剧情介绍
This strange film is a made-up documentary, detailing the future history of Denmark in four related but discrete storylines. In one, the refusal by a group of shipyard workers to work on ships carrying atomic warheads leads to sympathetic strikes around the country, and a general strike threatens. In another, the future relationship of the Common Market nations to various defense pacts such as NATO is discussed by a group of high-ranking national representatives. The third and fourth stories are closely intertwined: after a leftist group kidnaps the Danish Secretary of State, the police stretch the law as far as it will go in order to respond to the threat. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
‘Evening Land’ opened in Copenhagen and four other Danish cities, as well as in Stockholm, on February 18, 1977. The reaction by most of the Scandinavian critics was hostile, and the film was attacked primarily for “lacking a political base.” The Marxists expressed their dislike because the film supposedly sympathized more with the ‘terrorists’ than with the workers. One reviewer’s query - “When will Peter Watkins learn to stop frightening the public?” - echoed the sentiments of most of the conservative papers.
Instead of dwelling on these negative reviews, I again turn to Joseph Gomez for his evaluation of ‘Evening Land’ (‘Peter Watkins’, Twayne Publishers, 1979 : “Those familiar with Watkins’ Scandinavian films might at first perceive Evening Land as a step backward in his cinematic development. Gone, for instance, are the complex sound-track overlays, the careful manipulation of silences, and a multilayer method of psychological investigation. It might be more appropriate, however, to consider the film as a step to the side - a parallel development of his style. In fact, Watkins stresses that he deliberately attempted to break away from what he achieved in Edvard Munch in order to establish, in Evening Land, a structure of confrontation chiefly through dialogue. The emphasis is also in directness, and thus Watkins, for the first time in his professional career, avoids the use of an off-screen narrator or a television interviewer who becomes a major character in the film. Although stylistically different from much of his other work, one of the purposes of Evening Land remains the same. Watkins again attempts to force his audience to re-evaluate film and television structures by extending them beyond their conventional, present-day “response-oriented” uses. Also, in this film, especially through the use of Martin the journalist, who loses his job as industrial correspondent, Watkins tries to alert his audience to the dangers of the misuse of media in today’s world. The great achievement of Evening Land rests with the dialectic patterns that Watkins evolves through his editing. Though the film gives a "multifaceted newsreel" impression, its structure is meticulously controlled through the editing. Watkins' dialectical organization is especially complex because it is sustained throughout the entire film, and even if one employs Sergei Eisenstein's A + B = C shot structure to analyze the editing process, the constantly shifting nuances in each term of the equation alter the meanings of the terms even within the same shot. As such, generalizations become almost impossible. The strike committee, for example, does not represent a consistent position at any one time. It is made up of numerous views which are continuously changing, and thus the terms of the dialectic shift every time a new juxtaposition is posed. These permutations multiply throughout the film, and as such, its very structure comes to reflect the difficulties of coming to understand the pressures and implications of events which affect us today. Of course, the film does not propose any kind of dogmatic solution. Watkins wa