Caines 1

Cliff Caines
Prof. Janine Marchessault
FILM 7000
8 November 2012

Written Summary of Presentation: Deleuze’s Cinema Project

Reading:

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 1985. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Gelata.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.

Ch. 3: From recollection to dreams: third commentary on Bergson (p. 45-67)

Ch. 4: Crystals of time (p. 68-97)
Ch. 5: Peaks of present and sheets of past: fourth commentary on Bergson (p. 98-125)
Ch. 7: Thought and cinema (p. 156-188)
Ch.10: Conclusions (p. 262-280)

Summary:

[…] we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’ (Cinema 2 280)

Cinema 2: The Time-Image by Gilles Deleuze was first published in France in 1985. It is the second
and final volume of Deleuze’s work on the cinema. It can be read as separate or as a companion to
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983).

In Cinema 1, Deleuze discusses his concept of the movement-image and its varying degrees alongside
classical, pre-WWII cinema. Dismissing the concept of cinema as a succession of still photographs,
similar to the way Henri Bergson opposed the conception of movement as a succession of separate
elements, Deleuze proposes that cinema embodies a modern conception of movement ‘capable of
thinking the production of the new’ (7). The first volume comments on the films of D.W. Griffith, Abel
Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Louis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Robert
Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman and many others. For Deleuze, Cinema 1 is
not a history of cinema; it is a ‘taxonomy’ of images and signs.

In Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses his concept of the time-image alongside modern, post-WWII cinema; a
crucial turning point in modern consciousness and cinema in which he suggests time is no longer
subordinate to movement. Deleuze states that his work is not a theory of cinema, but a conceptual
practice and philosophy working with ‘the concepts which the cinema itself gives rise to’. The second
volume comments on the films of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Pasolini,
Rohmer, Ophuls and many others.

Questions:

1. How does Rodowick’s notion of ‘digital cinema’ (1s and 0s) as incapable of embodying ‘filmic
duration’ (The Virtual Life of Film 163), challenge or concede to Deleuze’s concept of time-image:
the direct representation of time?

2. How does Deleuze’s concept of the ‘thinking’/’autonomous’ screen (the ‘screen-plane’ of

information) relate to notions of today’s media and information technology?

3. How can Deleuze’s view that ‘being’ is necessarily creative and always differentiating, and his
philosophy in general, offer insight into the material, actual conditions of cinema (and existence)?
 Caines 2

Notes on the Author:

Gilles Deleuze (b.1925 - d.1995) was a French philosopher from the early 1960s to his death. He wrote
on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

Timeline:

1925 Born in Paris

1944 Attends Sorbonne (attracted to Sartre)
1948 Agrégates in Philosophy (French civil service competitive examination)
1953 Writes First Monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity (Hume).
1957 Starts teaching at Sorbonne
1960-64 Holds position Centre National de Recherché Scientifique
1962 Publishes Nietzsche and Philosophy
1964-69 Appointed to University of Lyon
1968 Publishes Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
1969 Appointed to University of Paris VIII (experimental school, with Foucault and Guattari)
1987 Retires
1980-90s Most works translated to English
1995 Commits Suicide by jumping out of window (suffered from debilitating pulmonary issues)
2011 Eleventh most frequently cited author in English-speaking publications in the humanities,
between Freud and Kant

Concepts (Cinema 1 & 2)

Movement-image = indirect representation of time

• Classical Cinema
• Pre-WWI
• Time is subordinated and communicated through movement
• Time is in relation to movement either as its minimal unit or as the whole through which it travels
• The totality of time is only communicated through montage
• It is only at the moment of the cut (the “noosign”) that we make closure to a whole that is
changing
• “Action images” and “affection image”

Time-image = direct representation of time

• Modern Cinema
• Post-WWII
• ‘Time is out of joint’
• Movement subordinates itself to time
• Time causes aberration or normalization in movement
• objects are not acting to cause change, but time inflicts change on them
• Images are experienced as “opsigns” and “sosigns”, images that are not going anywhere, but
empty, disconnected, abandoned spaces.
• Inspires the question ‘what is there to see in the next image’ vs. ‘what is there to see in the
image?’
• “Recollection images” expand the present, “dream images” expand the whole or world
• Time-image embodies both the actual and virtual, making the real indiscernible from the
imaginary, the outside and inside
• This shock or confusion inspires around our perceiving sensory-motor schema to create a new
thought
 Caines 3

Examples of Concepts in Cinema 1 & 2

Concept: Movement-image (action-image: small form and burlesque)

Example: The Great Dictator. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. 1940. (124 mins., Chaplin’s first talkie).
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvjoWOwnn4

Bazin insisted that The Great Dictator would not have been possible had Hitler not, in reality
appropriated and stolen Charlie’s moustache. (Cinema 1 171)

Concept: The crisis of the action-image

Example: Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1948 (105 mins.)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOa7qmv1xw

It was also Hitchcock’s task to introduce the mental image into the cinema and to make it the
completion of cinema, the perfection of all the other images. (Cinema 1 200)

Concept: Pure Optical Situation / Any-space-whatever

Example: Germany Year Zero. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1948. Film (78 mins.)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jWi3JymbSI

This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent [de voyant, non plus d’actant]. What
defines neo-realism is this build up of purely optical situation (and sound ones, although there
was no synchronized sound at the start of neo-realism), which are fundamentally distinct from
the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism. (Cinema 2 2)

Concept: The crystal image (peaks of present and sheets of past)

Example: Last Year at Marienbad. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1960. Film (91 mins.)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFuNm1hS4SA

The coexistence of sheets of virtual past, and the simultaneity of peaks of deactualized present,
are the two direct signs of time itself. (Cinema 2 105)

The past does not follow the present that is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The
present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a
mirror. (Cinema 2 79)

Concept: Any-space-whatever ‘released from its human coordinates’

Example: La Region Centrale. Michael Snow. 1971. Film (180 mins.)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYr_SvIKKuI

If the experimental cinema tends toward a perception as it was before men (or after), it also
tends towards the correlate of this, that is, towards an any-space-whatever released from its
human coordinates. (Cinema 1 122)

Concept: ‘screen-plane’ of information

Example: Hitler: A Film from Germany. Dir. Hans-Jügen Syberberg. 1977. Film (442 mins.)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8sfBoid8_Y
Note: Video essay on HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1977, dir. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg). Text
taken from Susan Sontag,"Syberberg's HITLER" (1979).

The modern world is that in which information replaces nature. (Cinema 2 269)
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Deleuze on Bergson

Translators Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam describe Deleuze’s work as a ‘counter history’ of
philosophy.

Deleuze describes the task of escaping the history of philosophy:

[…] to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what comes the
same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an
author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be
a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually
had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it
was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions,
which I really enjoyed. (Bergsonism 8)

Bergson’s major thesis on time are as follows: the past coexists with the resent that it has been; the
past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into
present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved. (Cinema 2 82)

Bergson: time as changing qualitative succession… becoming: “aberrant movement.”

[…] 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 around. (Cinema 2 82)

Bergson considering the nature of the image as an ‘image-in-itself’. For Bergson, dispensing with the
traditional dichotomy of subject/object, the image is fully real and embodies an ontological status unto
itself.

As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it,
we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by
virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs, and psychological demands.

But, if our sensory-motor schemata 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… [Cinema 2, p20]

When Deleuze speaks of a direct representation of time, he seems to be speaking about realization
beyond the pro-filmic world, but a realization of time within the audience, an experience of stepping out
of language and actually experiencing a duration.

Any-space-whatever

[…] the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to,
in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. The were ‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but
inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And
in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather
than acted, they were seers. (Cinema 2 Preface to the English Edition)
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Conclusions in Cinema 1 & 2

A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which
are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in
general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others. (Cinema 2 280)

The theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of cinema, which are no less
practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. (Cinema 2 280)

[…] we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’ (Cinema 2 280)

Movement-image:

Cinema is not a universal or primitive language system [langue], nor a language [langage]. (Cinema 2
280)

Cinema’s study is neither Semiotics nor Semiology. Film is not representation but actual content

This places his analysis in the realm of philosophy – that film is not made up of signs, but instead a pre-
linguistic automaton: a brain.

Automata = “Psychomechanical”, “Utterable”, “Signifiable” (a “ pure semiotics”), “Spiritual”,

“Psychological automaton”, “The way thought thinks”

Time image:

Cinema has reacted in the post war period with a new type of ‘thinking’. The time-image.

The time-image mimics some characteristics of information technology, the screen becomes not
eye/perspective centered, but a screen-plane of information, existing in interchanging layers, and the
sound divorced from the image.

This concept of the screen as database of information, ever-available to be related and presented in
new ways, morphing and peeling layers away, resonates with our other readings in new media and
animation. Deleuze sees this in the structure of the technologically standard film cut.

The screen no longer refers itself to our perspective—or any perspective—but to its own “thoughts.”
The hope is this new image, combined with the “will to art”—which I take to mean an intuitive (or
“involuntary”) creative force, without ideology, that can give force to the interchangeable, apathetically
equal information—can create a cinema without ideology, that inspires self-awareness, and the
realization, “we are not yet thinking.”

The point of inspiration is the time-image, created by the irrational interval cut. Deleuze uses the term
“irrational” after its mathematical usage, to note something coming from outside of the rational set, such
that the irrational interval comes between juxtaposed images that form a “non-representable
multiplicity”—they cannot be reconciled. This Time Image gives a direct representation of time.

Deleuze describes the time-image as something which may not exist in perfection (or even abundance)
within cinema, but a limit that cinema can approach.

Rodowick:
 Caines 6
Alternatively, moral perfectionism begins with this sense of ethical disappointment and ontological
restlessness, catching up the modern subject in a desire for self-transformation whose temporality is
that of a becoming without finality. (“An Elegy for Theory” 108)
Deleuze’s Overall Philosophy:

• Two Groups of works:

1. Monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume,

Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault) and artists (Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon)

2. Philosophical texts organized by concepts (e.g. difference, sense, events,

schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy.)

• Work is perhaps best understood as a post-structuralist reading of Spinoza through Nietzsche.

• Deleuze's main philosophical project can be summarized as a systematic inversion of the
traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference.
• Not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the
first place derive from differences
• Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying
forms imposed by the subject.
• He concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the
virtual".
• A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced
thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and
sensations.
• Deleuze, alluding to Kant and Schelling, at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental
empiricism
• Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting
novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior
categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking
• Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference.
• it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains
equivocal in and for a univocal Being.
• Deleuze claims that being is univocal
• pluralism = monism

Criticism of Deleuze’s Philosophy

• Writing is contradictory, expansive, and confusing.

• “utterly idealistic”
• difference fails to explain the unity of consciousness
• Pascal Engel says that Deleuze’s metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to
reasonably disagree with a philosophical system and so destroys meaning, truth, and
philosophy itself.
• Difference is contradictory to immanence (monism)
• Slavoj Žižek claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism
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References

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. 1911. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005. Print.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 1908. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New
York: Zone Books, 1991. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. 1966. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone
Books, 2011. Print.

---. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. 1983. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.

---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 1985. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Gelata. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.

---. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Tans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

---. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print. 2003.

Fisher, Caitlin. Deleuze – Cinema 2: The Time Image Conclusions. Future Cinema. York University.
Nov 2005. 1 Nov 2012. < http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/futurecinemas/?p=121 >

Gilles Deleuze. Wikipedia. 2012. Web. 27 Oct 2012 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze >

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2002. Print.

---, ed. A Shock To Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. New York and London: Routledge,
2003. Print.

Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York and London: Verso,
2009. Print.

Rodowick, D.N., ed. Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. 2010. Print.

---. “An Elegy for Theory.” October 122, (Fall 2007). 91-109.

---. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Print.

---. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.

Shaviro, Stephen. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. 2004. New York and London:
Routledge, 2012.