Notes for chapter 12

Here are notes from spring's last session at Harakka, dealing with Cinema 1's concluding chapter. Next up shall be Cinema 2, once the reading group gets into full swing...

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image                                                 Janne Vanhanen 21.8.2012

Chapter 12: The Crisis of the Action-Image

Deleuze begins by introducing C.S. Peirce’s concept of Thirdness as a third category of different images. As we remember, for Deleuze 1) Firstness is linked with images of affection (something that relates only to itself; pure quality and possibility), 2) Secondness with action (something that refers to itself only through something else; action–reaction pair, duel; fact and actuality). 3) Thirdness, in turn, is related to “mental” images – “a term that referred to a second term through the intermediary of another term or terms [and appears] in signification, law or relation” (C1, p. 197). Peirce considers Thirdness as the aspect of generalization of future instances of Secondness – this “object of thought” or representation is Thirdness (habit, law and necessity). Peirce’s notion is that everything in the world forms habits. That is, everything aspires to regularity and continuity, and this requires mediation between terms so that two distinct things can be connected.

In human thinking signs are primarily these kinds of mediators. Signs for Peirce are triads consisting of the 1) form of the sign (representamen), red light at an intersection, for instance; 2) object of the sign, cars stopping at red light; and 3) sense of the sign (interpretant), the idea that cars should stop at red light by an intersection. Semiosis means the interplay between these three aspects.

Thus, for Deleuze the most adequate way to understand Thirdness is relation, for it is the mediator (“third”) between two terms. Relations can be divided into two kinds: 1) natural (signification) and 2) abstract (law or sense). In natural relations one passes “naturally” from one image to another (“formation of a succession or habitual series of images”). The second kind of abstract relations are formed by linking images which are not naturally united (“constitution of a whole”). (C1, pp. 197–198.)

What kind of images would then be related to the mental category of Thirdness? Deleuze admits that images of “earlier” categories have something of a mental kind in them, too – affection-image (Firstness) is related to “pure consciousness”, the brute fact that there is consciousness experiencing something; action-image (Secondness) implies conception, judgment and reasoning. Yet, what should the “properly” mental image (Thirdness) show us? Not a representation of someone’s thought (or even a pure thought or thinker), but “an image which takes as its object, relations, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings” (C1, p. 198), having a completely new relationship to thought.

Maybe somewhat surprisingly, Deleuze turns to comedy in his explanation of mental image, moving from Harry Langdon (Firstness, affection-image), via Laurel and Hardy (Secondness, action-image) to the Marx Brothers (Thirdness, mental image or relation-image). The triad of the Marx Brothers in fact gives us all three Peircean categories: 1) Harpo is representative of Firstness, of “celestial affects” and “infernal impulses”, 2) Chico is a character of Secondness and action, of “the duel with the milieu, the strategy of effort and resistance”, while finally 3) Groucho stands for Thirdness as the interpreter, mediator, a character of “symbolic acts and abstract relations”. Groucho is the master of reasoning, arguments and syllogisms – “pure” relations, the purity of which is expressed in nonsense (“Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”). Deleuze sees the greatness of the Marx Brothers as “to have introduced the mental image into burlesque” (C1, p. 200).

Likewise, he singles out Alfred Hitchcock as the one director who has created the mental image as the perfection and completion of cinematic images. Hitchcock’s films can be considered as expositions of reasoning processes: “In Hitchcock, actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end […] action, and also perception and affection, are framed in a fabric of relations. It is this chain of relations which constitutes the mental image” (C1, p. 200).

Deleuze provides a rather lengthy exposition of Hitchcock’s methods, referring in part to Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s study of the director (Hitchcock, 1957), but ultimately naming Hitchcock as the descendant of English thought on relations (mainly in logic). It is the camera, not the characters, who testifies to the existence of relations – this explains Hitchcock’s actors’ distant or remote style of acting. It is the element of suspense in Hitchcock’s films that introduces a third term: in addition to the director and the film, audience is a key element in that it is the first to know the relations, as if from outside, from the perspective of the testifying camera. In this way Hitchcock produces relation-images as figures of thought in cinema.

This results in particular signs: a) marks (natural relations; referring terms back to other terms in “customary series”); b) demarks (abstract relations; terms appearing in conditions that take them out of the customary series – like ordinary birds suddenly wreaking havoc in The Birds [1963]). Therefore a symbol shall not be an abstraction, but “a concrete object which is a bearer of various relations, or of variations of a single relation” (C1, p. 204). Demarks and symbols are the two great signs of mental images, demarks being disruptions among series of natural relations, symbols being sets of abstract relations.

To rephrase the above: natural relations seem “natural” to us, mind moves easily from one thing to another – thinking of the situation of a dinner, for instance, we easily connect objects such as dinner table and plates and cutlery with the act of someone eating and the quality of warm temperature of the food et cetera. What is natural is thus customary, habitual, what is expected – the functioning of Thirdness. Sun comes up at dawn on a clear morning – it gets warm – you start sweating – the back of your shirt gets wet – ... A natural series of relations is formed in which every mark can be explained by the others. Now, abstract relations constitute a set instead of a series – a set is constituted “artificially” in comparison to a natural series. A sign of such relation is the demark, something that breaks out of the natural series and shows it in a new perspective. Symbol is a sign – often an object in Hitchcock’s films – that points to a crisscrossing of different relations.

In introducing the mental image, Deleuze sees Hitchcock as bringing the movement-image to its limit, bringing “cinema to completion” (C1, p. 204). This makes Hitchcock an important figure in the crisis of the traditional images of cinema – after Hitchcock’s total mastery, why make action-centered films any more? Deleuze locates the crisis of movement-image generally in post-War cinema (Italian neo-realism and the French new wave, new American cinema), but admits that the seeds for the crisis of the action-image have always been present. SAS and ASA structures have been criticized, as it has been difficult to establish either a globalizing situation (S) or preformed action (A) great enough to bring the succeeding action or situation “naturally” into existence. Therefore, unforeseeable elements of “the open totality and the event in the course of happening” are always-already present in cinema. (C1, p. 206.)

Yet, many factors became pressing enough to launch the action-image into crisis only after the War: political and social upheavals, minority struggles, proliferation of images in everyday life… “We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it – no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially. The most ‘healthy’ illusions fall. The first things to be compromised everywhere are the linkages of situation–action, action–reaction, excitation–response, in short, the sensory-motor links which produced the action-image. […] We need new signs.” (C1, pp. 206–207.)

Deleuze lists five characteristic features in new cinema: 1) situations are dispersive, not globalizing or synthetic (the dispersive situation); 2) action breaks down, ellipsis becomes part of a situation, “reality is lacunary as much as dispersive” (deliberately weak links); 3) sensory-motor action (or situation) becomes replaced by wandering movement, the modern voyage happens in any-space-whatever (the voyage form); 4) the set (of relations) in a world without totality is maintained by clichés, the floating, anonymous images circulating in the external world and penetrating the internal (the consciousness of clichés); 5) the power of an organizing plot is no longer believed in (the condemnation of the plot). (C1, pp. 207–209.)

All these features point to the dissolution of the unity of sensory-motor situations or natural relations which could form a support for action-images. Granted, what Deleuze is talking about here is cinema as Art – works of popular cinema, as well as “art films”, that are good and inventive enough to bring about new ways of seeing (and hearing and sensing and feeling…) cinema. Action-image reigns supreme in most of film productions even in post-War world and can be considered as forming the Hollywood-formula of film-making. Still, Deleuze observes a crisis and claims that this brings about new kinds of images – what shall replace Deleuze’s focus on movement-images in the second Cinema volume is time as the next dimension of cinematic exploration...

Notes for chapters 10 & 11

Hello all! Here's the last batch of notes, this time for chapters 10 and 11 of Cinema 1. I'll post a compilation of all notes as pdf to the people in the mailing list after our last session this spring.

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image                                                 Janne Vanhanen 16.4.2012

Chapter 10: The Action-Image; The Small Form

Deleuze presents straight away another type of action-image – that which corresponds to the “small form”. The “large form” (SAS’) moves from situation (S) to action (A), and this action modifies the situation (S’). Now, conversely, if we move from action to situation and then towards another action, we have an ASA’ structure (the small form of action-image).

The small form means that action is the element which discloses a situation, whereas in the large form it is the situation that engenders the action, the situation provides the conditions for the action’s emergence. The small form leads us from “action to action, [during which] the situation gradually emerges, varies, and finally either becomes clear or retains its mystery” (C1, p. 160).

The large form of action-image proceeds as follows: SITUATION [encompasser, synsign] - ACTION [duel, binomial] - SITUATION' (or S, or S'').

In last chapter it was discussed that the large form is connected to Bergsonian or phenomenological conception of life as having two poles (like a developing egg): the vegetative infusion of energy towards saturation point (growth of the embryo) and the animal outward action resulting from the intake (breaking out of the egg shell). In this case life emerges from and is engendered in a situation (the milieu of the egg, providing an encompassing horizon for the entity within). An action is required to change this situation into another one, as the animal breaks the shell and steps out into a widened horizon with different (and expanded) set of conditions for its existence.

The small form reverses this sensory-motor schema and its sign is the index. Movement proceeds from action (a mode of behavior or “habitus”) to a partially disclosed situation which is deduced from the point of view of action. A detailed comparison can be made between the two types of action-image:

Action-Image:	The Large Form	The Small Form
Movement:	SAS’	ASA’
Sign:	Synsign (S) / Binomial (A)	Index (of lack or of equivocity)
Representation:	Global, spiral	Local, elliptical
Construction:	Structural, organic	Eventual, organizational
Form:	Ethical	Comedic

The originator of the term, C.S. Peirce defines index as a sign that is a “real reaction” to the denoted object. Index marks an object or event by virtue of being affected by it (such as smoke is an index of fire: smoke is not fire, yet it is caused by fire). Index draws attention to something else. A knock on the door is an index of somebody behind that door. Yet, indexicality need not be simultaneous with its object: a track is an index of frequent walking along that route.

Now, in the small form of action-image Deleuze notes two opposite cases of the index sign that is characteristic to the form. 1) The action (or its equivalent) reveals a situation that is not given beforehand. The situation is therefore understood on the basis of the action, it is deduced from the action, either by immediate conclusion or detailed reasoning. Because the situation is not given, its sign is the index of lack (a gap in the narrative, ellipse [French, meaning “ellipsis” in English]). In the example of Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923, translated in Cinema 1 as Public Opinion) a gap of one year makes us infer the change in the heroine’s situation when her behavior and clothes have changed. Or then there can be reasoning-images where reasoning processes are situated in the image (index) itself. Something is shown that makes us deduce that it must mean this… Deleuze mentions Lubitsch as a frequent user of this type of reasoning-image.

2) Another type of index is the index of equivocity. This corresponds to another meaning of the French term ellipse – the geometrical “ellipse”. Equivocal index denotes to uncertainty or possibility of different interpretations. In this type of index reasoning-images do not lead to a singular conclusion, but retain at least two opposing interpretations. In A Woman in Paris we are left wondering whether the heroine – displaying indices of enigmatic quality – is really in love with the rich man or whether she loves him only for his fortune. Here the action (a mode of behavior) conceals a minute difference which relates it to (at least) two different situations. Or two actions are only very slightly different and yet lead to two opposing situations. We cannot decide… This device is very often used, for instance in the case of an innocent man assumed guilty (standard fare of detective stories: incriminating details lead a hasty police officer to declare X guilty, yet a more careful analysis of clues brings the master detective to a totally different conclusion). Deleuze names “the law of the new index: a very slight difference in the action, or between two actions, leads to a very great distance between two situations” (C1, p. 162).

To sum up: “in the small form [of action-image], we deduce the situation, or the situations, from the action” (C1, p. 162). Deleuze notes that this form leads to less “expensive” productions and is a distinct feature of “B movies” or low budget features – they have to rely on visual inventions and experimentation in creating cinematic representations and thus working within the parameters of a more limited form of ASA suits this method. Deleuze states that we can see divisions between action-image’s large and small forms in different film genres. Among those that have been discussed in previous chapters are the psycho-social film (SAS)/comedy of manners (ASA); monumental historical film (SAS)/costume film (ASA); Flaherty-style documentary (SAS)/English school of 1930s (ASA); crime film (SAS)/detective film (ASA)…

Deleuze devotes a longer look to the Western, from Hawks to neo-Western. Hawks uses the large “respiratory” form which starts from an encompassing, global milieu from which an action rises, which in turn modifies the global situation from within. Units of this great organic representation are 1) one or several fundamental groups [well-defined and homogeneous], 2) a makeshift group [together by chance, heterogeneous] and 3) a big gap between the situation and the action – the gap being there in order to be filled. The hero must actualize necessary powers inherent in the initial situation and become capable of action. He represents the “good” fundamental group, but needs the help of the makeshift group. Deleuze notes how Hawks already deforms this organic representation by, for instance, making the interior milieu become the source of the unexpected, violent event, instead of crisis appearing from the usual direction of exteriority (appearance of Indians on the top of the hill etc.). (C1, pp. 164–166.)

Yet, it is in the neo-Western where the small form replaces the organic unity of representation. Threats are internalized: Indians spring up from within enclosures, the fundamental group disappears to be replaced by a multiplicity of makeshift groups that lose their clear distinctions, oppositions shift constantly (one can think of the constantly double-crossing characters of Sergio Leone’s Westerns, where everyone is in turns the good, the bad or the ugly). Here, in the small form, “action can never be determined by and in a preceding situation – it is, on the contrary, the situation which flows progressively from the action” (C1, p. 167). Minute differences lead to logically very distant situations; doubts and fears are no longer justified as a necessary part of the process of filling the gap between situation and action – i.e. rising up to the challenge that the situation demands in the large form. In the small form there is no longer great action. A complementary space is defined: in contrast to the respiratory space of the organic large form, a “skeleton-space” appears, with missing intermediaries, composed of heterogeneous elements. (C1, p. 168.)

In the small form the situation no longer encompasses everything, as in a great contour around the life-world of a subject (like the contour of an egg, see notes for chapter 9). The genetic sign of the small form is the vector [“carrier” of something from point A to point B], rather than the large form’s impression.

Deleuze devotes some pages to analyze one genre that seems particularly devoted to the small form: the “burlesque” [French burlesque refers to the comic in general]. There the formula of AS is most developed – in the burlesque a minute difference in action (or between two or more actions) produce huge variations in resulting situations. These tiny differences in fact exist in order to bring about such distances. Examples of Charlie Chaplin films ensue: for instance, in The Idle Class (1921) a shot of deserted husband from behind his back shows the man shaking – perhaps sobbing uncontrollably? But no, when he turns to face the camera, we see that he’s shaking a cocktail for himself!

[See it all at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p80TPov7nNA – the cocktail shot at around 7 minutes.]

Thus, the burlesque process is as follows: “the action is filmed from the angle of the smallest difference from another action […] but in this way it discloses the enormity of the distance between two situations” (C1, p. 169). The sources of the small form appear: confusion, slight differences making the situation fluctuate, the instant as the critical moment leading to opposing situation – all incorporated in the zigzagging line of the universe. This is the law of the index: “the slight difference in the action which brings out an infinite distance between two situations” (C1, p. 170). Chaplin is nominated as the master of this in his way of evoking different situations from gestures that are very close to each other – his humanism brings laughter and deep emotion side by side, without diluting either. It is worth citing Deleuze at length on this matter:

It is a laughter-emotion circuit, in which [laughter] refers to the slight difference, [emotion] to the great distance, without the one obliterating or diminishing the other, but both interchanging with the other, triggering each other off again. No case can be made for a tragic Chaplin. There is certainly no case for saying that we laugh, whereas we should cry. Chaplin’s genius lies in doing both together, making us laugh as much as moving us. (C1, p. 171.)

Chaplin, then, utilizes the concept of the tool – the immeasurable variety of the uses of an everyday object. A similar gesture (action) in different situations produces an infinite difference between possible situations. In comparison, Buster Keaton brings about a machinic sensibility in his use of the burlesque small form: the absurdity of makeshift machinery. Deleuze compares the ”communist-humanist” vision of Chaplin with the “anarchistic-machinic” one of Keaton. Chaplin perfects the burlesque small form of action-image, Keaton transforms the small form action into the large form: the immense absurd situation, out of which the minuscule, keeping-up-with-the-crazy-machine-breaking-down action emerges.  

Chapter 11: Figures, or the Tranformation of Forms

There are, of course, passages and transformations between large and small forms of action-image. These transformations take place by utilizing a deforming “original form”, the sign of which Deleuze calls Figure. [Deleuze uses the concept of the Figure in his book on Francis Bacon’s paintings, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981).]

Deleuze notes – going along with “Plato’s sense” – that the two terms of the large and the small correspond to both a) “forms of action” and b) “conceptions, ways of conceiving and seeing a ‘subject’, a story or a script” (C1, p. 178). What this means is that the forms of SAS and ASA do not only produce effects of cinematic narration, but function also on the level of suppositions and preconceived notions of what cinema is in the first place, the Idea of the film.

Deleuze discusses the transformation of forms in Eisenstein’s work, where he uses caesuras in organic representation, marking out crises which produce qualitative leaps between situations. The small form (qualitative leaps) is situated within the large (the whole related to a cause). In terms of signs, transformation passes between synsign (duel) to index. These transformations occur in what Einstein called the “montage of attractions” – insertions of special images, theatrical (scenographic) or sculptural (plastic) images, which seem to interrupt the flow of the action. Deleuze gives examples from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (1946), speaking about theatrical images which either replace the action or prefigure the action to come. Similarly, action can be extended in sculptural representations which distance the viewer from the situation at hand. Clear example of this is in Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929), where the action is halted in suspense when a peasant collective wait anxiously whether the new cream separator works or not. A drop of milk falls, then a flood – along with general rejoicing.

The point is: Eisenstein makes here a formal qualitative leap, passing “from one image to a quite different mode of image which has only an indirect reflexive relationship with the initial image” (C1, p. 181). There are distinctions to be made: 1) in theatrical representation the action-to-come is replaced by fictitious action; instead of S-A we have S-A’, with A’ functioning as an index sign to the real action A, which is being prepared meanwhile. 2) In plastic representation the action does not disclose the situation toward which it is projected, but it is encompassed in a more grandiose situation; instead of A-S we have A-S’, with S’ functioning as a synsign (encompasser) of the real situation S, which is relayed only through its intermediary.

Schematically, in theatrical representation the small form is injected into the large form, in plastic representation the large form is inserted into the small one. In both cases there is an indirect relation between a situation and an action: “between two images […] a third intervenes to ensure the conversion of the forms” (C1, p. 182). Here the fundamental duality of action-image takes a leap towards a “higher” instance – we are in the presence of reflection-image whose sign is the Figure. This attractional image circulates through the action-image.

Deleuze then brings up Werner Herzog, who in his films makes the figures of the Large and the Small pass into each other. Large and small are, in addition to being forms and conceptions, also Visions, which feature heavily in Herzog’s films.

In Herzog there are two obsessive themes: 1) A “man who is larger than life frequents a milieu which is itself larger than life, and dreams up an action as great as the milieu”; this is a special kind of SAS’ form, “a crazy enterprise” of action that is not required by the situation, dreamed up by a visionary who seeks to rival the whole milieu. This action divides in two: 1a) the sublime action, reaching to the beyond, a hallucinatory dimension of the acting spirit raising itself on par with nature’s infinity; and 1b) the heroic action, confronting the milieu and breaching its limits, a hypnotic enterprise of the acting spirit running up against the limits of nature.

These two have a figural relationship. For instance, in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) the heroic action of Aguirre is the consuming trek through the mountains and forest, and the descending of rapids. This reflects the sublime action of Aguirre the Traitor, in his quest to betray everyone and found an incestuous regime with his daughter, “the Large is realized as pure Idea, in the double nature of the landscapes and the actions” (C1, p. 184).

Another, complementary theme of Herzog is 2) “the Small which becomes the Idea”. Here the hero is no longer a heroic conqueror of the useless, but the protagonists are rather reduced to the state of retards and other beings that are so diminished that they have no use any longer. No more visionaries, they are “weaklings and idiots”. Also landscapes are dwarfed and flattened, even disappear. Vision is reduced to elementary tactility, walking close to the earth. This is an ASA’ form, but “reduced to its most feeble aspect”.  (C1, pp. 184–185.)

What we encounter in the films of Herzog concerns: 1) the sublimation of the large form (going beyond the situation’s requirements in a visionary way) and 2) the enfeeblement of the small form (enfeeblement almost to the point of disappearance). These extremes are metaphysical and Deleuze nominates Herzog as the most metaphysical of cinema directors. We are talking about the absolutely Large and Small, opening each other up in their extremes.

To end the chapter, Deleuze then sums up the different domains where the large and small forms manifest their real distinctions and which act as spaces of possible transformations between the forms (leading us already somewhere beyond the action-image). This categorization comes up rather suddenly in the book, but it serves as a general exposition of how situation and action can be brought into relation with each other – and how the established large and small forms can be transformed and varied. Deleuze brings up Japanese cinema and especially Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi as forerunners in this transformation between forms. Different modes of variation take place in terms of:

1) Physico-biological domain (milieu): 1a) an encompassing milieu surrounding the body and acting upon it (SAS’); 1b) an interval between two bodies, the fluid which transmits intensities (actions) between bodies (ASA’).

2) Mathematical domain (space): 2a) global space (univocal, defined set; ambiance-space, SAS’, the limit of which is the empty space); 2b) local space (fragmentary, forming immediate surroundings, ASA’, the limit of which is the disconnected space whose parts can be linked together in infinite number of ways). Both spaces’ limits are brought into contact in the any-space-whatever.

3) Aesthetic domain (landscape): 3a) primordial void and the breath of life (unites all things in Oneness, presence of things is in their appearing; encompassing synsign, SAS’), Kurosawa; 3b) median void and the skeleton (articulation, joints, the wrinkle, moving from one being to another; the zigzag line of the universe, presence itself lies in its disappearing; transforming vector, ASA’), Mizoguchi.

Notes for chapters 8 & 9

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image                                                 Janne Vanhanen 28.3.2012

Chapter 8: From Affect to Action; The Impulse-Image

Deleuze begins by stating that when powers and qualities are actualized in milieus (states-of-affairs which are geographically and historically determinable), we have moved into action-images. Action-images’ “realism” is opposed to affection-images’ “idealism” (C1, p. 123). Here Deleuze equates the two image-types with Peirce’s Firstness (affection) and Secondness (action). As we recall, Firstness refers to the immediate fact of consciousness, the fact that there is consciousness, perception. This fact concerns pure qualities (that which is only for itself), without reference yet to Secondness. Secondness, in turn, concerns forces and “external dead things”, pure objects of perception. [Thirdness is mediation between these: the subject and objects of perception form relations of representation.]

However, between these image types lies an interzone of “impulses”. Deleuze forumulates:

Affection-image	Impulse-image	Action-image
Any-spaces-whatever	Originary worlds	Determined milieus
Powers/qualities (affects)	Elementary impulses	Modes of behaviour

The in-between state of the impulse is like a “degenerate” affect or, conversely, “embryonic” action. An “originary world” is something more defined than any-space-whatever. It appears in determined milieus, which are derived from this originary dimension.

Now, a linguistic concern has to be brought up: the translation of the original French term l’image-pulsion as the impulse-image is a bit problematic. Pulsion is generally translated as “drive” or “instinct” (or even “desire”), so the translation as “impulse” does not contain all the psychological or psychoanalytic connotations of the original.

[In psychoanalysis the drive is, for Freud, a functional concept: it is something that exists on the borderline of the physical and the psychical; from the point of view of the psyche it is a pressure or urge towards an object of satisfaction, and this urge has a bodily origin. The goal of the drive is its satisfaction, the object of the drive is a means towards this state of satisfaction and the origin for the need of satisfaction is in the biochemical processes of the body. In latter-period Freud there are two famous primal drives: eros (libido) and thanatos (“death drive”), the former a drive to continue one’s existence, the latter a drive of animate life to seek its original inanimate state.]

In comparison to “real milieux of geographical and social actualization” (such as a house or a region) originary worlds appear vague or formless, marked either by artificiality of the set (e.g., a studio forest etc.) or the authenticity of a zone (e.g., a virgin forest). This unformed space is composed of unformed matter and energy which do not refer to constituted subjects.

As such, we can note that the originary world greatly resembles Freud’s id, the repository of drives or instincts. Deleuze himself state that in such a world characters appear animal-like – not because they imitate animals, but because their acts take place on a level prior to any distinction between animal and human (C1, pp. 123–124 ).

In characterizing the originary world Deleuze refers to Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher who first established the four fundamental elements of the world (air, fire, water, earth), as well as the basic forces (love and strife) that animate these elements and produce their changes and mixture (the elements themselves are unchanging and independent). Originary world consists of fragments and impulses, like Empedocles’ elementary particles and basic forces. This fragmentary world is, at the same time, also unified: all the fragmentary parts “converge in an immense rubbish-dump or swamp, and all the impulses in a great death-impulse [pulsion de mort being often translated as “death drive”]” (C1, p. 124). It is a world hovering continuously by “the steepest slope” in imbalance between the beginning and the end.

This Deleuze nominates as “naturalism”. His use of the term deviates from a standard one nominating a realist style of representation. Deleuze’s naturalism is not opposed to realism but rather heightens its features and crosses over into surrealism. He offers the literary figure of Émile Zola as an example of an author who adds the energetic dimension of the originary world to the real or actual milieu, which functions as the medium of the originary world. The result is thus that in Zola’s works the real – geographical and historical – milieu is motivated by “animal” instincts. The everyday seethes with hidden energies that produce the real. Naturalist authors are therefore designated by Deleuze – following Nietzsche – as “physicians of civilization”, meaning that they diagnose the actual world according to the symptoms it displays. These symptoms are the result of what takes place in the energetic originary world.

Deleuze in fact appeals here to two Peircean sign types: symptoms and fetishes. 1) Symptoms are the presence of impulses in the real milieu. 2) Fetishes are representation of fragments. In naturalism these two signs are present in the actual world. (C1, p. 125.)

Deleuze finds two great naturalists in cinema: Erich von Stroheim and Luis Buñuel. In Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919) – his debut as a director – a mountain resort in the Dolomites becomes a site of conflicting passions. Deleuze states that it is the mountain peak in this film where the originary world appears in an actualized and localized form. The film depicts the love triangle of two competing suitors, not-too-energetic Mr. Armstrong and a playboy-like lieutenant von Steuben, who starts to make advances towards Mrs. Armstrong. The film climaxes in a mountain trek by the two rival men, where Armstrong confronts von Steuben about his intentions towards his wife. After hearing that his wife has indeed promised her to von Steuben, Armstrong leaves the officer on the mountaintop without a rope to climb down. Only on his way down does he discover that his wife has afterwards written to von Steuben and rejected him. Shaken, Armstrong falls down to a crevice, but survives to instruct a search party to rescue the lieutenant from the mountaintop. Von Steuben, however, falls down to his death.

(You can watch the film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YntYV3ty-UU – see ca. 1 h 10 min. onwards for the climactic end.)

The originary world is the beginning (the festering swamp) and the end (the rubbish dip). A body falling down is a crucial type of image in Blind Husbands, according to Deleuze. This is a deadly return to the originary world from a determined milieu. Beginning or end – salvation or doom – emerge from a return-movement to the origin. Time appears prominently in naturalist film, but primarily in entropy and degradation. In Stroheim time is entropy and cinematic Expressionist elements – light and shade – are subjected to this time-towards-degradation – the steepest slope towards ruination. (C1, pp. 126–127.)

Buñuel, on the other hand, is an artist of cyclical time – of eternal return and repetition. Here time in not inherently disastrous, but alternates good and evil, love and hate. In both cases – degradation or eternal return – time is grounded in the originary world, appearing as destiny in the determined milieu. For Deleuze this brings naturalism very close to time-image already. Yet, this achievement is prevented by naturalism’s dependence on impulse as a co-ordinate. Thus for Deleuze naturalism approaches time only as negativity: entropy, waste, destruction or oblivion.

In any case, naturalism’s most important element for Deleuze is the impulse-image. First aspect of it is the impulse itself. The originary impulse is often very simple: hunger, sex, greed… But impulses appear in the derived milieu as complex and perverse behavior and Deleuze lists cannibalistic, sado-masochistic or necrophiliac behavior as displaying the impulses of the originary world. Deleuze mentions that Buñuel is a director who complicates the range of impulses into the perversely spiritual dimensions. (C1, pp. 127–128.)

Another aspect of the impulse is the fragment – the object of the impulse – which belongs to both worlds, the originary and derived worlds. Deleuze characterizes the object of the impulse as fetish or a partial object. This is a term derived from psychoanalysis and means the object of (infant) desire or drive: for a small child, the mother appears as a collection of partial objects towards which the child’s greed is projected. Deleuze notes that the fetish is connected to the cinematic close-up. Impulse “tears away, ruptures, dislocates”, isolates the fetish-object. Therefore the invalid and the monster are figures of naturalism, because they are both deformed objects (fragments), which the impulse takes hold of, and the ill-formed subjects of this act. (C1, p. 128.)

Third aspect of the impulse is to take possession of everything it can in a given milieu and to seek to relocate into another milieu. The impulse, then, displays a kind of elementary restlessness, always hungry for more, always ready to move on after better opportunities. Impulse takes whatever is available for it in a given environment, even if it means an opening into another milieu. Deleuze’s example of this is a scene in The Brides of Dracula by Terence Fisher. The vampire lusts after his victim, and yet is willing to capture another prey since what is most important is the impulse (bloodlust in this case) and its satisfaction. Deleuze praises this as an important step in the evolution of the horror film “from the Gothic to the neo-Gothic, from Expressionism to naturalism. We are no longer in the element of the affect [affection-image], we have passed into the milieu of impulses”, with the work of Mario Bava standing as an exemplary case. (C1, p. 129.)

The main lesson of this is that the impulse is exhaustive: it exhausts the offers of a given milieu and seeks to move on to another environment. This presupposes a co-existence of several milieus, in order to maintain the desire to move between them. Here a distinction between the rich and the poor is made. The poor are not able to exhaust and explore the milieu of the rich, whereas the rich can easily penetrate the domains of the poor. Again a comparison between Stroheim and Buñuel is made: Stroheim’s perspective is of the rich man in his milieu and perhaps his descent and degradation into the lower spheres, but Buñuel’s view is of the more cunning reversal of this – the invasion of the poor into the rich milieu, and its subsequent exhaustion. (C1, p. 130.)

Yet, both the rich and the poor possess impulses that want the same: “to smash into fragments, to tear off fragments, gather up the scraps, form the great rubbish dump and bring everything together in a single and identical death impulse [death drive]”. Naturalism seethes with death drive, according to Deleuze. Buñuel adds the good and the holy to the coterie of exploiters: “Beast of prey or parasite – everyone is both simultaneously.” The Good and the Evil fetishes (“relics” and “vults”) are two aspects of the same symptom of impulse’s parasitic nature. (C1, p. 130.) No-one is completely good or evil, the positions shift, good men fall, the bad reform…

The rest of the chapter then goes into a more detailed description of Buñuel’s methods, into which we won’t go here at length… Suffice to say that Deleuze once again highlights the difference between Stroheim and Buñuel, with the latter achieving a kind of naturalism of the soul – recognizing the artificial constructions of perversion but also the supernatural domain of faith. Perversion and spirituality are interconnected.

For Stroheim the tension is where the originary world imposes impulses upon the real milieus, leading to degradation or entropy. Buñuel, on the contrary, replaces entropy by the cycle or eternal return. This breaks the one-way direction of entropy and introduces a possibility of salvation: repetition can either be disastrous, binding us to repeat fruitlessly the always-accomplished events of the past, or repetition can be directed towards the future and bring about a renewal of faith, introduce something new and increase the area of possibility in life.

Deleuze concludes by examining the difficulties of achieving naturalist cinema: Visconti is too concerned with time; Renoir is led towards brutality, but in a detached way. American directors are too preoccupied with action-image to invest in naturalism. Deleuze sees an exception in Nicholas Ray’s films, even though Deleuze classifies Ray as lyrical abstractionist.

Impulse-image is hard to achieve rightly because it is “stuck” between affection- and action-images. In Ray’s later work this interzone is reached. Ray’s oeuvre begins with Kazan-like young man’s aggression: fighting against society, father, injustice etc. But his very aggressiveness, a boy yearning to become a man, is what draws the young man to become a child instead. Only in his later works the characters achieve a level of serenity which allows them to choose and to keep on recreating the situation of choices – accepting and affirming their world. Their violence ceases to be linked to a situation but is instead internalized – the rebel possesses not an acted but compressed violence, from which abrupt and terrible acts emerge. Deleuze praises Wind Across the Everglades (1958) in particular as a masterpiece of naturalism, where the originary world – Everglades swamp – gives rise to a man of impulses but the film also goes beyond this situation, the plot opening a way out of the swamp, a possibility of reconciliation.

Yet, the title of the third great naturalist director goes to Joseph Losey. In his cinema the degradation manifests as the reversal against self: the characters’ impulses are too strong for them and they turn against themselves. The possibility of salvation is left to women, who do not suffer from the impulses in the same manner. (C1, p. 137.)

Chapter 9: The Action-Image; The Large Form

Deleuze notes that the domain of the action-image is “easier to define” since the derived (or determined) milieus start to maintain their independence. Qualities and powers are actualized in determinate, historical, social, political, geographical space-times. Affects and impulses are embodied in behavior “in the form of emotions or passions which order and disorder it. This is Realism” (C1, p. 141).

Deleuze gives two factors to define realism: 1) milieus and 2) modes of behavior. Milieus actualize, modes of behavior embody. A corresponding realist image-type – the action-image – means the relation between these two, milieus and modes of behavior. According to Deleuze, this is the model for the triumph of the American cinema.

As mentioned in the beginning of this text, Peirce’s Secondness concerns forces. In action-image milieus actualize qualities and powers and synthesize them into an encompassing Ambiance. Qualities and powers do not appear in themselves but have become forces in the milieu. The character is placed in this situation: the milieu and its forces throw a challenge to the character that has to respond to the situation. “He must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation” (C1, pp. 141–142.)

The reaction leads to a modified situation, which in turn presents further challenges… Situation and action are correlative and antagonistic terms. Action is a duel of forces. The formula SAS’ applies here (Situation–Action–Transformed situation). Deleuze calls this the “Large Form” of action-image. It is organic representation, which resembles respiration: expansion towards milieu or situation, contraction from action. Deleuze evokes a figure like the hour-glass, or double-spirals, expanded and contracting at the point of action. (C1, p. 142.)

Two signs correspond to the organic representation or action-image. 1) Synsign refers to the organic unity of the situation: the set of power-qualities as actualized in a defined milieu (state-of-things or determined space-time); 2) Binomial refers to the duel between forces, to that which is active in the action-image (e.g. feints, parries and traps). In the Western genre the moment of the duel, when the situation clears out for the play of forces, is the best example of the binomial sign. Deleuze mentions also the different forms a binomial situation can take place and uses the case of Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928), where the heroine has to endure a series of duels, physical, psychological, sentimental… (C1, pp. 142–143.)

Deleuze elaborates how the SAS’ type of action-image has developed in cinema. He first notes the case of documentary cinema. Introducing the comparative historian A.J. Toynbee’s theory of different civilizations being answers to particular challenges thrown at them by their milieus, Deleuze notes three variations in such schema: normal case being that the civilization confronts and meets the challenges posed to it. Two variations of this are possible: civilization of survival (challenge almost overbearing) and civilization of leisure (very favorable milieu). Robert J. Flaherty’s documentaries explore these variations and his films are therefore more ethology than enthnology. Nanook of the North (1922) portrays a society constantly on the brink of survival. Here the Large Form scheme is SAS (rather than SAS’) – action leading to no alteration in the situation, since all the film’s Inuit population could do was to try to measure up to the challenges of nature. (C1, pp. 143–144.)

Deleuze then takes up “psycho-social” film, such as King Vidor’s. As a director, Vidor was able to take up great syntheses, moving from individual to collective to individual… This form Deleuze calls “ethical”. Here the form of SAS’ (individual modifying a situation) has its antithetical correspondent in SAS, which denotes in this case “the American nightmare” where an individual is lost in his or her environment, and at best finds him- or herself in the same situation once more.

Or, as a third form of the development of action-image in cinema, things can get worse and worse, in a downward spiral of SAS’’ form. This type of “realist degradation” is not the black hole of affect falling upon the characters (as in Expressionism) or the destiny of the entropic impulse (as in naturalism), but rather “a pathology of the milieu”. (C1, pp. 144–145.)

This realist degradation is the proper milieu of film noir and characters who are alcoholics or “born losers” etc., inhabiting a precarious environment of precarious alliances, where modes of behavior lead only to catastrophic ends.

Deleuze lists the Western as the fourth great genre of action-image. The form SAS’ has an emphasis on the milieu (the wide skies and prairies), expanding and contracting along the milieu–action emphasis like respiration. Here the milieu acts as a “cosmic or epic” encompasser of the hero’s relationship to a community and the difference between SAS (epic) and SAS’ (ethic) forms depend on whether the character re-establishes the cyclic order of the community or modifies the situation. The “health” of a community depends upon its ability to create illusions about itself. The criminal milieu of noir is a jungle of all-against-all and does not hold any illusions, therefore the result of action is S or even worse S’’. To reach an ethical form, the communities of Westerns need to develop an illusion or ideal – the continuity of the nation – to act as Encompasser. (C1, pp. 146–148.)

Deleuze makes the final note that “the American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization”. Here (as discussed in the chapter on montage) the model of representation is organic. It lacks a dialectical vision of the world: each nation-civilization has previously acted as a seed or a genetic form for the emerging America, universal history leads here, to the moment of birth. Deleuze notes also the role of Christianity as a model of the “melting pot” of differences for America. From the point of view of the historical film, all the other genres are seen as already historical, portraying pathogenic (crime) or exemplary (adventure) historical structures. (C1, pp. 147–149.)

Next, “laws” of organic representation are considered. (1) SS’: A) From the point of view of the situation (space, frame, shot) different powers either conflict or co-operate. The situation forms an inward-curving horizon, outside of which hostile or beneficial forces appear (e.g. “Indians appear on top of a hill, at the boundary between earth and sky”). B) From the point of view of time (succession of shots) organic composition forms the passage from S to S’ as respiratory alternation of expansion and contraction (of relations and powers, of inside and outside). These two combined results in organic representation as “parallel montage”, “a spiral of development which includes spatial and temporal caesuras”. Griffith or Ford are exemplary figures of this. (C1, p. 151.) 

(2) SA: Another type of montage – “concurrent or convergent” – formulates the passage from S to S’ through the intermediary action (A). This decisive moment is often placed very close to S’, states Deleuze. The organic unity of synsign contracts into binomial or the duel of forces, which are redistributed as the result of the duel. The passage from S to A is then the content of the second law of organic representation. The decisive action (A) of the duel can arise from the organic unity (S) of the encompassing situation only if there are converging “lines of action”, coming together in confrontation. Griffith, again, or Lang are here examples of this.

(3) A: The third law is a kind of reverse of the second. In action there is “something which rebels against any montage”, states Deleuze, and refers to André Bazin’s notion of the “forbidden montage”: in two coinciding actions there must be a situation (shot) where they must be present simultaneously (e.g. without montage of different shots). Hence, despite all the tricks in filming, the hero must be present in the lion’s cage at some point in order for a confrontation to form between them. This law of the binomial concerns A itself.

(4) Yet, the binomial sign of the duel is always polynomial: there are never only two conflicting lines of action, but rather several. The “boundaries” of the duel are obscure: between which factors does it take place? (In Lang’s M [1931], for instance, we are not sure whether the duel is between M and police, M and society, M and the underworld. Or is the duel fought even on a meta-filmic level, between the underworld as representing the “rational” mode of behavior and M representing the Expressionist action through affect or impulse? And hence the duel might, in the final analysis, be between Lang himself and Expressionism?)

(5) Last, there is the law of the “big gap between the encompasser and the hero, the milieu and the behavior which modifies it, situation and action” (C1, p. 154). The gap is to be bridged bit by bit, through the process of the film itself. If one were to cross this gap instantaneously, it would lead to burlesque as the terms of the duel would be in too close proximity to each other (e.g. man opens a cabin door and receives snowballs in the face). The protagonist (or antagonist) must become ripe for the action, which at first is too great for him or her.

In structural terms Deleuze outlines the necessities: a) the protagonist is, in fact, equal to the encompasser, but only potentially; b) protagonist’s power must be actualized; c) removed position from the situation must be abandoned, inner strength (that the situation has deprived) must be rediscovered; d) favorable moment must be reached, when the community supports the protagonist; and e) the protagonist needs the help of “a makeshift group” (lacking the fundamental unity of a community). Additionally, failings, betrayals and evasions of both community and group must be coped with. These variables can be found in the historical film as well as the Western. There are caesuras – moments of impotence and indecision – that the protagonist must pass through on the way to the moment when he or she measures up to the required action, his or her power being equal to the encompasser, also in actuality.

The whole field of organic representation is thus ruled by the last law of development: “there must be a big cap between the situation and the action to come, but this gap only exists to be filled, by a process marked by caesuras” (C1, p. 155).

Finally, Deleuze turns into the question of behavior in terms of the action-image. “Behavior is an action that passes from one situation to another, which responds to a situation in order to try to modify it or to set up a new situation” (C1, p. 155).

Here Deleuze makes a reference to phenomenology: the situation–action–modified situation structure (SAS’) must be engendered, the sensory-motor link must be very strong. The two-fold formula of realist violence resembles an egg: a) on the one hand, the situation permeates the character (the vegetative pole), b) on the other hand the character must burst into action from time to time (the animal pole). Deleuze mentions that this conception of the action-image was systematized in the Actors’ Studio and in the films of Elias Kazan. Here the actor is never passive, even when immobile. Either the actor bursts out in action or else he or she is being permeated by the situation, both options are full of intensity.

This egg-like combination of vegetable infusion and animal action is compared to Bergson’s basic conception of life: plant accumulates energies, animal detonates them in sudden movements. Deleuze cites Samuel Fuller and Kazan as masters of this differentiation. The methods of the Actors’ Studio seek to focus on the inner state of the characters, yet in such a way that they become manifest on the outside. This is proper sensory-motor training of the actor – a link between situation and affect (object and emotion). This “emotional object” (impression) is the genetic sign of the action-image. “In its most general definition, the impression is the inner, but visible, link between the permeating situation and the explosive action” (C1, p. 159).

Thus, the action-image (of the “large form” variety discussed in this chapter) operates with the following signs: a) synsign (or the encompasser), b) binomial (or the duel) and c) impression (as the genetic sign giving birth both to the object and the emotion).