As the film progresses, we see the hidden vulnerabilities underlying all of the characters, making for some very fascinating dynamics. He is thus thrust from a state of depression to one of uncertainly, but also a certain exhilaration. The film centers on Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a broken, depressed man, who finds himself both courting a semi-arranged relationship by his parents, while also pursuing the equally lost but enchanting Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow). The result is a layered film, a powerful character study, and an intelligent exploration of the nature of loss, love, and our underlying motivations. It's a film that has familiar elements, certainly, but an uncommon execution with both a mature sensibility and nuanced look at relationships. And it did so to confirm the emergence of that “something else” to which it naturally tends, materializing partly thanks to electronic and digital media images, made of pixels or non-time particles (or particles of eternal time, unable to die, like Spielberg’s David).In the saturated genre that is romantic dramas, Two Lovers manages to distinguish itself in a truly unique way. To some extent, 21st-century cinema has gone through a transit space similar to the David’s immortality: it studied the perseverance of the time-image, it watched the gestures of its body free falling before surviving and transforming into something else. His silent wandering through a ruined city is not so different from Edmund’s in Germany Year Zero: the only difference – a big difference – between them is that David, raised in the infinite innocence of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, cannot die. Two and a half months before the Twin Towers attack, Spielberg’s A.I flooded Manhattan: feet dangling over an aquatic abyss, David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot with the capacity for unlimited love, discovers that he is nothing but a circuit of cables programmed for affection. Another suicide, also of a child, marks the reincarnation of the time-image in contemporary cinema. That is why Rancière thinks of the movement-image as a philosophy of nature – much closer to Bazin’s theory about realism – and of the time-image as a philosophy of spirit. But Deleuze takes the Bazinian idea beyond realism and into the field of thought – if we once had nice, organic representations, then due to the crisis of faith in human actions, all we have now is a cliché we tirelessly come back to in order not to forget how worn out it is. Deleuze is definitely indebted to André Bazin, the first theorist to admit Neorealism looks into the inside of human beings when forcing them to look to the outside. The sudden and emphatic connection between the time-image and the postwar period may seem to contradict Deleuze’s assertion that he doesn’t want to write a history of images, but in fact it does not. Deleuze warns us that he is not writing a history of cinema but a classification of signs, and Rancière shows that Deleuze, like Bresson, aims to draw a map of the things of the world, some kind of natural philosophy where “the image need not be constituted at all” because, following Henri Bergson, “t exists in itself”. It is Jacques Rancière who calls into question the relationship established by Deleuze between his taxonomy of the film image and the unfolding of History. Rossellini’s year zero is also a year zero for images: the year when the cinema depicts a teenager committing suicide is the year when the innocence of the movement-image seems insufficient to understand a world ripped apart. When watching one particular scene, different layers of our film experience, namely, those of visual and of temporal depth, collide in such a way that they provide the phenomenal basis for us to produce a temporal interpretation of the spatial relations held between the displayed images. I then apply this Deleuzian semiotic film phenomenology to his analysis of deep focus cinematography in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). To bring his observations more fruitfully into film phenomenological studies, I will examine his notion of the discordantly operating body and as well offer a phenomenological interpretation for his notion of cinematic signs. Although Gilles Deleuze is openly defiant toward the phenomenological tradition, his studies of film experience can serve this purpose as well, because he is interested in the direct and pre-verbal significance of cinematic images. By means of Vivian Sobchack's semiotic film phenomenology, we may examine our immediate perceptual acts in film experience in order to determine the ways that the primordial language of embodied existence found at this primary level grounds the secondary level of the more explicit interpretations we give to the film's elements.
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