"Dike" is one of the representative works of the Left Bank of the French New Wave. Like other Left Bank movies, the literary narration makes people enter the author's artistic and literary mood more quickly, and at the same time, the unique form shows the possibility of literary words as a film language. In "Dike", it can be said that it is an experiment in a new way of watching movies.
Among them, the "new" is reflected in the change of the audience's long-term viewing habits: from relying on narrative logic to read, the film language has become a side branch, to the film language walking in the front, and obtaining the center of the story through the structural language.
First of all, the narrative of "Dike" adopts a circular structure, turning around and going back to the starting point, the story is like a fantasy. After experiencing the third world war (nuclear weapons), Ollie hid in the underground with other victims. The underground world connected with the human world on the ground, and classes appeared, dividing those in power (experimenters) and the bottom (prisoners of war). The prisoners of war used their bodies to carry out memory experiments for the experimenters, to explore the possibility of returning to the past or the future by means of memory, and to solve the current problems in this way when they succeeded, and directly avoid the era of no disaster. And Ollie was selected as a race with rich imagination, and after the memory cleaning, his memory was reorganized. He went back to the past to fall in love with the woman he saw on the embankment in his childhood, and also went to the future to meet the human beings who escaped the disaster. Under the choice, he chose to go back to the past and fall in love with the woman in his memory. When he was running for love, he encountered an experimenter who came from his memory, and he died on the embankment. And all this is the memory that Ollie witnessed as a child. It can be seen that the embankment is the starting point of Ollie's memory. He has the impression of love here, and ends his fate here. This is the beginning of death. Death is the end, but it is arranged at the beginning. This is the structure of the circle. At the same time, Ollie's memory was purged, but the memory still existed. He was the bearer of the memory and the protagonist of the memory. The first vision and the third vision coexisted. Under the combination of the two contradictions, the audience has accepted the first new mode of watching movies. Under the circular narrative structure, the painful memories are repeated, and the sweet memories can only be healed in fragments.
Then, the presentation of memory brings impressionistic memory to the audience to connect the story. The movie viewing experience brought by "Dike" is fragmentary and illogical. In Ollie's past memory, it is nothing more than his love with a woman. Each time starts at a different place, sometimes on the street, sometimes on the street In a museum without a time dimension... From the beginning of the memory we receive Ollie's ardent love for women, through narration. But the woman is like a shadow in the photo, and it is difficult for us to feel her heart. The static and black-and-white presentation of the whole film brings obstacles to the interpretation of the characters, but at the same time, because of this form, a dynamic image of less than ten seconds appears in the middle. (The woman stares at the camera and blinks her eyes) It will feel extra soft. It turns out that this woman is also flesh and blood, not just a shadow in her memory. She also has feelings for Ollie. So there is a couple atmosphere between the two when they are in the museum. In addition, these fragmented memories are presented, the author does not care whether the narrative structure will be messy or lack of logic, but more about the logic of a memory point, the connection of feelings, because the feelings brought by several memories accumulate, and finally see Ollie only felt sad when he died, not simply because of the death, but because of the contrast between the previous impressions and the ending.
The seemingly simple production of "Dike" can bring such a big echo, because of its unique way of storytelling, we no longer rely on the plot itself or the author's thoughts, but can feel the author's feelings through the interpretation of language. Intention, only then does the film as an independent art.
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