THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
“Something bizaare about the cinema struck me: its unexpected ability to show not only behavior, but spiritual life as well. Spiritual life isn’t dream or fantasy- which were always the cinema’s dead ends- but rather the domain of cold decision, of absolute obstinacy, of the choice of existence… Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind.”
– Gilles Deleuze
(The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, 2000)
The film is structured in a way that profoundly resembles the inner workings of the mind. Since the human mind is overflowing with uncalculated thoughts, rooting from the subconscious to the conscious without any distinct pattern or succession, the film appears as if it’s an inside tour to the main character’s artistic consciousness. And what better framework to support it but Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy significantly correlated with cinema.
Deleuze’s philosophy is somewhat self-explanatory and concentrates not on the “motion picture” itself but on the “sensory-motor image” which highlights the idea of “Cinema of the seer and no longer the agent”. Deleuze acknowledges that which plays an important part of cinema that most scientific theories fail to include—the sensory perception of its viewers. The whole film itself is like a create-your-own-adventure journey that covers a broad scope as that of the human imagination or the inner workings of the human mind and at the same time leaving the audience thinking and/or deciding what comes next or what happened before. According to Deleuze, “…it is in the mind where points of views superimpose themselves on one another… [like] a chessboard… [it] unfolds a possible set of moves that only memory can condense in the mind of the player.”
Deleuze overtly emphasizes the importance of the active participation of a film’s viewers by eliciting emotions either through the images on screen or to the actual time frame being followed by the film. This participation helps in understanding the film and/or having the viewers arrive at a conclusion even when a film is as open-ended as a broken hanging bridge. Deleuze even came up with a term for this “hanging bridge” which is the “any-space-whatever” or the “disconnected space”. “Any-space-whatever” refers to “the connection of nevertheless, absent, or as even disappeared, not simply out of frame, but passed into the void”, and due to this, we are left to think and formulate our own hypotheses therefore becoming a participant of the film itself.
“A space is born that is not reducible to exteriority; instead of condemning us to see things from the outside, it clarifies from within.” For Deleuze, a film spirals us down into its own space and time frame and once we get immersed into it, the film throws us back to our world with a better understanding of that different kind of experience. Deleuze treats each viewer as a thinking entity therefore, a filmmaker doesn’t need to translate everything literally into the big screen because a viewer is given a thinking faculty that they are able to deduce the relevance of the film in their own lives. This then, results to those more formal film theories formulated by equally competitive film enthusiasts and it does not, in any way, [as most people perceive] a deviation from those structured schools of thought in Film and Filmmaking.
Reference:
*1 The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema ed. By Gregory Flaxman Copyright 2000 University of Minnesota Press.
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