By chance, I started to read Deleuze's "What is Philosophy?" In this chapter of "Percept, Affect et Concept". This article by Uncle De talks about a very important point that is completely against the trend: "Art has no ideas." At the end of this chapter, he proposed a relationship between philosophy, art and science. The three-part structure of "Philosophy uses concepts to present events, art uses feelings to construct immortality, and science uses functions to build the state of things."
Out of a stance that tends to be anarchists, I don’t believe that feelings can be achieved in some form." "Immortal", but Uncle De's definition of these three is actually opposed to almost all contemporary popular art forms. Looking back at the contemporary art that has been steeped in leftist ideas since 1945, which category has completely escaped the mode of constructing the core of works with concepts? Which art form influenced by ideology and political thoughts is not trying to construct the state of things? But Uncle De was very decisive and swept all these to the other two sides: Do you construct the concept? Then you want to play philosophy; you want to describe the state? Sorry, you have become a scientist.
The fact is that the entire Western art history has never really separated science and art. Aristotle himself was a physicist, mathematician, biologist, etc. while writing poetics. The masters of the Renaissance all worked as artists, scientists, inventors and architects and became all-around champions. (Because there is no indication that they are schizophrenic patients, don't tell me that these identities will not visit each other). The title of Rousseau's first award-winning thesis was "On Science and Art". Countless people have written articles describing how Bach is a mathematical genius and how the fugue structure is arranged geometrically. Even in this world, art has not separated itself from science in terms of its core, but is closer to science in form. Looking at those arrogant conceptual works of art, you will experience the trembling power of “science and art”.
In fact, it was in this chaotic state of science and art that gave birth to a large number of soft-eaters who rely on science to explain art, the so-called semiotics, and the masters who deconstruct everything in a way of brain cramping psychoanalysis. They all have a seemingly endless gold mine. As long as they continue to use rational structure and deconstruction of sensibility, there will always be blowout angles and viewpoints.
But looking at it so far, no one has explained to me-I suspect this is a dirty tacit understanding-how feelings are produced and how do they work? How are human emotions fermented? How do human perceptions turn into feelings and then rise to emotions?
All the collages dug out from the gold mine are ancient collages restored from fragments of rationality. When I point to it and tell my children that this is a mammoth, the mammoth has long been extinct. But it doesn't matter. In a rational world, a closed system that can justify and start functioning will not stop to accept questions without answers. They will roll bigger and bigger like the snowball effect, and eventually jump out of the scope of rational research in philosophy and history and begin to directly guide practical activities... In other words, isn't this the function of Western philosophy...
2.
Abstracted, jumped back to the Fish Tank in the critical state of a schizophrenic, and briefly looked at how a concept guides the operation of the system core of the so-called "art film", or how a concept that cannot be distinguished from true or false is to be reasonable Explaining the purpose of his existence and constantly disguising himself:
a girl, a teenager in the "fish tank" state: the establishment of a concept.
To prove the rationality and unquestionableness of the concept of "existence" that she represents is also the basic purpose of this film. The director listed a series of "peripheral existence": this person is more violent. Love to dance. Living in a proletarian social housing community in a capitalist society. Single and slutty mother. Jealous sister. A handsome lover of a mother who is sometimes wild, sometimes gentle, and sometimes fatherly. A white horse. A stupid boy and car mechanic who met by chance.
These "peripheral beings" began to move and were causally related to each other, but the ultimate goal was to derive the rationality of the basic "concept" with one or several logical psychoanalytic formulas:
In order to participate in a dance talent show, the girl began to practice dancing desperately. The mother started dating her handsome fatherly boyfriend while trying to get rid of the girl to boarding school. And the latter started to show good to the girl frequently without any purpose. At the same time, the auto mechanic, as a representative of the proletariat, started to remind the girl of her class attributes. After being seduced and seduced, the girl had a sex fight with her "father love" on the sofa under the dazzling light. Then the "father love" disappeared and the girl traced back to her lair, and found that this person was originally a member of the middle class and had wives and daughters. Obviously, under the strong psychological suggestion, the girl took away the "father-loved" daughters to express psychological demonstration. The dance audition ended without a problem. The girl's last psychological line of defense collapsed. Return to the proletarian state represented by the silly repairman. Completely completed the self-shaping of a "concept".
The key to the persuasive concept of the whole concept is to allow people who watch the film to have an unquestioned identification with the girl’s identity and perspective at the beginning of the film, and to keep the whole film in the process of being put forward and just waiting for proof. . The director here offered the housekeeping tricks of most leftist intellectuals, and firmly fixed the girl in the overall environment set by the film at the beginning of the whole work with an identity that was soaked in ideology and class and hierarchy. Using the audience-most of them are middle-class and petty bourgeoisie with a left-leaning ideology-the confirmation of the correctness of their own political positions has quietly changed the original rationale for the rationality of the characters in the film: Unconscious audiences obviously do not doubt their own political tendencies, and certainly do not doubt the rationality of the characters' initial identities and environmental positioning in the film. The paradox is that this rationality is actually what I tried to prove in the whole process of this film!
To use an easy-to-understand analogy: A told B that she was very bitter, and B didn't doubt her identity as Sister Xianglin because A looks like Sister Xianglin, and then A began to talk about my child in reverse. How did I get taken away by the wolf, how did the landlord exploit me? Because B has confirmed the identity of Jia Xianglin’s wife, so he was led to tears by A’s narration and finally concluded that the old society is really cannibalistic Xianglin’s wife. What a pity! This argument seems to be normal and smoothly confirmed. But the most critical point was forgotten by B: Is A sister Xianglin or not? ? This is actually to be proved by her narration, but this narration is regarded by B as an inevitable and unavoidable "tribulation" experience because A is Xianglin's wife, and in turn strengthens A's identity as Xianglin's wife! A clear and confused account! !
Fundamentally, we will find that the problem actually lies in the fact that "A is Xianglin's wife", is such a priori concept that is not perceptible in art works, is it valid? Does Sister Xianglin exist? Does B realize that such a topic has been trapped by self-proving logic?
It's no wonder that Uncle De is so wary of the "concepts" of art!
Going back to Fish Tank, when we give up resistance and automatically identify with the identity of a girl, we will find that everything is so "reasonable" and is so similar to what was described in the introduction to Uncle Fu's psychoanalysis. Surrounded by "I", this mother is so tyrannical and irresponsible, and Micheal Fassbender is so handsome and gentle and passionate, full of the warmth of his father, and "I"'s feelings for him are so in line with Uncle Fassbender. That complex named after a Greek fairy, and reality (the absurd call girl draft) is so destroying my last bit of human dignity!
But wait a minute! This is a movie, it tells a story that happens between people rather than a formula and theorem that needs to be proved! This means that in addition to "I" who needs to be a person with a full personality and full of humanity, the people around "I" are not just adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and equalizing, they are all flesh and blood with their own souls. Body.
The hypocrisy of Fish Tank was exposed. When I jumped out of the girl’s perspective and stood in the perspective of a real bystander, I found that except for the girl’s role in the film’s operation, other than the complete self-certification None of the characters and events can be formed independently to complete their selves. Although the girl is clothed with the weak nature of being a marginalized teenager in a capitalist society, she is actually like a queen in the structure of the film, calling all the other characters on and off. All these They are all auxiliary means and assumptions she used to set off her rationality. From the perspective of a bystander, Micheal Fassbender is simply a patient with multiple personality schizophrenia, and his mother is a heinous wicked woman. In that dance competition, it was obviously for hiring candidates to dance pole dancing, but a street dance gangster was sent a notice of competition. Which strip club would be so full? But this is okay, it does not affect the logic of real life at all, as long as they can serve the "concept"-the reasonable existence of the girl herself.
It is particularly ironic that just because of an infiltrating ideology, this film gives people an impression of extreme realism, but in essence, it corresponds to the fact that every audience is converging to recognize the girl’s perspective. Later, self-identification and intoxication of the self-masochistic tragedy are nothing more than. With a little bit of real realism, the creator of the film should first complete several characters in the film.
In addition, it is worth replacing that the impact of this solid concept established in advance on the film creation itself has gone beyond the scope of narrative and has fully penetrated into the expression of film language. To cite just one example, the abuse of a large number of oblique glare and backlighting in the fish tank is an aesthetic derivative behavior surrounding the concept of construction.
In the creation of the movie, it was not the invention of Fish Tank to carry out the concept-first shaping with great fanfare, and then to construct the system to complete the proof of the concept. It is a methodology that has existed for a long time in the camp permeated with leftist ideology and has undergone unlimited expansion. We can even say that it is closely integrated with the propaganda and media control of the entire leftist ideology and the ideological control of the mass media. together. In the film industry, it is likely to be systematically used by Italian neorealist authors at the earliest, and then carried forward by Bazin and Rouch, accompanied by rounds of left and right ideological confrontations. , And continue to absorb the energy of survival to evolve and survive. In essence, what they create is not movies or works of art. Instead, they are performing live-action dramas that are permeated with political propaganda methodology, and they flourish by pleasing the political ideology of the masses. In other words, this type of movie, in essence, has no insurmountable difference from "Tunnel Warfare", "Mine Warfare" and "Plain Guerrilla".
What needs to be mentioned in particular is that this creative methodology, which has been squeezed by political propaganda, will have a complete and scientific system to perfect the concept itself after the concept is established. The so-called cinematic semiotics and the application of psychoanalysis are the theoretical tools for argumentation against concept shaping. This is a complete scientific system in continuous self-correction.
The only thing it lacks and cannot bear is the element that art should use in the "immortality" that art repeatedly emphasized in "Percept, Affect et Concept": the Sensation of human beings.
3.
Summarize.
(1) As Uncle De is very keenly aware, the establishment and proof of concepts in artistic creation is actually a decisive methodology that determines the nature of the work itself. The establishment of a concept guided by a concept will inevitably bring a work into a scientific proof activity around the concept. Although it is expressed in various artistic forms.
(2) In film creation, the advancement of concepts has actually brought a completely different way of organizing materials. Artists working in this mode will inevitably form a filtering thinking system that will remove those that are contrary to the concept. Virtuality even invents elements and trends within the spiritual category that do not exist in reality.
(3) This kind of creative methodology, because it is far away from the support of people's own feelings, will inevitably rely on the scientific coding system established in accordance with the scientific model as the medium for conveying certain designated feelings, such as semiotics. Psychoanalysis and so on.
(4) Although conceptual creation may be infinitely diverse and modern in form, it still maintains the same roots as the "scientific art" in classical art under the influence of human reason. They all follow the transcendental thinking and creative mode.
Finally, let’s talk about Sensation. Spiritual creation is the only possible way to express and record human sensation. In my opinion, the expression of feelings, emotions and even perceptions cannot be produced in a scientific, quantitative, and logically dialectical system.
Faced with the endless changes and combinations of human sensation, creative activities are largely based on recovering and providing an environment for sensation to recover to record and even stimulate its existence.
From this perspective, the forging and filtering of sensation brought about by conceptual creation itself is a practice that deviates from reality, no matter how much realism it brings to people's rational cognition in form.
To quote a reply I wrote to others: Someone took a plastic bag with goldfish home, and poke a few holes in the plastic bag because it was too heavy. The water kept leaking along the way. When I got home, the goal was to bring the goldfish back home. Home. But all the water leaked out, and the goldfish was already dead.
As a digression, from the perspective of the art and film industry, concept first has always been the most labor-saving, effective, and most pleasing creative method for elite intellectuals. Take the Cannes Film Festival as an example. The award-winning works of the past few years, including this Fish Tank, Entre les murs, are all three weeks and two days in April. Gomorra is nothing but works that racked their brains to construct a complete concept. The admiration of concepts and the fascination with propositions essentially reveal the hypocrisy of the Western intellectual elite as a whole.
Of course, compared to Comrade Xiao Jia's crude and crude concepts, this film is still a well-rounded and coherent work. But even so, in the process of watching, such a problem is derived from a problem that proves its own reasonable existence, even if it is covered with a more sensational model, even if its concept is firm and close to my ideological position. , I can’t accept it with sensibility, I can only start to pick the mistakes with reason.
I am not sure whether the "immortality" that Uncle De said really exists, but at least when we face a concept that cannot be avoided, I will try to use sensation to guide the concept, even if there are several of them and they are different from each other. In the same way, a concept will not be allowed to dominate the indescribable sensation.
"La Maman et la putain" by Jean Eustache is the perfect example I can think of now.
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