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).