In Turin Horse, narrative gives way to time and space. Movies are not designed to describe external reality or to gain some kind of communication with the audience, but are themselves an aesthetic medium, a stage for forming ideas and creating conflicting relationships. Nietzsche and his ideas play a pervasive role in the film. The film opens with the story of Nietzsche going mad as an introduction. The end of the world, the death of God, the Dionysian culture and so on have all left a deep imprint on Nietzsche's thought. This article will try to analyze the theme of the film from three perspectives of Nietzsche's view of time, world view and art view.
1. Nietzsche's View of Time: Eternal Reincarnation
1. Time-image:
The Horse of Turin is modern, a time-image film. Time-image is a film form proposed by the philosopher Deleuze, influenced by Nietzsche's "eternal reincarnation" view of time. Nietzsche believed that time is vertical time, not horizontal time in the past, present, and future. Every moment is the coexistence of past, present and future. Here, Nietzsche expresses the major premise of an anti-Christian doctrine: time is not linear and purposeful. Accordingly, Deleuze proposes two categories of film: motion-image and time-image.
In motion-image, the time of movement is the time of abstraction, of things. In motion, time is the measure of motion, there is no time without motion, and time is subordinate to motion. Classic films before World War II basically followed the motion-image rule. If time is regarded as the freedom of thinking and spirit, the manipulation of time by motion-image is the manipulation of meaning and thinking, and it is an unfree image.
In time-image, the time of memory is the time of mind and thought. This time is immeasurable, beyond perception, and can only be acquired with consciousness. Embodying in film is the dominance of time, manifested in a heterogeneous, diverse, and non-chronological view of time—a “generative” representation of meaning rather than a singular representation. In time-image, there is no narrative, no plot, no purpose, no center, no logic of movement, and no reality such as fantasy and imagination. Time is no longer manipulated, meaning is no longer defined and constructed, but is freely and directly expressed.
Time - The time in the imagery is non-temporal. It is non-linear, a non-spatialized view of time, containing a juxtaposition, quantity and order. Time is not after replacing before. Past, present, and future are an indivisible whole, and the continuation of time is the continuous advance of the past that invades the future and expands on the way. The past has remained indefinitely from the time of growth.
Specific to "The Horse of Turin", the time in it is subordinate to the thinking spirit of the characters. Time is perceived here, not spatialized. Pure duration is an autonomous and creative time that is closely linked to human thinking and perception. Here cities can be destroyed in a day, and wells can dry up in a day: everything is irrational. There is a misalignment between outside time and inside time.
The deceleration of time is achieved through multiple repetitions of the same event, through the dilution of the plot, and through long staring at the same thing. And I think the purpose of this deceleration is to cause the audience a sense of psychological pressure of "long days".
2. Pure audiovisual symbols:
The purely audio-visual symbol of modern film is a realistic image that is separated from the extension of motion, such as the wandering, loitering, and meaningless behavior of characters. "Walking" is also often featured in Bella Tarr's films, as he believes that "there is a power when people walk". But these behaviors can no longer respond to environmental stimuli.
In traditional motion-image, action is a reaction produced by perception and follows the law of cause and effect. If the whole of the moving image composed of perception, action, and emotion is transformed, this is the intrusion of a new element, which prevents the extension of perception to action, leads perception to the relationship with thinking, and makes the image follow a new the requirements of the symbol, which brings the image to the other side of the movement: the dimension of time.
Here, the movement of people and objects and the movement of the camera are not developed for a certain center. Camera-consciousness to self-explore the existence of the world. The characters are loose, wandering, still and rigid. Feelings and movements are no longer coherent with each other, spaces no longer cooperate and complement each other; there are fractured gaps between movement and action.
3. Dissolution of meaning:
The new image dissolves the stipulation, unity, and integrity of meaning, requires self-presentation of meaning, and the audience is required to interpret the image by itself, while the meaning of the image is ambiguous and ambiguous.
In Deleuze's context, modern films like The Horse of Turin belong to crystalline images: the existence of an interaction between actual and potential images. Deleuze believes that cinema not only expresses images, but also surrounds the world with images. The movie image and the world image are the interactive relationship between the actual image and the potential image. Crystal images are based on actual images and potential images. The relationship between the actual image and the potential image lies in the circulation and interaction of the two, which is indistinguishable. It becomes indistinguishable between feeling and memory, reality and imagination, body and mind, forming a double image. Every moment in the crystal image is a bifurcation time. Potential does not exist in actual matter, it exists in extension, outside of consciousness.
From then on, the world of modernity no longer has a complete, self-evident meaning. The certainty and collapse given by the form and image of God. In human experience, life becomes something with no necessary direction or meaning. As in Don Quixote: The world suddenly becomes of a certain terrible ambiguity; the single divine truth is broken down into hundreds of relative truths shared by human beings.
2. Nietzsche's worldview: God is dead
1. Death of God
The Horse of Turin expresses the idea that God is dead through silent images. First of all, the use of light seems to have deliberately borrowed from Western classical oil paintings. The direction of the faces of the characters is emphasized, while the large space behind them is very dark. That shadowy dark space creates a sense of absence—the absence of God, pointing to nothingness. In medieval icon painting, Jesus is often in this position.
Second, it is the subversion of "Genesis". Genesis is basically a kind of self-image about the modern imaginary self-determination. God created the world in seven days; in the movie, Bella Tarr also took seven days to destroy the world.
Behind such a main line lies Nietzsche's worldview: the world is a composition of eternal change. The production of any kind of thing is bound to face the end of extinction, which makes things continue to emerge and continue to perish. The process itself is meaningless, without a God or truth behind it as a source of meaning.
2. False Power
"The Horse of Turin" is against the metaphysical view of truth: the world is the product of the will to power, and the will to power is the will to life.
In the meaningless eternal cycle of birth-destruction-create, the God who was once given meaning is only a false fantasy of man. The eternal return is not the return of the same, but the generation of force, the generation of power. There is no truth in life, there is only change, and this change is the false power of life, the will of power. It is an inflated vitality, a force that dominates life to seek the superiority and expansion of life in this world of becoming and destruction, even at the expense of life. The competition of all things and the war of mankind are the result of the will to power. What constitutes power is the development of the possibility of survival by the will to power. There is no reality, and in order for us to survive, we need to create reality.
False power is the generating principle of images and the source of inspiration. The image should live in a way that the past did not have to exist/may create the impossible, that is, in a false movement/time way. Reopening the real/creating another real is falsification and fiction in Nietzschean sense, that is, false power.
According to Deleuze, false force formally defines the most general principle of immediate time-image relation. The truth of time, space, people, and events gives way to the false. The fiction of time brings false power, the past and the future are not continuous certainties in the process of time, but two aspects of power, the power that transcends boundaries, carries out transformation and develops legend and fiction in its own domain.
3. Nietzsche's View on Art: Dionysian Culture
1. Falsehood is the only truth
There is no truth or truth, the world is false, cruel and meaningless, and art is only false, but this falsehood is not for deception, but to admit falsehood, that is, to treat falsehood as falsehood. So, according to Nietzsche, art is the only truth. So is cinema as one of the arts. Since fiction is the only truth of the film, the temporal experience of fictional narrative need not conform to the temporal experience of life.
In The Horse of Turin, surrealism always coexists with reality. First of all, the whole story is derived from a true story and extended. It uses a lot of depth-of-field long shots, showing not an incomplete space, but a continuum of time as a stretch, but it does not prevent it from unfolding fictitious fakes.
The value of art is that it obscures the truth, and we no longer need to recognize the truth as our mission. Even if we recognize the falsity of the truth, it will not destroy the meaning of life. The pursuit of art does not lie in truth, but in the saving of life - to make life still have the value of existence after the loss of truth and belief. Therefore art is higher than truth.
2. The Dilemma of Art
After God is dead, the world is in crisis of faith. Art was once regarded by Nietzsche as the savior of the world, reflecting Nietzsche's high evaluation of art as Dionysian culture.
In the film, when the original world begins to collapse, the father and daughter realize their own limitations and seek to transcend, but they are only reflexive, but have no way out. This is the eternal dilemma of the pilgrim: never to the other side. Once they are freed from all the boundaries of certainty, they no longer know who they are and have to go back to finding certainty. The tree on the hillside, like eternity, is a representation, but it cannot be presented. Because it is an idea, derived from the operation of reason. And even if they went to settle in a distant place, it was just another dwelling where they were imprisoned. Once boundaries are broken, new boundaries are created.
In the final analysis, they always have the will to decide, not the will to know. They always need to determine meaning by finding the criterion of truth that makes certainty possible, not by finding the foundations that make cognition possible, being forever nomads like the intruding gypsies.
"The Horse of Turin" is a modern film of time-image, and it can also be interpreted as a meta-film reflecting on contemporary art represented by film. Contemporary movies are in a state of loss as a whole, and "The Horse of Turin", as the film master Bella Tarr's film, intends to return to the body of the movie.
references:
"Life and Multiple Times in Postmodernity"
"Image and Time: Deleuze's Theory of Images and Bergson-Nietzsche's Philosophy of Time"
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