Whether or not everyone can comprehend this "language" is an entirely different matter again. In art philosophy ac-cording to F. Schelling, which was later partially taken over by Hegel as well as Nietzsche, Adorno or Bloch, art as a new unity of spirit and nature is the unconscious carrier of the absolute. Art is not a science, and therefore must not be unique. It must provide "eternal interpretation", "without ever being able to say if this eternity originated in the artist or rests only in the artwork"4. In addition to this, art must be more than simple imitation of nature. It must come mostly from the artist's imagination. Finally, it must not pursue any practical purpose, i.e. it should be "useless" in a mundane sense. It should be an independent "being" in itself – art for the sake of art. This would be the purest and holiest form of art according to Schelling.

About the form of film

Art theory knows two forms: the closed and the open form. The closed form in film means a linear plot structure that works based on the rules of causality, with a beginning, middle and ending. The causative connections create a common theme that leads to the idea and the message of a work. This idea in turn can be a one-dimensional stereo-typical story, i.e. targeted solely on entertainment, or a multi-layered, e.g. psychological study or a piece of art set up as social criticism. Film mostly uses the closed form in classical mainstream and Hollywood cinema. The mainstream aes-thetic is strongly derived from or influenced by the ad-vertising aesthetic, i.e. the aesthetic is rather based on the product. There is a good reason why Hollywood uses "screening trials" in various provinces to review and pitch the film and its reception among a broad audience. The form and plot of the film is then "diluted" according to the audience's reaction to make it better consumable and thereby even more profitable. In the end, this makes the purpose of the work "less artistic" and turns it into a subject of consumer goods. From that point onwards, we can no longer speak of "film as art" but must speak of "film as goods". The watcher is, literally, only watching, since there will hardly be any intellectual challenges beyond a simple cognitive reflection. The idea will be served ready-made on a silver platter. The only thing expected of him (and the only thing left for him to do in the end), is to "bite". On the psychology of such films, Rudolf Arnheim wrote in "Film as art“: "Like a psychologist is able to uncover the structure of his patient's soul from an irrelevant dream story, these silly film stories offer material on the psychology of the average person. […] Such films offer two things for the audience to enjoy: they summon what is pleasant and good, as all people wish, and they show punishment of evil. As we will see, they work based on very petty bourgeois value standards. The fact that they nevertheless find global approval shows how widely spread the taste of petty bourgeois and backward thinking secretly is. […] Since people love what is bad and are innately stupid, someone who has the will to improve the world must enforce this will not only against external opponents but most of all against himself. This stupidity and evil in human nature is stroked by manufactured film; it makes sure that dissatisfaction does not discharge itself in revolutionary action, but dissipates in dreams of a better world. It serves what should be fought concealed in sugared pills."4

For Arnheim, such films are extremely reactionary and re-gressive. By offering the audience colourful happy-ending pills against the grey everyday life, they imprint the existing world view with its economic assumptions and order deeply in the human psyche. Even if the world was to end, it seems to be easier to survive the apocalypse than to optimise or change economic production processes.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the media have thus replaced the function churches have held for millennia as educators of the immature masses.

The open form, by contrast, has no linear narrative struc-ture. The entire construction is arbitrary and often turned into a whole from many fragments. Often, it resorts to provocation to wake the audience from its intellectual sleeping mode and to involve it actively in the work by intellectually challenging it.

Umberto Eco speaks of the "artwork in motion"7, since this is not only about multiple meanings, but also about "flexibility of form and lack of determination". Since the work and watcher are constantly in motion, the sense of essence of it all with the respective personal interpretations culminates in ambiguous interpretative plurality. It is like a "language of the spirit", since the perception coordinates for an open artwork, i.e. its causative and narrative reception, depends on the audience's intellectual horizon in the end. Peter Wuss took over the construct of an open piece of art from Umberto Eco and systematically expanded it in what is called the topic series6. Sense is not "integrated" in the film, but must be added by the onlooker, just as during everyday perception. In an open artwork, the final gist of the work should not be presented to the audience as if it was unable to think for itself. Out of sheer respect, it should be left to speak the last, concealed wisdom on its own.

The open form can be found in all spheres of art. In particular, it is known in music from composers such as Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, John Cage or in Jazz. In literature, James Joyce is known for his open art form. His novels "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" can be read in different manners because their depth and ambiguity tries to encompass the entire human universe.

In the area of film, the open form is very often found in auteur cinema and independent films that are not necessarily produced based on market rule. The film "The Forest" uses an open art form as well, since the film can be read ambiguously and in various manners. For example, there is a materialistic-economic interpretation level, a psy-choanalytical interpretation level and a philosophic-meta-physical interpretation level. Nevertheless, all possible levels are still connected by the film's idea.

If I was to name the idea of the film, it would be: "The eternal quest for purpose". Many are seeking without actually knowing what they are trying to find. Everyone is looking for something different, but in the end, we are all trying to find the same thing: ourselves.

Let me briefly explain the term "The eternal question for purpose": Since the days of Antiquity, there has been a wis-dom that applied philosophically and mystically alike. Ac-cording to it, not only man but everything in nature is made up of dialectic bipolarities: A kind of yin-yang. In philosophy, the problem of the duality of body and spirit continues to this day. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm saw human nature or psyche as having two sides: "being" and "having"8. This is represented by the two main protagonists in the film. "Being" is looking for the "essence" or, in other words, the "purpose of everything", while "having" prefers to strive for material security. While the two protagonists in the film still mechanically play their social roles in their usual envi-ronment, the bourgeois facades are dropped later in the forest, when they are abandoned to nature and the course of things. What is "lost" becomes more and more apparent. Somewhere deep inside, they both feel that they really know hardly anything. Just as they are lost in the forest, they are lost inside themselves. They are complete strangers to themselves and lost. Socrates said: "A life lived uncon-sciously is not worth being lived". In that case, physical death would be the only evident proof that we have lived. Dying "unborn" is the saddest fate a person can suffer. This way, the intellectual adventure through life morphs more and more into a suffering search for purpose.

Following the prologue, which is a miniature of the entire thing, there is the narrative that becomes a reflection on life. The narrative line splits at the time where the children disappear and the protagonists are lost in the forest. From then onwards, the setup breaks up as well. There are multiple fragments of "being". These fragments are "char-acter features" or "theorems" of the respective characters, their deepest characteristics regarding the world and social environment. These fragments are the inner portrait of a society – its psychogram.

The following names clarify how far form becomes content here: The form of fragmentary narration fits the spirit of our times and a globalised and yet scattered world.

Analogue, linear reception of life as something continuous or smooth is rarely possible anymore today. Human nature is setting out onto new terrain to which the old spirit still has to adjust. Since we are constantly interrupted by advertising, emails, WhatsApp messages or Twitter, our actions are now patched together out of many fragments. Our thinking is scattered everywhere. We are everywhere, except where we actually are. The acceleration of technology in the service of consumption and profit determines the speed of life in a perpetuum mobile of consumption, profit and continuous entertainment. Anyone who still wants to join in and secure a place in the sun has to hurry.

Burnouts, depression, estrangement, are side effects of this objectification of the world. From a certain point onwards, any real reference to life is lost. The world is mutilated and turns into a dead subject. The absurd thing about this is that the more we intensify life, the faster we turn our hamster wheels, the more we become estranged. Life intensity can only be increased up to a certain point, after which we reach a dimension of rapid standstill subject to a total immunity against any type of empathy, where nothing matters anymore. We shout into the forest, but no one can hear us. The world has long turned into a mere simulation of reality. Albert Camus says": "The absurd is born in light of the fact that people cannot help but shout into the world – and will only experience its silence." This fear that the world around us will disappear, that we lose every reference to the world, is ever-present in the spirit of today's time.9

When modernism is viewed as the revolutionary path into the whole, the utopically absolute, Post-Modernism is the lost path that splits up into multiple directions on a crossroads. The fragments scattered around the mind are waiting to be re-composed, similar to the rebirth of Platonism in Christianity or Antiquity in Renaissance10. Modernism may have been declared dead and withdrawn, but continues to live in the scope of Post-Modernism, though not as a whole or an independent spirit, but in the form of many overgrown pathways of a forgotten world.

Since our perceptions were analogue continuous linear and smooth receptions of narratives for millennia, what we experienced as the great depressive immaturity today is an evolutionary adjustment to the new, estranged circum-stances of the digital, fragmented lifestyle.

In the course of the film, the narrative dramaturgy leaves its horizontal course and therefore puts both the narrative and dramaturgy into a vertical perspective that strives to find the highest "self" and ends in this. The highest self is no longer placed next to the sphere of dialogue and text, however, but rather in the poetic abstraction of images and music.

Thus, art as abstract essence of life becomes the highest form of being. This highest position, no matter if we want to call it insight or self-realisation, however, we cannot hold forever. We will degenerate and must work ourselves back up to that height anew every time, like Sisyphus. The epilogue or the last poetic image brings us back to the prologue in a full circle, answering the question about the purpose of life with a counter-question: "To what extent does man actually exist if he can barely perceive the essence of being?"