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...