Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America

ISSN: 1475-3820 (Print) 1478-3428 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbhs20

The Time-Image in Carlos Reygadas’ Stellet Licht: A

Cinema of Immanence

Sheldon Penn

To cite this article: Sheldon Penn (2013) The Time-Image in Carlos Reygadas’ Stellet
Licht: A Cinema of Immanence, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 90:7, 1159-1181, DOI:
10.1080/14753820.2013.839147

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2013.839147

Published online: 25 Oct 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 375

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbhs20
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XC, Number 7, 2013

The Time-Image in Carlos Reygadas’

Stellet Licht: A Cinema of Immanence*
SHELDON PENN
University of Leicester

Carlos Reygadas’ first three feature films, Japón (2002), Batalla en el cielo
(2005) and Stellet Licht (2007) are distinct from the output of the majority of
what has been termed the new wave of the New Mexican Cinema that
derives its language largely from the Hollywood tradition.1 Amongst
directors cited as influential by Reygadas are Robert Bresson, Andrei
Tarkovsky and Carl Dreyer whose film Ordet (1955) is overtly referenced in
Stellet Licht. Reygadas’ work is art-house cinema and the director is vocal
about his dislike of narrative-driven, commercial film. In an interview given
in 2005 he states:

I really think most of what we call cinema is not cinema. It’s really film
theatre or, even worse, illustrated literature. The object of the film is the
story, and the characters are just technical people representing
something. […] In my opinion that is not real cinema.2

Whilst acknowledging the sense of a community that the renaissance of

Mexican cinema affords,3 Reygadas clearly does not wish to be pigeonholed

* The author would like to thank the University of Leicester for granting the study
leave that contributed to the writing of this article.
1 The director’s fourth full-length film, Post Tenebras Lux (2013), was released as this
study went to press. For a discussion of this new wave see Jason Wood’s introduction to his The
Faber Book of Mexican Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), xi–xiii. Whilst Wood points
out the potentially fleeting nature of this new wave, his summation in many ways highlights a
role for cinema that Reygadas has been keen to eschew: ‘Now, though, they [Mexican
audiences] once more had a national cinema to be optimistic about, one that matched if not
bettered the films imported from across the border; a cinema with its own stars, its own high
production values, and its own characters and concerns. These Mexican audiences were once
again able to recognize themselves, their hopes, aspirations and troubles, on screen’ (xii).
2 Carlos Reygadas and Charlotte Higgins, ‘I Am the Only Normal Director’ (interview),
The Guardian, 22 August 2005, n.p., <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/22/edinburgh
filmfestival2005.edinburghfilmfestival> (accessed 23/06/2009).
3 Reygadas and Higgins, ‘I Am the Only Normal Director’.

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/13/07/001159-23

© 2013 Bulletin of Spanish Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2013.839147
1160 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

as a national director. In his first films, he has avoided the overt treatment of
Mexico as nation and, rejecting a thesis-based cinema, he never openly
addresses geopolitical issues. It is not uncommon for filmmakers and critics
alike to respond to expectations that subaltern cinemas represent the
nation.4 Nevertheless, Reygadas remains resolute in his universalist
approach. Stellet Licht is set in a Chihuahuan Mennonite community
because, according to the director, he ‘wanted something as timeless and
placeless as possible’ for a ‘love story’.5 The intention is unambiguous for the
spectator. The isolation and difference of the Mennonite community from
perceived national norms or characteristics produce an otherworldliness that
removes the story from ideological inscriptions of time and place. One
response to this approach might be to criticize the director for failing to
address socio-political reality but this would be to ignore his primary aim,
namely an aesthetic exploration of the real. By paring down social context,
Reygadas aims to avoid the over-determination of identity, a danger for
cinemas burdened with the pressure from certain vocal commentators to be
always politically or socially accountable (from which Mexico is no exception).
The director neither exoticizes the Mennonite characters nor uses them as
lazy archetypes. Instead, the ‘timeless’ and ‘placeless’ staging enables an
authentic re-imagination of the relationship between people, landscape
and time.
The components of Reygadas’ cinema combine to produce an uneasy,
paradoxical naturalism. The study of relationships achieves an affective reality
but one which never settles to moral cliché, encouraging empathy but not easy
understanding or judgment. Despite their essentially avant-garde roots,
Reygadas’ films are not detached intellectual exercises. Characterization and
emotional interaction assume a level of importance connecting the director’s
cinema, albeit obliquely, to the melodramatic tradition. The characters lack the
illustrated psychological motivation required by realism proper but their
actions are contextualized within classical narrative frameworks that draw
us into their stories. In Stellet Licht, for example, the spectator lacks the full
back story to be able comfortably to rationalize the events that unfold, but their
tragic and, arguably, Romantic dimension demands an emotional response.
The spectator believes in the characters in their milieu, not because they are

4 See, for example, Paul Julian Smith’s discussion of the case of Amores perros, the film
that, arguably, launched the international recognition of the second wave of the New Mexican
Cinema at the beginning of the Millennium. Smith comments on both the critical reception of
the film and González Iñárritu’s own observations about the role of the film vis-à-vis the nation
(Paul Julian Smith, Amores perros [London: BFI, 2003], 14–15).
5 Jonathon Romney and Carlos Reygadas, ‘The Sheltering Sky’ (interview), Sight and
Sound, 18:1 (2008), 42–44 (p. 43).
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1161

‘true’ in word and deed but because their incompletion—a kind of coming into
being in the world—promises authenticity.
Naturalism is an apt term for the film, albeit a naturalism of strangeness
rather than familiarity with a basis in the director’s particular approach to
the direction of the cast. In this, although the results differ significantly, the
director has a connection with Neo-Realism in his use of a non-professional
cast. Reygadas has stated his rejection of acting in cinema, claiming that his
mode of working requires that his cast ‘be’ rather than perform.6 This
objection seems to be partly rooted in his dislike of theatre in which ‘the
actors are presenting roles’ as a means to little more than personal
‘catharsis’.7 Although this apparently flippant dismissal of theatre tout
court must be taken in its interview context, what can be deduced from it is
the director’s objection to the direct transferral of theatrical performative
norms to the cinema in its culturally dominant form. Little effort is required
to recall experimentations with a theatre of being from such figures as
Artaud and Cixous8 that could even prove to be enlightening for a study of
Reygadas’ work, but two key points arise here. First, Reygadas objects to the
essential artifice of acting and second, the director implicitly finds a quality
inherent in the medium of film that strips away representation and
personality leaving us with what he would wish to be unfettered life in itself.
Reygadas does not work with a script, instead directing words and
actions immediately before filming. He demands that the cast members
bring only themselves to the film. There are several important results of
this method of working. On one hand, Reygadas exercises more obvious
close control over the cast than directors who allow autonomy for the actors’
‘art’. The filming process is painstaking and the directorial precision
extreme. On the other hand, the ‘performance’ of the cast manages to
escape directorial authority because, being non-actors, they behave in
unexpected and non-uniform ways. Reygadas’ characters are versions of
the ‘spiritual automata’ that Deleuze identifies in the films of Pasolini,
Rohmer and Bresson amongst others:

Automata or ‘models’ according to Bresson are not at all the creation of

the author: in contrast to the role of the actor, they have a ‘nature’, an ‘I’,
which reacts on the author (‘They allowing you to act in them, and you
allowing them to act in you’, p. 23). Bresson’s cinema, or, in a different

6 Reygadas and Higgins, ‘I Am the Only Normal Director’.

7 Reygadas and Higgins, ‘I Am the Only Normal Director’.
8 Citing Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double, Marc Silverstein writes: ‘For Cixous, as
for Artaud, theater must effect a “reconquest of the signs of what exists”, stripping them of
their character as signs in order to retrieve their existence’. See ‘ “Body-Presence”: Cixous’s
Phenomenology of Theater’, Theatre Journal, 43 (1991), 507:16 (p. 509).
1162 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

way, Rohmer’s, is evidently the opposite of direct cinema; but it is an

alternative to direct cinema.9

These automata, in line with Reygadas’ aims, are not creations of the actor’s
skill but have a life and identity of their own, which nevertheless is not
autonomous from the cinematic field incorporating the director or, ‘author’,
as Deleuze terms it. The use of non-actors often produces—sometimes
deliberately, sometimes not—an alienating affect of flawed verisimilitude,
but in Reygadas’ films this is not the case. Echoing (if not exactly replicating)
the ‘free indirect’ cinema discussed by Deleuze,10 Reygadas’ characters
sometimes appear to act and speak as if their own ‘gestures’ and ‘words were
already reported by a third party’.11 However, because the automata are
neither direct products of acting or authorial intent they retain the autonomy
of a supernatural or ‘spiritual’ clairvoyance (Deleuze has referred to them as
‘seers’).12 The appearance of rehearsal in Stellet Licht does not emphasize
artifice. Shunning verisimilitude or representation from the outset,
Reygadas’ approach manifests, rather than a self-reflexive or ironized
realism, a heightened reality or the innate unfamiliarity of the real that
inhabits a ground between documentary and drama without ever fully
conforming to either.
Reygadas’ influences read like a roll call of Deleuze’s originators of the
time-image. His admiration for Tarkovsky is particularly telling, given that
Deleuze cites the Russian director in the first chapter of Cinema 2, noting
how, for Tarkovsky, ‘time in cinema becomes the basis of bases, like sound in
music, colour in painting’.13 Inspired by the European new wave, Reygadas’
formal attitude fits squarely with the cinema of the time-image. Like Japón
and Batalla en el cielo, Stellet Licht is poetic rather than essayistic and
echoes the director’s conviction that authentic cinema ‘doesn’t mean
anything’ but rather, similarly to music, ‘conveys feeling’.14 Although
Reygadas’ comments do not amount to an extensive reflection on his
approach or on cinema in general—the director is not keen to theorize
publicly—the assertion that genuine cinema deals in sensation rather than
meaning is instructive.
What Reygadas means by ‘feeling’ in this context is not beyond debate
but the distinction drawn with meaning can profitably be mapped
onto Deleuze’s account of the difference between the cinema of the

9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta
Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 304, n. 48 [sic]. Deleuze refers to Bresson’s Notes here
(see n. 42 [sic], 302).
10 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 177.
11 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 177.
12 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 170.
13 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 278, n. 25.
14 Reygadas and Higgins, ‘I Am the Only Normal Director’.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1163

movement-image to that of the time-image. This difference results from an

historical shift caused by World War II and the subsequent crisis of
knowledge.15 From a Deleuzian standpoint, Reygadas’ statement that cinema
‘doesn’t mean anything’ would need to be historically contextualized. As the
foremost theorizer of the cinema of the movement-image, Eisenstein’s films had
meaning as their rationale. As an example of ‘[c]lassical cinema, the cinema of
the movement-image’,16 Eisenstein’s work is ‘intellectual’17 in the sense that
makes thought visible in a dialectical representation of ‘the Whole’.18 Via the
classic consciousness-inducing shock of revolutionary cinema, mind and body
are unified in the ‘action-thought’ that ‘[i]ndicates the relation between man
and the world, between man and nature, the sensory-motor unity, but by raising
it to a supreme power (‘monism’)’.19 The cinema of the action-image translates
itself into the action-thought, a process only possible in the movement-image
where time is measured and rationalized to the extent in which it is inseparable
from space. In this model, cinema is a network of logically connected images
(montage) and part of an all-encompassing system of intelligibility (Eisenstein’s
monism) from which it derives and to which it contributes meaning. As Gregory
Flaxman puts it, ‘[t]he “régime” of the movement-image bespeaks a process of
regulation that Deleuze ascribes to a “sensory-motor schema”, a neural network
that “affectively” contains the image-flux’.20 However, as Deleuze posits, in
postwar cinema, the sensory-motor schema breaks down and along with it the

15 Deleuze associates this as initiating in the cinema of Italian Neo-Realism. See Gille
Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), Chapter 12, ‘The Crisis of the Action Image’ (201–
19) and Deleuze, Cinema 2, Chapter 1, ‘Beyond the Movement-Image’ (1–23). To identify the
cinema of the movement-image entirely in opposition to that of the time-image risks a
reduction of the complexity of these two terms. Deleuze initially identifies the movement-
image as a definition of the essential quality of film (an image that moves) and, in this sense,
the cinema of the time-image also comprises movement-images. However, it is within the
period of cinema that Deleuze associates broadly with the movement-image that its various
‘varieties’, namely the ‘perception-image’, ‘affection-image’ and ‘action-image’, produce the
indirect representation of time. The example I discuss here is that of Eisenstein’s action-image
and is the one which Deleuze chooses to base his reprise of the movement-image in Cinema 2.
16 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 152.
17 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153.
18 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153. Deleuze makes different uses of this term through the course
of both volumes of the work on cinema. Its usage here, which is underlined with the use of
capitalization, needs to be differentiated from his discussion of the Bergsonian ‘third thesis’ of
the whole as ‘the Open’ or durée that was developed in Creative Evolution. The distinction is
fundamental because the idea of the whole used in relation to Eisenstein in Cinema 2 relates to
cinema as an intellectually totalizing project. The whole, understood as the Open, is the ever-
changing and intangible reality of duration. Deleuze treats this expositionally in Chapter 1 of
Cinema 1 and goes on to discuss it in detail in relation to technical aspects of film in Chapters 2
and 3.
19 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 156.
20 The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman
(Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000). See Flaxman’s introduction, 1–57 (p. 5).
1164 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

possibility of the action-thought. The cinema of the movement-image comes to

an end when film as a social revolutionary tool becomes impossible. The
movement-image operates by clarifying the status and roles of film and the
outside world; it enables meaning in the dialogue that is set up between these
elements within an intelligible and finite system. The cinema of the movement-
image need not, of course, be overtly political but it is essentially ideological and,
in this sense, connects closely to the definition and purpose of film that
Reygadas rejects.
Deleuze’s theorization of the movement-image as a ‘sensory-motor
schema’ owes much to Bergson’s philosophy of time, particularly as
developed in Matter and Memory. Bergson’s argument hinges on the
contention that time can only be humanly perceived—in terms of cognitive
understanding rather than brute sensation—as space. Bergson confronts
succession and linearity (time measured as space) with durée, or pure
duration. In Bergson’s intuitive philosophy that aims to eliminate the
opposition between idealism and realism, durée is at once ideal in that it
cannot be perceived, yet real because it accounts for time in a way that does
not revert back to a measurement of space. It is Bergson’s peculiar realm of
intuition—an appeal to non-verifiable experience—that inspires Deleuze in
the conceptualizations of the time-image. Contrasting the action-image, the
cinema of the time-image is characterized by Deleuze as thought. Not to be
confused with the intellectual purpose of the movement-image, thought, in
this new context equates to the filmic image as a particular actuation of a
mind or a plane of consciousness; not thought as producer or appropriator but
the thinking of thought that works against its own stable objectification.
I would argue that Reygadas’ definition of cinema as ‘feeling’ can best be
understood, not as an appeal to a vague emotional or sentimental response, but
within the cinematic intellectual context outlined above. The director’s
preference for music as a comparable artistic medium is instructive in that it
recalls one of the ways in which Bergson first explains the concept of durée. For
Bergson, music, as affect, functions as durée, the notes forming ‘a continuous or
qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to number’.21 It is only when
music is recollected that it becomes ‘a homogeneous medium or measurable
quantity’22 and therefore a symbolic representation of duration that is strictly
spatial rather then temporal.23 Transposing music back onto cinema, we can
postulate how Reygadas’ filmic image functions similarly to Bergson’s
conception of the musical note. But to grasp this we need to disambiguate
‘image’ as pictorial record from ‘image’ as a kind of visual ‘oscillation’, the term
that Bergson uses with reference to a sound utterance. When Bergson states
that ‘images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement’, by

21 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001), 105.
22 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 105.
23 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 105.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1165

‘image’ he means recollection and representation.24 The step that Deleuze

takes in adapting Bergson’s intuitive philosophy of durée is to show how the
cinematic time-image operates like thought and thereby escapes reification.
Bergson’s symbolic representation of sound is expressed as an ‘image’;
following this, film as ‘homogeneous medium’—with a solidified ‘meaning’—is
an ‘image’ of an image (a potential definition of Deleuze’s movement-image).
Reygadas’ images, like Bergson’s musical oscillations are ‘perceive[d] one in the
other, each permeating the other and organising themselves like notes of a
tune’.25 In this, they resemble the crystalline multiplicity of Deleuze’s time-
image.
Stellet Licht, like Reygadas’ two previous full-length films, emphatically
presents the spectator with the experience of time, with the knowledge of
time spent in the mechanical processes of filming and viewing deliberately
underscored. It hardly need be said that this aim runs contrary to most
cinema where the spectator’s awareness of the passing of time can normally
be taken for the failure of a film to entertain. The mere experience of passing
time does not equate to the realization of durée but it can, in different ways,
reveal fissures between time and space thereby exposing ideologizing
functions of the movement-image. Stellet Licht, I would argue, not only
employs numerous ‘Deleuzian’ instances of the time-image but also
thematically addresses the question of time more overtly than the director’s
previous films. Notwithstanding Reygadas’ warning against meaning in
cinema, time in Stellet Licht is closely connected to the spiritual and cosmic
dimensions of the film that are apparent in the resurrection of Esther and
the opening and closing sequences of dawn and dusk. Indeed, in Stellet Licht,
Reygadas appears to openly present the viewer not only with an examination
of time but of multiple manifestations of time. In a direct citation of Dreyer’s
Ordet, Johan stops the clock on the wall to halt the marker of chronology as
he reflects on the crisis of his relationship with Esther. Echoing the
significance of the stopping and the subsequent restarting of the clock in
Ordet, there is an overt—albeit ambiguous—connection made between non-
chronological time and the love of Marianne that enables resurrection.
Neither film allows a clear interpretation of the significance of the stopping
and starting of chronological time (or the clocks, at least) but the prominence
of the act requires the spectator to consider time in its human, divine and, in
the case of Stellet Licht, its cosmological dimensions. Given the fact that
Deleuze discusses Dreyer’s film on several occasions in Cinema 2, it seems
appropriate to take into account Reygadas’ chronologically ‘post-Deleuzian’
reworking of Ordet in relation to a wider reading of time on Stellet Licht.

24 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York:
Zone Books, 1991), 175.
25 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 105.
1166 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

Before this discussion, I will turn to look in detail at the presence and
function of some of the varieties of the time-image in the film.
In the first chapter of Cinema 2, in which Deleuze traces the initial shift
between the cinemas of the movement- and time-image, he cites Ozu’s
landmark use of static images which he refers to as ‘instances of pure
contemplation’.26 Referring to ways of defining such moments characterized
by their overt absence of action, such as Noël Burch’s ‘pillow shots’, Paul
Schrader’s ‘cases of stasis’ or Donald Richie’s ‘still lifes’, Deleuze wants to
find ‘a distinction to be made at the centre of the category itself ’.27 He does so
by interrogating the difference between the empty image, most closely
connected with the classic meaning of the landscape and the full, self-
containing image that is the still life. Ozu, he contends, experiments with the
boundaries of these categories revealing that cinematic still lifes ‘defined by
the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves
or become their own container’28 express time in its formal, unchanging
state. In illustration, he cites the scene towards the end of Late Spring (1949)
where the director cuts between a long shot of a vase and the face of Noriko
whose expression alters from a faint smile to tearful sadness as she becomes
reconciled to her future life. Discussing this scene, Richie writes:

The vase serves as a pivot. Though it means nothing in itself (not even
repose, sleep), it is the pretext for an amount of elapsed time; it is
something to watch during the period in which the feelings of the
daughter change.29

Whereas Richie affords the image importance as a structural and temporal

marker with a prepositional significance in relation to Noriko’s development,
Deleuze argues that its meaning—albeit not in a standard hermeneutical
sense—is fundamental. Deleuze agrees that the sequence unfolds character
development but argues that if the shots of Noriko herself indicate her
change in time, those of the vase indicate how time—the form of Noriko’s
alteration—is unchanging.
This simple sequence illustrates a radical difference between the cinema of
the time-image and the archetypal Eisenstinian use of the movement-image
discussed above. Although both Richie and Deleuze note the importance of the
vase in relation to time, Richie’s account serves to naturalize the role of the
image within the schema of a rational system of montage. Richie’s observation
that the vase ‘means nothing in itself ’ inadvertently takes us towards
Deleuze’s identification of it as an ‘opsign’: an optical image that links to
time as a universal with an ambiguous status as a signifier. Although the vase

26 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 15.

27 Deleuze,Cinema 2, 15–16.
28 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 16.
29 Donald Richie, Ozu (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 137.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1167

apes still photography as a static image, for Deleuze it expresses time as

movement and becoming in the Bergsonian senses. Where Richie contextualizes
the vase alongside the shots of Noriko and within (and beyond) the work as a
whole, Deleuze’s reading emphasizes the decontextualizing force of the opsign
that stresses the disconnect between the shots as well as the animate, discrete
nature of the object beyond its putative contemplation by any third party
whatsoever.
Reygadas has said that he ‘think[s] much more like a “fixed
photographer” rather than a traditional filmmaker in the sense of spectacle
and show’,30 an attitude demonstrated by the framing and duration of many
shots that immediately recall the ‘still-life’ image. However, the cinematic
still life is very different from still photography because it is anything but a
frozen instant of duration. With reference to Bazin’s discussion of the
difference between still and cinematic photography, D. N. Rodowick points
out how the former ‘works like a mold or death mask’ or ‘a spatial congealing
of the former life of its object’, whereas the latter combines this effect with
‘the imprint of its duration’.31 The effect of a photographic, and in some
instances, a painterly ‘static’ sequence within the moving medium of motion
film diverts emphasis away from movement through space towards time as
movement. In Stellet Licht, rather than use the still life sparingly, Reygadas
deploys the effect so regularly that it is transformed into a default mode. The
objects framed in this way exceed those normally considered as suitable still-
life subjects to include, I would argue, not only discrete objects inside and
outside but also landscapes and people.
This extreme use of the technique results in a bleeding of the still into the
animate and produces an intermingling of the two states in a way that echoes
the inherent ambiguity of Deleuze’s opsign. The still life in Stellet Licht is
omnipresent to the extent that the viewer witnesses its own paradoxical
deterritorialization. The first sequence to introduce us to the characters
presents us with images of the utilitarian furniture of the Mennonite family’s
home. A symmetrically framed close-up of the dresser is reminiscent not only
of a still photographic study but also of the precise everydayness of Flemish
humanism. The lingering shot duration compels the viewer to study the
objects and their positions within the frame as one would a still life.
Reygadas does not cut to and from the dresser, instead in one long take the
camera remains fixed upon it as Esther and the children move in and out of
frame in the foreground, the youngest visible only as truncated heads. The
camera lingers briefly on the dresser once all human movement has finished.
Not a ‘pure’ still life as we see in the case of Ozu’s vase, the scene functions as

30 Carlos Reygadas and Jonathan Marlow, ‘Carlos Reygadas and “A Perfect Universe”’
(interview), Green Cine, n.p., <http://www.greencine.com/central/node/257?page=0%2C0>
(accessed 24/8/10).
31 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P.,
1997), 44. The last of these three is a direct citation from Bazin.
1168 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

a depiction of family members going about everyday activities yet

simultaneously fixes the dresser at the centre. The viewer notices the
family and the naturalism of their depiction but the dresser never ceases to
be centre stage. This shot could not be read as a device specifically intended
for the viewer to reflect only upon the characters; it carries the individual
resonance of objects ‘wrapped up in themselves’ rivalling the importance of
the family’s movement and interaction. Placed at the beginning of the film, it
accentuates the still life and prompts the viewer to consider its relationship
to cinematic action. Immediately, questions are raised about the categories of
the animate and inanimate and how these might be distinguished in relation
to one another.
In the next scenes when the camera moves outside the house, this
unconventional yet compositionally familiar still life is followed by long and
extreme long shots of landscapes and buildings that have a function beyond
spatial contextualization. Although the images do not correspond to those
typically associated with the still life, the framing, long duration and sense of
static immanence conveyed all echo what has gone before. On leaving the
house, Johan’s pickup is framed in the distance, first driving towards the
camera. Following a cut, it enters the frame in the right mid-ground, turns
right directly away from the camera down a straight dirt road framed just off
centre in a landscape of trees and farm buildings. The camera remains fixed
whilst the vehicle travels to the horizon in the far distance until barely visible,
turns right along the skyline and disappears behind a tree in right of frame.
The take continues momentarily after the pickup has vanished, returning us
to the initial, motionless and unpopulated landscape. The next part of the
journey is shot from inside the vehicle and this is followed by a starkly
contrasting cut to a simple split-level industrial building with a farm vehicle
parked inside to the right of the frame. At first the camera remains fixed and
then, almost imperceptibly, begins to move forward very slowly until the
screen becomes almost entirely black as it enters the darkness inside the
building, contrasting sharply with the brightness of the Chihuahuan daylight.
It then tilts down to gradually reveal—with the aid of dim natural and electric
light—a group of men working in an inspection pit. Throughout the duration
of this take, the spectator is drawn equally to the jumbled and dissonant
soundtrack that, we learn eventually, is comprised of the men’s voices,
dialogue on a radio and the sound of an electric grinder.
These two sequences, although different in composition and cinematography,
are both developmental instances of Reygadas’ use of the still-life effect. The first
continues the blurring between still life and action that was seen earlier in the
home, repeating the technique of introducing human movement into a frame
that prioritizes objects rather than people. As the pickup travels into the
distance, it becomes so tiny that the viewer must concentrate hard to discern its
movement. Before the human movement has actually disappeared, it seems to
have already blended into the static landscape. Movement through space is
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1169

converted into an awareness of time and what might have been a purely
instrumental shot to indicate Johan’s journey becomes a self-contained unit that
troubles narrative continuity. The landscape here is not an authenticating
backdrop nor, as Deleuze terms it, an ‘empty space’,32 rather it is a still-life
composition. Not an environment that the characters are free to enter, leave or
use at their will but a topography that has, in Bergsonian terms, an intensive
and extensive existence that relates to but at the same time overlaps with the
human.
The viewer only becomes aware in hindsight that the second sequence is
introducing us to Johan’s destination. Reminiscent of the earlier interior
scene, the framing and composition are again pictorial and the attention is
drawn to the detail of the starkly utilitarian objects. Although, as before, the
images provide the necessary information about the social environment
depicted, the exaggeration of their self-sufficient presence troubles the
apparent naturalism of the every-day subject matter. Unable to relate to
the objects only as functional signifiers or a contextualizing code for the
automatic reading of ‘agricultural workshop’, the viewer is compelled to see
them existing for themselves, independently of narrative and character
development and of a rational schema for the film as a whole. The slow
movement of the camera during this scene serves not to disrupt the still-life
effect but only to remind us that cinematic movement is being used by the
director to produce an alternative to the movement-image. As the screen is
momentarily plunged into darkness, the immediate experience is that of a
cut to ‘nothing’ echoing the primordial darkness at the beginning of the film.
Only afterwards is the context re-established as the mechanics come into
view following the optical readjustment to the relative darkness of the
interior. The viewer is overtly being made aware of cutting as separation
even though here, deliberately, the director introduces the idea of a cut
whilst none is made. Echoing Deleuze’s conceptualization of the cut that will
be discussed in depth later, the director is replacing the continuity of the
movement-image with the serialism of the time-image.
Reygadas’ still-life compositions are often striking audio-visual images,
the last example discussed above being a notable case. In his treatment of the
sound image and its relationship to the visual, Deleuze again cites Ozu as a
pioneering manipulator of these two ‘components of the image’.33 Ozu,
according to Deleuze, leads the way with ‘a ‘dissociation’ of the two powers
which strengthens each of them’.34 Although Ozu came late to the talkie, he
immediately avoided the literalness of the connection between the visual and
sound that was a feature of much early sound cinema. Instead, he freed up
both sound and visual images to behave autonomously or, as Deleuze terms it

32 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 16.

33 The title of Chapter 9 of Cinema 2, 217–50.
34 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 237.
1170 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

borrowing from Kant, heautonomously. ‘Modern’ cinema (Deleuze’s term),

finds a new relationship between sound and visual images within which there
is no longer any ‘whole’ audio-visual image where both parts rely on each
other for their identity. In this phase, the audio-visual image is not
invalidated; rather it is renewed and fortified by the relationship of
components that resist one another in their difference. Reygadas achieves
this kind of relationship in the workshop take. Although the viewer must wait
briefly to confirm the sounds as diegetic, it is not their unknown provenance
that creates a disjuncture but rather the singularity of both optical and
auditory components set in relation to one another. The discovery of the
‘sources’ of the soundtrack—when we see the men in the pit—does not, as one
might expect, result in the rationalization of the relationship between sound
and image. In presenting the sound and visual images not as parts of a whole
but as discrete, distinctly textured components, the viewer is drawn to
consider them independently and then resists the contextualization of the
diegetic information. The optical and auditory refuse to be ratified by each
other to form a ‘whole’ audio-visual image and the force of decontextualization
of Reygadas’ still-life cinematography is increased. Deleuze argues that the
heautonomous relationship between the optical and the auditory is also
dictated by the limit points at which they meet: ‘[w]hat speech utters is also
the invisible that sight sees only through clairvoyance; and what sight sees is
the unutterable uttered by speech’.35 The visual and sound images, are not
simply different—the former, for Deleuze, a stratigraphic surveyor of things
and the latter a creator of events—but are identified in and by each other’s
limits. Because of this, sound and vision, as heautonomous units bring about a
cinematic relationality of perspective where cinema is not simply seen or
heard but speaks and hears. Reygadas’ still lives, understood in this way,
remind us of the qualities of the classic still-life object. The images and all of
their components retain an autonomy and resist the power of the gaze. ‘Out of
place’ (decontextualized), suggestive of the ‘invisible’ and the ‘unutterable’
and therefore secretly animate, they replicate thought and programme
the gaze.
The still-life time-image as a form of thinking machine is seen clearly
during the family bathing scenes in Stellet Licht in which a shot from above
of one the daughters lying on the grass and looking up towards the sky is
followed by a cut to an image of the upper branches of trees gently moving in
the wind. The shot of the girl lasts for thirteen seconds and that of the trees
for twenty-six. Again, these images are not absolutely static but they conform
to the still-life aesthetic in the ways discussed above. If we return to Richie’s
initial interpretation of Ozu’s sequence in Late Spring for comparison, there
would appear to be an even stronger case to interpret this scene as a girl

35 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 250. For Deleuze, all cinematic sound has the status of a
speech act.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1171

gazing at trees. Because the girl is sentient, following cinematic convention,

we are led to conclude that we are also ‘watching’ her unknown thoughts.
But the still life, to which we have grown accustomed by this point in Stellet
Licht, dictates a different reading. Viewed as autonomous objects enveloped
in themselves, the cut introduces a very different relationship between the
two shots. Taking a lead from Deleuze’s argument that the vase is not a
vehicle for the passage of Noriko’s thoughts, it can be argued that here we
are watching two shots ‘contemplating’ one another. This conclusion is
strengthened further, when we consider that each object is filmed from the
perspective of the other. The sense of perspective that the director
introduces here, is not one of a person contemplating her environment but
of two discrete objects relating to each other in series. Like the sound and
visual images in the workshop scene, they come together but remain
autonomous. By incorporating human-object still lifes in this way,
Reygadas is experimenting with the (il)logic of the forms and mechanisms
of the still life to produce his own startling results. The still life of the girl
functions as a time-image equally as that of the trees and it does so without
objectification in the standard pejorative sense. Instead, it reveals that
quality of life that does not pertain to the individual and which connects to
Bergson’s durée. It will be contended that, by definition, a person cannot be
a still-life subject but Deleuze’s conceptualization of cinema founded upon
Bergson’s thought and his particular understanding of immanence, not only
permits this paradox but, I would argue, necessitates it. I will elaborate on
this and the implications for a reading of Stellet Licht in the conclusions to
this study.
In the discussion of the still life, reference was made to the way in which the
cinema of the time-image reconfigures the role and significance of the cut. In the
workshop and bathing sequences, distinct from its normal role in the classic
cinema of the movement-image, the cut is highlighted for attention (in the first
case, even whilst the cut is only a ‘phantom’). For Deleuze, the new significance
of the cut in the cinema of the time-image is most fully developed in his
discussion of the ‘outside and inside’. This pairing has many allusive dimensions
but can be understood to map onto Bergson’s categories of the intensive and
extensive denoting mental and external space and past and present times.36 In

36 The definitions and investigation of the extensive and intensive experiences of time
underpin Bergson’s early work, Time and Free Will and are at the heart of his thesis in Matter
and Memory, the work that has a major importance for Deleuze in Cinema 2. For Bergson, the
extensive and intensive map onto the physical and metaphysical respectively, where the
extensive is the sensation of the exterior reality of the present and the intensive is the mental
reproduction of the past as memory. The first is actual or material time and the second is
virtual or imaginary time. The thesis of Matter and Memory hinges upon an examination of the
way in which these discrete realms come into contact with each other.
1172 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

Cinema 2, Deleuze identifies what he terms as ‘a topological structure of the

outside and the inside’.37 To summarize this we must isolate two key issues.
First, the term ‘topological’ indicates Deleuze’s emphasis on the manner in which
the outside and the inside are connected and, importantly, on the interstices or
on the cuts themselves. Second, in defining this topology of the time-image,
Deleuze is drawing a distinction between the outside-inside relationship as
configured in the cinema of the movement-image.
In the cinema of the movement-image the various pairings of inside and
outside are joined by what Deleuze calls ‘rational cuts’.38 The result is a
harmonious composition where all elements maintain their integrity and
combine to replicate a logical and unitary system. Under the aegis of the
movement-image, the cut exists to join; it has no independent significance
and the viewer pays it no attention. The movement-image not only
guarantees harmony within the film; it also sets up an order between film
and exterior world. The time-image has a different topology. Like a painting
by Escher or a Möbius strip, the outside and the inside are conjoined yet
differentiated. The relationship between the outside and the inside becomes
unstable and, as a result, the integrity of each is brought into question.
Outside and inside, actual and virtual, past and present circulate and bleed
into one another. In the cinema of the time-image, the interstice between
inside and outside is defined as an ‘irrational cut’.39 The ‘irrational cut’ is
itself an instance of meaning, bringing images together at the same time as it
signals a disjuncture. The cinema of the time-image repeats this topology in
its relationship with the world. Film no longer asserts its given place within
a unitary, ordered whole; instead it becomes one instance of an infinite series
of signification.
A sequence that best exemplifies such a topology in Stellet Licht is that in
which Johan returns to his children after having sex with Marianne. Having
been told by the waitress that they are ‘with Bobby in his van’, Johan and
Marianne go outside to the vehicle which is parked alone, framed centrally in
the car park with low-level motel rooms in the near distance and agricultural
buildings protruding above and behind them. The van remains at the centre
of the frame whilst the camera moves slowly towards it. Johan peers through
the blacked windows and then he and Marianne circle the van in opposite
directions before disappearing from view behind it. The only sounds to be
heard are the low-level hum of a light aircraft blended with distant road
traffic noise. A cut takes us to an extreme close-up of Johan’s back as he
opens the rear doors of the van to reveal Bobby and the children accompanied
by the sound of laughing children, a singing male voice and piano music. The
source of these latter sounds is then revealed by a cut to a small, centrally

37 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 205.

38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 205.
39 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 206.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1173

framed TV screen (clearly inside the van and a meta-cinematic still life) that
is displaying a black-and-white Jacques Brel performance. This image
remains fixed for twenty seconds before cutting to Marianne and Johan,
framed close-up from chest height, in the doorway of the vehicle watching the
film. A cut is then followed by a close-up, from behind, of the middle portions
of Johan and Marianne’s bodies. Marianne reaches out her hand along
Johan’s back as if seeking his own and they remain hand in hand for a few
seconds before Johan climbs into the vehicle and sits down next to the
children. The camera pans up to a shoulder-height view of Marianne looking
in the direction of Johan and the children and there follows a cut to a point of
view shot of the people in the van. Bobby announces that he needs to close
the doors and Marianne is ‘shut out’ of the gathering. We linger briefly on the
closed doors and are then cut back to the distance view of the van from
behind which Marianne appears, walking obliquely towards the camera is it
tracks backwards away from the van in centre frame. After Marianne
disappears from the left of the frame the director cuts to a full-screen
image of the Brel performance which continues for a further minute and is
followed (after a lengthy black screen ‘pause’) by footage of audience
applause. The sequence is ended by a cut to another black screen that
remains for five seconds before we see three of the children saying grace at
the dinner table in the family home.
This scene marks the greatest divergence from the film’s diegesis. Placed
halfway through the story, its strangeness takes on a pivotal significance and
it is no coincidence that it performs an inter-play between outside and inside.
The cinematography and editing in this sequence emphasize a topography of
space. Once again, the establishing shot of the van and its surroundings
appears as a still life rather than a landscape because immanence rather
than emptiness is emphasized. Already aware that the van contains Johan’s
children, it is a putative interior before we are allowed to look inside. Once
the doors are opened the scene is constructed to emphasize a complex
relationality between outside and inside. The camera looks inside from
without and vice versa and then stresses Johan’s movement from one to the
other and Marianne’s exclusion from the interior. The take of Johan and
Marianne touching each other behind their backs reveals to the spectator an
act of which those on the inside are unaware. The sequence is a structuration
of outside and inside that codifies the disclosure and withholding of
knowledge and mediates the emotional tensions of the plot.
This spatial exchange between inside and outside prefigures the
topological study of the image in the Jacques Brel sequence. First
presented on a TV screen, the Brel concert is an inside within an inside
and an image within an image but nevertheless logically intelligible as such.
We then have a clear example of Deleuze’s irrational cut when we are
returned to the concert, this time without the contextual frame of the
television. The images of Brel’s performance and the audience reaction (to
1174 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

reiterate, separated by a further lengthy cut) fill the frame. In the cinema of
the movement-image the viewer would automatically take the cut to the
unframed Brel concert as a signal to assume the position of the diegetic
spectator, an effect that would be enhanced by a cut immediately as the doors
close. However, the cut takes place after the director has re-established the
initial shot of the van, centre frame in mid-distance and the effect is quite
different. An irrational cut, in dialogue with the previous exploration of
interiority and exteriority and the carnivalesque performance that follows,
mediates a time-image that shatters continuity of action. The logical
relationship between outside and inside pre-figured in the previous scene is
replaced by a circulation of realities where the inside and outside are
mutually indiscernible. The initial impression that the sequence is
structured like the layers of an onion with the landscape containing the
van and the van containing the people and the television, which, in turn
‘contains’ the Brel performance is replaced by a series of self-containing
objects. The global unity of the movement-image disappears in favour of a
series of related but contesting images and time splinters as the Brel concert
exists semi-independently both inside and outside of the diegesis.
Illustrating Deleuze’s affirmation that the cinema of the time-image is not
abstract, the Brel sequence is joined to the film’s other images by a process of
disjuncture. Understood in a Bergsonian sense, the virtual and the actual,
the past and present coexist. The qualitative realities of different times
overlap within a time-image where pure duration subsumes chronology.
The significance of this brief scene can be read elsewhere in Stellet Licht.
The Brel concert represents the universe that Reygadas creates in the
relationships between time, space and character in the film and can be best
summed up by what Deleuze has termed ‘movement of world’.40 Deleuze
describes the comedies of Jerry Lewis as a ‘new burlesque’,41 arguing that
Lewis’ characters are not motivated to act by their will but rather as objects
of the subjectivity of time.42 The Brel concert, albeit brief, is a prime example
of this ‘new burlesque’. Its marked difference in tone to the rest of the film
leads the viewer to see it is an interpretative key rather than an aberration.
Ghostly yet urgently alive, Brel reminds us of the passion play of the main
characters. Marked by indiscernibility, Esther, Johan and Marianne are
caught between the insistence of will and the shifting tides of time. Their
story of love and adultery would, conventionally, entail an examination of
morality and provoke judgment but Reygadas removes his characters from

40 See Deleuze, Cinema 2, Chapter 3, 58–63.

41 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 63.
42 ‘And it is this wave, movement of world on which the character is placed as if in orbit’
(Deleuze, Cinema 2, 63). This reading is closely related to Bergson’s thesis that time is the
ultimate subjectivity: ‘But, increasingly, he [Bergson] came to say something quite different:
the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who
are internal to time, not the other way round’ (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 80).
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1175

this sphere by shaping them along the lines of Deleuze’s ‘spiritual

automata’,43 objects of ‘a higher control which brings about critical and
conscious thought and the unconscious in thought’.44 Typical of the cinema of
the time-image, they are manifestations of thought and, more precisely, of
‘what does not let itself be thought in thought’.45 Subject to ‘movement of
world’, the ‘higher control’ of time, their actions cannot be predicted as they
would within the universe of the movement-image. Esther’s resurrection is
the film’s overt diegetic challenge to linear time but its miraculous defiance
of time’s arrow that appears to pit divine immortality against human
mortality is, within the illogic of the time-image, a red herring. Once seen
in relation to the exploration of the time-image, Esther’s return to life is
rendered, in Deleuzian terms, ‘indiscernible’.46 This is not to say that we
cease to believe in the resurrection, rather, that within the context of the
multivalent time-images, the film’s apparent realism is brought into
question. The resurrection therefore, signifies not so much a disavowal of
an organic reality but an affirmation of what Deleuze has termed, ‘the power
of the false’,47 where the false is understood, not as a binary negation of truth
but as a kind of irreducible otherness of the image. In this way, the miracle
does not contradict the everydayness of the rest of the film; rather it exposes
a strangeness that infects the naturalism.48
Accustomed to what Deleuze terms as the drama of ‘limit-situations’49 in
the cinema of the movement-image, we are inclined to see the resurrection as
the crescendo and resolution of Stellet Licht. However, the film closes with a
mirror image of the beginning, giving us a time-lapse sequence of sunset. The
bookending of the film with a star-filled sky invokes a cosmic or universal

43 See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 158–64. Deleuze develops his idea of the spiritual automaton
from Artaud’s connection between cinema and automatic writing.
44 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 160.
45 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 163.
46 See, for example, Deleuze, Cinema 2, for a discussion of the ‘indiscernibility of the
real and the imaginary’ (61).
47 Chapter 6 of Deleuze’s Cinema 2 is dedicated to a discussion of this idea. Deleuze
connects it particularly to the films of Welles.
48 In a recently published study, Niels Niessen investigates what he has termed the
‘miraculous realism’ of Reygadas’ film. Concentrating primarily on the miracle and basing his
reading on Spinoza’s particular understanding of intuition, he argues that Stellet Licht
operates an ‘expressive realism’ illustrating this with reference to Deleuze’s crystal-image (see
Niels Niessen, ‘Miraculous Realism: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht’,
Discourse, 33:1 [2011], 27–54 [p. 44]). Although my study reads the miracle somewhat
differently, as a manifestation of what Deleuze has termed ‘the power of the false’, the two
analyses offer complementary rather than contradictory conclusions on the question of the
resurrection. Niessen’s discussion of the time-image by way of Spinoza, entails a more overtly
theological interpretation of the film than my own but his assertion that Stellet Licht ‘becomes’
a miracle rather than a representation of one (32), resonates with my contention that the
resurrection betrays the appeal to immanence in Reygadas’ strange cinematic realism.
49 See, for example, his use of the term in Deleuze, Cinema 2, 19.
1176 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

contextualization of the story that goes before, not in order to underline the
exceptionality of the ‘miracle’ but to confirm that it is ordinary. To explain
the power of the mundane in Ozu’s cinema, Deleuze notes:

The philosopher Leibniz (who was not unaware of the existence of the
Chinese philosophers) showed that the world is made up of series which are
composed and which converge in a very regular way, according to ordinary
laws. However[,] the series and sequences are apparent to us only in small
sections, and in a disrupted and mixed-up order, so that we believe in breaks,
disparities and discrepancies as in things that are out of the ordinary.50

Stellet Licht has elements of Catholic spectacle that distinguish it from Ozu’s
profound understatement but Reygadas draws us close to that cinema by
revealing the cliché of the event. Esther’s resurrection reveals no
metaphysical truth, no message that links film to world as a whole, rather
the ‘movement of world’, implicit in the opening and closing sequences,
reinforces the perspective of the ‘subjectivity of time’ that contextualizes the
scene within the serialism of Bergson’s durée. In Deleuze’s words:

if our sensory-motor schema jam or break, then a different type of image

can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without
metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror
or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer
has to be ‘justified’, for better or for worse.51

The ‘thing in itself ’, the ordinary, be it the resurrection, the Brel concert or
the dining room dresser is a manifestation of the time-image in Stellet Licht.
Whilst acknowledging the inspiration of Ordet, Reygadas has argued that
the resurrection in Stellet Licht is closer in motivation to that of the Sleeping
Beauty fairytale because love rather than faith brings Esther back to life.52 It
might be added that the fairytale, albeit not overtly cinematic, functions via
an assumption not so very different from Deleuze’s ‘power of the false’. Shorn
of its didactic role that was largely a product of the nineteenth century, the
fairytale presents a fictive universe that resists rationalization. Reygadas’
borrowing of Dreyer’s film certainly avoids any overt intellectual engagement
with the Christian theology of faith, despite the fact that his characters are
apparently examples of extreme devotion in an increasingly secular world.
Nevertheless, the film’s dialogue with Ordet and faith is significant even if
the director chooses to underplay the connection. Deleuze cites Dreyer’s late

50 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 14.

51 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 20.
52 Carlos Reygadas and José Teodoro, ‘Silent Witness: An Interview with Carlos
Reygadas’, Cineaste, 34:2 (2009), n.p., <http://www.cineaste.com/articles/emsilent-lightem-
an-interview-with-carlos-reygadas> (accessed 20/10/2010).
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1177

films as prime instances of the use of the automaton, with Ordet having two
such figures in Inger, who falls into a coma and Johannes, the delusional
Christ figure who wakes her with a kiss after emerging from his own trance-
like state. Esther, is Reygadas’ ‘mummy’53 and we have already seen how
Stellet Licht is a film populated with automata defined in Deleuzian terms.
Deleuze, does not discuss faith in terms of Christian theology in Ordet, rather
he uses the film as an illustration of the cinema of the time-image as an
affirmation of ‘belief in this world’.54 The time-image, resulting from the end
of cinema as sensory-motor experience and indirect representation of time, is
the reproduction of thought spurred on by the ‘powerlessness to think at the
heart of thought’.55 As such, the time-image is symptomatic of a disbelief in
the world because those sensory-motor connections that once provided
knowledge of it have disappeared.56 Disbelief, in this sense, equates to an
acceptance that knowledge of the world as verifiable, extensive experience is
impossible. This lack of knowledge, for Deleuze, can only be replaced by
another kind of belief, i.e. faith:

The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only
link. The nature of the cinematographic illusion has often been
considered. Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of the
modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christians or
atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in
this world.57

Belief is now reserved for the physical and is pursued in a purely psychic
cinema via the ‘seers’ of Ordet and Stellet Licht. Reygadas borrows heavily
from Ordet, from its setting in an orthodox Lutheran community to the
resurrection scene but his film noticeably omits any overt treatment of the
crisis of religious faith. Yet faith is writ large in the film, not least because
the viewer is asked to believe in the resurrection in the stark absence of any
diegetic treatment of theology. Deleuze’s reading of Ordet offers a persuasive
link between the two. Johnannes only succeeds in waking Inger ‘precisely
because he has ceased to be mad, that is, to believe himself to be in another
world, and because he now knows what believing means’.58 The faith that is
transferred from Ordet to Stellet Licht lies not in the possibility to transform
the world but ‘in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe

53 A term used by Deleuze to refer to Inger. See, for example, Cinema 2, 165.
54 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 166.
55 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 161.
56 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 166.
57 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 166 (author’s own emphases).
58 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 165 (author’s own emphasis).
1178 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but
be thought’.59 When asked about the possible readings of the resurrection,
Reygadas is adamant that it is neither fantasy nor metaphor and qualifies
this by stating that he does not believe in miracles ‘in reality’.60 For the
director then, the scene is a cinematic statement of faith in love and the
impossible. Isolated from diegetic and figurative rationalization, it remains
outside of a dialogue between the film and the world as a rationally
connected whole.
It would be wrong to connect the Deleuzian conceptualization of faith only
to the resurrection in Stellet Licht. In the interview cited above, Reygadas
commented that for him, ‘reality is a miracle’61 and although not a precise
theorization of his practice, the statement does point firmly towards a
definition of the character of Stellet Licht and the director’s two previous
feature films, namely the study of the ordinary as inexplicable. To this, it
would have to be added that, in Reygadas’ cinema, the ordinary is not merely
a conundrum. The ordinary in Stellet Licht is as magical as the miracle of the
resurrection because the film attempts to get to grips with, to use Deleuze’s
words, ‘the thing itself ’. Life in Stellet Licht encompasses all categories of
cinematic object, all of which are actual rather than phenomenal. The spatial
rationality of inside-outside/intensive-extensive has been replaced by a plane
of consciousness manifested by time as movement. Above, I argued that
Reygadas’ characters were cinematic still lifes equal to the furniture and
buildings framed as such. Deleuze’s conceptualization of the spiritual
automaton helps us to understand how this can be the case:

According to Schefer, it is the suspension of the world, rather than

movement, which gives the visible to thought, not as its object, but as an
act which is constantly arising and being revealed in thought: ‘not that it
is here a matter of thought become visible, the visible is affected and
irremediably infected by the initial incoherence of thought, this inchoate
quality’. This is the description of the ordinary man in cinema: the
spiritual automaton, ‘mechanical man’, experimental dummy’, Cartesian
diver in us, unknown body which we have only at the back of our heads
whose age is neither ours nor that of our childhood, but a little time in the
pure state.62

Like Ozu’s vase, the spiritual automaton shows us, not the spatial,
quantifiable time of the movement-image, but a direct experience of time as

59 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 164.

60 Carlos Reygadas and Karin Luisa Badt, ‘Silent Light or Absolute Miracle: An
Interview with Carlos Reygadas at Cannes 2007’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 57 (August
2007), n.p., <http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/57/reygadasiv.html> (accessed 17/06/2009).
61 Reygadas and Badt, ‘Silent Light’.
62 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 163–64.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1179

quality. ‘Time in the pure state’ is Bergson’s virtual time, as it exists free
from the unavoidable yet erroneous connection with space. The spiritual
automaton, for Deleuze, ‘brings out the thing itself ’ because it gives a direct
experience of the real, which, in these terms, is precisely such because it is
not concretely verifiable. ‘The ordinary man in cinema’ is a product of
thought in action defined, in Bergsonian terms, as ‘vital’ rather than
‘speculative’.63
Reygadas’ films elicit a faith in the characters precisely for this very
particular sense of vitality that ‘infects’ them. ‘Limit situations’ (the
intended suicide in Japón, the murder in Batalla en el cielo and the
resurrection in Stellet Licht) are used to focus attention onto the ordinary
and away from event as individual spectacle. The spiritual automata have an
existence similar to Deleuze’s definition of indeterminate life that he
considers in his final, brief essay. Taking a lead from Fichte’s definition of
the transcendental field, and citing an illustration from Dickens’ Our Mutual
Friend, he argues that ‘a plane of immanence’ finds its definition in ‘a life’.64
Distinct from life sui generis and an individual life characterized by its
subject, ‘a life’ is ‘impersonal yet singular’.65 An indeterminate ‘life of pure
immanence’

does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but
only between-times, between-moments; it doesn’t just come about or
come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the
event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate
consciousness.66

The lives of Reygadas’ characters and, by extension of the connection that I

have argued above, the still lifes of Stellet Licht, exist alongside these
indeterminate, singular lives made visible in the irrational interstices of the
time-image. ‘A life’ as a manifestation of a plane of immanence is virtual
rather than actual for it is never concretized into a fixed identity; is always
‘in a process of actualization’.67 The use of images in Stellet Licht repeatedly
suggests this quality of indeterminacy that is a constant companion to the
solidity of the everyday. This constitutes the hybridity of strangeness and
naturalism to which I referred in the introduction.
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is indebted to Bergson’s fundamental
concept of durée and it is within the context of this ‘empty time’ that an
‘immediate consciousness’ of events is possible. Stellet Licht opens and closes

63 See, for example, Bergson, Matter and Memory, 212–13.

64 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans.
Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 27–28.
65 Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, 28.
66 Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, 29.
67 Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, 31.
1180 BSS, XC (2013) SHELDON PENN

with an unambiguous signifier of time framing the events of the film and, as
such, the significance of time as theme seems difficult to ignore. But what
can be made of these sequences in the light of the above discussion of the
time-image? I have argued that Stellet Licht illustrates Deleuze’s assertion
that the time-image instigates a new, direct representation of time. Do the
time-lapse sequences of dawn and dusk mark a return to the cinema of the
movement-image as a spatial, indirect representation of time with an
interpretative key to resolution of meaning? Although it is tempting to
infer a mythological significance to these sequences, connecting, perhaps, to
Mesoamerican cyclical calendrics, there is little in the film to warrant such a
culturally specific reading. The opening and closing sequences, nevertheless,
are framed with a silent, black screen that first cuts to and, eventually, from
a full-frame image of a star-filled sky. There is an undeniable compulsion to
read these sequences as a movement from the universal to the particular and
back again as the camera takes us on a return journey from nothingness to a
rural community in Chihuahua via an image of the cosmos. It might even be
ventured that a suggestion of cyclicality coupled with a process linking the
human hierarchically to a beyond could assist us in a metaphysical
interpretation of the resurrection. But isn’t such a rationalization of the
film precisely a compulsion of the movement-image that would insist upon a
logical inside/outside spatial topology and a resolution to a programmatic
and indirect representation of time?
As prominent as these sequences are, their role is not to supply a thesis
about the nature of time thereby solving the aporia so prominent elsewhere
in the film. They do, however, underline the fact that time is the preeminent
milieu. Echoing the director’s comparison between Stellet Licht and Sleeping
Beauty, the framing sequences play a role in defining the fictive singularity of
the events that are then seen to take place ‘once upon a time’. Despite the
naturalism of the film which, stylistically, separates it from the fantastic,
the images of the cosmos therefore succeed in removing the events from the
world rather than contextualizing them within it. As a result, the apparent
sequential depiction of spatial scale is challenged by the disjuncture: the
events of Stellet Licht take place, not as a part of a continuum in the world
but are formed alongside it as series emerging from a plane of immanence.
The initial and final black screens are irrational cuts, extending the
separation of film from world and reinforcing the subversion of the inside/
outside topology. There is, as Deleuze claims, a ‘bliss’68 in these interstices or
‘between-times’,69 and it may be that it is belief in ‘a life’ that shapes the
spiritual dimension of Reygadas’ cinema. If the cosmic dimension of the film
has a metaphorical significance, we might read it as a reminder of what

68 Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, 30.

69 Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, 29.
THE TIME-IMAGE IN CARLOS REYGADAS’ STELLET LICHT 1181

Deleuze refers to as Bergson’s third thesis of ‘the whole’ or ‘the Open’ that,
via movement, reconnects to the discreet ‘sets’ of the cinematic images.70
Again, it is the black screen that is most telling because its ‘rarefaction’71 in
the cinema of the time-image serves only to emphasize its infinite legibility.
The opening and closing black screens are suggestive of Bergson’s thesis of
the subjectivity of durée within which the action of Stellet Licht is
internalized. It is this perspective of ‘the Open’ that the film’s shuttling
movement from universal to particular captures, recasting Bergson’s
conviction that ‘[s]ubjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or
the spirit, the virtual’.72

70 See Chapters 1–3 of Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1–57.

71 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 14.
72 Cited by Deleuze in Cinema 2, 80.