Next session: next week! 16.1.2012 at Kuvataideakatemia + Chapter 3 summary

Just a short note to remind you that we have Spring term's first meeting of the Gilles Deleuze Cinema-books reading group on next Monday, 16.1. at Kuvataideakatemia, screening room of Time and Space Arts, at 4PM.

We have presentations for the next two chapter of Cinema 1, so please read chapters 4 and 5 beforehand. (I just noticed that information in Kopsu is one chapter ahead, but 4 & 5 are the correct chapters to read!)

I'll include here a (too) short summary of the last chapter discussed, it is fairly conscise - I've had a really bad flu and this is the best I can do at this moment! We'll have to discuss the notion of the closed set/open whole in further detail a bit later on...

All the best,
Janne

 

 

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image | Janne Vanhanen 20.12.2011

Chapter 3: Montage

At this point, we arrive at discussing montage as the “third level” of relations between movement and time in cinema (first two are the frame and the shot). Let us summarize the structure of previous chapter according to the third chapter on montage:

Frame is the immobile set, roughly corresponding with the composition of image (its visual features); it delimits a closed set of elements. Shot puts these elements into motion, “translates” the visual “data” into movement-image by introducing movement into the elements of the frame via movement of the elements themselves or movement of the camera. Movement has two aspects: 1) translation of the relationship between parts and 2) expression of the state of the whole. As such, the shot as movement-image stands between the frame (as composition of parts) and montage (as the “whole” of a film).

The three elements of movement and change are only relatively distinct, as frame, shot and montage are interlinked constantly. Montage is implied in the individual shots which contain framing etc.

Montage yields us the “whole” of the film. The notion of the whole is something that Deleuze contrasts with closed sets (i.e. the immobile section of the frame and the mobile section of the shot). As has been discussed earlier, the whole implies a perspective of the outside of any closed system: it reminds us that any closed set is, in this sense, artificial, as it may be related to some other elements.

The whole of the film is not so much its theme or plot, but its “form of time”. “Between the beginning and the end of a film something changes” – we are exposed, yet only indirectly through the montage of movement-images, to the particular form of time of a particular film. (C1, p. 29.)

The construction of these forms of time is, for Deleuze, montage and he distinguishes between four different schools:

American organic montage is exemplified by Griffith and his parallel montage of pairing distinct parts, working together like parts in a machine. Differences and conflicts are finally assimilated into the dynamism of the organic unity.

Soviet dialectic montage is developed by Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Vertov… and their montage of conflicting parts, out of which a new whole appears, generated by the synthesis of the conflict.

Quantitative montage of pre-war French directors such as Gance, Epstein, L’Herbier… with their interest in the quantifiable, metric relations of movement. This produces a mechanical composition of movement-images. -> Simultaneous co-presence of successive moments.

Intensive montage of German expressionists Lang, Murnau, Pabst… favors the play of light in relation to movement. Light and shadow, chiaroscuro, diagonals, oblique angles… These create a dynamic character of vital, non-organic movement (possession, madness, the uncanny…).

The first two forms can be opposed on the axis of organic–dialectic, the second two on the axis of the mathematical/geometrical (quantitative)–dynamic (intensive). The latter axis corresponds also with Immanuel Kant’s two notions of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamic.

Mathematical sublime – which Deleuze sees the pre-war French school evoking – denotes the subject’s perception of an immeasurably large or numerous phenomenon/-a. So vast is the scale of this impression that our senses and their guiding faculty (Imagination) fails to provide us a synthetic unity in our experience and thus presents us with the possibility of the overpowering of our mental faculties. Yet, Reason saves the day and picks up where Imagination falters: Reason can provide an infinite Idea of a finite phenomenon and thus control it.

Dynamic sublime, on the other hand, is evoked by a magnitude of force which might overwhelm our human existence: raging thunderstorms etc. Yet, when observed from a distance of no immediate danger, we can recognize the phenomenon as dangerous but not fall into a state of terror but rather of a fearful pleasure of observing it as a representation to our senses. This represents a victory of our Reason’s power to act over our animalistic instincts.