The movement and time of Cinema

Roland Barthes mentioned in his Image Rhetoric that when the audience looks at the photographic works, what they see is the former Dasein. The present moment and the “other place” of the photo constitute an illogical disconnection of time and space, thus constituting the “unreality of reality”. And Christian Metz, based on the above point of view, made an exposition of the transcendence of the cinema’s authenticity of photography in Essais sur la signification au cinema. He believes that the most significant difference between cinema and photography is that when cinema meets the above conditions, it also possesses a movement attribute, and it is this movement attribute that creates a strong sense of reality. Form reflects its objectivity in movement, and the real world itself is in constant motion. Therefore, compared with photography, cinema provides a new coordinate axis for reality. At the same time, movement actually exists in human cognition as a basic mechanism of psychology or mental structure. Starting from human feelings, movement is always based on the a priori of space and time, and at the same time, people also confirm the practice of the transcendental concept of space and time in the real world through movement. From this perspective, the importance of movement to cinemas is self-evident. It gives cinemas the ability to directly stimulate people’s psychological mechanisms to produce a sense of reality. This divides the movement in the cinema into space and time. Unlike pure photography, because of continuous motion, the image of the cinema is more of an internal entity with the ability to develop independently. Motion makes the cinema break away from the limitation of the “plane” of photography and move concretely in a background: cinema content break away from the cinema base and digital frame and become the “three-dimensional reality”.

The a priori of time constitutes the movement factor at the narrative level of the cinema. Although its existence is non-visual, it provides more favorable conditions for the development of the cinema than the movement at the material level. The presentation of any narrative in a cinema will inevitably form a kind of closure, because the actual existence of narration is based on the linear time experience of the cinema in the real world. When the time movement of the cinema ends, the narrative of the cinema will inevitably end and close. Only when the cinema’s narrative has a beginning and an end, can it be realized independently of the outside, opposed to reality. Although there are many relatively “high-level cultural” narrative structures that resort to an open or spiral ending, the timeline of the cinema actually clearly marks the beginning and the end, and the audience may realize that the events in the world of the cinema remain the same. It will continue, but as far as the story presented in the cinema itself, it must have been closed. Therefore, the time of the cinema presents a closed structure. When its beginning and ending are inevitable, its middle process actually determines the detailed level of the cinema’s narrative, which means that although the timeline of the cinema in the real world is a kind of one-way linearity, but the internal composition of the cinema’s time structure is not necessarily. In other words, the cinema’s time composition can be a phenomenon in which the time of a nonlinear narrative is projected onto a single-direction linear time axis. The internal disparity of the dual temporality formed by the time of the narrated thing and the time of the narration causes the audience to have a very complicated psychological mechanism when actually watching the cinema. This is the most basic principle of the montage technique. According to the Kurischoff effect, the emotional expression of a cinema is expressed in the audience’s mind in the form of multiple consecutive segments rather than a single picture, and a single picture only appears as a material. The study of structuralism and semioticism of cinema therefore regards cinema as a form of paradigm. I don’t want to go into too much detail on this, because it involves many very complicated philosophical studies. But there is no doubt that the various properties of cinemas make it possible to manipulate “time” in the production process of cinemas, and nonlinear editing was born from this. It is not the result of pure technological progress, but at the same time the product of the understanding of the image itself.

The above are the theoretical and logical principles of non-linear editing on the cinema itself. In the actual operation process, non-linear editing also presents its own certain cybernetic characteristics. The pan-language nature of the cinema itself makes the combination of cinema material extremely free. It is not as orderly and “polite” as the pure language that people often use, but more of a kind that can be freely combined. And constitute the objective “sensible”. The application of cinema editing is actually the shaping of the spirit of the material by the cinema maker through the logic of cybernetics. This shaping directly changes the cinema and also has an impact on the audience. Therefore, it can even be said that the cinema montage is the cinema. The creator completes the communication with the cinema audience through the control of pan-language. This eventually led to the birth of the “Odessa Staircase” in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which used the “juggling montage” technique to highlight the bloody massacre of civilians and even the weak and old women and children by the Tsar’s military police. In this shot, Eisenstein actually combined multiple materials from different time nodes in the same time period in a non-linear way. First, he gave the audience a panoramic shot, which included the stairs, the running crowd and the Cossack cavalry, then the middle shot of an army passing by the mother who died with the child, and then the panoramic view of the crowd running on the stairs. Then came the middle shot of the dead. Since the actual time of this clip is more than six minutes and it is very classic, I will not repeat it again and add pictures. Analyzing this whole paragraph, it is not difficult to see that the non-linear time structure and the cycle formed by a certain multiple time node at the same time give a stronger emotional expression of events in a cinema and make it possible to understand more comprehensively. The final statistics of the shots show that there are more than 150 shots in this entire segment, and the average shot length is less than three seconds, which shows its importance and influence on cinema history.

As a result, the importance of the motion attribute and time of the cinema to the cinema narrative is fully revealed. Editing as a practical technique becomes important on this basis, this makes cinema as an unrealistic closed expression of a time period of various events becomes more colorful and richer.