Date: Mon, 3 Jul 1995 01:20:47 +1000
From: mmcmahon-AT-extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Melissa McMahon)
Subject: Re: Montage?


>There are levels and operations.

Ok, I don't see this distinction, because I see the levels as _defined_
operationally (functionally) - they _are_ an operation. This also suggests
to me that 'movement' in the form of an operation is 'added' to the levels
from the outside, whereas I see this as the crux of what Bergson identifies
as the illuson of movement: the idea that it is constituted of immobile
cuts 'to which' movement is added. Deleuze says that while this is the
technical operation of projecting a film reel, this artifice of the
conditions is corrected in the result: what we are 'given' is not an image
to which movement is added, but the movement-image. The immobile cuts
re-emerge once the autonomy of the mobile section is established as simply
its 'parts', but 'part' has now taken on a different sense. Me and Malgosia
had a big discussion on this issue early on in the piece.

>The first level is the immobile
>section--the frame.  As such, it's really impossible to speak of it in terms
>of
>"objects," since only some operation (mobility, montage, or interpretation)
>can
>create and relate objects--reveal the frame's dividuality.  The second level
>is
>movement--the shot.  Again, though, a further operation is needed to free the
>shot from Bergson's criticisms--to open the closed set, however finely.  The
>whole is an arrangement of movements (of shots) which releases a somewhat
>indeterminate spirit (for if spirit were, or could be, circumscribed,
>Bergson's
>critique would still hold).

In the first chapter, where Deleuze is explaining the different levels, he
uses the example of scenarios between A and B, Achilles and the Tortoise,
the spoon and the glass etc. It is clear that these are the 'parts' between
which the movement takes place, and occupy the first level. I also do not
see how the frame can be defined as the first level, the immobile cut, when
he begins the chapter on framing by saying that the frame is the
determination of the 'relatively closed system', which from the first
chapter we can identify as the 'ensemble', the second level (but maybe you
mean the reel frame?). And to identify the whole as an 'arrangement of
shots' seems to me to confuse the 'whole' with a _totality_, which it is
defined against in the first chapter. A totality, like an arrangement of
shots, can be given, the whole cannot, by definition, it is what prevents
the relatively closed system from becoming absolutely closed, ie from
becoming a totality. In any case, one of the first examples that Deleuze
uses to _explain_ the concept of the whole is of a single shot (I think it
was Hitchcock, the camera that follows the woman into the room, then
reverses and mounts to the window from the outside). I don't see that any
effort is required to 'release' the whole given that it is just one of any
movement's faces, namely, the qualitative change that it expresses, which
is not localised in space but the image of time that it yields, and yields
necessarily.

To argue for the immanence of movement, which is the problem of the first
chapter, and the problem of the movement-image as a whole (as that to which
movement is immanent, not added) is for me to argue for its autonomy and
self-sufficency, which ceaselessly, and of its own nature, both divides
itself into the parts between which it translated, and unites itself into
the whole it expresses. In this sense it is the 'second' level, the mobile
section which really comes first (and in this sense I agree that the
'shot', as most immediate dimension of film, is most happily understood as
the second level), the other two levels being its two 'faces'.

But anyway, I'm going on... to bed!

- Melissa






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