Dike is a French Left Bank work around 1960. One of the characteristics of the embankment is that except for the 2-second blink, which is a dynamic effect, the rest are still images.
"story"
Through the vo narration, the story is expressed unhurriedly. The embankment is a key time point in the protagonist's life, but to take a step back and talk about this film, this is to discuss the philosophical question of which came first, the egg or the chicken, and then extends to a reflection of human beings on themselves: we should stop at the past, and Focus on the present, or look to the future, or a deeper exploration of the meaning of life.
But more of this film got me thinking: the connection between time itself and facts. How do we judge whether something is true or false? When there is a rupture in time, or more precisely in consciousness, how do we judge that the experience we are in is continuous? Is that part of our memory or consciousness that we're missing still there? If what we see is a symbol of our consciousness, must that consciousness be real?
So, I think a large part of our human cognition comes from the effects of time on us. Time has always existed linearly. When we fall asleep, and then open our eyes again, our consciousness continues, but we never question "Time is gone, or is my presence gone while I'm asleep?"
A while ago, a friend of mine posted a post on Moments: Will consciousness disappear?
This is of course an unanswered but creepy topic. After all, once a person loses consciousness, he also loses the ability to think. But if consciousness represents a person's soul, does the disappearance of consciousness represent liberation from reality? Because at that time, we were not controlled by time.
This is why there are so many comments in the comments about whether the male protagonist has appeared in the past or the future. For the male protagonist, the timeline of his consciousness is still linear, but the facts that happened to him form a circle: Is it because he saw his own death that he became a test object? Or did he see his own death because he was reduced to a test subject? This also goes back to what I just said, it's a chicken-and-egg question.
The dodo in the ps story gave me an illusion of time.
"Video Art"
Still images can actually create a sense of flow, and this awareness makes me feel that the film is telling a story that is more real than moving images. It may be because we are usually used to using photos to record a lot of things. So this story with some sci-fi elements seems so real, as if I was watching a documentary. So when I saw the clip of the woman blinking, like vo said, I kind of couldn't tell the difference between reality and a dream. Is the woman winking at me, or am I expecting her to wink?
But still photos do have a time-fractured component from a narrative perspective. We never knew how the man came to the lab, and we never even knew about the entire space. The process of a man going back to the past is also a mystery. At what moment did he meet a woman, and where did he have a story with her. We will never be able to answer, after all, the male protagonist has never really existed as an adult in the past. I say this because it is difficult for us to judge what the state of existence in the past was like, when the time of the fact is a circle, but the consciousness of the male protagonist is still linear.
But we can think of it this way, we just keep falling asleep and waking up. Each photo is the moment we are awake, and the gap between the photos is the moment we dream. But we rarely realize that we have a moment in this world to be stopped.
The ps film always has a grainy atmosphere, covered with mottled traces of the passage of time.
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