Temenuga Trifonova - Deleuze on Cinema

Temenuga Trifonova134

SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

A Nonhuman Eye:Deleuze on Cinema

Temenuga Trifonova

Sartre’s

Imagination

and

The Psychology of Imagination

play an importantrole in philosophy’s renewed attempts to go beyond the human, to annihilatesubjectivity, to return to pure perception in which objects vary for one anotherrather than for one privileged image or center of reference (consciousness). BeforeSartre, Bergson was already interested in pure (inhuman) experience “abovethat decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomesproperly human experience’” (Deleuze,

Bergsonism

27). Deleuze confirms thathuman intelligence is bound to reduce differences in kind to differences in degreeand that the former are rediscovered only “above the turn” in the examinationof the conditions of experience by intuition:

To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which areinferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This isthe meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to liveamong badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed compositesourselves. (ibid., 28)

Deleuze’s task in the two volumes of

Cinema

is to demonstrate how moderncinema in particular has made it possible to surpass the human condition byabolishing subjectivity as a privileged image in what Bergson calls “the aggregateof images” (the material world).Bergson’s theory of duration, of the contemporaneousness of perceptionand memory, is based on his analysis of the phenomenon of déjà vu, which heconsiders the most authentic expression of the true nature of our mental life: theautomatic preservation of the past in the present. Similarly, in his two volumeson cinema Deleuze advances the hypothesis that the appearance of the time-image in cinema (more specifically, in Italian neo-realist cinema) has revealedthe true nature of time as a continuous forking into incompossible presents andnot necessarily true pasts. Time-images are experienced as past; however, they belong to an impersonal rather than an individual past. In this sense, the time-image is a form of déjà vu. In déjà vu we feel that we have experienced something before, yet we cannot trace the experience to our own past, as if our ownrecollections have been stolen from us or, alternatively, as if we are recollectingsomeone else’s past. Both Bergson and Deleuze conceive the subject as a sort of

134

Deleuze on Cinema135

SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

abridged and necessarily limited version of our entire mental life. To restore therichness and complexity of that mental life, they believe, subjectivity has to besuppressed or surpassed, which in turn calls for a redefinition of representation.Deleuze’s

Cinema I: The Movement-Image

and

Cinema II: The Time-Image

1

exemplify the changes in our understanding of representation as they trace thetransition from a cinema dominated by movement-images to the modern cinemaof the time-image. In the regime of movement-images, time is subordinated tomovement: things and events determine psychological duration. The drawback of the movement-image, according to Deleuze, is that it fails to present duration, but subordinates it to movement or spatialized time. Deleuze’s contention is thatmodern cinema has liberated itself from subjectivity or representation; however,his theory of the time-image does not get rid of subjectivity, but only reformulatesthe notion of the object. The object for Deleuze is a pure image, a “mental image”purged of any materiality and no longer subordinated to sensory-motorschemata.Deleuze believes that to restore its original nature as a being rather than anobject of knowledge, the subject must become even more subjective: it mustconstitute itself “above” its own representations; it must create hyper-representations. Deleuze privileges the time-image over the movement-image because the former constitutes itself beyond representation, thus reaffirming thesubject’s autonomy. The subordination of movement to time achieves namelythis: when duration dictates what is happening, rather than events determiningtime, the subject has restored its independence from the world. While therepresentation of the world still presupposes an essential difference between thingsand their descriptions, the time-image eliminates this difference, replacing thingswith their descriptions.The relationship Deleuze establishes between things and their descriptionsis similar to the one Baudrillard posits between objects and signs. Like Baudrillard,Deleuze appears to believe that simply placing the description of a thing in the“place” (this “place” is within the system of representation) usually occupied bythe thing itself renders the description pure, or thing-like. All referential material,all objectivity is evacuated from the time-image, but precisely because of that,Deleuze contends, the time-image is not a subjective representation, but a thingin itself, a pure expression. This is so because the idea of an object alwayspresupposes the idea of a subject (representation is not only the presentation of the world as a reflection of the subject but also, and to an equal degree, the self-objectification of the subject) and the end of representation is the annihilation of both subject and object. However, Deleuze fails to take into account the fact thatthe act by which an end is put to representation cannot itself be bracketed out.

Temenuga Trifonova136

SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

Something of the subject always remains and it is namely (and only) from thepoint of view of this remainder of subjectivity that the end of subjectivity is positedand simultaneously proven impossible.

2

The impossibility of eliminating point of view applies both to literature andto cinema. In

Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres

, Bruce Morrissette describesan excellent example of this impossibility in the work of novelist/filmmaker AlainRobbe-Grillet. Taking the case of Robbe-Grillet as an example of the attempt toget rid of the specific, situated point of view and substitute it with a purely“geometric and visual perspective”(45), Morrissette demonstrates how this projecteventually restores, though in a slightly modified form, the omniscient narrator:

Is it possible to separate point of view in itself, as localization of a cameraobjective or of an authorial eye, from the reason or internal justification of this same point of view? Does this “observer,” who for Robbe-Grillet…neednot be a “character” in the narrative, have the privilege of randomlypositioning himself almost anywhere? …Can he displace himself at will?What will then prevent such an eye of the camera or of the novelist from becoming, once again, an eye “everywhere at once,” if not an eye that isperpetually omniscient and omnipresent like the eye of God? …Yet if wegrant the camera an absolute liberty of movement…an omni-optiquesystem is obviously created, the justification for which seems as difficultor arbitrary as in the case of the omniscient author. (46)

A distinction needs to be made between the objectification of point of view andthe alleged “dehumanization” resulting from it. The suppression or the disguiseof the subjective point of view in cinema or in the novel never attains the totalelimination of subjectivity. Robbe-Grillet’s apparent objectification of the pointof view does not necessarily deprive his novels of humanism. His descriptions of objects and events create only the appearance of an impersonal work for they“do not in any way have a ‘photographic’ or naively realistic purpose; theyare…rather supports or objective correlatives of a tacit psychology”(93). Themost “objective” descriptions and manipulations of the point of view are boundto remain “pseudo-objective”(106).

3

Most of Deleuze’s ideas in

Cinema II: The Time-Image

repeat and occasionallyelaborate on Robbe-Grillet’s analysis of the New Novel in a series of essays writtenin the fifties and sixties and collected in

For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

(1965).For example, while Robbe-Grillet draws attention to the role of “description”—as distinguished from signification—in the modern novel and film, Deleuzecharacterizes the cinema of the time-image as “pure expression”; while for Robbe-Grillet “the false” is that which does not appear “natural,” that which is cut off from signification and thus from verisimilitude (163), Deleuze argues that thevery nature of time in contemporary cinema is falsification. Robbe-Grilletproposes that precisely by refusing to signify and by instead drawing attention

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