jarmusch abandons the poetry of the image itself, but uses the most bits and the most ordinary small things to accumulate life. The film filmed Patterson's seven-day life, every day from morning to night, in addition to going to work is "looking for excerpts". On the third or fourth day, Patterson meets a ten-year-old girl who reads a small poem he wrote, and he ponders all the way back home.
Jarmusch is so well filmed here—the film doesn't say anything, but we can feel something changing in Patterson's mind, maybe a collapse in his own confidence in writing poetry, because the girl wrote well, maybe even better than him.
Finally, on Saturday night, Patterson and his wife went out to watch a movie and came home to find their days and nights of accumulating poems, a notebook, bitten by the family's bulldog. The only passion in Patterson's life seemed to be destroyed, when a Japanese man (Masatoshi Nagase, who played Jarmusch's "Three Moons"), chatted with him about poetry, and gave him a blank notebook as parting, "sometimes blank, meaning more possibilities". It's the machine front again, but it's zen in life. Time began again on Monday, Patterson went to work again, began to write poetry again, and the days went on again.
When it comes to literature and art, no one has ever been able to pass ThroughJamusch. But whoever made this movie couldn't convince me, and whoever made it would probably be a particularly false story. But Jarmusch could convince me. Because there is no myth about literature and art, not mythological poetry and poets. Literature and art, or poetry itself, cannot change our lives, we still have to get up every morning to work, we should drive a bus to drive a bus, we should squeeze the subway or we have to squeeze the subway. But poetry, or literature, makes Patterson and the people around him live more interestingly.
If Jarmusch threw poetry to the dead, patterson returned poetry to life.
Week 16 On the road
Saturday, March 25, Dead Man (1995)
Sunday, March 26, Easy Rider (1969)
Wei Xidi lives as usual · WeChat: iweixidi
【2016.12.3 - 2017.12.2】
Patterson, hymn of life