转自smz的一篇影片分析

The narrative may be summarized thus. A middle class girl is put to work on the streets by her boyfriend-pimp. She meets a negro, falls in love. After fleeing from the pimp’s wrath, they are married. They arrive home to find the pimp awaiting them. She shoots the pimp, and their love triumphs. One’s first viewing of the film may not, however, seem to match up to this description, since Straub has meticulously broken the film down into stylistically autonomous fragments. There are twelve shots in the film, and they form seven units which have, at first sight, little to do with each other. The first unit comprises the titles, which appear over graffiti, among which we discern the statement, “Stupid old Germany, I hate it over here, I hope I can go soon, Patricia.”

The second consists of a long tracking shot (the first half of which is silent, the second accompanied by Bach’s “Ascension Oratorio” ). This shot runs interminably down the prostitutes’ row of Munich. The third section consists of an entire three-act stageplay, which lasts ten minutes, shot in a single take. The fourth consists of a thriller-style chase. The fifth is a wedding ceremony. The sixth is a mystical slow pan that commences on an empty field, until magically a car is conjured out of nothing, and the camera seizes on it. The seventh segment is the shooting sequence, preceded by verses from St. John of the Cross. Only this final segment, the film’s transcendental, is shot in a style that we would recognize as pure Straub. The preceding six are rather a meditation upon the other stylistic possibilities of the cinema and in their sequential organization they constitute the history of that cinema. The mood of the film’s development, both in terms of its plot and its aesthetic meditation, is crystallized by the tonal difference between the first and last images. The darkness and gloom of the Landsbergerstrasse is transformed into the shimmering light of the sky and trees of the final shot.

In what sense do I mean THE BRIDEGROOM ... constitutes the history of the cinema? The scene on the Landsbergerstrasse, like the image of the graffiti, is absolutely non-interpretive—the camera simply records reality, like Lumière did. (The shot’s very darkness implies a “fallen” Lumière, though.) Then, through variations of the car’s pace of movement and the unexpected movement of another car on the street, the camera discovers its power to manipulate our emotions, expectations. Introducing Bach on the sound track further transforms our response—it contradicts the visual reality before us. A dialectic of sound and image is established.

Then the stageplay commences. But rather than a production of Bruckner, it is a critique of Bruckner, Straub having concentrated the original text into its essential elements. These elements are those of bourgeois drama. What Straub leaves us with is the empty shell of melodrama, with its intrigues and sexual games. The facade of psychological observation is stripped away. The deliberateness of cues is emphatically exposed as when at a point of revelation, someone enters to thwart that revelation. The actors mechanically adopt “meaningful” postures, exposing the manipulative mode that we know Straub decries. The actors come and go through the two doors of the set like so many robots—the empty ritual of bourgeois drama is mercilessly exposed—and intelligently so. Straub’s attack is not negative. One senses that in clearing out these relics of theatrical practice, he is actively ushering in a new style. The long take that envelopes the play is both a reference to the earliest films, those static “filmed plays” that comprised the early history of film (and the early years of “talkies” ), and Straub’s critical observation of that style. This critical attitude is enforced partly by Straub’s characteristic diagonal camera angle which, in its very difference from the flat-on angles of the early Edison and Méliès films, emphasizes Straub’s (and our) critical stance. One of the lines from Bruckner’s play that Straub retains is from Goethe: “Even in science, nothing is known, everything is to be done.” And the same, of course, applies to cinema.

The fourth segment of the film comprises five shots. The negro, James, leaves Lilith’s apartment; he is followed by the pimp when he drives away. They chase across a bridge, by a gorge, up a scrubby hill. The sequence seems to bear no relation to what has preceded it—the stageplay. But the end of the stageplay consisted of Frede’s decision to put his girl friend to work on the streets. And Frede is played by the same person who plays the pimp (Werner Rainer Fassbinder, another figure of the German theatrical and cinematic avant-garde). The continuity of person forces us to realize the continuity of narrative, elliptical though if may be. The chase sequence constitutes Straub’s examination of the thriller genre. His sense of angles and lighting is correct. For instance, when James leaves the apartment and comes to his car, Straub’s camera is by the pimp’s car—thus setting protagonist and assailant in conflict in the frame. Again, when the cars chase across the narrow bridge, Straub’s camera sits at the end of the bridge, with the car and its headlights rushing dramatically at the lens. But Straub’s critique of the mode is enforced by the way he evacuates each image of all the tension it has accrued. He holds the shot way past the theoretical cutting point. In the first instance, where an “action” director would cut when the cars moved off, Straub simply holds the shot until all movement has disappeared. In the second, Straub actually undercuts the mode during the chase. As the first car comes off the end of the bridge, Straub pans to follow its dramatic course. But instead of then panning back to pick up the arrival of the second car with all the dramatic tensions implicit in such a conventional procedure, he simply holds on the now motionless first car until the second one’ finally arrives in the frame of its own accord. In other words, throughout this sequence of images, Straub, while appearing to conform to the thriller mode, actually evacuates the impact from each shot, thereby exposing the overtly manipulative strategies demanded by this style of filmmaking.

After the thriller, or Hollywood, came the resurgence of documentary and particularly cinema-verité. And this is the mode of the fifth sequence: a long single take of the wedding ceremony between James and Lilith. And, as the cinema-verité movement discovered for itself, the mode fails to penetrate to any essential truths. This at least is what Straub suggests by his decision to depict the wedding ceremony with such literal objectivity. It is both boring and theatrical—linking it in fact to the earlier stageplay sequence. Unlike Straub’s documentarism, this one doesn't bear the seeds of its own transcendence.

And then comes the near-mystical sixth segment: a long shot of a field, a few buildings in the far distance, and trees. After a few moments, almost miraculously there appears a vehicle, right out of the center of the image. The camera pans slowly to hold it central in the frame, until finally the car almost fills the screen. This astonishing shot, in its context within this intensely metaphorical film, quite simply represents the rebirth of cinema, movement coming out of stasis.

And so to the final, seventh segment: James and Lilith address each other in the language of St. John of the Cross. James has come to, “Buy the bride free who has served under a hard yoke.” Thematically this sums up the development of the narrative—the freeing of a prostitute, and it foreshadows the shooting of the pimp, lending humanist authority to the killing. After the killing, their love is fulfilled, and the camera can, to the strains of Bach’s “Ascension Oratorio” , track into the ecstatic, shimmering final image of sky and trees. But Lilith is not the only prostitute to be freed. The other is art, specifically film art, which in the course of these 23 minutes has evolved through its principle historical stages, until reaching its liberation in the materialist presentation that is Straub’s own. The killing of the pimp is metaphorically the killing of German’s decadent cultural heritage—the specifically German implication being raised in the graffiti that opened the film: “Stupid old Germany, I hate it over here, I hope I can go soon...”

Straub has laid “stupid old Germany” to rest. The cinema has been liberated from its stifling conventions, and the film’s movement from the sordid opening to the celebratory close cements the significance of this new beginning. Certainly THE BRIDEGROOM, THE ACTRESS, AND THE PIMP is one of Straub’s most difficult films, the near total elimination of the narrative proving a major obstacle for many viewers. (Martin Walsh)