德勒兹-黑蜂 (旧稿)

德勒兹也许是无可非议的，因为他出自哲学的显赫门庭，拿这个身份玩弄一下电影这位年轻漂亮的女仆，又算得了什么呢？何况，从学术角度看，这已经是一种创新的尝试，是一件家族成员所默许，甚至还要暗中鼓励的韵事，是和伟大的公子哥儿精神一致的，这个精神，就是要把哲学的基因散播到所有的艺术女神体内。

一方面德勒兹仍然认可经典电影剧目的有效性，一方面他全然不提业已存在的庞大电影理论研究，也难怪，对于一个“大哲学家”来说，那点子电影理论，就好比追求她的美貌小女工的某听差，虽然门当户对，却是不能跟大老爷相提并论的，是根本不能构成竞争对手的。他的论述既无视电影的创作（小女工的想法），也回避电影作为一种工业的历史（小女工的家庭成员、成长史），而只是关注电影所能为他所提供的快乐（小女工的肉体）。

这只强有力的黑蜂，从一个名字跳到另一个名字，把它坚硬而狭长的器官，插入花朵的隐秘处。

The word concept means this for Deleuze – making cinematic

The word cinema means this for Deleuze – making concepts

对于贵族大老爷来说，什么是身份？身份就是有人伺候，就是当你希望将自己的意志施加于别人身上时不遭到抗拒。从这个意义上看，一个规规矩矩的不拈花惹草的贵族甚至就不是一个贵族，因为他没有去履行那些表现其身份的相应动作。采花，正是这样一种义务。

“对许多人而言，哲学不是造就，而是先验的。然而，哲学理论自身不过也是一种实践，正如其对象”

将一种情绪，或超验的领悟带入哲学，始作俑者可能要算尼采，其次就是柏格森，与其说德勒兹创造出affect这个词用以描述电影，不如说他用affect来软化哲学的逻辑框架。

Re-viewing The Diary of Country Priest

Many have noted a peculiar formal aspect of Bresson’s films, especially in his prison trilogy : Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951), Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956) and Pickpocket (1959). In every one of these films, the voice-over narration is most of the time redundant to the visual channel. Not only we are shown the diary entry, or notes, that the voice is reading, we are shown often immediately the actions indicated, described by the words. This double of triple redundancy proved to be a headache for most critics for they have yet to find a way to incorporate it into their theoretical framework.

Same for me. But this recent re-viewing of the Journal has given me some inspirations on this issue. I came to realize that the voice over in Bresson’s films (as well as a bunch of others, as I shall name later) are not narrative devices. They represent rather a sonic presence of the ‘spiritual power’ of our protagonist. Although most of time diary entries are connected with pen, with the act of writing, in the opening shot however, a hand simply remove the blotting paper and reveal the inscriptions underneath. Many events echoed in voice over, as we have reason to doubt, are not registered in the diary. But that does not prevent certainly our hero’s reflective mind acts upon it in its occurrence. I came to realize that voice over in this film is a stylistic device but not a narrative convention. As for this latter category, The Letter or an Unknown Women (1948) immediately came to mind, as I have seen it only last week. Letter represents the situation that we are so conditioned to this convention that we refuse to allow other possibilities take place. Instead of talking about the distinction between VO as narrative convention and VO as stylistic device, we talk about the reliability or unreliability of the VO, as if it is our task to determine the moral stance of the voice.

In light of these arguments, I also contend that those visual sequences of writing a diary (or anything else in this case) is in function equivalent to the sonic presence of spiritual power. I have an evidence to support my view. In the end of Diary, Claude Laydu still strives to write what are probably his last words, that he had referred his friend Dufrety to his old master, Curé de Torcy. Not only we see that these lines are written in pencil, without the usual neatness, but the VO is absent. An unusual silence accompanied the images. Then the pencil itself fell.

Now it is time to think about other films which, like this one, employ VO as a stylistic device. Terrence Malick is the most prominent contemporary example. Both of his Thin Red Line and The New World are excellent demonstration of this concept. It is not that only in his films we have the monologue, but that without this non-stopping monologue the images will not hold up as a meaningful construction. There is yet another possibility that I can think of: Leanne dernier a Marienbad and L’homme qui ment. In these two films the voice over is an element that manipulated by the cinematic narration to create inner tension, contradiction.

Films like these one reveal the poverty of our existing theoretical efforts. Plato divided narration into diegetic and mimetic ones. This formula is later repeated by David Bordwell, Gérard Genette and many others. But this division is evidently no longer able to account for the specificities of cinema.

Collateral (plot summary)

Max is a taxi driver, ‘temporarily’. In order to escape from reality (he has been doing this for 12 years) he dreams about two things : Maldive island and the business idea inspired by it : island limo service. Tonight, his first client is a black girl whom we, along with Max, figure out to be a prosecutor working on a big case. He offers his genuine concern (as a symbol a picture of the island) for her devastating working habits (which means that she will be available and alone when the killer comes). In return she gives him her card, ‘call me if you want to conduct an investigation on, say, fortune 500’ Well lets face it, there is little in common between them. How can then the potential romance realize? I couldn’t think of any solution. But a skillful screen writer can. To be continued.

Max’s next client is Vicent, who expressed immediately a certain loathe for the city, LA. Why? Because in spite of the dense population people don’t get to know each other and dead bodies take a long time to be discovered. Why, that should be two definite advantages for a travelling killer! Anyway in the course of conversation he developped a liking for Max and offers him 600 bucks for driving him to five locations, plus 100 to the airport.

The framework of the plot is then reconditioned to five sections, with an interlude between the third and the fourth. These five sections are in their emotional tensity comparable to five movements of a symphony (yes I know usually there are only four), as we shall see immediately.

Things went wrong only too soon. In the first location, the body fell out from the window and landed directly on the waiting taxi. The identity of the client is now exposed. So, no intention to make any suspense on that; no direct depiction of the killing.

Second location. This time Vincent seems to be doing just fine. It is Max who is having a problem. Being tied up to the wheel, he cries for help. And there comes the help : two hoodlums grab his wallet – and Vincent’s suitcase. They shouldn’t have done that. Because Vincent will be displeased. Now we get to see the violence, fully frontal, without any embellishments. Bang, bang, two guys down.

So we are going from tense to tenser. Maybe it is time for a little break. And that is what Vincent suggests. Now they are sitting in a quiet Jazz bar, enjoying their drink. It seems that Vincent is really much into Jazz. Not only did he enjoy the performance of a fat guy on trumpet, he showed a genuine interest in his story of meeting and co-performing with Miles Davis years ago. It is only when all guests are gone that we smell something burning here. We suddenly realize that Vincent has been waiting, that he has not come to this Jazz bar out of no reason! The fat guy is his next target! To put a long story short. He shots the guy because he doesnt know where Miles learnt music.

You will have to agree this part is indeed ingeniously conceived. Moreover, it is not something that is staple in Hollywood culture: if this is Tarantino, then it is understandable. Because the Miles Davis story is really very engaging. Both parties played their role so convincingly that you are starting to forget about the job.

Anyway, now the audience’s appetite has been whetted, it is no longer easy to satisfy them with any easy killing. So we are taken to the exact opposite: go to the hospital and pay a visit to your mom. And don’t forget to bring the flowers. The importance, or function, of this section is not to be underestimated. It does not contribute to the main action. But it is indispensible in the construction of characters. You never get to know a person until you meet his mom, right? No matter how cool he is in front of everybody, he just can’t be the same in front of his own mom.

In order to connect the causality (I would not care much if it is completely broken, but let’s us not forget we are in Hollywood), Max destroyes the suitcase, namely, customer information. Vincent is thus clueless to what is his next target. There is actually two holes here. For one thing, a killer always memorizes his targets without the need to consult a list at the last minute, like a cableman. Besides, he has to choose a best route among them in order to carry it out with utmost efficiency. Second, Max picked Vincent up at the same building where Annie works. What is he doing there if he is not doing some location surveying for his last victim?

But let us believe that they have to retrieve the information. In order to do this they have to go to Felix, the big boss behind all this. It is here that our timid escapist friend Max is gathering up his manhood. Perhaps he saw too many dead bodies tonight to stay in a cowardhood. Meanwhile, we become aware that FBI is closely watching the case. And we have detective Fanning hounding down from the first and second locations. It seems that all parallel lines are converging to a point. And they are going to converg at the Fever club, where the fourth guy is.

Now the big action with lots of helicopters is taking place. In a crowded place, different gangs are competing for their speed to locate the target. Vincent is the winner. He has to be. Otherwise what about the fifth victim? But Max is manly enough to confront him. He is no longer dominated by Vincent and out of nowhere he gathered the courage to fight him. Nowhere? But...yes, love. Because American people would glad to believe that in order to save girlfriend’s (or potential girlfriend) life a man is capable of anything. There is nothing more to say. The film is finished for me at this point. Despite the fact that Vincent ‘do this for a living’, he is killed in a High-Noon fashion gun fight and becomes himself a body on the metro. Max and his girl walk to the horizon, traumatized but live happily thereafter.

Art School Confidential or How to get into the dispute of artistic value

Art School Confidential is a rare film where the confusions around artistic value are depicted. Yes, modern art is not merely a tolerant attitude shown by museum curators, who kindly allocate some of their precious space for the works from Mondrian to Pollack : artistic value, at least in New York City, has become the foremost issue for our art students. When they enter into Stratmore, what are they supposed to learn from their professors?

In the good old days, this value is never a subject for open discussion. Value equals beauty and beauty demands properly applied techniques and hard working (added up in due time something called ‘personal vision’). It is a student’s task to get familliar with those rather ‘technical’ aspects of fine art and these techniques are taught in seperated disciplines : drawing, painting, sculpture and so on. Now the question is : if art is no longer ‘about composition and color’, but about ‘express with maximum freedom your true nature’ (say, for example, an assholian nature), do they still need to attend an art school in order to learn art? The answer propagandized by the film is a seeming ‘no’. For if it is true that most of the professors teach because they need a health insurance, if after twenty years of experience the only thing they learn to draw is triangles, if a cop who never gets more than Cs can paint all of a sudden with ideologically well-received paintings, if revealing the process of art is indeed a sufficient reason to justify the existence of a bad work, what is there to learn, after all, in an art school? You might as well invest the hard earned money of your parents in some more fruitful undertakings.

But if some of these issues exposed by this film are true, no meaningful alternatives are provided (if sucking and licking certain parts of human body do not count). The author of this film (if there is any), it seems to me, have adopted too easily (with an American businessman’s efficiency) a nihilist point of view. Modern art IS about the freedom of form and it IS about the process and ideology behind artistic creation, but it is never about nihilism. The confusions experienced by art students are understandable because unlike their ancesters, they face a crossroad where doctrines (good and bad) have been wiped off, road signs (right or wrong) have been uprooted. It is totally up to yourself to discover your own method and direction. But there is no reason to panic so soon. Directions will show up again, with techniques and hard working.

Another important issue brought up by the film is : can an artist exists all by himself? Probably not. Art seems to be a pursuit of beauty (or anything else at all), but in reality this endeavor is often mixed indiscernibly with all sorts of other less prestigious motivations : be famous, with all its derivative advantages (wealth and female admiration), and be great, if possible.

Out of pure fear that all these are not entertaining enough, that the abstract confusion of artistic value alone is not enough material for a watchable film, the plot gets disrupted by this cliché film student and his hectic project (sponsored generously by grandpa, for the love of gun fights) of ongoing campus murders. The one who had commited them, on the other hand, claimed to have paid a ‘humble tribune to the great murderer’ by making a serie of portraits of the victims. A typical case of schizophrenia, no doubt. What is interesting here is that those moments of uncontrollable killing impulses have been described as ‘enlightenments’ which sort of ‘redeem’ the impotency caused by artistic failure, that true crime (with murder ranking high above) is a sort of behavior art (an idea that has become, in the course of years, more and more popular), that paintings inspired, driven by these moments are powerful thus valuable.

Or if they still do not possess a recognizable value, then exposure certain does. Maybe we should cry this credo out really loud : don’t doubt your work, if its value is not recognized, it is simply not exposed enough. Once turned into a celebrity, our protagonist no longer needs to worry about anything about art– as long as his painting sell.