Indivisibility

Bergson as a pre-existential philosopher, most of his theories about being and life. First of all according to him life is something fluid. There is no possibility to divide it into pieces or chapters. Like a river it just goes and with each decision it constructs its own riverband and branches. However in Waltz with Bashir as Ari remembers the past its like divided moments. We see that he remembers each part with the help of different people. It was not like he remember a moment and then could link the moments with each other. Rather like chapters, every trace took him to different piece of his past. What I mean can be understood clearly in the film Click. In this film, Newman can divide his life into chapters can travel from moment to moment. He could skip to future and turn back to past again. However he lost the sense of the whole of his life by dividing his life into chapters. In this point what Bergson says about the fludity of life can be proved. The life is a whole and there is no division between states of life.

What Bergson says about memory and forgetting is quite logical according to me. He claims that we always store what we experience in our memories. What we think that we forget is actually not erasen from our memories. It’s just the function of brain filter. We filter our memories and remember them and of course this may varies from situation to situation. So in Waltz with Bashir Ari has the whole memory of what was happened. By the help of right people and right objects he accomplished to remember the memory belongs shared with other people. However after the film audience can remember the each scene. For example in Before Sunrise throughout the film we see the characters in some certain places and times. At the end of the film we see the scenes again but this time without characters. However we as audiences immediately remember that they slept together in the park, listened music in a street and so on. However the experiences do not belong to ourselves our memory can remember each of that experiences. This is because we exposure to the images during the film and what we remember is actually not the action itself but the self that percieving that scene.

Another point is about time. According to Bergson past is something that carries itself into present and the present turns into past and becomes a future. The present contains past and future in itself. We also cannot divide time into parts. As Deleuze mentions about Augustine, time is a problematic issue. Both Aristotle and Agustine deals with that problem and they conclude that there is neither present nor past nor future. We name them for the pragmatic reasons. As Ari remembers his past, all his memories become present. In this manner what he does is to make an illusionary division between moments and fill the spaces in his memory.