In the latter part of the film "I Want to End It All", when the heroine kisses Jack, there is a shot of the old man peeping out through a small hole. At this time, the men and women in the story are frightened to a certain extent, and the audience may also The same reaction, terrified and amazed, these characters seem to finally have a direct connection at this moment. Finally, the plot was able to start to converge at this time, the mental box that contained this (or several) journeys began to fall apart, and the old man slowly moved towards his death.
Before these characters meet, many "deliberate" clips can be observed at the connection between the old man's time-space and the main story's time-space, where continuous sounds or similar actions are put together to create a line that seems to be easy to break through. Due to the intertextuality of this image connection and connotation, the character identities and relationships become elusive, and at the same time, it also makes the audience know that the world we peep is not normal.
In the middle and second part of the story, the way of intertextuality reached a high point. Jack and her began to discuss some textual content. When talking about Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", she quoted: "The spectacle cannot understood as a visual deception created by mass communication techniques." Meanwhile, her image was briefly replaced by Cobie Minafi. In the text of "Society of Spectacles", Guy Debord used a lot of deviance to complete his works. According to Debord's statement: debouncing is the opposite of citation, the opposite of the theoretical authority that always falsifies, and its only The reason is that it becomes a reference; it is a fragment extracted from other contexts and movements, which is ultimately a fragment extracted from the era as a general reference, from the exact choice of the reference within the reference, which in turn is Accurately recognized or false references. By 1974, Debord made Landscape Society into a film. In the film, Debord would select fragments from the book as narration, forming a contrast with a large number of film materials. It is a practice of derailment in the media material of film, and it is also a supplement to the original work. For example, in the film "Society of the Spectacle", when Guy Debord's narration talks about the problem of the totalitarian bureaucracy, the accompanying images are the images of the Soviet military parade and the Odessa stairs in "Battleship Potemkin". Fragments of the massacre create an intertextual intertext between narration content and images, recorded images and film images.
Going back to Kaufman's film, even if her image is only briefly replaced, we can still appreciate the inevitability of this treatment. When quoting Debord, how can we not use Debord's way? When discussing Cassavetes' "The Drunk Woman" in the previous part, she first imitated Gina Rowlands' actions in the film, and then there was a discussion and a passage of criticism of Cassavetes (quoting Paulina Kyle). 's comments), which is most likely still a deviant. Although there may be the possibility of misreading in judging whether there is a deviance, such an intertextual way obviously also implies the pattern of mutual penetration of thought and behavior after personality split.
And Edgar Moran in "Film or Imaginary Man" constantly emphasizes the concept of "double". It is also mentioned in the book that although there is a difference between reality and imagination, we should also see the complex unity and complementarity in it. The same is true of watching movies. We experience movies in a state of dual consciousness, and experience vision and dream vision play a role at the same time. , so reality and fantasy reflect and identify with each other, and the way in which the character (Cobie Minafi) in the fictional movie watched by the old man replaces her image also verifies this point of view. If you think about it further, this sparsely populated snow scene is likely to be derived from the movie "The Thing", when she steps up the stairs into Jack's childhood bedroom, she can catch a glimpse of a stack of movie tapes (several horror movies), and Among the films that happen to be titled outwards are horror film director John Carpenter's work "The Thing" (The Thing), which tells the story of an Antarctic research station being destroyed by an alien that kills creatures and then transforms into its shape. After the biological invasion, in this closed space of ice and snow, human beings are suspicious of each other's true identity and kill each other. If the fictional movie the old man watched while eating had an immediate impact on the story, then the movie Jack watched as a child probably had a long-lasting and deep impact, and therefore had many subtle correspondences with the main story. . The complementarity of reality and imagination determines the suspenseful background of the journey she and Jack experienced, so even the characters are dressed in horror, and the real body is difficult to identify. Even though the original book itself has elements of horror and suspense, it seems that it is not enough for Kaufman. He still chooses to carefully arrange everything with a lot of intertextuality, and deeply interpret the appearance of the schizophrenic world: incomplete, full of time The memory fragments of space are also because the imagination cannot accurately restore the specific reality, the scenes are scarce and lack scale, and the number of characters is also very limited.
If you look back at several films Kaufman directed or wrote, it is not difficult to see the trend contained in them. For example, the stop-motion animation used in "Disorder", the synonymous rhetoric in "New York Synonyms", the layered structure in "Adapted Script", and the eerie puppet of "Becoming John Malkovich", all present meta-narratives. , Thousands of people are one face, time and space jumps, various characteristics of mixed memory, the gap created by the comparison with reality seems to be closer to reality, because he understands the gap between people and can't really understand it. Just like when watching a movie, even though people can share the screen image, the associations generated while watching are different. Probably under the influence of the "double" reality of this image, whether it is a realistic theme or an unrealistic one The subject will eventually return to subjectivity. Just like Kaufman's constantly changing but similar methods, he chose to focus on the presentation of intertextuality and the spiritual world in "I Want to End It All". After that, when the audience spied on this spiritual box, the images and With the aid of intertextuality, we go deep into the interior, we can see some kind of complexity and circularity reflected by those fragments, and gain free interpretation space, and then deepen the distance between us and reality by comparing with reality. Integrity hidden deep within the character.
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