deleuze film theory
NOTES 1. This is a common storyline for many films, but Toto le hews achieves it as much with typical scenes of a man recollecting his past as by showing a continuity of past and present in general with resonating cuts, graphic matches and matches on action between different events. It shows us film thinking for itself. We see not the thing, but what it is to see (or not see) the thing. We can learn as much from what film shows as from what philosophy says: both are vital forms of expression for Deieuze. Thinking with Cinema: Deleuze and Film Theory. Source: Aitken, Ian. Deleuze articulates it as follows: What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present into two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls towards the past. It is thus that Delueze is able to argue that Bergson is allied with film, since his own theory describes the entire universe as cinema. What Deleuze calls “any-space-whatevers” (“espace quelconque“) arise (a concept he takes from the anthropologist Marc Auge; Deleuze 1986:109). This is the power a/the “false” as such: the power to create untruths, the power to not correspond (with the old “truth”, the formulaic truth), but to respond to the world of change by instantiating it anew (cf. Two things must be said here. From Bergson’s movement-image, Deleuze derives three varieties of images: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. Indeed, the culmination of Cinema 1 tells us that it was Alfred Hitchcock who brought these relations among images to their completion, directing the movement-image to its “logical perfection” (1986: 200, 205; 1989: 34). They lose their utility when they cannot respond to the new challenges after 1945 (post-war European anomie and exhaustion, class upheaval, social reorganization, physical and spiritual dislocation, moral re-evaluation, vast economic migrations). Characters and actions become specular, quasi-meditative – processed for their spectrality to create suspense or unease. But it is the task of Cinema 1 to tell the story of the rise and fall of the movement-image – its various incarnations as perception-image, affection-image, impulse-image, action-image and mental-image – as well as the various signs related to them. : 155, 141-3). Indeed, Deleuze explains virtual ontology plainly: “for the time-image to be born … the actual image must enter into relation with its own virtual image as such” (ibid. Things happen for a reason: framings and cuts expressing either the challenges an agent meets with, or how he or she responds to them. It begins with a state of nature, followed by its fall and subsequent redemption: there was once a cinematic image adequate to expression that then fell into crisis (the shattering of the movement-image) before its resurrection as a time-image, an image adequate to its time, even when it is a time of loss and decay. The local is never closed off: there is always a bi-directional movement that extends the quantitative change in the part to the qualitative state of the Whole. Time in modern cinema, Deleuze tells us, “is no longer empirical, nor metaphysical; it is ‘transcendental’ in the sense that Kant gives this word: time is out of joint and presents itself in the pure state” (Deleuze 1986: 7,46; 1989: xi, 271). In the first book-length introduction to Deleuze's work on film from a feminist perspective, Teresa Rizzo ranges across Deleuze's books on Cinema, his other writings, and feminist re-workings of his philosophy to re-think the film viewing experience. This extension of the local to the whole is bi-directional, or reciprocally determining. M. Antonioni, 1960) or Ladri di biciclette (The bicycle thief; dir. The films of the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and the New Hollywood of the 1970s only give us glimpses of this virtuality, but they are direct glimpses all the same.7 Tliese “new”, evidently, bring the virtual with them (ibid.). : 109). This paper takes this film as an example and discusses Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy from three levels: time, latency and presentation. He gives us the mental images (of movement) rather than the action-images themselves, virtual movement over actual movement. Daunting though this objective is, it is not an infinite task, for after fifty years or so, Deleuze finds that cinema has exhausted all the variants of actual movement possible in the image. He writes: Tve tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; its a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be”‘ (Deleuze 1995a: 141): event as becoming contra being. (London: Athlone, 1989), 39, 55. The body and brain is thus an accumulation of habitual memories. Home › Literary Theory › Gilles Deleuze and Film Theory, By Nasrullah Mambrol on August 6, 2018 • ( 3 ). By inventing new relationships between sound and vision, new types of space, and even new kinds of body (that correspond to a “genesis of bodies” rather than fixed organic coordinates). For this, says Deleuze, is exactly how Bergson understood images, as “mobile sections of duration”; duration itself being the Real {ibid. : English preface, xi). These varied relations just are what Deleuze means by the perception-image, affection-image, action-image and so on. Deieuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta (trans.) The second approach emphasizes film theory over musicology, again telling us little about the relationship between the music and the film. Montage – a new, aberrant, connection between images – releases even more the qualitative, holistic movement from the local (on-screen) movement-images in an indirect “image of ‘time”. Opsigns and sonsigns, being breaks with the sensorymotor, are glimpses of real time, the time that lies virtual behind all actual (movement) images. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We keep missing the event. As D. N. Rodowick correctly notes in his introduction, Deleuze's film theory has largely been ignored either because commentators approach his cinema books with insufficient knowledge of Deleuze's concepts and philosophical work as a whole (which Deleuze presupposes throughout his cinema books), or one is familiar with Deleuze's work but is inadequately knowledgeable of film and film theory. The philosophy of time in film makes us pay attention to the status of and changes in life itself. argues that there is strong shift in theoretical orientation between the two Cinema books, Cinema 2 largely ignoring the image-ontology set up in Cinema 1. With the lectosigns of modern cinema, for example, sounds now constitute an “autonomous sonic continuum”, to use Ronald Bogue’s phrase, while images constitute a separate visual continuum, the two being put into relation with one another through their mutual differences – their asynchrony rather than a synchrony; cf. Pisters does not embrace the Deleuzean approach in a straightforward fashion, but on its strengths as the rationally … Martin Schwab (2000:134n.) Ultimately, it is the Event. Deleuze continued writing about philosophy, taught at Paris VIII University, and was heavily involved with activism, art, and film. European Film Theory And Cinema A Critical Introduction. The crisis for cinema, then, is also one for our culture and philosophy, for our ability, fundamentally, to think anew. Guattari worked heavily with anti-psychiatry movements and … Ángela Molina and Fernando Rey in Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). : 98). The book introduces Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the assemblage and uses it to understand the relationship between film and viewer, showing how Deleuze and Guattari's work can be useful to feminist film theory. : 105). So, when does an event occur? Its link to the whole, therefore – that is, what it expresses of the whole by its infra-imagistic selection – itself constitutes a kind of (qualitative) image that Deleuze calls the “perception-image”. The answer is that it (a static entity) could never occur (a process); to change is to stop being: The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening … it is the present as being of reason which is subdivided ad infinitum into something that has just happened or is going to happen, always flying in both directions at once. These various types of image (perception-image, affection-image) do not, therefore, represent the relations between subject and object; rather, they instantiate or exemplify them. Deleuze calls the first of these the “large form” (following Noël Burch’s nomenclature), wherein situations lead to actions that then lead to altered situations, as seen in westerns and action films in particular. With the perception-image, Deleuze tells us, “we are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught in a correlation between a perceptionimage and a camera-consciousness which transforms it” (ibid. This is the cinema of bodies, which is not sensorymotor, but “action being replaced by attitude” (ibid. The locus of the indiscernibility of the virtual and actual is named (after Guattari) the “crystal-image” by Deleuze. Bogue 2006: 212-13). : 203).6. R. Bogue, Deieuze on Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003), 7-8. 7. Lecturer in English PSC Solved Question Paper, Sarah Kofman and Film Theory – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Analysis of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, Cleanth Brooks' Concept of Language of Paradox. In What is Philosophy? Like the movement-images, of which they are a subspecies, perception-images have their own variable characteristics, namely a bias towards passive perception at one limit, action at another, and the affect that occupies (without filling) the gap in between.1 The perception-image, however, should not be regarded as subjective, but rather as an objective subjectivity (it is formed from the real auto-delimitation of images). Deleuze is saying no more than what Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Bergson and Martin Heidegger said before him: when something breaks, when a habitual act fails to find its target, it emerges (as it really is) into consciousness. This mutilation gives us real time, or the event – the time of eternity. The same occurrences are also populated by different characters/actors, a case in point being the line “its the midnight sun” (above the Arctic Circle), which is spoken twice by different characters in different scenes communicating between two remote points in the film. Would film survive to fight the good fight against cliche? Deleuze is not a thinker with a singular ‘theory’ that can be lifted and used as a critical/hermeneutical template (like Freud, Lacan, Metz, etc. Indeed, the story-arc of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 is as dramatic as it is (narratively) classical. And alongside the cliffhanger ending and curtain-fall, there also comes a real crisis and gap in Deleuze s film-philosophy, although we shall have to wait until we have seen what the time-image does before we tackle that.4 So what does it do? Deleuze was born in Paris to conservative, middle-class parents, whosent him to public schools for his elementary education; except forone year of school in Normandy during the Occupation, he lived in thesame section of Paris his entire life. : 29-55). In a sense, though, it is only the same thing that is being said in different ways, and this is in line with Deleuze s theory of univocity (that Being is said in the same way of, and by, every different thing). New kinds of actor will also have to emerge, consequently: amateurs, “professional non-actors”, or “actor-mediums”, capable of “seeing and showing rather than acting” (ibid. Where the movement-image weakened itself in formulaic, “false” movements, it is superseded by and subordinated to the time-image. 6. The small form is typically seen, according to Deleuze, in melodrama and burlesque (ibid. Yet while Deleuze provided dense descriptions of action-images, affection-images, and perception-images, his concepts decidedly subvert the methods of dominant psychologistic models that now constitute a large amount of scholarly film theory. Image = consciousness = matter in an objective phenomenology (the flipside of Deleuze’s thesis that the “brain is a subject”) (Deleuze & Guattari 1994:209-11). Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts - Kindle edition by Colman, Felicity. The action-image, on the other hand, expresses the well-organized, sensory-motor relationship between characters and the story-worlds that they inhabit. The history of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century comprises all the various permutations that these images and their space-times can take on, the purpose of Deleuze’s Cinema 1 being to chart each and every one of them. About this list: All the films mentioned by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image because someone had to do it. 3. Into the gap come many things: a real sense of anticipation (for the advent of the time-image), of suspense (over the life or death of cinema) and of animationness (how long before the sequel, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, would come out?). Each of these biases is itself expressed by a different type of film image: the perception-image as such (images that act on a central image), along with action-images (reaction of that centre to those images) and affection-images (the gap between that action and reaction, internal or undischarged reaction), as well as even further subdivisions (the impulse-image coming in between action and affect as a kind of virtual action, of potential acts more than actual ones). The new image, the time-image, was needed to meet the challenge of the cliche. We offer world-class services, fast turnaround times and personalised communication. This thread or relation between part and whole is expressed even more clearly with the use of editing techniques, be it in the American, “organic”, style of editing, Soviet “dialectical” montage, the “quantitative” style of pre-war French film-makers, or the “intensive” cutting of the German Expressionists (ibid. But, and this is the crucial point, the series of repetitions is kept going by the non-coincidence of these two lovers who keep missing each other, even on their first night of love. James Williams has emerged as one of the most important and accomplished readers of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. With the work of Alain Resnais, for instance (Je t’aime, je t’aime [1968], Hiroshima mon amour [1959]), we “plunge into memory” (ibid. And cinema, modern cinema, shows this. Or, if it is, then at least it is not within a simple present, as L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last year at Marienbad; 1961) demonstrates when its events derive from three types of present: that of the past, of the present and of the future. Or, rather, the event is in this constant missing, about to happen or having happened, but never happening. There is but one Being, with many languages through which it may express itself. Orson Welles‘s Citizen Kane (1941) is a case in point of the co-presence of past and present, the famed depth of field photography expressing “regions of past as such … The hero acts, walks and moves: but it is the past that he plunges himself into and moves in: time is no longer subordinated to movement, but movement to time” {ibid. Yet, despite the centrality of the Bergsonian image in his theory (one that would strike many as already veering back towards a phenomenology of appearances), Deleuze does not regard his approach as subjectivist. And, after Hitchcock, after 1945, cinema certainly seemed in need of a new artistic image. What we shall see in all of this is no mere philosophy of cinema, but how cinema gives us a new philosophy of subject and object and what moves between them: time. In the comedies of Jacques Tati, for instance, we see (and read) what it is to be a sound, as when the sound of a swinging door becomes boredom itself in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulots holiday; 1953), or in the numerous false fidelities between sound and image (a car horn that is also a ducks quack, a door hinge that is a plucked cello) that make us hear and so think about sound as sound. He rarely traveled abroad, althoughhe did take a trip to the U… Indeed, this organicism is said to culminate in the acting “Method” itself, whose rules apply not only to the actor but to “the conception and unfolding of the film, its framings, its cutting, its montage” (ibid. In other words, perception itself is an infra-imagistic delimitation, a further selection or filtering of images from the whole, although nonetheless still linked to the whole. : 193), going so far as to make even the scenery accord to the “attitudes of the body” (ibid.) (London: Continuum, 1994). Time, space and even thought itself are made perceptible in such time-images: they are made visible and audible by being thematized in the breakdown of “natural” sights, sounds, and actions (1989: 67, 18).5 Direct time is the “out of joint” of perception, action and affect, and therefore, of all the dimensions of movement {ibid. His personal life wasunremarkable; he remained married to the same woman he wed at age 31,Fanny (Denise Paul) Grandjouan, a French translator of D. H. Lawrence,and raised two children with her. This argument comes directly from Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.) These different types of image, with their salient features (emphasizing agency or affect or milieu) also encompass and are intimately tied to their own respective forms of space and time, each of which possesses the same emphases.3 Variously active, reactive or affective, antagonistic, melodramatic or comedic, such spaces nevertheless remain fairly complicit with the well-determined space-times of the movement-image, whose co-ordinates come from sensory-motor organization. : 273). Deieuze offers the example of “the obsessive framings” of Eric Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O… (The marquis of O; 1976) as expressive of this objective phenomenology, or semi-subjectivity. This is the Deleuzian event: above the Arctic Circle the sun never sets – a very Platonist idea evoking both the constancy of the atemporal event as well as the circulation of actions and individuals it keeps in play. After writing two early books on Lyotard (1998 and 2000; see also Crome and Williams 2006), Williams published, in rather quick succession, critical introductions to two of Deleuze's most important works, Difference and Repetition (2003) and Logic of Sense (2008). Jeffrey Bell. Cinema 2, 74). What is being iterated here is a materialist identity of brain and screen. "Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction" proposes a new way of thinking about cinematic viewing by exploring it as a bodily and emotional experience. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. The image is for itself and not for a consciousness (as both phenomenology and Freud would have it). In one respect, all the movement-images, or set of action-reaction images, can be thought of as cliches because, following Bergson, Deleuze sees any perceived image as a selection and deletion of reality in accordance with preset utilitarian formulae (1989: 20). These others are that between the limpid and the opaque, and the seed and the environment (cf. With “in a plurality of ways of being present in the world”, Deieuze is citing Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 233-4. between another of Deleuze's important concepts, 'event', and his film theory. And how those different relations are generated is given to us in the story of images that Bergson provides in chapter one of Matter and Memory. This is seen vividly (although also rather abstractly) at the beginning of Cinema 1 in the relation between one or more images and the set of all images surrounding it (the Whole, which is itself incomplete or “Open”). Finally, there are the numerous coincidences throughout that are not psychological premonitions (of the stag, for instance) but actual coexistences of different times gathered together by the same resonating names (“Otto the Piloto”) and events (collisions, falls) where things and people do not coincide. This is what his books are about. So “there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur” {ibid., 79). The power of the false is the power of creation, invention, novelty. Deieuze invokes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s linguistic model of free indirect discourse to explain this transformation; Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam (trans.)
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