The experimental film I want to analyze is Balance(1989).
The film’s figurative elements are simple: boards, boxes, fishing rods, people, and the eternal space. They seem to have nothing to do with each other, yet they maintain a delicate balance. The film begins with five people standing on a suspended board. They stand back to back in different directions while the board balances. Presently, one of the men caught a box from under the board. The weight on his side increased, so the other four men went to the other end of the board to balance with him. Then one of the four took a step back, his balance was broken, and the box slid towards him. The next five men began to play for the box. Finally, with a slap in the face, the five men shook hands over the box, upsetting the balance. After some fighting, there was only one man left, facing the box at either end of the slab. He ends up suspended in nothingness, unable to satisfy his desires any longer.
This balanced space is set in a timeless space, and the overall environment is represented by cool colors of blue and gray. There was no warmth in the light. In this space, all “people” have blank faces, dull movements and the same intelligence, the only difference is the number behind them. They are more like “products” of industrial society than “people”. They have no emotion, no speech, no expression, so the sound effect of the whole film can be almost described as dead silence. Only the sound of boards. The elements used by the director mainly focus on a single object in the picture, cold color and dead sound effect, forming this eternal space, emitting eternal nothingness and depression.
The use of elements in the whole film is relatively simple and simple, but the theme and emotion the director wants to express is far more than that. First of all, outward balance does not equal inner balance. People’s hearts are never balanced, they are filled with curiosity, desire, selfishness and other emotions. So in the event of any single stimulus from the outside, it’s out of control. People in desire and greed under the stimulus, step by step to break the balance, conflict. Secondly, it is inevitable that the balance will be broken. People are in the eternal space, there is no ideal and hope, the spiritual world is empty, so it will be easy to be tempted by an old box. Finally, combined with the creative background and historical factors at that time, in 1989, the Eastern European upheaval, the Berlin Wall was about to be torn down. Many of the people inside East Berlin could not bear the oppressive conditions and fled outwards, climbing toward the so-called freedom. When the Berlin Wall was built, according to historical sources, “the barbed wire was slightly to the inside of legal GDR territory to ensure that East Germans who had crossed the wall could be shot.” We can see how oppressive the social background was.
In short, although the film is about “balance”, but also about the lack of “balance”. The theme involves the greed and selfishness of human nature, social order and moral rules, profit distribution and resource integration and so on. The director conveys his deep philosophical views in the form of experimental films.
