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How are we to account for Deleuze's
temporality, both based in philosophies
difference, when confronted with43435f50
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or Bergson's theories of
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of life, creation, and
an aesthetic object such as film: a
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fixed, repeatable representation?524f4649
drive Deleuze's work as a whole,4c450001
JOURNAL
ExploringFOR the VISUAL
one is faced with perhaps a more
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STUDIES
larger processes that
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appear to be a contradiction in Deleuze's
upon Bergson to address the cinema,
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Amy H
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while
erzogBergson himself used the
medium as a model for the forces of rationality that immobilize and
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fragment time. I will argue, however,
between Deleuze's and Bergson's
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that there is no contradiction
approaches
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when we view film not
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as a model for perception, nor a 20735247
unique image with its own duration.
at the heart of the problem
reflected image of reality, but as a
What this seeming conflict
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points to is07ce00020009000600310000616373704d53465400000000494543207352
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and in practice). 00000000
At stake are not only all theories that address "the
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arts," but larger questions regarding the nature of the real. The key
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to unraveling
"Existing this
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the
as a complex
work ofunderstanding
art...."[1]
4657363000001840000006c77747074000001f000000014626b7074000002 of time
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that Bergson proposes. By using d4850202 this theory to re-evaluate cinema,
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Gilles Deleuze,
Deleuze does not in misconstrue
his two books the
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film, Cinemaof1:film.
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c400000088767565640000034c0000008676696577000003d4000000246c7TheInstead,
Movement-
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following 56d69000003f8000000146d6561730000040c000000247465636800000430
Bergson, Deleuze further expands
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Cinema 2: The Time-Image, proposes a revolutionary
where
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reinterpreting theDeleuze's
on way in which own we
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philosophy of
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repetition andnature
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Bergson, the
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Cinema books
notions of
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destabilization of the very
extend
signification
these
and
idea of a representation,
theories
association
to foreground those
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in favor
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that are most essential to the medium: 00000000 of
displacing
acts of
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that film unfolds in time,
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and images of thought.
and is comprised of ever-differentiating 00000000 planes of movement.
Deleuze's writings as a whole resonate 00000000 with correspondences
The greatest achievement of the00000000 Cinema books is that they suggest
between concepts of transformation, difference, and the forces of
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a means of looking at film that explodes
impersonal
project, so
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Deleuze's
Bergson's work
the work of art does. Rather than00000001
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Bergson
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Deleuze, has the potential to create its own fluid movements and in
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this context
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for
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on the one hand,
temporalities. These unquestionably valid.
movements,40000015while In addressing
related the elements
to formal cinema, of
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duration transposes
within the these theories,
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film itself, cannot which beare inherently
reduced to
bound up in the shifting and 36465736
unique movements of life, and uses
specific techniques or concrete images. Similarly, the temporality
them
film,
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to discuss
that Deleuze
ofmeans
shot, nor
the mechanized
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in the shooting, editing, projection, or reception of a film. By refusing
to thus situate his theory, Deleuze completely sidesteps
psychoanalytic and semiological film theories that would locate the
"meaning" of film beneath the surface level of signs. The
ramifications of Deleuze's project far exceed the scope of this paper.
My goal, nevertheless, is to map several of its threads. The first is an
interrogation of what varied meanings the term "representation"
might have for Bergson or Deleuze with specific reference to cinema.
The second involves the relationship between film and the realm
that can be designated as the "real." Finally, the overarching
question that motivates me is whether it is possible to maintain a
commitment to the "art of living" that Bergson (and Deleuze) so
convincingly promote while doing work on the "objects" of visual
culture. These are lines of inquiry that I cannot exhaust, but at the
same time, they are a movement toward understanding the creative
potentials of thinking through and with the work of art.
If the intellect were meant for pure theorizing, it would take its
place within movement, for movement is reality itself, and
immobility is always only apparent or relative. But the intellect
is meant for something altogether different. Unless it does
violence to itself, it takes the opposite course; it always starts
from immobility, as if this were the ultimate reality: when it
tries to form an idea of movement, it does so by constructing
movement out of immobilities put together.... Of immobility
alone does the intellect form a clear idea.[5]
The assemblages which film forms with its outside will necessarily
differ from those formed in literature or the other arts. Nevertheless,
Deleuze and Guattari's discussion bears weight on my discussion
here. Practices of filming or writing cannot be generalized as having
"productive" or "regressive" relationships with the real. Books and
films can act equally rhizomatic/crystalline or trace-like, depending
on their individual relation to the outside, the direction of their
movements.
It is this provocation that I see as the true potential of film. The act
of creation, for Bergson, is a solution to a challenge from the
outside, from life. The question of cinema is not a question of
representing or perceiving movement, but of thinking through
movement, of creating new movements and new images of thought.
Dorothea Olkowski, in her work on representation, returns to
Bergson's assertion that the most elemental function of philosophy
is to ask whether a problem has been properly stated. One cannot
propose to solve a problem in which the terms are falsely
established. In such cases, one will be bound up in an illusion,
unable to see the qualitative and quantitative differences between
the elements in question. Olkowski writes:
The provocation, then, for both the filmmaker and the film theorist, is
one posed by philosophy. The challenge is to see film not as a means
of representation, but as an assemblage of images in flux with the
world of images, to see the history of film and the history of
philosophy as convergent. The art of living remains the becoming of
true creation, but the image of thought introduces the stutters and
hesitations that give us access to this movement. "It's the image of
thought that guides the creation of concepts. It cries out, so to
speak, whereas concepts are like songs."[23] Bergson
writes of the creative capacity in art, "[w]hen music cries, it is
humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking,
it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into
them, like the passers-by that might be nudged in a dance"[24] It is
somewhere between the crying out and the song that we can hope
to find the movement of becoming that will carry us thus, beyond
ourselves.
Notes
15. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and
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W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991),
524742 000000 9. ffd8ff
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16. Bergson, Time and Free000000
Will: An Essay on
000000 the Immediate
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Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson
000000 (New
000000 York:
000000
49460 Macmillan,
000000
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000000 000000000000
1959), 100, as quoted in Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles 00102000000
000000
Deleuze and
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the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University01005 of California
d60001 d60001d60001 d60001
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Press, 1999), 121. Translation altered
000000 by Olkowski.
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17. Olkowski, 91. 485020 617070 e2053
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18. Olkowski, 114. 000000 000000000000
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19. Deleuze, Negotiations, 000000
164-165. 000000
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20. Rodowick, 176. 000000 000000 c4500
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21. Rodowick, 177. 000000 000000000000
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22. Deleuze, Negotiations, 000000
149. 000000000000 000000
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23. Deleuze, Negotiations, 148.