For Deleuze, movement and time constitute the essential elements of cinema. He invokes Bergson's view of the image, which holds that consciousness is inherent in the image. In the vernacular, the image itself is conscious, it's not just physical. So for Deleuze or Bergson, the image is a fusion of mind and matter, subject and object. In their view, the image of the film does not represent reality or anything, but it is itself a real existence that integrates subject and object, and the sufficient condition for it to be so is movement. Movies are self-moving images.
"Dike" is an avant-garde sci-fi short film from the 1960s, and its creativity is still ahead of its time and admirable. Its narrative is unfolded by dreams and memories. After the third world war (nuclear war), scientists who can only live underground perform human experiments on the male protagonist, one of the survivors, intending to travel through time to the future. to overcome the current crisis. The main reason for choosing the male protagonist is that when he was a child, he often dreamed of a young woman on the bank of the airport, and at the end of the dream, a man died in front of the woman. During the experiment, he was sent to the past before the nuclear war, met the woman, and the two started dating... In the end, he who should have been sent to the future chose to go back to the past, and this time he went back It turned out to be his childhood dream, and it was himself who was shot and killed!
The Dyke refutes Deleuze's film theory in one sense, but deepens and exemplifies Deleuze's theory in another sense. Why do you say that? The peculiarity of the film is that it is composed of non-distinguishable, non-consecutive photos like a slideshow. That is, a series of static photos turned into a "movie". So at least on the surface, it's not self-moving images, and it's obviously not watching continuous motion movies in the traditional sense. In this sense, it is anti-Dreuzian film theory. But on the other hand, it sheds more light on what the so-called movement of cinema is. We know that even traditional movies consist of still pictures, 24 images per second, and our naked eyes naturally cannot discern the difference between the previous and the next. But from a single sheet perspective, each sheet is static (doesn't this smell like Zeno's paradox?). So, is the movie, as many people say, the art of deception? Of course the director did not want to express this. Perhaps only those who take the so-called Platonic "truth" very seriously would devalue cinema and even all possible representational art. What the director wants to express, (I guess), is what the motion nature of the film is. The so-called self-moving images are actually the flow of consciousness, the care of our consciousness. The beauty of Dike is that it amplifies the essence of the film form, and self-moving images do not need to be realized through a blinding method in essence through the obvious static discrete photos, because as Bergson said, consciousness Inside the image, then each independent image is fused with consciousness (note: this is not to say that the image is the carrier of consciousness). Consciousness is naturally not static, so even if discrete pictures are presented slowly one by one, there will be a sense of movement, because movement is inherent in consciousness, and consciousness is inherent in the picture. What about time? Time is also in it.
As the photos are presented one after another, and the monologue magnetically narrates, the audience still experiences a smooth narrative and uninterrupted sense of motion, which is determined by the nature of the image. Of course, the appearance of seemingly fragmented pictures is also the feature of formally portraying memories and dreams. Often our memories and dreams are like fragments of a story. Links between fragments are also often illogical. So in this movie, the male protagonist dreams of himself who died as an adult when he was a child, and with the help of "science", the adult himself "remembers" the scenes he saw as a child. This certainly does not conform to non-contradictory scientific or rational logic in the usual sense. Dreams and memories are mystical realms, with little science and reason to speak of their content. Related to this, the concept of time presented in "Dike" is also multi-threaded and non-linear. Figuratively speaking, the timeline in the film seems to be a flower arrangement completed on the fixed space of the embankment. And this masterpiece comes from the human consciousness or mind. The director may be a fan of Kant, and time and space are the inner sensory forms.
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