Film-Philosophy
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Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 33, November 2001
Eleanor Kaufman
Deleuze, Klossowski, Cinema, Immobility
A Response to Stephen Arnott
Stephen Arnott 'Deleuze's Idea of Cinema' _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special
Issue vol. 5 no. 32, November
2001 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n32arnott As Kevin Heller and I were putting
together _Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics,
Philosophy, and Culture_, I was excited to include Deleuze's
short piece 'Having an Idea in Cinema', yet also regarded it
as tangential to the overall collection (it was a rather
late addition to the project). At the time, I would not have
agreed with Stephen Arnott's extended emphasis on the
exceptionality of this piece in his generous review of
_Deleuze and Guattari_. After all, it does not reflect
Deleuze at his most rigorous; it expresses in passing ideas
(such as that of the society of control) that are elaborated
more fully elsewhere. But in light of the excellent work
that has come out on Deleuze and cinema in recent years
(starting with David Rodowick's _Gilles Deleuze's Time
Machine_), in light of the many times I have referred
students to 'Having an Idea in Cinema' as an introduction to
Deleuze's work on cinema, in light of the growing
realization that it is the seemingly more simple writings
(_Negotiations_, _Dialogues_, _What is Philosophy?_) that
shelter a thundering brilliance -- in light of all these
things, I concur more fully with Arnott that this piece is
of 'immense import'. Perhaps one of the ways to engage this
import is to extend the argument to a terrain that has been
evoked but not explicitly mapped out (not unlike what
Deleuze himself does with Burrough's and Foucault's notion
of the society of control). Such is the realm of immobility.
If cinema is the stringing together of blocks of
movements/duration, if an innovative resistance occurs when
a severing takes place between what one sees and what one
hears, then what cinematic idea is at stake when we find
alongside sound a posed immobility (*tableau vivant*) where
we would expect to see movement? The very concept of the *tableau
vivant* is fraught with contradiction and exaggeration. The
*tableau vivant* opens up a network of issues that revolve
around animation and immobility, gesture and pose, and above
all the oeuvre of Pierre Klossowski. It might be useful at
this juncture to cite the lines customarily left out of
Foucault's famous statement about Deleuze in 'Theatrum
Philosophicum': 'I believe that [_Difference and
Repetition_ and _Logic of Sense_] will continue to
revolve about us in enigmatic resonance with those of
Klossowski, another major and excessive sign, and perhaps
one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.'
[1] One of the most excessive aspects of
Klossowski's fiction, painting, and philosophy is the way
immobility highlights an unbroachable disjunction between
bodies and their gestures. In his philosophical novel _The
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes_, Klossowski poses the
opposition between gesture and bodies by way of the
Scholastic philosopher Octave's discussion of the
*solecism*. Octave, who dabbles as an art critic, occupies a
good third of _The Revocation_ with lengthy and pedantic
descriptions of his art collection, and especially his works
by the imaginary painter Tonnerre. He begins his ruminations
as follows: ''Some think there is solecism in
gesture too, whenever by a nod of the head or a movement of
the hand one utters the opposite of what the voice is
saying.' This passage from Quintilian, quoted at the head of
the descriptive catalogue to my collection of paintings --
to what does it allude? . . . But if solecism there be, if
it is something *opposite* which the figures *utter* through
this or that gesture, they must say something in order that
this opposition be palpable; but painted, they are silent;
or whether, from painting the kind of scenes he chose, he
was, to the contrary, trying to demonstrate the positiveness
of the solecism which could be expressed only through means
of an image.' [2] Solecism, then, is a gesture -- often
of the hands -- that provides a point of contradiction
*within* the image: the hands, for example, seem to beckon
even when the body's overall pose is one of defiance or
nonchalance. Such solecisms of the hand abound in the
curious set of photographs and drawings that accompany
Klossowski's quasi-economic treatise _La Monnaie vivante_
(_Living Currency_). [3] Taken by Pierre Zucca,
these photographs depict Klossowski's wife, Denise
Morin-Sinclaire, in a series of sometimes-compromising
postures that are loosely based on other fictional works by
Klossowski, such as _The Baphomet_ and _Roberte Ce Soir_.
[4] In one photograph a bearded man places what
appears to be a crown on her head. With her body, she leans
backward to accept the coronation yet with her hands
extended before her torso she defends herself from some
unseen onslaught in front of her, while simultaneously, and
by way of a slight curvature of the right hand, gracing that
same offender with a gesture of waving or beckoning.
[5] In discussing Tonnerre and the genre
of the *tableau vivant*, Klossowski's Octave first asks if
the *tableau vivant* is not 'the basic antecedent to every
picture', and then holds up Tonnerre as exceptional in that
he reverses this ordering: 'Here, in the case of Tonnerre, I am
referring to the fascination exerted upon him by this in
itself false genre, very much in fashion during the period.
It was the reverse process that took place then; one
generally drew one's inspiration from some well-known
painting standing clear in everybody's mind, to reconstitute
it, usually in a salon, with the help of those persons
present, improvised actors, and the game consisted in
rendering as faithfully as possible the gestures, the poses,
the lighting, the effect one supposed was produced by the
masterpiece of such and such a painter. But this was not
simply life imitating art -- it was a pretext. The emotion
sought after in this make-believe was that of life giving
itself as a spectacle to life; of life hanging in suspense.'
[6] It is precisely this gesture of life
hanging in suspense that is at the crux not only of the
*tableau vivant* but of Deleuze's reading of movement and
immobility in the cinema books. While the *tableau vivant*
literally stages an encounter between movement and
immobility, Deleuze produces such an encounter in the realms
of thought and image (percept, affect, concept). In
Deleuze's intricate trajectory from _Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image_ to _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, we find at
once a complex Bergsonian analysis of movement and
immobility *and* a movement away from movement towards time.
In discussing 'crystals of time' and 'sheets of past' in
_Cinema 2_, Deleuze redeploys Bergson so as to accentuate
the way certain cinematic auteurs produce, through their
images, multi-layered renderings of time. One example is the
way depth of field gives rise to: 'two poles of a
metaphysics of memory. These two extremes of memory are
presented by Bergson as follows: the extension of sheets of
past and the contraction of the actual present.' [7]
Deleuze uses Alain Resnais's and Alain Robbe-Grillet's _Last
Year at Marienbad_ as an example of how the film's cast of
characters and auteurs may be situated along two different
yet mutually inflected axes of time: 'The difference is thus in the nature
of the time-image, which is plastic in one case and
architectural in the other. For Resnais conceived _Last Year
at Marienbad_ like his other films, in the form of sheets or
regions of past, while Robbe-Grillet sees time in the form
of points of present. If _Last Year at Marienbad_ could be
divided, the man X might be said to be closer to Resnais and
the woman A closer to Robbe-Grillet. The man basically tries
to envelop the woman with continuous sheets of which the
present is the narrowest, like the advance of a wave, whilst
the woman, at times wary, at times stiff, at times almost
convinced, jumps from one bloc to another, continually
crossing an abyss between two points, two simultaneous
presents.' [8] What Deleuze effectively describes
here is a solecism of time, in which past and present
inflect one another with a contradictory yet nonetheless
sustainable tension. The man's gesture extends to the past
while the woman remains less fixed, and in this fluctuation
captures the present. What if such an analysis were to be
extended backwards to the movement/immobility locus of
_Cinema 1_, as a quest for disjunctions or solecisms that
haunt the dialectic of movement and immobility? In the second commentary on Bergson in
_Cinema 1_, Deleuze, in a solecism of his own, both invites
and dismisses reflection on the posed nature of the *tableau
vivant*. He begins by suggesting the virtual potential of
both movement and the image: 'And how can movement be
prevented from already being at least a virtual image and
the image from already being at least possible movement?
What appeared finally to be a dead end was the confrontation
of materialism and idealism.' [9] Insofar as
movement would be in flux and the image more fixed, their
virtual coming together in the movement-image implies
neither movement nor stasis as such. This suggests that, at
its limit, immobility is also in flux. By reading Deleuze alongside
Klossowski we see how (like the image that is not just the
image but also the disjunction of vision and sound) there is
immobility, which is not just immobility but the disjunction
of movement and arrested movement. That such a disjunction
is imbued with a particular erotics is Jean-Francois
Lyotard's Klossowskian insight in _Libidinal Economy_.
Lyotard locates the 'acinema' in the non-contradictory space
of 'extreme immobilization and extreme mobilization', a
space which is epitomized by the Klossowskian *tableau
vivant*. [10] In the lengthy passage that follows,
Lyotard uses Klossowski to analyze the erotics of
immobility: 'Presently there exists in Sweden an
institution called the *posering*, a name derived from the
*pose* solicited by portrait photographers: young girls rent
their services to these special houses, services which
consist of assuming, clothed or unclothed, the poses desired
by the client. It is against the rules of these houses
(which are not houses of prostitution) for the clients to
touch the models in any way. We would say that this
institution is made to order for the phantasmatic of
Klossowski, knowing as we do the importance he accords to
the tableau vivant as the near perfect simulacrum of fantasy
in all its paradoxical intensity. But it must be seen how
the paradox is distributed in this case: the immobilization
seems to touch only the erotic object while the subject is
found overtaken by the liveliest agitation . . . But things
are not as simple as they might seem . . . We must note,
given what concerns us here, that the tableau vivant in
general, if it holds a certain libidinal potential, does so
because it brings the theatrical and economic orders into
communication; because it uses 'whole persons' as detached
erotic regions to which the spectator's impulses are
connected.' [11] The intricate erotics to which Lyotard
refers revolves around the tension between the corporeal and
the incorporeal: 1, while posed in the *tableau*, the
characters have no bodily contact either with each other or
with the spectator -- while at the same time suggesting
considerable erotic potential; 2, the characters are
immobilized yet clearly full of life, so that, at any point,
an abundance of animation and movement might be expected to
burst forth; and 3, the posed immobility of the characters
highlights and eroticizes certain bodily parts, namely the
hands as opposed to the face. In this fashion the tension or
solecism in the cinematic *tableau vivant* is not so much
concerned with the disjunction between bodies and affective
states as it is between bodies and their immobile placement
in an otherwise mobile apparatus, here the cinematic
apparatus. In _The Cinematic Body_, Steven Shaviro
highlights the separation between bodies and
affect: 'We cannot read [bodies']
postures, gestures, and countenances as indications of inner
emotional states. We are made oppressively aware that
corporeal appearance and behavior in fact precede identity,
that they are the 'quasi-causes' (to use Deleuze's term for
the action of the simulacrum) of which identity is a
transitory effect, and that such quasi-causes are themselves
incited and relayed by the presence of the movie camera, and
by all the codes of cinematic display.'
[12] Following from this, we might envision
the abstract category of identity not just as a 'transitory
effect' of corporeal appearance but also as an effect of the
interplay between bodies and immobility as it is captured in
the solecism, gesture, or pose. Raul Ruiz's _Hypothese du tableau
vole_ (_Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting_) (1978)
illustrates the way the filmic *tableau vivant* affords,
through its reverse logic, a dizzying sensation of motion
*within* arrested movement. In this adaptation that
condenses several of Klossowski's works of fiction, the
comically bombastic art critic-narrator (a version of Octave
in _The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes_) presents a
continually displaced hypothesis about why one painting in a
series of works by the painter Tonnerre is missing.
[13] Instead of enacting the narrative, the
characters pose in mid-action as the event is being
described. We hear the narration of a mesmerizingly
incoherent series of events which include games of chess
(between two Crusaders vying for the affections of a young
page), hangings (of the very same page, hanged in a ritual
ceremony), metamorphoses (in the *tableau* version of the
Diana and Acteon story), and betrayals (the young girl 'O'
discovering her beloved marquis conspiring against her), all
while the characters at issue remain posed in a single still
that stands, in one arrested set of gestures, for the
entirety of the narrative. Momentous actions are here
rendered in the form of silent and immobile *tableaux*, in
which the characters neither speak nor touch. The extremity
of the action described is at once betrayed and contained by
the living immobility of the characters' poses. Such a disparity between words and
image is in fact characterized by Deleuze as a
'cinematographic idea', [14] one that derives from
the cinema of Syberberg, Duras, and Straub/Huillet. He
characterizes such a disjunction as an act of resistance,
citing the cinema of Straub/Huillet: 'Take the case, for example, of the
Straubs when they perform this disjunction between auditory
voice and visual image, which goes as follows: the voice
rises, it rises and what it speaks about passes under the
naked, deserted ground that the visual image was showing us,
a visual image which had no direct relation to the auditory
image. But what is this speech act that rises in the air
while its object passes underground? Resistance. An act of
resistance.' [15] For Deleuze, there is a sort of
epiphany when a non-diegetic voice and a diegetic space move
apart, as if two distant worlds are potentially connected by
a plane of reference (here, literally the ground). In Ruiz's
film the non-diegetic has a minimal presence; instead, the
diegetic space unleashes an intricate array of schisming
narratives from the seeming coherence of a fixed field of
vision. [16] At the beginning of _Hypothesis of the
Stolen Painting_, the art critic/narrator describes an
illicit 'ceremony', in which the painter Tonnerre took part
and which was interrupted by the police. At one point the
narrator explains that the *tableaux vivants* *are* the
ceremony. He goes on to explain that, with the *tableau
vivant*, it is not a matter of illusion but of showing. As
he narrates these words from a seated position, the bottom
half of two different paintings are barely visible in the
background. But just before the punctuated ending of the
sentence (after he has pronounced 'les tableaux mis en scene
par le moyen de tableaux vivants ne font pas allusion'), he
rises, bringing into full view a painting of a scene that at
a later point in the film will become a *tableau vivant*
with bodies posed and hands pointing (one where the young
girl 'O' points at the marquis in an accusatory fashion). In
this manner, the narrator's body rises as his voice
intonates 'ils montrent' and the image descends, as it were,
to meet the voice and body at a strange impasse. The voice
tells us that the *tableaux* are not allusions but the
things themselves, while the visible painting depicts scenes
that will *become* the *tableaux vivants*. Not only is there
disjunction between sound and image, live *tableaux* and
inanimate painting, and movement and immobility, but also
between present (the painting) and future (*tableaux
vivants*). To evoke Deleuze's analysis of _Last Year at
Marienbad_ from _Cinema 2_, it is as if the posed woman is
once again 'continually crossing an abyss between two
points, two simultaneous presents', while the narrator's
prophetic statement that these paintings are not allusive
(for they will soon materialize with an animated immobility)
is intoned in nothing short of the most philosophical of
tenses, the future-anterior (sheets of future?). 'Having an Idea in Cinema' highlights
Deleuze as a thinker of disjunction, something that is more
fleshed out -- literally -- in the written and visual
oeuvres of Klossowski and Ruiz. Such a juxtaposition with
Klossowski and Ruiz also reveals Deleuze as a philosopher of
immobility no less than of movement, indeed of the
non-oppositional relation of these two terms. It illuminates
Deleuze's occasional qualifications that the nomad need not
move, such as when he writes in 'On the Superiority of
Anglo-American Literature' that: '[T]o flee is not
exactly to travel, or even to move . . . Toynbee shows that
nomads in the strict, geographical sense are neither
migrants nor travellers, but, on the contrary, those who do
not move, those who cling on to the steppe, who are immobile
with big strides, following a line of flight on the spot,
the greatest inventors of new weapons.' [17] Like
silence, immobility -- and its attendant disjunctions -- is
at once a withdrawal and a force of resistance. University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia,
USA Footnotes Many parts of this response were
inspired by discussions and joint writings with Renu
Bora. 1. Michel Foucault, 'Theatrum
Philosophicum', in _Language, Counter-Memory, Practice_,
trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), p. 165. 2. Pierre Klossowski, _The Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes_, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York:
Marion Boyars, 1989), pp. 97-98. 3. Pierre Klossowski, _La Monnaie
vivante_ (Paris: Losfeld, 1970); photography by Pierre
Zucca, non-paginated, all page numbers put in
parentheses. 4. Pierre Klossowski, _The Baphomet_,
trans. Sophie Hawkes and Stephen Sartarelli (New York:
Marsilio Publishers, 1988), and _ Roberte Ce Soir _, trans.
Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Marion Boyars,
1989). 5. Klossowski, _La Monnaie vivante_
(p. 84). 6. Ibid. (p. 100). 7. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989), p.
109. 8. Ibid., p. 104. 9. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
56. 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Acinema',
in Andrew Benjamin, ed., _The Lyotard Reader_ (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989), p. 177. 11. Ibid. 12. Steven Shaviro, _The Cinematic
Body_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.
230. 13. Ruiz's _Hypothese du tableau vole_
is based on the work of Klossowski and was done in
collaboration with Klossowski. While loosely depicting the
story of Klossowski's _The Baphomet_, it also contains
elements from _The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes_,
_Roberte Ce Soir_, and _Le Bain de Diane_ (Paris:
Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1956; repr. Editions de Minuit,
1980). 14. Gilles Deleuze, 'Having an Idea in
Cinema', in Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, ed.,
_Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics and
Philosophy_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), p. 16. 15. Ibid., p. 19. 16. For a similar analysis of Chris
Marker's _La Jetee_ involving a sequence of immobile images,
see D. N. Rodowick, _Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine_ (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 4-5. 17. Gilles Deleuze, 'On the
Superiority of Anglo-American Literature', in Deleuze and
Claire Parnet, _Dialogues_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987), pp. 37-38. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Eleanor Kaufman, 'Deleuze, Klossowski,
Cinema, Immobility: A Response to Stephen Arnott',
_Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol. 5 no. 33,
November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n33kaufman>.
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