Human trials have become a prophecy in World War II. The three wars are ingenious, throwing prisoners of war into time-travel experiments; hoping to survive the beleaguered present in the past and future. As in the Nazi gas chambers, the people who traveled through time were both dead and insane. Those in power then turned their attention to the protagonist.
"Ordinary moments don't solidify into memories. You only remember them when their scars are exposed in those moments." The protagonist is obsessed with a picture, from a childhood without war. The Orly Airport in the suburbs, the observation deck at sunset, the face of a woman. With his obsession with it, he imagined/remembered the time before the Third World War.
"Dike" is astonishing. At one point I was at a loss as to whether I wanted to immerse myself in it, or jot down details that I can't remember. The slightly trimmed mouth is like a bowl of basil seeds, which swells with water to the appearance of pearl fruit that is often drunk when I was a child.
Pang said at the end of the new book that the lack of imagination is nothing but a numb recognition of the status quo (the Chinese dream). Facing the bleak 1960s (concentration camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Chris Marker opposed the realistic style of Alain Resnais and others (such as "Night and Fog"), and used "Dike" to remind us that the imagination (the protagonist's blending like that) memory and fantasies) are integral to human existence.
Images that combine memory and fantasy are often compared with real/fake by real people. memory is real? Fantasy is false? Is the memory true or false? Fantasy is false or true? That's it. The genius of Chris Marker is that he separates the picture from the empirical notion of reality. For him, the truth of the picture is an emotional truth, in how it is felt, how it reproduces the tension of a moment in memory.
On the tenth day of the time travel experiment, images of the protagonist's memory/fantasy began to appear one after another. He hypnotically repeats: "This is a real morning before the war," "This is a real bedroom," "This is a real child." . .
They are clearly memories/fantasies, but they are more real than the underground space where the protagonist lives (on screen) and the bleak sixties (off screen) where humans live. Through picture-in-picture (mise en abyme), Chris Marker created a utopia for human beings at the time (the director's favorite subject is recommended to watch).
Of course, if "Dike" only has the aspect of utopia, I will not call it amazing~ We can interpret it according to the clues laid out by the director. Go back to the tenth day of the time travel experiment. In addition to the protagonist's speech, there is an almost whispering voice throughout the memory/fantasy picture. Who is the second voiceover from? There is no doubt that it is the experimenter beside the protagonist. They prolong memory time by increasing the injection dose; they can also send the protagonist back to the original time point in the face of emergency.
One's own memory/fantasy is supplemented by others, and subjective freedom is dominated by the external environment. The director warns us in the pre-information age that memories/fantasies can be tampered with, fabricated and objectified. (50 years later, Nolan's Inception discusses the same topic)
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