File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9812, message 51


From: "michelle phil lewis-king" <king.lewis-AT-easynet.co.uk>
Subject: RE: Deleuze and Redemption - or flight.
Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 00:51:39 -0000


Dear Dan,

 I respond to your thoughts on the disruptive power (to narrative) of
special effects, of cinema as rollercoasting punch fest in which teams of
specialists strive to impress ever more imperceptibly. A special effect
'action'in which we surrender to the sheer quantity of effects, loosing our
ability to recognise them as 'special effects'. These effects are the best
special effects.. A kind of violence on thought... repeated hammer blows,
which bust their way through 'common sense'... and might wake thought up....
one question might be whether hollywood blockbusters string these 'blows'
together into some hashed up narrative to make an  empty kind of common
sense...  to lull thought back to sleep again.. reterritorialize ... twas
but a dream.. a memory. The mere play of shadows on a giant screen as
opposed to the grip of living through a bombardment.

Take Stephen Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan' a story about singling out
one unique person in a mass .. take away this story of the question of the
unique and keep the first ten minutes or so as a short film ...two twentieth
century industries (war and movies) come together in one thunderous
representation.

 You mentioned ' Godzilla' ( which I watched on an airliner buffeted by air
turbulence ) wasn't this originally a kind  Japanese response to the atomic
destruction visited on them ?  (These films taken as bombardments might be
likened to a Test Department concert )..

.... 'action'........


'special effects' draw a limit to be crossed between knowledge and belief..
we know that something isn't so but choose to believe it to be so... and yet
we 'can't believe it!' .... then as a limit to be crossed a boundary we
choose to go over .. ( it isn't real.. twas but an effect.. something we
encounter that can either convince us of the film's veracity or explode
it)..

" Thought is primarily trespass and violence..." wrote Deleuze 'following'
Plato  in  'D+R' pp 139

and

" Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not
of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. "

Grasping these affective effects.. believing in them and yet safe in knowing
that they are illusions.. we are caught between wanting to recognise them
and  (for the sake of the action) not. The special effect from the point of
view of its producers doesn't want to be recognised in the action of the
film and yet asks for its quality ( of not being recognised ) to be
recognised later. We encounter the special effects in the narrative of the
film... often a film might open with such an encounter.. Bunuels 'Eye
Slicing' sequence cuts across pre-determined narratives or moralities we
might bring to his film.. the string of shocks through a film is a kind of
animation rather than a dramatic narrative.. we twitch and jerk from jump
cut to jump cut... ripped into an actual dreamworld...caught up in a
different machine entirely from that of classical theatre.. The
deterritorialising jumps of surrealism have become cinematic convention
against which waves of narrative normalisations roll so in a film such as
'Private Ryan' we can witness both at extreme degree.

Thanks, phil.

>i wasn't praising for "action" over "narrative" but only trying to point
>out what a radical break in the narrative action sequences involving
>special effects require - an asignifying break, a rupture, they have no
>relationship to the narrative as such but bring into play a whole other
>range of affects that have no place in a conventional narrative - in
>short, they introduce the deluge, the inhuman...
>
>i'm not really talking about  rhizomes as such - what I was trying to
>say (perhaps not very clearly) was that while moving images/sequences of
>images have been used in cinema mainly to create narrative structures
>that take a model of narrative based on writing, and have continued a
>form of narrative specific to writing,  developed through writing (as
>opposed to narrative in oral traditions, for example,which operates
>differently, has different functions) this isn't the only way of using
>cinema/film.   Film doesn't have to reproduce that kind of narrative, or
>any kind of narrative - it can operate through rupture and break - the
>cut.

>dan h.
>
>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> [mailto:owner-deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of
> Anthony Beck
> Sent: 06 December 1998 11:17
> To: INTERNET:deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: Deleuze and Redemption - or flight.
>
>
> Dan,
> May I merely touch on two points of the interesting ones you raise:
> 1. the unconnectivity of rhizomes - in what sense is it still a rhizome?
> 2.  The cut - I saw, degradedly, last night, again, Total Recall (Sharon
> Stone. Arnie) in which SFX do indeed cut into what is on the whole for the
> rest a narrative which passes muster as somewhat plausible, in order to
> expose total implausibility.  One does indeed enjoy them as SFX and they
> offer in some ways the best part of an empty film.  If the film was not so
> vapid one would not be so grateful for the SFX.  That is not a defense for
> your position - narrative is powerful in producinf suspense and sustaining
> conflict, the essnticals of any dramatic genre, conventionally conceived.
> There may be other conventions - but are they superior, or even is
> no-conventions superior?  The bottom line is the aesthetic sense.
>  It s not
> that there is no bottom line.
> Anthony.
>


   

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