Date: 6 Jan 1996 13:45:05 U
From: "Bill Schaffer" <bill.schaffer-AT-fine.arts.su.edu.au>
Subject: Re: a question


        Reply to:   RE>>a question

I was grateful to Peter for his reply to my attempt to play devil's advocate
with Deleuze, but I don't think I phrased the question right to provoke the
kind of discussion I was hoping for.

So I am going to try playing devil's advocate again.

I agree with Peter that C1&2 are written less in the mode of a general
hermeneutic, more as an affirmation of certain moments in cinema that involve
going beyond the limitations of motor-sensory continuity (and of the
possibility of 'conceiving' such a line of flight).

My question is about the way in which Deleuze establishes what forms of cinema
are trapped by those limitations and which escape them. It is in this sense
that I wondered about the almost total neglect of mainstream US cinema, as if
it contributed more or less all it had to contribute before the war.

I am reminded of something Descombes says about D's philosophy in general: in
order to 'believe' in the affirmative it needs first of all to denounce the
reactive - yet this 'you are evil, therefore I am good' is supposed to be
precisely the definition of the reactive itself ...

In other words, I am ready to accept that C1&C2 are affirmations, but I wonder
if they are utlimately affirmations of much more than Delueze's own desire to
distinguish between the affirmative and the reactive - affirmations not of
difference, but of sameness?

A nicer way of seeing this would be: Deleuze affirms his own thought in
relation to cinema. He affirms their mutual transformation. Which perhaps
explains why it sometimes difficult to tell, especially in the early
meditations on cinematic vs natural perception, whether for Deleuze cinema is
a moment of thought or thought is a form of cinema.

I can see it both ways: I stop still and shift between them, as between the
virtual and actual ...

Bill

--------------------------------------
Date: 31/12/95 3:02 AM
To: Bill Schaffer
From: seminar-10-AT-jefferson.village.v
Bill Schaffer wrote on December 30:
 
> I have a question about Deleuze's work on cinema concerning the relation
> between the movement-image and the time-image and the 'little narrative' 
which
> Deleuze seems to construct of the passage from one to the other. 
> 
> I'd like to preface it by saying that I find Deleuze's books on cinema 
> continually provocative and enjoyable - that is why I want to question them.
> To some extent I'm playing Devil's advocate.
> 
> As I understand it, the two forms of image are not mutually exclusive, but
> rather immanent potentialities of cinema. Leaving aside for the moment the
> question of what 'cinema' is for Deleuze, I can't help but wonder where
these
> potentialities 'are' when they have not been actualised?
> 
> I know that sounds naive - it probably is. But I just can't help but feel
all
> the time, when reading Cinema 1&2, that the 'time-image' is not so much a
> function of the films in question, but of the context which Deleuze so
> brilliantly brings to it.
> 
> For example, I can not understand the almost complete lack of concern shown 
by
> Deleuze for  possibilities of the time-image in mainstream American cinema.
> 
> What are the criteria by which Deleuze decides whether a particular film is
> exemplary of the movement-image or time-image - or not even worth talking
> about?
> 
> Is he simply isolating attributes of cinema (or even, perhaps, 'perception',
> whatever that is) in general (false continuity, etc) in particular films,
> which he can then 'promote' as exemplary of cinema?
> 
> The little narrative of C1 & C2 seems to suggest a history in which the
> time-image struggles to emerge from the restrictions of the movement-image: 
as
> if the movement-image were only significant insofar as, through the crisis
of
> the action-image, it eventually brings about the conditions of a time image.
> 
> I am almost tempted to say: until it brings about an image which Deleuze can
> describe as the perfect reflection of his own philosophical categories.
Isn't
> it all a bit self-serving and Eurocentric?
> 
> I think this relates to the question of what 'cinema' means for Deleuze, but
> that's another story.
> 
> 
After having spent a good deal of time working on the cinema books without 
having read much else by Deleuze, I have also wondered whether it would be
more 
suitable to treat the time-image as an aesthetic, a set of methods developed
by 
certain filmmakers (many of whom are not western Europeans, such as
Paradjanov, 
Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky) that radically undermine the imperatives and 
expectations of what he calls the sensory-motor system (consciousness at its 
most utilitarian level), rather than a hermeneutic which one can deploy on the

filmmaking as a whole.  John Orr, in "Cinema and Modernity," also invokes 
Deleuze in describing what he calls the rise of a modern, as opposed to 
classical, cinema.  The trajectory of this account for both would begin with 
Eisenstein, Flaherty, Murnau, and Dreyer, among others, who were the earliest 
directors to bring film to bear on the question of time.  It is interesting to

note that in "Evolution of the Language of Cinema" (What is Cinema, Volume 1) 
Andre Bazin also favored these directors as participants in the effort to
evoke 
a greater sense of reality in the cinema, an increasing sense of unity and 
wholeness through mobile framing and a resistance to editing, as opposed to
the 
crude editing and mis-en-scene that had given rise to filmed theatre.  It
seems 
that this paradigm set up by Bazin remains latent in Deleuze, hence the 
latter's willingness to treat the cinematic practices of Hollywood in the
terms 
of the Nietzschean definition of "monumental history" set forth in "On the
Uses 
and Disadvantages of History for Life," the achievement of epic naivete, as a 
counterweight to the leaner productions of the neo-realists.  I don't recall
if 
Deleuze thinks the films of Andy Warhol examine the potentialities of the 
time-image, but given that he and others have held modern cinema to be 
marginal and in its own way, adversarial, in relation to mainstream norms, it 
might be most rewarding to look into avant-garde American cinema for examples 
of the time-image.  Michael Snow, I think, as well as Stan Brakhage, are both 
mentioned in Cinema 1.

But where Orr stops by making the case that a modern cinema is essentially an 
oppositional cinema, as against the bulk of worldwide cinematic production,
and 
Bazin is content to praise the achievements of Orson Welles and Jean Renoir as

culminating moments in his aesthetic teleology, Deleuze's detours into the 
"thought-image," which as I recall has to do with the fifth dimension, beyond 
time, that of the spirit (Cinema 1, I believe, in relation to Dreyer), as well

as the final words on the "underground fire" (at the very end of Cinema 2)
have 
left me somewhat at a loss - it seems that the theory itself, which at the 
beginning depended so heavily on Bergson's theses on movement and on time, has

in a sense declared in its own inadequacy as critique and in so doing given 
itself over to invoking either figures without reference, or a truth-claim so 
specific as to resist all theorization, all reference to the discursive.  Does

cinema in this sense enact or perform the failure (nonclosure) of theory?
  
Yours sincerely,

Peter Yoonsuk Paik		Bielefeld, Germany


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Subject: Re: a question
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Date: Sat, 30 Dec 1995 16:17:14 MEZ
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