Notes for chapters 6 & 7

Hello all! A couple of posts providing reading notes for chapters 6 to 11 of Cinema 1. Blogger had for some reason marked my previous post (containing ch. 6 & 7) as preview only and didn't show them on the blog - this is now corrected:

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image                                                 Janne Vanhanen 16.2.2012

Chapter 6: The Affection-Image; Face and Close-up

Deleuze starts this chapter by making a connection between the (human) face and the close-up image, which he in turn links to the second kind of movement-image, the affection-image (as we remember, the first kind is perception-image, and the third type shall be action-image).

The question is how can one claim – as Deleuze does – that the face is identical to the close-up? Isn’t the close-up merely an image, a representation of a face? Why is the relation between the face and the close-up something deeper than pictorial representation (the close-up as a depiction of a face)? Deleuze begins his explanation by bringing up an example that surprisingly does not involve a human face: a recurring shot of a clock in close-up. This, he claims, has two “poles”: 1) an intensive series of “micro-movements” of the clock hands towards something (a critical instant, such as the “doomsday clock” we discussed in the seminar meeting) and 2) a reflective and reflecting unity of the clock face, a receptive immobile surface.

These two aspects of the clock (and thus, by extension, of the face in general), Deleuze notes, correspond to Bergson’s definition of perception as “a motor tendency on a sensitive nerve” (C1, p. 87). [Please remember the earlier discussion in chapter 4 of the basic structure of life as involving an action–reaction circuit, with the living image’s receiving surface introducing a delay and indeterminacy to the causal chain of movement-impulses, not only transmitting and translating, but also internalizing incoming impulses.] Here Deleuze evokes Bergson’s idea of the receiving agent’s essential immobility: the nervous “surface” has to be immobile to act as a support for perception. Here external movement becomes translated into expressive, intensive “movement”, transmitted between sensitive organs and involving an internal, reflective and affective aspect: the feeling of that which is internalized.

Deleuze likens this combination of immobile unity and intensive expressive (micro-)movements to the face, “this organ-carrying plate of nerves” (C1, p. 87). The face is a neural and sensory nexus that gathers together a number of tiny movements (affects, impressions) from the rest of the sensing body. These hidden impressions (micro-movements) are given expression only in the face. Thus: the face comes to mean every instance when a thing – anything whatsoever, not only the concrete human face – brings together the two poles of reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements. “The face” is therefore a structural term denoting a certain type of organization. What, then, is the relation between the face and the close-up? Deleuze states that the face is the close-up and that they both are affection-image. This has to be clarified a bit later…

A face implies two states: 1) it contemplates (or wonders about) something or 2) it is affected by something. In cinema, there are two types of corresponding close-ups: a) the Griffith close-ups where everything is organized for the face; which gathers together different elements (as in an iris shot) onto the surface of the face to express a certain quality, and b) the Eisenstein close-up where the face becomes variable, the image shifting from a face into a certain look, which in turn shifts into something else, becoming a part of a series of different elements jumping from quality to different quality.

To sum up his considerations, Deleuze then offers a table comparing the two aspects of faciality (C1, pp. 90–91):

“Clock-face” (reflective)	“Clock hands” (intensive)
Sensible nerve	Motor tendency
Immobile receptive plate	Micro-movements of expression
Faceifying outline	Characteristics of faceicity
Reflecting unity	Intensive series
Wonder (admiration, surprise)	Desire (love, hate)
Quality	Power
Expression of a quality common to several different things	Expression of a power which passes from one quality to another

A distinction between quality and power (puissance in French) then emerges. The reflective face expresses “a pure Quality” and quality must be understood as something that is common to several distinct things. The intensive face, in turn, expresses “a pure Power” that denotes a potential of passing from one quality to another.

As an example of this Deleuze brings up a scene from Pabst’s Lulu [in fact, proper English title is Pandora’s Box, 1929] where the faces of the characters Lulu and Jack the Ripper form a sequence, starting from relaxed, reflective wonder of both, until Jack is caught in an intensive series of emotions when he sees a knife, yet finally subsiding into a reflection of death’s inevitability. Deleuze notes that film directors can be categorized according to their preference of either reflecting or intensive face. (C1, p. 91.) He then goes on to compare Expressionist cinema’s intensive treatment of faces with the reflective “lyrical abstraction” of Sternberg. (C1, pp. 92–95.)

In any case, an equation of close-up = face = affect can be reached. The affect has two poles: quality (reflecting surface) and power (intensive series), and the faces passes from one to the other according to circumstances. Deleuze wants to highlight the integrity of the close-up/face: it is not a partial shot or a partial object, but in cinematic close-up the face is abstracted, that is, detached from ts spatio-temporal coordinates and is therefore an entity on its own. (C1, p. 96.)

What, then, is the face as an Entity? In close-up face becomes pure expression, the face is no longer bound to its usual “three roles” which are: 1) individuation (distinguishing a person), 2) socialization (manifesting a social role) and 3) communication (forming relations between people, but also intra-personal relations). Deleuze praises Bergman as the director who has most insistently concentrated on the cinematic link between the face and the close-up: his characters lose their identity, their social roles, their will to communicate… What remains are “pure” affective qualities – “the close-up turns the face into a phantom” (C1, p. 99).

In considering the unity of the expressing face and the affect, Deleuze brings up philosopher C.S.Peirce’s notions of Firstness and Secondness. The aspect of secondness is identity formed in opposition between two distinct things in a concrete situation (between action and reaction or individual and milieu, for instance). “Actual” things belong to the category of secondness. Firstness, on the other hand, is “difficult to define” rightly because it “concerns what is new in experience, what is fresh, fleeting and nevertheless eternal” (C1, p. 98). Deleuze concludes that pure quality or power (the two poles of the affect) belong to this category, firstness being pure Possibility, not actual reality; the quality of a possible sensation, feeling or idea, detached from any concrete state of things, and opening a virtual future of possibilities. This is why the affect-face-close-up is phantasmal.

Deleuze closes the chapter by referring to Franz Kafka’s observation of the effects of modern technology: on one hand technology is communication-translation (transportation technology), on the other hand it is communication-expression which summons up all kinds of disembodied phantasmal phenomena (communications technology).

Chapter 7: The Affection-Image; Qualities, Powers, Any-space-whatevers

We begin again with the scene between Lulu and Jack in Pandora’s Box. Deleuze describes it from two angles: the circumstantial (the actual state of things) and the affective – “the brightness on the light on the knife” etc., pure singular qualities or potentialities. These “power-qualities” do not refer to their cause but rather turn back to themselves. An example from an early film theorist Béla Balász: a precipice may cause vertigo, but does not explain or make comprehensible the expression of fear on a face. The feeling of vertigo is “eternal” in the sense that it is pure quality, it is not dependent on particular spatio-temporal circumstances. (C1, p. 100.)

Power-qualities (i.e. affects) have thus two manifestations: a) already actualized in distinct states-of-affairs and b) expressed in-and-for themselves. First type is essential to the action-image (and medium-shots), the second to affection-image (and close-up). In affection-image the face (or its equivalent, such as a clock) gathers and expresses the affect “as a complex entity” of singular points (different qualities), expressing Peirce’s firstness (i.e. pure quality).

[Remember that for Peirce firstness is freedom, meaning that it stands on its own, it does not have “another [cause] behind it” (Principles of Philosophy, III, §2) – this is why the quality of firstness is “pure”; consider, for instance, the perception of “redness” of a particular manifestation of the color red, detached from its particular details. It just is that particular shade of color. We do not need to consider its causes or its circumstances or relations to any other thing. As Claire Colebrook explains it, firstness (for Deleuze) is not the relation yet (that would be secondness), but rather the potential to relate: a pure quality or power that can actualize itself in a myriad different circumstances (Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, p. 61).]

Expression (the face) is what produces the unity of the affect, bringing together many different singular qualities. Yet it is not dependent on concrete circumstances. Rather, the affect – or the expressed – stands on its own, as firstness and as affection-image in cinema.

Deleuze goes on to discuss Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) as the affective film. Granted, in the film the whole secondness-level situation is present – historical circumstances, social relations, individual characters; the trial of Joan, in total – but the affective level of the event (the Passion of Joan) goes beyond these states-of-affairs. Through the characters and situations the pure power of anger and pure quality of martyrdom become present. These are the qualities and powers that are present in a particular situation but yet extend beyond the particular actualization. Deleuze then considers the cinematic means Dreyer uses to achieve this affective dimension in the film: affective framing, affective cutting (“flowing close-ups”) and affective montage. (C1, pp. 107–108.)

Deleuze then moves on to consider the cinema of Bresson. We begin by noting once more that the close-up functions by extracting (or abstracting) the face (i.e. the expression) from all spatio-temporal coordinates. Yet, the face “can carry with it its own space-time”. The question is, then, if the affect can obtain its own space in this way, what remains to tie it to a face or to a close-up shot? Comparison between Dreyer’s and Bresson’s Joan of Arc films makes this problem evident. Bresson does not rely on the close-up but rather uses medium- and reverse-shots extensively. (C1, pp. 108–109.) Yet, what he achieves in Deleuze’s opinion is truly affective cinema.

Deleuze describes how Bresson constructs a series of closed spaces which the viewer must approach in a tactile manner in order to piece them together. Here the affect is no longer tied to the face but to the space in medium-shot. These apprehended fragments of space construct not a determined space but any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). This type of space is defined by it not being homogenous any longer. There is no unifying principle of metric relations between its parts to bind everything together in coherence. Rather, linkage between parts can be made in an infinite number of combinations. This space is therefore purely possible (or virtual), not actual, and it is saturated with affective potentialities (qualities and powers). (C1, p. 109.)

Therefore, two kinds of affection-images can be categorized (as two figures of firstness): a) the power-quality expressed by a face (or equivalent) or b) power-quality presented in any-space-whatever. The latter is, for Deleuze, potentially more subtle and nuanced instrument. The advantage of abandoning the facial close-up is that it takes us away from the human coordinates and towards “non-human affects” (C1, p. 110). Here a distinction similar to perception-image can be made: regarding Peirce’s signs, we find two kinds of affection-image. Icon refers to the expression of the face; Qualisign (or Potisign) refers to the presentation of power-quality in any-space-whatever. Icon is a sign corresponding to the mode of composition of the image; qualisign refers to the genetic or differential element of the image (parallel to the gramme discussed with perception-images; see notes for chapters 4 & 5). In the qualisign, as in the gramme, we leave the human coordinates of the sensory-motor schema behind and enter a more fundamental generative dimension, out of which a habitual human reality can be conditioned.

Affection-imagea	Quality or power expressed in the Face	Icon
Affection-imageb	Quality or power expressed in Any-space-whatever	Qualisign (or Potisign)

Deleuze then devotes some thought to the techniques of constructing the generative any-space-whatever. This space is achieved a) through shadow, as in German Expressionism, b) through lyrical abstraction of Dreyer and Bresson (etc.), who alternate space between the actual circumstances and the “spiritual” space of virtuality or possibility, and c) through color, where the colored quality absorbs heterogeneous objects into the affective dimension. Here Deleuze sees Antonioni as the figure that takes cinematic colorism to its limit, in a similar way that Bergman does with the face. Both void their images: Bergman turns to the void with his faces, Antonioni with his any-space-whatevers. (C1, pp. 119–120.)

Deleuze makes a further distinction between aspects of any-space-whatever: it can be divided into two types of qualisigns, signs of a) deconnection and b) emptiness. Shadows (Expressionism), white (Dreyer and Bresson) and colors (post-war cinematic colorists) produce the any-space-whatever, which can be either deconnected or emptied. Deleuze mentions the actual situation of the post-war world which produced similar spaces: demolished cities, waste grounds, abandoned industrial spaces… Contemporaneously, a “crisis of the action-image” in cinema found its characters not in sensory-motor situations but rather the cinematic characters end up wandering aimlessly in “pure optical and sound situations” (C1, p. 120). This can be found in Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, the “German school of fear” (Fassbinder), the New York school (Lumet, Cassavetes) and, ultimately, in experimental cinema (Snow, Duras), leaving behind the human coordinates in favor of any-space-whatever.

***

The concept of expression that Deleuze discusses in these chapters may need some elaboration:

Expression is used here in a specific sense, deriving originally from Deleuze’s treatises on 17^th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who famously equated Nature and God as the single substance of the world. Expression is, then, not the outward-projecting expression of some “inner” (and more “real”) content, but rather the power, or potential, of life to structure itself differently. Life expresses itself in continuous variation; life is this virtual potency of variation.

Therefore, in terms of human subjectivity, it is in the power of affection that we get a sense of this originary potential of life. Affects “concern” us, but they do not belong to us. They are pure qualities, singular points in the world before any spatio-temporal (or human) coordinates. Therefore affect combines singularity and generality: it concerns just that specific affection (a certain type of exhilaration, for example) that can, in turn, find its expression in many different times and situations. Affects, as singularities of relations that emerge in various contexts, are therefore “autonomous”, yet they are actualized only within concrete situations. Affects are therefore virtual: “pure” potential to be actualized, time and time again – “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”

In considering the cinematic affection-image, we can remember the tripartite structure of the movement-image, where perception-image and action-image form a movement of translation between impulse (perception) and reaction (action). Affection-image, in turn, does not translate this movement outwards but turns it into “internal”, qualitative, reflecting element. In human terms the face is the principal area of concentration for affection. It has sacrificed its mobility in favor of expression. Because what it expresses is the affect, which as we discussed above is ultimately non-personal, the advantage of the cinematic affection-image is to enable the detachment of the face from purely personal or circumstantial coordinates. In cinema the close-up’s expression is abstracted from particular situation and comes to express pure qualities – affects in themselves. What we see on the screen is the face = the affect = pure quality.

Next session *tuesday* 14 February; notes for chapters 4 & 5

Hello all! Just to remind you that our next session will take place on tuesday rather than monday, on 14 February at the usual place in Kuvataideakatemia, from 4 PM onward. We have presentations for chapter 6 & 7, so please be prepared and read them beforehand.


Here are my notes for last session, chapters 4 & 5 of Cinema 1. Take care, Janne

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image  |  Janne Vanhanen 20.1.2012

Chapter 4: The Movement-Image and its Three Varieties; Second Commentary on Bergson                                                

Deleuze begins by returning to Henri Bergson on the question of the identity of movement and image. The necessity for this identification comes about during a ”crisis in psychology” at the turn of 19th and 20th Centuries when images are seen to belong to consciousness, movemenent to space. Accordingly, images are thought of as qualitative and without extension, movement in turn is quantitative and extensive, taking place in absolute, extended space. Now, the problem and “crisis” comes with the question: how to move from one to the other, from movement to image, or vice versa? How do matter and mind interact? It seems that this confrontation with materialism and idealism leads only to irresolvable dead end. Either one posits matter as the prime substance or one grounds everything in mental terms. Yet, both approaches retain the distinction between (true) reality and (mere) appearance.

Two figures appear in philosophy at this pivotal point: Edmund Husserl and Bergson – yet neither of them considers cinema as providing any answers to the crisis, and cinema is here Deleuze’s topic, after all. Husserl considers the mind–matter problematic: all consciousness is consciousness of something, perception is thus intentional. For Bergson, in turn, all consciousness is something. Both try to bridge the divide between matter and mind, thing and consciousness, in considering the action of perception. For both phenomenology and Bergsonism, the object and the perceiving subject form an inseparable union, there would be no perception without both aspects.

The difference is that Husserl as phenomenologist, however, starts with a bigger baggage than Bergson. Phenomenology supposes the existence of ”natural perception”: that there is consciousness that perceives, in the first place. Bergson goes further away from common sense in this case: he starts with a more non-intuitive proposition that there are matter-images – a universal flow of images, and that consciousness is a distinct kind of image in that matter-image-flow.

What is meant by “image” by Bergson is then something else than how it is understood generally: for Bergson image is affection – the influence of a thing upon another. A thing-as-image ”projects” itself upon others which ”perceive” the thing’s influence. This is metaphysics of light or emanation: all “things” project themselves outwards, perceptions means receiving this influence. Being is being-perceived (as Bishop Berkeley has stated).

In fact, speaking of things or even images is somewhat misleading, as for Bergson and Deleuze the ultimate reality is in the boundless interaction that distinguishes something as a thing. Deleuze posits this “infinite set” of images as “a plane of immanence” [note: the French for “plane”, plan, is the same term as is used by Deleuze for the cinematic “shot”]. Plane of immanence is the movement that connects every isolated system (“closed set”) to each other and forms an open Whole. (C1, pp. 58–59.)

To speak of images instead of things or bodies is to highlight this interaction. Language ascribes to bodies a status of nouns, onto which qualities (adjectives) and action (verbs) are imposed. Nouns are already something, they have an essence. Images, in turn, are already becoming, on-the-way, affecting and being affected. The term image also corresponds with the metaphysical plane of affection as light.

Between distinct images, there are so-called ”laws of nature” governing this interaction: for instance, physical laws and law-like probabilities like causation. Matter operates, for the most part, mechanistically, determinably, predictably. Like an isolated system of particles bouncing upon each other and driving each other into movement. Yet, there are interactions or encounters that do not result in such mechanistic causation.

This gap in causality and determination can be called ”life”. Life introduces temporality into the proceedings: life constitutes a delay in the relay system of determination. In the mechanistic interaction movement is translated into another type of movement. A simplest kind of life possesses a choice of some kind: there is an impulse and then – a decision, even a tiniest one – not total determination.

Perception is part of movement because it is linked to action (or reaction). This is meant by the term sensory-motor link: perception translates movement (image’s influence), internalizes it via senses and neural structure and transforms it into action. This is Bergson’s Darwinistic view: perception is born out of the biological need to react, to respond in order to survive within an environment.

Hence the sensory capacity is evolutionarily determined: perception is a living being’s capacity to react to its environment. Yet, one cannot take in all the excitations of the world. Thus the sensory-motor system is, in the first place, selective. This is the intuition of Freud also: senses limit our perception, sift out the most relevant aspects of consideration for our existence. There is a kind of schematicism here: the more limited the choices, the easier it is to react in a proper manner. Nonliving things react to everything indiscriminately, their perception of the world is in this sense “perfect”; life, on the other hand, selects and chooses.

Here, in the schematic action of selection, images are translated into the kind of representations we usually think about when thinking about images. Bergson’s primary meaning of image is ”presence”, whereas image in general terms is understood as representation.

For Bergson presence is light, representation is the diminishing of light, isolation, darkening. Mental representation of a thing is only a selected filtering of its aspects, like partially reflected light back onto its surface. This obscures the ”true” nature of perception as the interlinking of movement between different images: perceived object, its influence, act of perception, its processing in the neural system etc. There would be no perception without the unity of these. In this sense the separation between subject and object is artificial.

And if the separation between subject and object is secondary, this results in the understanding of the world as the open Whole, a unity of interactions, a universal resonance: matter-flow.

What, for Deleuze, is of special interest in cinema is its direct relation to this universal movement. Cinema does not anchor itself in phenomenological natural perception – where movement is still related to ideality (with existential coordinates in the place of essential ones, as in earlier philosophy). For phenomenology all perception is intentional: it has form, it is of something. Therefore it pre-establishes the perceiving body (if not consciousness) as an existential given. Cinema, in turn, is able to show us the world imaging itself, without a necessary subjectivity to act as its focus.

Cinema’s power is its potentiality towards the acentered, non-representational image-interaction. Natural perception starts with this amorphous state, and then moves towards defined representations. Cinema can reverse this and proceed toward gaseous perception where matter is matter, not something represented and in itself mute and invisible. ”Universe as metacinema” (C1, p. 59).

Deleuze distinguishes three varieties of movement-images in cinema, corresponding to life as the interval. There is movement (action–reaction) and there is, in some cases, interval (a gap in the causal chain). This presupposes time alongside movement and the living images (life) inhabit time. Life involves framing: isolated systems are formed, according to sensory and active capacities; certain actions are framed – anticipated. Schemes of reception and action are formed. The living image is “an instrument of analysis in regard to the movement received” (C1, p. 62). As inhabiting intervals, living images are “centres of indetermination” (ibid.).

Life presents opacity for the light emanated by images to seep into, intervals of varying scale according to the scale of complexity of the living images. There are two systems of reference: one is image-as-it-is: image considered as a part of universal interaction; the other is a perspective of a single living image, as it perceives and receives and transmits action.

Perception is, as mentioned, limitation – an atom perceives infinitely, we perceive only what is in our (biological) interests.

Acquiring the subjective point of view by framing is the basis of the first movement-image type, Perception-image. Taking-in the world from a perspective, the world curving around the centre of indetermination as a horizon of possibility. This already supposes another type of image, Action-image, as perception is but one facet of the impulse–reaction circuit and the interval of indetermination between them. Action is the delayed reaction of the centre of indetermination. (C1, p. 64.)

The incurvature of the world around the centre of subjective perception is the basis of action-image. “I” perceive the “virtual action” of others upon me and the “possible action” that “I” have upon others. Perception relates movement to bodies (nouns), action relates movement to acts (verbs).

Yet, between perception and action there is an in-between zone of Affection-images. It vacillates between perception and action: it is how the subject feels itself “from the inside”, hovering between the subject and the object. Affection-image relates movement to quality (adjectives), it marks the absorption of external movement that is not transformed into objects of perception or acts of the subject. Rather these come together in “pure quality”. (C1, p. 65.)

Affection is not a fault in the working of the impulse–reaction system, but rather its third necessary given. It belongs most closely to the interval of indetermination as it breaks down the relay of received movement and executed movement. Affection is the dimension of quality, of expression. This is something added to the “mechanical” perception of an impulse, it is how perception feels to us. It is feeling with our perceiving bodies. For human beings Deleuze situates the expression of this qualitative feel into the face (he discusses face-shots and close-ups in relation to the affection-image in a later chapter in Cinema 1).

Last, Deleuze brings up attempts to move away from the perspective of the centre of indetermination or subjectivity in cinema. “How can we rid ourselves as ourselves?” (C1, p. 66.) Deleuze mentions Samuel Beckett’s work Film, in the context of which he distinguishes movement-images as such and then, when related to centre of indetermination, three types of “subjective” movement-images: perception-, action- and affection-images. Yet, these are probably not the only kinds of images, as one can relate to time as well, as the open Whole is space-time or matter-flow. Here Deleuze mentions only “memory-image” in reference to Bergson, but leaves the door open for an inventory of a great variety of images…

Deleuze brings up the semiologist C.S. Peirce and the relationship of image and sign. “It is clear that the image gives rise to signs” (C1, p. 69). Here the sign can be considered as a certain image which represents a type of images; either from the point of view of its composition, or its genesis or its formation (or even extinction). Yet, the comprehensive classification of images and signs will have to wait, says Deleuze, and so we shall postpone that for a while…

Further, Deleuze describes examples of the three types of movement-images: perception-image in Lubitch’s The Man I Killed, action-image in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and affection-image in the close-ups of faces in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. We close the chapter with a final general classification: a) perception-image relates to the long shot, b) action-image to the medium shot and c) affection-image to the close-up, yet they each open up a perspective to the whole of the film.

Chapter 5: The Perception-Image

Deleuze begins the discussion of one of the three movement-image types, perception-image, by considering the two sides of perception: objective and subjective. In Beckett’s Film this was the constant point of vacillation: between the objective and the subjective image. In cinema the subjective image is often understood as seen “by” someone “within” the set. This perspective can have sensory factors (the blurred view of a drunken character etc.), active factors (view of an action by someone taking part in it) and affective factors (view by someone in love, for instance, seeing the object of his/her adoration, as seen in the example of Fellini’s The White Sheik).

This subjective image can supposedly be checked against an “objective” one, the “real” world as-it-is (view unblurred by drunkenness or by affection, etc.). Objective image would then be from the point of view of someone who is not part of the set. Yet Deleuze questions this distinction: who is to say what is external, what internal? An initially “outerior” viewpoint may turn out to belong to the set that is considered, after all. Integral to cinema is the movement between the subjective and the objective. Deleuze mentions Jean Mitry, who presents us with the notion of semi-subjective image as the image proper to cinema: the anonymous viewpoint of the camera, shifting its association from characters to outside and back again.

Deleuze asks us to suppose that the perception-image is indeed semi-subjective, but admits that since such semi-subjectivity does not coincide with natural perception (i.e. subject-centered point of view) it is hard to define the status of such image. The term Deleuze comes up with is the semi-subjective image being like free indirect discourse. This is posed against the subjective perception-image’s direct discourse (the “me” perspective) and objective perception-image’s indirect discourse (the neutral “outside” perspective). In literary studies free indirect discourse means a style of writing when the narrator and the character are mixed. What is characteristic of free indirect discourse is that it combines different subjectivities within a heterogeneous system. The point is that free indirect discourse retains two (or more) subjectivities; it does not merge them into seamless whole, but yet brings them together. It goes beyond the division between the objective and the subjective points-of-view.

Deleuze finds comparisons to this in the “internal” division of the subject – Cogito – of philosophy and art: an empirical subject needs a transcendental subject to reflect it. I watch myself act, I reflect myself… I think my thoughts. Pasolini thinks that this doubling-up denotes the possibility of “the cinema of poetry”: characters’ point of view is expanded and combined to others by camera/framing and montage. A “camera-consciousness” yanks the subjective image out of its neurotic centre. (C1, p. 74.) For Pasolini, cinema has gone through a long evolution to attain this (self-)consciousness in Antonioni, Rohmer, Godard… (and Deleuze adds Pasolini himself to this list).

Deleuze ends up equating the free indirect discourse of perception-image with Peirce’s dicisign. It is perception “framed” – perception of a perception, the divide between the neurotic-subjective characters and the obsessive camera (for example, a shot of a character who is very markedly observing something: camera sees the character seeing…).

Deleuze reiterates the Bergsonian view: subjective perception is one in which the image varies in relation to a central and privileged image; objective perception is where all images vary in relation to one another. Here the positions of what are normally understood as subjective and objective images are reversed: delirium, dreams, hallucinations are objective, matter in variation, without a central (subjective) perspective. The French and German schools took this type of subjective view to its outer reaches: the centre of reference was itself put into movement.

Deleuze discusses the “liquid” images of the French school as resembling just this type of images and opposes here the perceptions, affections and actions of men on land and men on sea. On land the movement is always between two points, on water the point is always between two movements (C1, p. 79). This liquid “cine-eye” presents a movement from dicisign (frame as isolated image) to reume: image becoming-liquid, passing through or under the frame, away from the geometrical composition of the frame.

The question of cine-eye is taken up with Vertov: cine-eye couples up any point whatsoever in the universe. Here it cannot be a case of the human eye any longer, but of cinema-vision as montage. What appears as constructed to human eye is “pure vision” to cine-eye. Given our state as sensory-motor subjects, we have to construct the pure vision, it is no natural to us. This takes us towards the “gaseous” form of perception, acentered variation of images. The interval is restored from the realm of subjectivity to “objective” matter itself: decision is not the property of subjects any longer. Here the sign is no longer reume, but gramme (engramme, photogramme): we return to the “pure” movement-image as asubjective perception-image (i.e. without subjective framing).

Free indirect discourse (subjectively framed)	Solid image	Dicisign
Free indirect discourse (perception that overflows the frame)	Liquid image	Reume
“Pure” movement-image (objective perception)	Gaseous image	Gramme

Deleuze claims that Vertov’s techniques of montage create the machinic cine-eye; this eye is no longer subjective (not eye of a fly or an eagle or eye of the spirit) but “the eye of matter” (C1, p. 81). Montage is then elevated to the technique of the interval. Here interval is not a subjective point of view (affective, decisive delay between impulse–reaction) but rather reaction appropriate to any point whatsoever, however distant (i.e. breaking up the subjective frame). Vertov’s style goes here beyond the Soviet Eisensteinian dialectics as it establishes intermediary relations of various distant elements rather than dialectical opposition between defined essences. This tendency was continued by later American experimental cinema (Brakhage, Snow etc.): “to reach ‘another’ perception, which is also the genetic element of all perception (C1, p. 85).  

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.

CINEMA 1 - Chapter 2

At the end of October we discussed the second chapter of Cinema 1, please find my notes of it below.

Hei,

here are some links relating to the next chapter (chapter 2) which will be
treated on monday (Youtube links have sometimes their limitations, about which
in my small comments below...)

Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk8FW9atXuw&feature=related
(the link has russian dubbing, but it doesn´t matter)

Hitchcock: Spellbound (1945)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grn-Wecipdo
(remix buy some Youtube-user... I couldn´t think any more annoying sound than
eurobeat and the "funny" idea of repeating the drinking as videoscratch is of
course destroying the original scene... but for our purposes but you can take
the beat + sound off and watch only the last image...)

Hitchcock: Frenzy (1972)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRfbuQgJsjY

Griffith: Intolerance (1916)
The scene that Deleuze describes is here (with funny music):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO545Fie1j4&feature=related
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7puu_dfsSB0&feature=relmfu
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

Lang: The Nibelungen (1924)
Extract: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxN2fXCkh2o&feature=related

Chess-like movement of the workers in Lang: Metropolis (1927)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLMp46Ojy5o&feature=related

Melvyn LeRoy: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Link to see the film:
http://blip.tv/the-phantasmagoria-theater-presents/i-am-a-fugitive-from-a-chain-gang-1932-4364016,
you can start to watrch the scene that Deleuze is describing at 00:42:00

Paul Newman: Sometimes a Great Notion (1970)
Link to see the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKdF-IP7rE0

Ernst Lubitsch: The Man I Killed (or Broken Lullaby) (1932)
link to the sequences that includes the framing that Deleuze is talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84WxGnM1f0g
The framing separated from other shots:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrP7IcjvkEk

Murnau: The Last Laugh (1924)
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYksodT5NA&feature=related
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.
(the scene that Deleuze describes could be the very first one, at least it is
easy to understand the point - even though there is no bicycle... what I
believe that he don´t remember the scene exactly as it is - the cinema of our
cinematic memories is sometimes a little bit different than the actual film)

Carol Reed: The Third man (1949)
Scenes:
(circular movement in a Ferris wheel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i47-QBL4Qo&feature=related
(flight scene) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvnjHevRceQ&feature=related

King Vidor: The Crowd (1928)
Link to the famous scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyMwGPyZ5t0

Wenders: Kings of the Road (1976)
link to one scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNlVXDD3cF8
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPvmJ5bHbZA&feature=related
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

Wenders: Alice in the Cities (1974)
Extract: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHc2D3gVxhw&feature=related
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePartyFears2#p/c/29B7BEE8F8CFD13F/0/m1uabGuh1Ck
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

here is also link to a scanned version of the book which I found from scribd:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32041767/Gilles-Deleuze-Cinema-1-The-Movemen-Image

best,

Kari

Dziga Vertov this week in KAVA

I´ll send here a link about Dziga Vertov
-screenings in KAVA this week (Thursday 5pm and Saturday 7pm in Orion,
Eerikinkatu 15; accompanied with live music by an interesting band Cleaning
Women -- they make music with everyday devices used at home). The tickets cost 12 e / 10 e. The text behind the link is unfortunately only in Finnish but here below are two short english
texts about the films and comment on Deleuze´s thoughts on Vertov:

The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi)

Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1928, 35mm, b/w, silent, 52 min. at 20 fps.

Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov
(and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director
Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema
Administration. The trio's first assignment was a documentary celebrating the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of
ode-inpictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the
political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography
and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the
twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such,
deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.

Kino-Pravda No. 21 (Lenin Kino-Pravda)

Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1925, 35mm, silent, b/w, 29 min. at 20 fps.

Lenin Kino-Pravda is a special, longer-than-usual issue of Kino-Pravda in which
Vertov jumps with boldness and ease between newsreel and drawn animation to
illustrate Soviet Russia's way up under Lenin's leadership, the decline in
Lenin's health, and the year elapsed since his death. One notable sequence
representing Lenin's illness can be seen as a tour de force of Vertov and
Alexander Rodchenko's animated titling. In another, an animated caricature
shows the face of a capitalist changing from gloating to despair – as he sees
more and more people, crowds of them, join the Communist Party after Lenin's
death.

"In an argument openly indebted to Michelson’s pioneering article, Gilles Deleuze claims that Vertov’s “camera-eye,” at once steadfastly trained upon quotidian “unplayed” reality and extravagantly mobile, functions not as a surrogate “subjective” gaze of any kind but rather as something like the ongoing movement of the dialectic itself, an image of the concrete totality, wherein the endless fullness of the external universe is perpetually reconciled with never-static cognition. Needless to say, neither this fullness nor this kind of cognition can ever provide the form or content for any finite human perception; on the most visible level, the Vertovian theory of the interval [marks] a correlation of two images which are distant (and incommensurable from the viewpoint of our human perception). [...] [T]he cinema could not run in this way from one end of the universe to the other without having at its disposal an agent which was capable of making all the parts converge.

Most important [for Vertov] were all the (communist) transitions from an order [that] is being undone to an order [that] is being constructed. But between two systems or two orders, between two movements, there is necessarily the variable interval. In Vertov the interval of movement is perception, the glance, the eye. But the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, that is, an eye in matter, a perception such as it is in matter [...] The correlation between a non-human matter and a superhuman eye is the dialectic itself, because it is also the identity of a community of matter and a communism of man.

It would seem initially, as François Zourabichvili argues in his excellent recent discussion of Deleuze-on-Vertov, that Deleuze’s “agent of convergence” is not camera technology as such but the cumulative effect of an entire repertoire of montage techniques, from shooting and editing right down to the stringing-together of photograms along the film strip itself. It is the work of the editor-creator that allows One Sixth of the World, as Deleuze writes, to show “the interaction at a distance, within the USSR, between the most varied peoples, herds of animals, industries, cultures, exchanges of all kinds in the process of conquering time.”

Zourabichvili points out, however, that Vertov’s “convergence of parts” does not converge, in Deleuze’s interpretation, around anything like a “subjective” center—however virtual or constructed—or emanate from a single authorial point. From a technical standpoint, argues Zourabichvili, it is Vertov’s consistent use of false continuity sequences— ubiquitous from the Kino-Pravdas on—that “de-center” the images he offers:
[T]he image is decentered, subtracted from its subjective condition, since the eye is taken away from the voyeur or the camera operator without for all that being attributed to another operator, the spectator perceiving the falseness of the continuity. For false continuity has an objective effect: that of opening the image onto a point of view that is not its own, and insofar as it is not its own. Each image thus interacts with other images, instead of organizing itself according to the conditions of the centering of “natural”—that is, subjective— perception. And it is in this sense that Vertov rejoins [...] the material world of movement-images: he starts with necessarily centered images, which he submits to an operation of decentering (montage)." (John MacKay, Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective)