Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 31, November 2001
Tom Conley
Film Theory 'After' Deleuze
_Apres Deleuze: Philosophie et
esthetique du cinema_ Edited by Dominique Chateau and
Jacinto Lageira Paris: Dis Voir, 1996 ISBN: 2-912-308-003 152 pp. When Gilles Deleuze published
_L'Image-mouvement_ in 1983 and _L'Image-temps_ in 1985 many
theorists of cinema in France were taken by surprise. At
that moment some of the longstanding lines of divide in film
studies were drawn in bold lines. In one camp semioticians
felt that a new vocabulary of cinematic effects was in the
making. Its terms would supplant the fuzzy and hazy
vocabulary of former grammars of film and eventually show
that the seventh art could indeed submit to the power of
language. In another psychoanalysts shared the conviction
that film opened the door to the unconscious, and that its
own basis as a medium of fantasy offered original and
compelling ways of defining symptoms and of working through
neurosis and psychosis. A transitional object in the
discourse of the analysand, a film could be used to open
cracks in the defensive walls erected around a hidden
memory. And in another still, for partisans of Jacques
Derrida's style of reading, cinema offered a medium by which
any and every discourse could be seen as divided,
splintered, and always doubly bound. Interpretations of cinema aimed at
locating points of reversal or fissure in the mosaic of
words and images comprising cinema. One track, entirely
foreign to language, is used to convey the signifiers and
the content of another. The image-track, that put forward
language in written shapes in the field of the shot, is
complemented by the sound-track, in which the aural
signifers could never be entirely located at any point on
the screen. But the twain would never meet, each track being
self-present and autonomous in respect to the other.
Difference and cinema became a theme: adepts of
deconstruction found that the need to construct an
omniscient grammar of cinematic motives was tantamount to
aiming intellectual lances at antiquated windmills.
Semioticians could not believe that language would ever fall
short of its mission to describe and classify, while the
psychoanalysts seemed content to let cinema do its work in
the pragmatic context of consultation and curative
procedures. After a surge of theory in the 1970s, film
studies settled, became a discipline with an agenda and an
archive, and developed curricula in directions away from
abstraction and pure thought. Deleuze's work came as a surprise,
doubly, because of its staunch affiliation with the canon of
western philosophy, and its blending of concepts with
cinematic genres and structures. It left a greater part of
the French public at a loss as to how to read it. In the
first sentence of _L'Image-temps_ Deleuze begins in a mix of
affirmation and negation: 'This study is not a history of
cinema. It is a taxonomy, an essay of the classification of
images and signs.' [1] The volumes are not a
history, but they are organized around the aftermath of the
Second World War, when the sight of what was seen in the
Nazi concentration camps could not be imagined. The trauma
of that moment in modern history begged the question about
whether any expression -- be it a film, a poem, a writing of
history, a page of statistics -- could follow what had been
too much for living beings to countenance. On one side of a
line of historical divide is a cinema that explores and
refines *movement* in and as image, and on another, in light
of what no system of signs can register in any stable
fashion, is a cinema beholden to images constructed under
the cruel blade of Chronos. Time -- that which is at once
succession, simultaneity, and permanence -- imbues the inner
state of the image after the trauma of the Holocaust. After
1945 cinema avows that it can no longer make images adequate
to what it records. A condition of pure sight and sound
cannot be prolonged in action or movement. 'It is supposed
to cause us to grasp something intolerable, something
unbearable . . . In every event something has become too
strong in the image'. [2] Thus the taxonomy is built upon the
history that, in its inaugural sentence, the book says is of
no immediate concern. The panoply of types of image, a
virtually Linnean project of cinematic phylogeny,
[3] is seen in the multiplication of species of
images. In the regime of movement are: the perception-image,
that replaces the long shot; the action-image, that
supplants the medium shot; the affect-image, that shows how
much the close-up is related to the faciality of all things.
There follows 'drive-images' [4] that seem
unvarnished expressions of brutal and originary force in
cineastes such as Bunuel, but these are related to 'mental
images' in the often psychotic realm of Hitchcock. These
variants of the movement-image give way to others, based on
a criterion of time suffusing the image, that know no
reliable idiolect. There is time actual and virtual, but
also crystalline in the sense of optical and musical forms.
Flashbacks and catastrophes of memory lost, regained, and
revamped show how the modern power of cinema resides in its
mendacity. Yet, as Deleuze works toward his
conclusion, the time of cinema becomes the time of
reflection, both in the medium itself and in its spectators.
Cinematic time calls into question the status of the
thinking body and how it can discern what Deleuze calls the
'components' of cinematic images from the beginnings of the
medium until now. They include the mix of things read and
seen at once, the visual dimension of speech in sound films,
voice-over as doubled or bifurcating reflection, and the
image as a 'stratigraphy' in the way that a landscape gives
to the eye the longer time of its geology, in which layers
and rifts, hills and valleys point to the greater rhythms of
inorganic creation. Included, too, is the autonomy of the
'image' and 'sound' tracks of film that cause synchrony to
be an illusion granting most effects of communication.
Finally, in a jeweled formulation, Deleuze puts to sleep our
doubts about what might have been the opacities and blind
alleys of his taxonomy insofar as it was a platform for
theory: 'For theory, too, is something that is
practiced no less than its object [cinema]. For many
philosophy is something that is 'not practiced' but
pre-exists and is readymade on a prefabricated horizon. Yet
philosophical theory is itself a practice as much as its
object [implied is the creation of events]. It is a
practice of concepts, and it must be judged in relation to
other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema
is not 'on' cinema, but on the concepts that cinema brings
forward, and that are themselves in relation with other
concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of
concepts in general having no privilege over any others, no
more than one object has any privilege over any others as
well. It is at the level of the interference of many
practices that things are made, including beings, images,
concepts, and all kinds of events. Film theory does not bear
on cinema, but on the concepts of cinema, that are no less
practical, effective, or existing than cinema itself . . .
Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose
philosophy has to turn theory into a conceptual practice.
For neither a technical, nor an applied (in psychoanalysis,
in linguistics), nor a reflexive determination suffices to
constitute the concepts of cinema itself.'
[5] In a word, Deleuze is telling us that
the study of cinema engages active reflection about the
relation of images to concepts, and of concepts to their
practice in a material accessible to a public, he implies,
as no medium had ever been. It is a pity that the majority of the
authors of _Apres Deleuze: Philosophie et esthetique du
cinema_ did not care to read or live with the tensions and
the 'interferences' of Deleuze's work on philosophy and
cinema. Even worse, the elegant aspect of the book betrays a
unity more than a conflict of visions and programs. The
squarish cadre of the page is given to broad white margins
and ample space between the titles and the essays. Designed
as a miniature art book that floats its printed reflections
on a bookish screen, a modest table of contents in the
beginning is the only page (p. 6 in fact, but for ostensive
reasons of aesthetics pagination is omitted to favor
unblemished whiteness) where the names of the eight authors
are linked to the titles of the chapters. Each contribution
seems to dissolve into the next in an authorless murmur.
That the language of each essay tends to be of the same
style and temper implies that each says the same thing. As
the title suggests, all of them are analysts of film who
would like to be philosophers 'after' Deleuze. They publish
their work in 1996, a year following his death in early
November 1995. If they follow Deleuze in a chronological
sense, they are also 'after' him, hot on his heels, in
pursuit of a dialogue and dialectic that forever eludes
them, in quest of a position that will square them away with
a thinker whom they never expected would ever trespass on
their intellectual territories. Because of the typographical design
close inspection is required to discern the pertinent
conceptual traits of each essay. The authors of the preface
(Dominique Chateau and Jacinto Lageira) state that their aim
is to mark a first step forward 'in testing different
manners of conceiving and of putting to work the convergence
of cinema with philosophy and/or aesthetics', either by
taking the convergence as a topic of 'historical or
theoretical reflection', or in obtaining, through a labor of
'analysis or theory about a specific aspect of cinema', an
approach or a problematic issue appealing to philosophical
'and/or' aesthetic perspectives (9). (For that reason
Jacinto Lageira opens the debate by posing the question 'Is
there a life of aesthetics after theories of film?' (11).)
The authors feel that once a *linguistic turn* has been made
en route to an aesthetic appreciation strong value-judgments
about film as art can be put forward. He ends this
discussion by standing at the threshold of an *aesthetic
turn*. The following essay by Veronique
Campan does not furnish an answer. Deleuze's thinking 'is
inscribed at the intersection of different systems of
thought' (27), she notes, and it arches back to
phenomenology if we are to believe what he says, not in the
books on cinema, but in _What is Philosophy?_ (co-authored
with Felix Guattari, first published in 1991), insofar as
the science of phenomena ought to pertain to the arts. She
discerns sound, and the way the spectator *hears* a film, to
be a rich area of perception. Sound, 'a moving and
disruptive element par excellence, is what disturbs the
regime of the visible: it is smooth, opaque, infinitely
modulating, and subject to multiple reflections that belong
to dream, diurnal reason, and the vagaries of viewing' (36).
Her project recoups a good deal of work already accomplished
by writers including Rick Altman, Michel Chion, Claudia
Gorbman, and Michel Marie, but remains fresh and productive
through the way it compares Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze in
general. Marie-Francois Grange's 'Derridean
Philosophy and Textual Analysis' rehearses much of the work
Marie-Claire Ropars has accomplished in _Le Texte divise_
(1981), _Ecraniques_ (1990), and her many contributions to
_Hors cadre_ (1983-93). Through a brief but elegant reading
of Godard's _Histoire(s) du cinema_ she discovers how close
Derrida's style of writing is to the very substance to
cinema. It has multiple tracks and evinces 'mirrored
flashes' that make clear: 'an effective depersonalization of
speech-acts that cannot be detached from the play of
writing, that cannot thus be unified into a self-present
meaning while, too, there are personal effects, surely
illusory but nonetheless effective, of discourse that could
be discerned in terms of thought, intention, and plenitude,
a discourse in which we would read a harmony between
intention and expression' (56). By underscoring the differences that
are evinced between sound and image, or acts of viewing and
writing, she arrives at hypotheses that call into question
the reductive and self-contained conclusions of most of the
other essays. Her work is a good preface to
Dominique Chateau's contribution, 'The Project of a
Philosophy of Cinema as Art: Art, Medium, and Ontology'
(65-84), an essay that ties Bazin's notions of film in its
own being as pure reality to Deleuze's concept of being. The
author did not avail himself of Alain Badiou's remarkable
study, _Deleuze: La Clameur de l'etre_ (recently translated
in English at the University of Minnesota Press), in which
it is argued that ontology is what enables Deleuze to move
from treatment of continental philosophy to Proust and,
especially, to film. Aesthetics, argues Badiou, are fraught
with questions of being. Chateau moves toward a similar
conclusion, with the productive difference that, in his
view, when Sartre and Bazin define the 'real' of cinema as
its 'being' they also imply that 'the real that the film
reveals is indivisibly tied to filmic material' (82), in
other words, to its matter and conditions of production. He
argues that the repressed dimension of Bazin's theory is
representation, and that the unknown dimension of the same
theory is ideology, at least in its Althusserian definition
as the imaginary relation that a spectator or a subject
holds with real modes of production. Chateau would have done
well to locate the points (such as the first page of
_L'Image-temps_) where Deleuze uses and reformulates Bazin.
But he marks a step forward toward what needs to be written
on Bazin and the author of _L'Image-mouvement_ and
_L'Image-temps_. The most philosophically rigorous and
rewarding essay of _Apres Deleuze_ is Jean-Pierre
Esquenazi's 'Elements for a Pragmatic Semiotics: The Event
as the Site of Meaning' (85-114). He determines that, as of
his earliest writings, Deleuze was haunted by what produces
signs. Esquenazi quotes from _Proust et les signes_: 'What
forces thinking is the sign' [7] -- hence from the
beginning Deleuze is anchored in a semiotic project. It
evolves from a treatment of language and space obtained
through readings of Peirce and Bergson toward a crucial
encounter with Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher for
whom the perception of a sign was tantamount to an *event*.
*Prehension* is what produces events; it is understood in a
biological and a phenomenological sense, and its process is
one that relates the perception of space to consciousness.
'The event is the place of meaning and, inevitably, the
genetic movement of reality' (101). Without buttressing his arguments on
Deleuze's terse and elegant chapter of _The Fold_, entitled
'What is An Event?' (in which Whitehead's open system of
event-production is compared to Leibniz's closed system),
nor moving through the pages of _L'Image-mouvement_ (that
take up events as the juncture of movement and time,
especially in the fourth chapter) Esquenazi breaks
significant ground. For this reason the reader who tackles
Francois Jost's 'The Cinema in its Works' (115-30) after
Esquenazi will feel he or she has taken a step backward.
With allusion to Deleuze cursory at best, Jost argues for
applying the principles of Paul Goodman and Gerard Genette
to the analysis of specific films. He uses a distinction of
allography versus autography to recover the spectator as a
defining element of cinema, the concept of which Deleuze had
called into question throughout his treatments of movement
and time. Like Walter Benjamin in the first sentence of his
'Task of the Translator' (in _Illuminations_), Deleuze holds
that where aesthetics are concerned consideration of the
reader or spectator is of no interest. Works in themselves
are of an autonomy that does not require a spectator to make
them acquire meaning. Jacques Gersternkom, in 'Contribution
to a Semio-Rhetoric of Film: The Field of the Ellipse in
Film' (131-40), also moves backward. Recourse to classical
figures of rhetoric in the analysis of film reminds readers
of Jost's earlier work. He had applied to cinema many
of Gerard Genette's concepts found in three volumes of
_Figures_. Jost's distinctions are thus tied to an
applied analysis of forms that had emerged with work on
metaphor that had dominated semiological studies in France
in the 1970s. The author offers a typology of ellipses
without reference to Deleuze, who in fact works on the
concept in his remarks pertaining to Pasolini and free
indirect discourse in film. [8] Nor does Gerard Leblanc offer much
insight about Deleuze in rounding out the volume with
reflections on poetry and cinema in his 'Almost a Conception
of the World . . .'. It would be wished that Leblanc had
studied how Deleuze uses 'wholes' and 'worlds' and our
detachment from them to inaugurate the two volumes on
cinema. [9] Some common ground is reached where the
critic observes that poetry is born of a refusal to take the
world as it is, 'such that it is stated' (143), and where
the cinematic image 'recomposes' the world much as free
verse might. Some intuitions that Deleuze might share with
the author are found where the latter notes that 'cinema
participates in the global experience of the individual who
no longer knows when and if they have been 'spectators''
(151). At the beginning of this review
article it was noted that Deleuze's work on film is both
taxonomy and history. So too is _Apres Deleuze_. On the one
hand, it is taxonomy to the degree that most of the authors
harbor a desire to locate film studies in a closed world of
applied semiotics. On the other, it is history in its
condition as object and, in fact, as reflection and
representation of the reception of Deleuze in times past.
Published in 1996, it stands as one of the first cohering
attempts to recognize Deleuze's work on philosophy as cinema
in French. Since 1996 a good deal of writing has appeared --
in French, English, and German -- on the film books, and for
reason of its date this volume is not up to speed. It
betrays points of resistance and of attraction to the
project of _L'Image-mouvement_ and _L'Image-temps_ among
semioticians in the middle 1990s. It does, nonetheless,
confirm that in Deleuze's early work the production of signs
inaugurated many of the greater reflections on philosophy
and the media. Surely the central remarks on the 'site' or
'event' in and of cinema and philosophy are worth the price
of the volume, and so too are the reflections on ontology
and difference in cinema. The volume will stand as a
significant moment in France, where the resistance to and
reception of Deleuze's work on cinema and philosophy needs
more extensive study. Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts,
USA Footnotes 1. Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
L'Image-mouvement_ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983), p. 7;
all translations mine. 2. Deleuze, _Cinema 2: L'Image-temps_
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), p. 29. 3. Carolous Linnaeus was an 18th
century Swedish botanist who devised a classification system
for flowering plants; phylogenesis refers to the
evolutionary development and diversification of
organisms. 4. My translation of the
'image-pulsion' classification; see Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
L'Image-mouvement_, pp. 173-9, and, especially for Bunuel,
pp. 185-87. 5. Deleuze, _Cinema 2: L'Image-temps_,
pp. 365-66. 6. See Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
L'Image-mouvement_, pp. 279-80. 7. Deleuze, _Proust et les signes_
(Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1986), p.
118. 8. Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
L'Image-mouvement_, pp. 106-11. 9. Ibid., pp. 20-21. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Tom Conley, 'Film Theory 'After'
Deleuze', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol. 5
no. 31, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n31conley>.
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