Reprinted from "Fantasy Class" July 22, 2017
Deleuze's film theory is rooted in Bergson's theory of time and memory, and further builds on Bergson's three views on motion: the whole and the whole, the arbitrary moment and the particular moment, the space of motion and the process of motion. Demonstrate the theory of moving images and temporal images.
The film "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle" was shot with 4K+3D+120 frames in order to make the film clearer, breaking through the traditional projection format. In addition to the embodiment of technical philosophy, the content of the film is also.
First discuss the concept of the whole and the whole. According to Bergson's theory, the whole is fixed and presented, it is a closed system, presented as static and rigid, while the whole is the connection of countless wholes, it is open .
For example, using a cup to collect water, the water received in the cup is a whole, but this cup of water is not isolated, it comes from the faucet, and the faucet is connected to the water pipe, and more densely intertwined water pipes make up our city. water supply system. Or from a chemical point of view, the water in the cup will evaporate. It is composed of water molecules. After forming rain and snow, it returns to the ground. The water molecules are also connected to the sun and the universe. This connection is endless and open. of the whole. And the same goes for people.
Deleuze interprets the whole in terms of "relationship": "It is a relation of a very object nature...and at the same time expresses a spiritual or psychological existence....relationship does not belong to the object but to the whole...the whole is a The totality of relations.” [1] The whole is connected to the whole, and the movement changes the quality of the whole, just like how long it takes for water in a glass to melt sugar, the changing whole is within the duration, and the movement changes the quality of the whole , is related to the duration of time, spirit and will, the process of waiting for the sugar to melt, the attention, patience, memory, and emotion involved are duration itself.
Deleuze came to a conclusion that what "fixed section + abstract time" projects is a kind of closedness, while real movement to concrete duration is a kind of opening of the whole. Based on such a theoretical analysis of motion, he concluded three points. The locking system referred to by the whole is like the frame of a movie. Adjusting the position of the object in the whole set and connecting the movement between the whole and the whole is equivalent to the lens, and finally in the movement The ever-changing totality or duration relies mainly on montage, "to determine the totality through joints, deletions, and misconnections" [2] .
Based on the above theory, this is further discussed with the movie. The movie "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle" uses the first-person perspective to fully present the protagonist Billy's experiences on and off the battlefield through cross-flashbacks. view. If the choice of his final return to the battlefield is put aside, many viewers can feel that the war is just a shell, and it has many coincidences with the split personalities and contradictory choices encountered in personal growth. For the already controversial "war", life and death and politics are often discussed behind it, but for soldiers, they have their own "ego" reasons for choosing to go to the battlefield. The reason why Ang Lee's choice of angle and theme can resonate with ordinary people does not rule out that some viewers have extended their brains to the "battlefield" image.
Everyday life is a state of "disorder and confusion", "rupture, disharmony and disharmony". Whether it is the whole and the whole or the whole and the whole, all its parts are interconnected by countless "lines". The film is composed of single shots, which are connected by the "whole", and Billy's halftime show clip and the war clip can be regarded as "whole" respectively, but under the montage editing, it achieves the duration of time and forms the whole.
For example, at the end of the halftime show, the stage fireworks blasted into the air with a loud noise, and the camera turned to the battlefield at this time. The loud noise was like the explosion Billy had heard on the battlefield, and this perception reminded him of the fierce battle and the death of the squad leader. Such memory is duration, it is not a stop in the present, but connects the past, the present and the future, is an open whole, and has infinite extensibility in time and space. The war scene is presented on the screen as a memory image. This is the image in Billy's mind, and it is also the visible image presented by the director to the audience. However, some are invisible, which requires the audience to "click and stop" the shot. Differentiation and Brain Compensation.
During the viewing process of the audience, that is, when the audience is present, the fantasy and memory brought by the image, that is, the movement of thinking is going on. Even at the end of the movie, the imagination in the brain does not stop abruptly. Here, the film as a whole, the thinking image of the human brain is the "duration" of time, and it is also an endless whole. Although the audience has not experienced war, due to the unique perspective and keen capture of the film, the audience can easily find the resonance between themselves and the protagonist through memory and imagination, and substitute their personal experience into the film.
Maybe the "battlefield" in the film is a job, a city or an emotion, they don't metaphysically consider how much benefit such a decision will bring to human development, even if it seems absurd results There is also a personal and rational selection process behind it. Whether it is escape or forced, or fate, this is the imagination space that the movie can provide to the audience.
In increasing the audience's sense of substitution and imagination, the "pure audio-visual situation" of the film is worth mentioning. Deleuze mentioned the key "pure audio-visual situation" when discussing the time-image. Both classic films and modern films are composed of audio-visual symbols. Visual and auditory symbols, that is, the situation itself expressed in the film, are attached to the perception and movement of the characters. Although the audience cannot grasp such a pure audio-visual situation through actions, they can use their imagination and thinking to "capture" the unbearable content contained in it, that is, "time pressure".
In Deleuze's view, this "unbearable thing" is inseparable from the "revelation and perception" of our third eye, the eye of the mind and thinking [3]. For example, Ganesha, the elephant-headed god placed on the car, appears twice in the movie. He is the god of creation and destruction of obstacles. Although he stands silently in the film, it symbolizes the passage of time. People form "expansion and imagination of memory" in such images. In the extension of visual symbols (still image of Ganesha), it has a strong religious meaning. and a sense of destiny. In India, the world believes that Ganesha can bring success and happiness, and here the protagonist and director of the film also offer such prayers.
For another example, at the beginning of the film, there is a long segment of Billy and the soldiers chatting in the Lincoln car, using close-up or close-up in the cramped space, plus simple panning shots, accompanied by slapstick chatter, duration It is very long, and some viewers may not be able to endure such a long dialogue in the film, but in fact, in the extension of the audio-visual symbols (the state of sitting and chatting), the distance between the screen and the audience is shortened, and it also makes people feel that the soldiers are like relatives. The friendship, which seems to be an understatement, is also to make a perceptual and emotional foreshadowing for Billy's choice at the end of the film. And the use of these pure audiovisual languages also makes it easier to bring an immersive experience to the audience at the beginning of the film.
Deleuze believes that "the brain is the screen", and the imagination of the human brain is like the image projected on the screen. This is obtained after demonstrating the theory of moving images and temporal images. Image is motion, motion is image, and the human brain itself is motion, "The world is not even the world of image-motion, because image-motion is the world, it is the composition of the universe. The disappearance of the boundary between image and matter depends on whether matter is not. has hidden potential." [4] The ubiquitous movements of the two are also full of action and reaction forces.
Deleuze's "movement-image" is based on Bergson's distinction between motion space and motion process. A moving object must occupy space. With the process of motion, it occupies a different position in space at each moment, so it is possible. points. But the process of motion is inseparable, it unfolds in the duration of time, and is inseparable as a state of behavior. This is like a "shooting star", which is a shining line in terms of its process, which consists of an infinite number of points, but it cannot stay at a certain point in the trajectory forever.
As Deleuze said, an image is composed of 24 frames, and when it becomes an image, it has an inherent continuity, and we can't think of it as a composition of 24 images. And these 24 pictures are any 24 pictures during the movement, and there is a gap between each picture.
24 equidistant random moments constitute the continuity of the film. In such a traditional projection format, if the number of frames is increased, the clarity of the image will be enhanced, and the number of frames that the human eye can withstand is about 800 to 900 frames. . Theoretically, it is within the acceptable range of the human eye to choose 5 times the number of frames to shoot a movie. At the same time, choosing to shoot at 120 frames means that the human eye sees exponentially more information per second. After trying 120 frames and 60 frames, it can be found that the former has a significantly better sense of depth in large scenes than the latter, which also enhances the three-dimensional sense brought by 3D, and theoretically increases the audience's sense of substitution.
The film uses a lot of fixed close-ups, such as the football team owner in the middle of the screen, he tells Billy his admiration for the heroes who participated in the war, and envy that the soldiers can have such an experience. At this time, the 15-second lobbying gave the audience the illusion that they were telling themselves.
In addition, there is a scene in the film where American soldiers break into a certain family in Iraq. After their relatives are taken away, the camera shows a close-up of the child sitting on the ground. Those bloodshot eyes with hatred look towards the camera, as if in Looking at the audience, such an impact has gone beyond the visual symbols.
The close-up gives the audience a relatively small amount of picture information, so the human eye can capture effective information in a short period of time, and can see what is seen very carefully. When the football team owner narrates to the camera, it creates the illusion that he is talking to the audience, thus creating a stronger sense of substitution. However, the audience also has enough time to react and think while perceiving the image. Whether the audience will "play" in such thinking and distraction is worth exploring whether this conflicts with the theoretical sense of substitution.
In the moving shots of the film, it is found that, for example, when a military vehicle is driving on a bumpy road, a kind of dizziness will occur when the human eye is watching. Such discomfort also seems to bring a sense of alienation to the audience. It can be seen that the film avoids the use of complex motion shots as much as possible.
In addition, the word human eye needs to be mentioned behind the discussion of high-tech shooting. Deleuze believes that physical vision is the observation of visible and observable things from the perspective of the body, which is what people see through natural senses. Another point to be made here is that when people watch with their natural senses: in the case of abnormal tension, excitement or concentration, the clarity of what the eye sees will be enhanced, and the memory flashback in the brain will also be very rapid. This is because when people are nervous or excited, the sympathetic nerves will be more excited, the pupils will be enlarged at this time, and more light will enter the eyes than usual, so things will be seen brighter and clearer, with higher clarity.
From a medical point of view, it is explained because, "The iris muscle layer of the eye includes two smooth muscles: one is the pupillary sphincter, which is innervated by the parasympathetic nerves and acts to narrow the pupil; great effect". [5] The sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves are mutually antagonistic nerves, sympathetic excitation, parasympathetic inhibition, and vice versa. Coupled with the corresponding psychological effects, people will inevitably observe more carefully what they are interested in.
Such physiological reactions are often encountered by soldiers in war. They have been in a state of high nerve tension, and the director tries to imitate the image world in their eyes and brains and present it to the audience. Therefore, the method of increasing the number of grids and increasing the pixels is adopted to improve the clarity of the image.
However, high-definition images in reality are the perceptual reaction of people when they are stimulated enough by the outside world. Although Gog's shooting seems to be imitating the moving images in this consciousness, it does not directly affect people. Although film thinking and human brain consciousness can be intertwined in the stretch of time, the boundary between the film screen and reality seems to be It is not so easy to break, and maybe more explorations are needed in the future.
references
1. [French] Gilles Deleuze. Film 1: Movement-Image [M]. Translated by Huang Jianhong. Taipei: Yuanliu Publishing Company (2003 edition, p. 37)
2. [French] Gilles Deleuze. Film 1: Movement-Image [M]. Translated by Huang Jianhong. Taipei: Yuanliu Publishing Company (2003 edition, p. 73)
3. [French] Gilles Deleuze. Film 2: Time-Image [M]. Translated by Xie Qiang, Cai Ruoming and Ma Yue, Hunan: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House (2004 edition, p. 28)
4. Kaiyin Deleuze's Film Lesson. Public Account of the Museum of Foreign Objects, 2016
5. Li Meiyu. Ophthalmology [M]. Beijing: Peking University Medical Press (pp. 8-9)
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