First blog

Eternal and One Day is the final film in the Greek trilogy directed by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. Through a large number of poetic long shots, the film tells the story of a late poet with cancer who spends his last day traveling between reality and memory, exploring the true meaning of life and time. Angelopoulos conveyed to the audience the most primitive and authentic philosophical issues of life through the poetic lens language and the narrative technique of interweaving the false and the real.

The poet Alexander in later life lonely and desolate, continued to write poetry dream but couldn't find the right words to complete. His wife's death, the mother was dying, and daughter could not accept him, he gradually out of the world, and at last he contact with the world's only remaining was apartment across the new tenant responded to repeat what he put music. On the last day of his life, he found a letter his wife, Anna, had written to him more than 30 years earlier. The letter, full of affection and loneliness, touched Alexander's soul, and he wandered through the mist of a Greek winter with deep loneliness. He came across a boy fleeing from Albania, the boy enriched the reality and illusion of the intertwined 24 hours, the two met a variety of people and things, the final parting, the poet Alexander found: a day, is eternal.

Angelopoulos's preference and practice for long shots began when he started making films. The average length of all his films was over 60 seconds. In Eternal and a Day, the average length was 121 seconds (Zhang, 2012). One of the biggest charms of long shots is to internalize the expression of the shots into the life itself. In the natural passage of time, through more detailed observation, the changes in the inner world and environmental atmosphere of the characters are revealed. Too much editing can disrupt the natural flow of mental processes.Angelopoulos said ‘When I'm trying to find a connection between two shots, it always feels like I'm putting it together at random...For me, long shots are living organisms that have their own rhythm and breathing, their own logic and rhythm’ (Bo, 2003). Just like the last 7 minutes and 26 seconds shot in the film, starting from the door of the seaside villa slowly opened, the camera moved gravely and slowly from the attic of the villa to the first floor, then moved to the sea. The picture was always composed symmetrically. Every frame was like an oil painting. The wife walks up to Alexander, they all dance together, finally she leaves him alone facing the sea. The whole thing is like a full breath. Through a continuous and complete long shot, the director allows us to feel more freely and deeply the process of Alexander being finally redeemed and returning to himself.

A very important achievement of Anzelopoulos in film narrative is ‘the transcendence of linear space-time and the integration of triple time within the same lens, same space.’ Alexander end back to the beach, eye lens with Alexander to the picture on the right side of clockwise rotate 180 °- back - counterclockwise returning to Alexander, real time and space has been converted into memory space and time, the lens cut out of the window, through the difficult level advance, vertical drop into the route to move to a distant sea - level, mother's voice, and finally with a dream film ended in the beach full of memories. Through similar spatiotemporal narration techniques, the objective narration and subjective inner expression are simultaneously realized efficiently and poetically. What supports the grand themes of humanistic and historical philosophy in Angelopoulos's films is his keen control of the audio-visual factors such as time and space, composition and soundtrack in the super-long shots.Anzelopoulos' deep concern for the history of his country and his unique understanding of time and space give birth to the unique aesthetic effect of his works with a strong sense of nationality.

It seems that only poetry can achieve this poetic transformation of time and space, which is completed so cleanly and completely without any trace in the film of Angelopoulos. The poet director uses the narrative method of interweaving the false and the real to allow us to travel through time and space at will and make the emotion flow fluently.

The application of long shots makes the rhythm of the film more slow. Combined with the long, low music and poetic dialogue, the film is more like a direct lyric rather than a narrative. The director directly expresses his feelings about marriage, self, life and time to us through the beautiful long shots.In the world of Anzelopoulos's film, long shots are restrained and direct, calm and calm, but passionate and unrestrained. Each shot is a poem, which is arranged together to form a complete and moving poem.

The slow pace, the numerous long shots, the poetic dialogue and the internal monologue make the film feel like a lyric poem, which unfolds and folds gently. Angelopoulos always regards his films as poems, ‘I think my film world is like the world of poetry, in poetry, there is a kind of detachment, the elements of poetry are usually detached from the logic of the real world, but they form an internal logic of their own.’ (Bo, 2003). Angelopoulos integrated poetry and film, truly achieving poetic film expression.

Second blog

One of the most important issues in the films of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe in the post-cold war era is how to deal with a series of problems brought about by the dramatic changes of Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Early after the post-cold War era, the film had become the focus of international film festival in eastern Europe, many films have been banned for many years been discovered. At the same time in the socialist history, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe upheaval as the background of the film was taken out, the socialist history as a negative factor is the story of the essential elements, these films jointly construct a kind of imagination about the history and reality in eastern Europe. After entering the 21st century, although the socialist history is still the background that the film often refers to, the narrative style and presentation attitude have undergone obvious changes, and two new narrative paths have emerged: one is socialist nostalgia, the other is based on this critical reflection. The former is like the famous film Goodbye Lenin!.

On November 9, 1990, the Berlin Wall came crashing down.In 2003, a film called Goodbye, Lenin! attracted an unprecedented 5.7 million viewers. With the release of the film, the whole of Germany set off a wave of East German memories.East German Youth League insignia, old records, and even East German television news tapes were hot sellers (Zhang, 2008). A new term has been coined in response to this craze -- Ostalgie. Ostalgie is a miscombination of Osten (East) and Nostalgie, which expresses the nostalgia and yearning for the former East Germany (Han, 2012).

After Germany surrendered in 1945, four divisions of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union occupied Germany and its capital, Berlin.In 1949, Germany was officially divided into capitalist Federal Germany (West Germany) and socialist Democratic Germany (East Germany). Symbol has always been an object that scholars are keen to discuss. Its high condensation ability constitutes a unique and efficient way of memory preservation, and it is an irreplaceable important part of the mechanism of cultural collective memory ( Austerrit edited by Feng, 2012).

The different symbols of East and West Germany presented in the film, ranging from daily diet to lifestyle, indicate that different places and different conditions change. When mother waked up craving Spreewaldgurke cucumbers and, with them vanish, Mocca Fix coffee. It symbolized the overnight substitution of East German food products with colorful West German foods. In addition to food and drink, grocery stores have undergone a sea change, with fashionable and colorful clothes replacing the monochromatic East German uniforms.Also in the film, from a view of the mother saw big changes. When walked in the streets, as she knew nothing about the Nazi symbol of elevator, Sweden ikea advertising, west Germany car brand trading center let mother bewildered, a huge statue of Lenin in overhead, raised his right hand as in waved goodbye to her mother.

But movies also extend their tentacles to behavior.Firstly embodies in the greeting when they meet for the first time, alex came to work in the new "X" TV companies, from west Germany boss draw an east German people with a west German partner office, alex and Dennis a set, alex beforehand to shake hands, Dennis also hand after a moment's hesitation, after alex shake hands with every one, the original west German employees stay standing began shaking hands with each other, while the boss on the blank faces. Secondly, the daily chat content is also different. Mother and friends make comments about the factory. The sister's West German boyfriend was unresponsive to national policy and was keen on exotic dancing to his liking. The film reveals the difference between East and West Germany through the symbol of material or behavior in life. It is the contact and feeling of different symbols that can make the film perceive the behavior and habits of oneself. The film skillfully captures the different symbols of the series, which makes the whole story both funny and memorable. It is also the symbolic foreshadowing of the differences between East and West Germany that makes the film's memories of East Germany unfold slowly in the plot line.

Studies on cultural memory all emphasize the significance of the construction of collective identity, including national identity. ‘The association between the collective memory and the present of a certain group leads to its different attitudes towards culture, resulting in the construction of the value system by the social group in the sense of multiple layers.’ Since the end of the 20th century, "memory" has been a veritable hot topic.Maurice Habwach, a French social psychologist, introduced the concept of "collective memory" into the field of social psychology for the first time, emphasizing that it is specific in space and time, it is exclusive to a certain collective, and determines the collective's understanding of itself (Wang, 2007). However, tens of millions of individuals who have a common collective memory cannot complete the transformation of identity overnight. How to find their own position in the new environment is a problem for everyone.Many East Germans felt they were treated as second-class citizens, unfairly treated and even belittled by the West Germans.

Goodbye, Lenin! took Germany by storm as soon as it was released. Memory is an incomparable to focusing on the theme of the film to the memory of the Middle East west difference of symbolic image rendering, the details of the individual and the collective memory to the east German people built, and the thinking of social identity under the memory imprint is opened for the audience to understand this special period in Germany the window of the culture and society. It is about an east German family lies and ideal, is the review and reflection on the history and the anterior have hope. The discussion of such issues is not limited to the unification of East and West Germany, but is worthy of reference for how modern people view the collective memory of national culture in the changing world and how to face the impact of foreign culture.