Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 34, November 2001
Richard Smith
The Philosopher with Two Brains
'Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe
in this World' Special Issue edited by Reda Bensmaia
and Jalal Toufic _Discourse: Journal for Theoretical
Studies in Media and Culture_ vol. 20 no. 3, Fall 1998 ISSN 0730-1081 249 pp. The opening piece of this special
issue is not so much an introductory essay as it is an
epistolary exchange between friends. Jalal Toufic, a video
artist and theorist, addresses his epistle on Deleuzian
collaboration to Reda Bensmaia, who in turn addresses her
epistle on the question of the relation of philosophy and
the cinema to Toufic. The exchange is entitled 'Recommending
Deleuze -- in 1998!'. The title is as close as the piece
comes to the traditional form of introductory editorial
essay. The intersection of the title of the introduction and
the subtitle of the edition, 'A Reason to Believe in This
World', is intriguing, and suggests that an encounter with
this body of work is pertinent to everyday life in much the
same way as Spinoza's _Ethics_ affords a thought of life and
perhaps contains a provocation to embark on a philosopher's
life. A quote which Deleuze places at the beginning of
_Spinoza: Practical Philosophy_ makes the point better than
I can. It's from _The Fixer_ by Malamud: 'I read through a few pages and kept
going as if there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I
didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with
such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's
ride. After that I wasn't the same man'.
[1] I must admit that reading Deleuze does
not have this effect on me. At times I find him impenetrable
and obtuse in a way that Spinoza most definitely is not.
Spinoza's _Ethics_ is one of the best books that I have ever
read, philosophy or otherwise. To read Deleuze is one thing,
but to study Deleuze is in some ways to be confronted with a
choice between philosophy and life, or, should I say, having
a life. That is, it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort,
and instead of feeling a wind at your back you feel a soup
in your brain. Perhaps the difference is between the work of
a professional philosopher and a philosopher who works at
night, outside of working hours. Recommending Deleuze is not
something to take lightly. One of the cornerstones of
Bensmaia's recommendation is Deleuze's last work of
aesthetics, _Cinema_, which seems to have had precisely the
effect of a witch's ride. There is quite a bit of commentary
on _Cinema_ in this edition of _Discourse_ so I will return
to this material. This special issue of _Discourse_
features a number of 'minor' pieces by Deleuze and, of
course, a number of commentaries on and encounters with
various aspects of Deleuze's thought. The pieces by Deleuze
are interesting in that they suggest the day to day writings
of a philosopher and not the great works of philosophy:
seminars (some of which are available on the internet site
The Deleuze Web <http://www.www.imaginet.fr/deleuze>),
letters to newspapers, to governments, film reviews,
interviews, and opinion pieces, while the commentaries range
from aesthetics, to politics, to traditional philosophy.
Eric Alliez writes on Deleuze's Bergsonism (with no
reference to _Cinema_, which is startling considering the
depth of the engagement with Bergson in that work); Michael
Hardt extrapolates Deleuze's brief essay on the contemporary
society of command and control; Raymond Bellour writes an
extended piece on _Cinema_; and John Corbett writes on
Deleuze and music. The minor pieces by Deleuze are quite
diverse and topical. There is a set of statements about
Palestine and the Palestinians: 'The Troublemakers'; 'The
Indians of Palestine' (with Elias Sanbar); 'The Grandeur of
Yassar Arafat'; 'Wherever they Can See it'. A set of
statements about the UN action against Saddam Hussein:
'Address to the French Government', which he cosigned with
Pierre Bourdieu, Jerome Lindon and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and
a statement, co-signed with Rene Scherer, condemning the
bombing of Iraq as an example of neo-fascism, where the game
is to 'wage war well so that we are given the right to
participate in the peace conferences' (170). There is a film
review from 1977 which defends _l'Ombre des anges_ (_Shadows
of Angels_) against charges of anti-semitism; an interview
between _Cahiers du cinema_ and Deleuze which was 'put
together by Deleuze in a more synthetic, and thus denser
form' (47). From his pedagogical work there is the
'Vincennes Session of April 15, 1980', on Leibniz, and the
'Vincennes Session of May 3, 1977: On Music'. And finally
there is a 1977 interview with the journal _Minuit_ under
the title 'On the New Philosophers and a More General
Problem', where Deleuze discusses the 'nullity' of the
thought of the new philosophers who use concepts 'that are
as coarse as a hollow tooth. THE Law, Power (*Le pouvoir*),
THE Master, THE World, Rebellion, Faith etc.' (37), and
explains why such 'nullity' represents a popular resurgence
of the French tradition of 'schools': 'there always is a
pope, manifestoes, declarations of the 'I am a member of the
avant-garde' type, excommunications, tribunals, political
flip-flops, etc.' (38). A polemical question: Is Deleuze's
concept of the cinema 'course' and 'hollow'? There is the
World (cinema itself), its 'Masters' (great stylists and or
auteurs), there is the question of Faith which affects the
very geography of the cinematic image, there are the schools
of classical (organic) montage and the auteurs of modern
(crystalline) montage. The books themselves are linked and
de-linked by a set of grand reversals of theory and
practice, and where whole systems of thought and action
collapse from the inside, and philosophical overturnings
which change the very relations of shots and montage and the
constitution of cinematographic time and movement, there is
the taxonomy of movement-images and time-images which seeks
to examine the Whole of cinema in some way, or from some
particular perspective. Above all there is the 'new' art of
the twentieth century. Considering that the concepts that
Deleuze ascribes to the 'new philosophers' are abundant in
_Cinema_ (at least at this cursory level), can the volumes
be characterised as molar in some essential way? Do they
restrict the molecular universes of cinema for the benefit
of an elegant systematicity? Is the subtle dialectic between
singularity and system that Bellour identifies undone? Is
_Cinema_ a 'new philosophy'? The commentaries and essays about
Deleuze's work are equally diverse. I focus here on two
pieces in particular: the introductory exchange between
Toufic and Bensmaia, 'Recommending Deleuze -- in 1998!', and
Raymond Bellour's 'Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of
Gilles Deleuze'. The introductory 'essay' attempts to place
Deleuze within world cinema and contemporary film theory.
Toufic asks: 'Is Deleuze part of world cinema?'; while
Bensmaia asks: 'Does cinema have *a philosophy*? Or
is there a philosophy of cinema? Does philosophy have
anything to do with cinema? These basic questions are worth
asking because if one considers the history of film theory
and criticism, one realizes that for more than thirty years
cinema seems to have forgotten to *think* philosophically.'
(11) One would have to counter this
forgetting with a reminder that poststructuralist philosophy
has, until Deleuze, completely forgotten to think
cinematically, except either critically or dismissively.
Bellour attempts a very interesting excavation of _Cinema_,
which takes the relevance of the two volumes beyond an
interdisciplinary relation between philosophy and film
theory and into general questions about writing and thinking
about cinema and the cinematographic. It is also curious
that Deleuze's use of Bergson presumes a set of concepts
which run 'in parallel with the transformations of science'.
[2] Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema may in fact
compliment scientific approaches to the cinema. In the
Afterword to _Bergsonism_ Deleuze argues that one of
Bergson's major contributions to contemporary thought lies
in the 'molecular biology of the brain'. [3] If
thought is indeed molecular we would have to suppose that
cinema has affected the brain, has contributed to a kind of
evolution or devolution of the brain. Toufic begins by decrying Deleuze's
absence from _The Oxford History of World Cinema_ and traces
it through other dictionaries and reference guides. Toufic's
piece is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which
is that he himself responds as a visual artist and not as an
academic. It is also interesting because his response raises
issues of collaboration, particularly what he calls
'untimely' collaboration (6). Toufic defines collaboration
as a fugitive relation of present and future. One need not
collaborate with another writer directly (when Deleuze
collaborates with Guattari he is 'switching modes of
collaboration' (6); he doesn't collaborate with Claire
Parnet but he does collaborate with 'Francis Bacon' and
'Nietzsche') in order to collaborate. There is clearly a
definition of the artist here as a collaborator with
alterity, or whose collaborative enterprise is always with
otherness, 'becoming'. Toufic's notion of collaboration
reminds me of something Deleuze says in a seminar on Leibniz
that his aim is to inspire in you (you the student, you the
reader?) a love of this philosopher's work. In this way we
can see what Toufic means when he says that Deleuze has
affected past artists. As stated above it was Deleuze who
lead me to Spinoza's _Ethics_. This notion of collaboration
seems a useful point from which to approach Deleuze's
tendency to write monographs on single authors. As Bellour
points out, in _Cinema_ this process of collaboration is
greatly amplified, the philosopher becomes
multitudinous. Bensmaia examines last 30 years of
film theory and criticism and concludes that cinema has
forgotten to think theoretically (despite the supreme
importance given in some centres to theoretical thought as
basis and proving ground of new research). If cinema has
remembered to think philosophically, it has done so
independently of Deleuze. There is a burgeoning field of
film philosophies which have appeared in the time between
Deleuze's _Cinema_ and the present. Phenomenological works
such as Vivian Sobchack's _The Address of the Eye_ use
Merleau-Ponty to think through the film experience. There is
a lot of work around Benjamin and the Frankfurt School which
presents itself as philosophical. And from other
philosophical perspectives, Stanley Cavell's books on cinema
constitute a scepticist philosophy of the cinema. In an
interesting contrast to Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek uses not only
Lacanian psychoanalysis but also Hegel (the bad object of
Deleuze's thought) and Kant to make philosophy think
cinematically. One of the stark realisations of reading
_Cinema_ is the extent to which philosophy of the past 30-80
years or more has resolutely refused to think cinematically.
Of the generation of philosophers to which Deleuze belongs,
and I'm thinking here of contemporaries such as Foucault,
Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Barthes,
not to mention the prior generation of Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Bergson. Only Barthes and Lyotard
write anything at all about the cinema, Barthes to reject it
in favour of photography, and Lyotard who writes an essay on
'acinema', on strictly avant-garde cinema. This refusal to
speak of the cinema is very curious indeed because the
cinema, or better, film theorists and critics have spoken
quite a lot about Lacan, and Foucault, and to a lesser
extent about Derrida, (although there is more and more work
around Derrida). What is the reason for this forgetting
of cinema in poststructuralist thought? My initial
inclination is to argue that poststructuralism is an
essentially literary movement. It is interested in
textuality and writing, in the power of the artwork. One of
the philosophically radical aspects of _Cinema_ is precisely
that it shows the importance of the cinema, classical and
modern, to the history of twentieth century thought.
Kino-eye discovers Bergson's movement-image from its own
perspective and turns to the service of the communist
decoding of reality. It is entirely plausible to argue that
the movement-image cannot be defined as Bergsonian-Deleuzian
but Bergsonian-Vertovian-Deleuzian. The movement of the
world turned into an image. Bensmaia herself argues that
filmmakers had integrated psychoanalysis into their work and
did not need to have it imposed on their films from the
outside. But this argument can be taken further so that it
is clear that a number of filmmakers have integrated
philosophy of some kind or another into their work and do
not need it imposed on them from the outside. Is this not
precisely what Deleuze does when he brings philosophers and
filmmakers into contact with each other, as if they were
precisely the untimely collaborators which interest Toufic.
Again, Zizek stands out as a thinker who makes philosophy
think cinematically. Another question begs: Why has cinema
suddenly remembered to think philosophically? Why now and
why from so many different philosophical positions? Is it an
attempt to resurrect the cinema as a theoretical object in
the wake of its technological redundancy? And why has this
philosophical tendency emerged at a time when there seems to
be a renewed interest in film history? Is there a connection
here? I cannot answer this question but it is intriguing to
go back just a decade or two and read the work which is
theoretically based and activist in its approach. Many of
the questions which feminist film theory raised seem to have
been elided or at least reframed in different terms. For
instance, feminist questions around filmic pleasure seem to
have been replaced by various notions of cinematic affect.
But quite often when people talk about cinematic affect they
do not mention feminist works at all. Questions about
radical film practice seem to have fallen out of favour as
well. One of the disconcerting prospects about the emergence
of a wave of Deleuzian film theorists is the extent to which
a particular canon and notion of canonicity may find its way
into thinking about cinematic value. I am thinking here of
Deleuze's tendency to be somewhat flippant and dismissive of
works that do not interest him, or which he feels are of no
value. Such gestures should be treated with the rhetorical
suspicion they deserve, not as statements of real value.
Deleuze is partial, he is selective, and he has very
particular tastes. Bensmaia also argues that Deleuze
reinvents the relation of cinema and memory -- 'to
'recommend' Deleuze is to be done with everything that
pushes us to forget the history of the world' (15). Again,
Bensmaia seems to be overstating the case. The question of
memory is not a new subject in film theory or even one which
has resurfaced with Deleuze. Much work on post-World War Two
film directly confronts questions of memory and amnesia. In
Australia the question of memory or amnesia is central to
concerns about the cinema, but it is primarily indigenous
filmmakers who are addressing these questions. Most
non-aboriginal filmmakers either restrict memory to personal
trauma, or to some apparatus memory of bits and pieces of
other films (this is recollection in a very simple sense),
or it is not much of a question at all. The road movie, of
which Australian filmmakers are fond, never seems to
seriously engage the question of memory (and location) when
it is a case of heading out of the city and away from
things. The past always seems to appear as if from the
future. This does not negate the interest of the proposition
that the image is in the past. But it is important not to
get too carried away when recommending someone's
work. The most sustained piece on Deleuze's
_Cinema_ is Raymond Bellour's 'Thinking, Recounting: The
Cinema of Gilles Deleuze' which calls attention to the
question of memory but also figures Deleuze as a kind of
Proust of the cinema. Bellour's piece is interesting in
itself and covers some prescient issues. He argues that
_Cinema_ is singular in Deleuze's oeuvre because it is a
book 'on an art, a domain here named Cinema' (57). Why a
book on the whole of cinema, why the radical departure from
the monographic tendency to work with an author or figure,
to work with a single oeuvre? My answer to this question is
somewhat Bergsonian. _Cinema_ is about the possibilities of
a 'new' art, about the possibilities of an art uniquely
bound to the forces of modernity, but also about the
possibility of new art forms, or about art's relation to new
social formations. Cinema is the art of movement, the art of
twentieth century modernity, and there is a trajectory of
argument which follows the possibilities of cinema as either
an art which is the subject of the people or an art which
subjects people. Hence the historical proximity of questions
around cinema and fascism, totalitarianism. Bellour's answer to this question is
characteristically grandiose, and resembles much of the
commentaries on Deleuze's style of philosophy, his
singularity as a philosopher. For Bellour the _Cinema_
volumes are the 'bearer of a unique gesture', which is
Deleuze's attempt: 'to take hold of the field of cinema
in his own way. This assumes an extraordinary and very
particular effort which engages the question of a relation
between philosophy and cinema at its vital edge.'
(57) Much is made of Deleuze's 'own way'.
My cynicism of such a gesture is due to the place of such a
gesture in the new ideologies of consumption and liberal
subjectivity around social mobility and spending power.
Ansett Airlines (an Australian, nay New Zealand airline
company) uses precisely this phrase to sell its services to
customers, and much of the rhetoric around computers and the
internet has this as a catch-cry. So what is different
between one's own way as the philosopher's life and the
traveller's life, or the consumer's life. Paul Patton, in
his review of _Cinema_, insists that this is the starting
point for the volumes. [4] But is it? Does not
Deleuze find his way with all manner of cinemas and with
many different filmmakers. Doesn't he also bring
philosophers in contact with filmmakers. And doesn't he
always move on, a bit too quickly sometimes, but importantly
the connection is made and the movement continues: as if he
were a cinematic traveller, although as Spinozist his mode
is different, he can 'reside in various states, he can
frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a
hermit, a shadow a traveller or boarding house lodger',
[5] whereas the new traveller's are strictly
socially mobile and have a distinctive sociability which has
nothing to do with solitude, sobriety or 'the ascetic
virtues (humility, poverty chastity'. [6] The
connection is nonetheless intriguing as it suggests that at
some level Deleuze can be read as a great bourgeois
philosopher, albeit in the sense that Antonio Negri in _The
Savage Anomaly_ reads Spinoza as the first bourgeois
philosopher. Only here the lines of freedom have been
transformed into a lines of escape. How can philosophy insist that
'concept creation' is the activity of the cinema, when it is
the 'vital edge' between philosophy and the cinema that is
at stake. Doesn't the movement of the image make itself felt
all the way through these books. The passages on burlesque
are exemplary here. Too much emphasis is placed on concept
creation with regard to these books, and not enough
attention is paid to the montage-relation, a vital edge of
collaboration, or mutual interest. Is such a challenge to
the notion of concept creation implied in Bellour's own
words: 'it will thus be a matter of thinking
the cinema, in another way (*autrement*), by trying to think
with cinema rather than about cinema, by writing a book of
philosophy with cinema. This remains the most difficult
thing to think.' (58) A very interesting aspect of Bellour's
article is his reading of the historical component of
_Cinema_. Bellour, following Deleuze, characterises it as a
'natural history', 'namely a history of a purely taxonomical
type' (58). This history has two great phases which are more
than familiar to film scholars: 'on the one hand classical cinema, on
the other modern cinema; the break being established
essentially from the time of the war, from the cinema which
is born after the war with Italian neorealism. It is thus
indeed a matter of developing cinema from its beginnings,
from the first moments of cinema, then silent cinema to the
most contemporary cinema and video. The great opposition
between classical cinema and modern cinema corresponds to
the gap between the two titles: _The Movement-Image_ and
_The Time-Image_.' (58) Apart from the surface applicability
of this natural history it is possible to take issue with
this schema on a number of levels. First, it misrepresents
the structure of the books. In this sense, as with a number
of reviewers of _Cinema_, Bellour is moving too fast, and is
not attentive to the subtleties of the taxonomic exercise. A
number of reviewers talk of the classical-modern division,
which turns on the crisis of the action-image which ensued
from the Second World War. Jaimey Fisher shows that the
German Rubble film attempted to re-establish the
sensory-motor schema in the wake of the war, at the time of
Neo Realism. [7] The gap certainly exists and there
is also a clear distinction drawn between classical cinema's
penchant for an associative concept of the interval; as
opposed to the modern cinema's development of an
interstitial concept of the interval. What's more there is a
sense of moving through cinema from its origins to video.
But how does a reading which seems to place each volume in
an oppositional or progressive relation to the other account
for the fact that the taxonomy of the varieties of
movement-image accounts for both classical and modern
cinema? How does it account for the recursive movement of
the books? A brief excursion into the taxonomy will make
this clear. From the six types of movement-image we can see
not a theory of classical cinema but a relation of classical
and modern which affects each type throughout the history of
cinema: 1. The perception-image: Mitry,
Pasolini, Vertov. 2. The affection-image: Eisenstein,
Griffiths, but also Dreyer, Bresson, Godard, and
Antonioni. 3. The impulse-image: Bunuel,
Stroheim, Losey, King Vidor (not to mention a long list of
near naturalists from the USA), Ray, Fuller, Renoir and
Visconti. 4. The action-image is perhaps the
exception to the rule as it concentrates almost exclusively
on classical American cinema, though it places Lang's _M_ at
the centre of the Large Form action-image in a gesture which
provokes the question of the extent to which Noel Burch's
formulations are not pivotal to Deleuze's concept of
American cinema. But even with the action-image the taxonomy
breaks out of the opposition, with remarks about Peckinpah
Arthur Penn, and Anthony Mann. 5. The reflection-image has a detailed
analysis of Herzog as the great metaphysician of the cinema,
'he is the most metaphysical of cinema directors',
[8] and of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. 6. The relation-image: Hitchcock, but
also the burlesque of Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and the
Marx Brothers, and a section on the crisis-of-action with
regard to the new generation of American
directors. How can we possibly institute a clean
break between classical and modern cinema on these grounds.
It is not just that each variety of movement-image has a
certain continuity through classical and modern cinema, but
that the relation is more complex than a rejection of action
in the face of the universal terror of world war. In a
revealing remark in _Cinema 2_ (where he is recapitulating
his argument from _Cinema 1_) Deleuze says that we can
either emphasise the continuities or the discontinuities
between the two modes of cinema. He has chosen
discontinuity. He then goes on to argue that in a number of
ways the classical cinema anticipated modern cinema's
reappraisals and reassessments of montage, that it
introduced from early on all manner of aberrant movements. A
final point on this, does not the Bergsonian thrust of the
books also require that they be read together, or as a
double whole. That is, once to understand the Bergsonian
concept of duration as it is being explicated with the
cinema, and a second time with the history of the cinema
being used to go beyond Bergsonism, to a thought of movement
which is properly that of the cinema. I am being a bit harsh
here because Bellour does not reduce the _Cinema_ books to a
simple progressive and opposive relation, and shows that
Deleuze, in the second volume, 'carves up cinema once again,
in relation to language, dialogue and more generally the
soundtrack, forming three great stages that match the first
division' (59). My point here is that it is
deceptively simple to read the _Cinema_ volumes along the
axes of classical cinema (movement-image) and modern cinema
(time-image), which coincides with classical philosophy
(time as effect of movement) and modern philosophy (movement
as aberrance of time). This is too neat and reductive. The
work of a director such as Billy Wilder who is considered a
proponent of classical Hollywood cinema simply cannot be
forced into such a model. And Wilder is just one example of
a director who worked within the classical system of montage
(is there really such a thing?) but who has 'time' as an
absolutely central component of his thought. The recursive
structure of _The Lost Weekend_ is a case in point. Where
does this film begin and end? It is about a binge, a bender,
a spree, but this event is clearly lodged in a system of
returns, and even the progressive movement of the bender,
the four days of the weekend, charts a passage from the body
to the imagination, from a set of spoken stories to a set of
absolutely real hallucinations. As Deleuze himself argues:
'What can be more subjective than a delirium, a dream, a
hallucination? But what can be closer to a materiality made
up of luminous wave and molecular interaction?'
[9] Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of
Bellour's reading is his intuition that _Cinema_ be treated
as 'a novel of the 20th century, one of its historical
novels' (60). He quotes as examples Balzac, Zola, Proust,
but we should not forget the important figure of F. Scott
Fitzgerald (another drinker). 'If these three novelists are
important here, its because they each offer a model of the
development of species, families, groups, individuals, on a
scale comparable to those put into play in _Cinema 1_ and
_2_ using a conceptual classification and a historical
plan.' (61) The 'novelistic quality of
classification resides' (61) in the montage of Bergsonian
concepts and schools of montage, individual oeuvres and the
great moments of cinema: 'To each conceptual innovation, to
each singular form or sub-form of the image corresponds the
placement of a 'school,' a work or part of a work that seems
in fact to itself induce the concept and give it body.' (61)
More than this the montage of Bergsonian concepts and types
of image take the concept well beyond its bounds. The
perception-image, for instance, acquires its own types which
can and are used in combination in any number of films.
There is solid perception, fluid perception, gaseous
perception, and the extinguishment of all these. This discussion leads Bellour to
identify a problematic aspect of _Cinema_, 'the question of
narration, or of the narrative (*recit*), in its relation to
fiction' (65). For Deleuze, in cinema narration is 'only a
consequence of the visible (*apparent*) images themselves
and their direct combinations -- it is never a given', the
only given of the cinematographic image is movement,
narration 'is never an evident (*apparent*) given of images,
or the effect of a structure which underlies them; it is the
consequence of the visible (*apparent*) images themselves,
of the perceptible images in themselves, as they are
initially defined in themselves'. [10] The substance of the problematic for
Bellour comes to this: 'a desire to recommence the history
of the world using the history of the cinema' (66). This
desire is evident in Deleuze's insistence that the image is
prior to narration. This despite the fact that 'we have
always told stories', despite the 'reality of narration as a
force internal to all culture' (65). Bellour then goes on to
make another proposition, to elaborate another aspect of
this problematic. 'My suggestion: a will to reconstruct the
history of philosophy using that of cinema.' (66) This
proposition arises from a sense of the change of conceptual
focus that becomes apparent in _Cinema 2_. Bellour cites the
comparison of Eisenstein and Hegel as 'system builders':
'modern cinema will become the analogue of modern
philosophy, that which goes from Nietzsche to Deleuze
passing via Bergson with anticipatory figures such as Pascal
or Kierkegaard. It is in this way that philosophy finds
itself linked to cinema' (67). What is more, Bellour points
out how in _Cinema 2_ the sensory-motor image 'is related to
classical philosophy as a specific mode of conceptual
elaboration' (67). To bolster Bellour's observation that
a classical modern philosophy relation incorporates a
classical modern cinema relation we need merely turn to the
discussion of aberrant movement in chapter two of _Cinema
2_. In terms of cinema, aberrant movement was recognized
early on and the classical cinema certainly used aberrant
movements, but generally aberrant movement was warded off.
Modern cinema explores aberrant movement, it becomes the
most everyday movement of things and bodies. In a sense
modern cinema is distinguished from classical cinema for
Deleuze by the fact that it turned its attention to
aberrance and thereby radically undid the sensory-motor
schema of classical cinema. A description of a scene from
_Umberto D_ shows the beginnings of this undoing and the
first glimpses of the body of modern cinema: 'the young maid going into the kitchen
in the morning, making a series of mechanical weary
gestures, cleaning a bit, driving the ants away from a water
fountain, picking up the coffee grinder, stretching out her
foot to close the door with her toe. And her eyes meet her
pregnant woman's belly, and it is as though all the misery
in the world were going to be born.' [11] It is not the weariness of the body
but the everydayness of its gestures which reveal the first
slackenings of the sensory-motor circuitry of cinematic
actions. What does this have to do with philosophy? Plenty.
For Deleuze is represents the beginnings of a Kantian
reversal . . . 'we will have to wait for Kant to carry out
the great reversal: aberrant movement became the most
everyday kind, everydayness itself, and it is no longer time
that depends on movement, but the opposite'.
[12] It must be said though that the
terrain of _Cinema 2_ is more dense that the
philosophy-cinema analogy would suggest. A cursory glance
through the second book reveals relations between the novel
and cinema, the theatre and cinema, theatrical cinema which
takes its lead from Fitzgerald, and an engagement with the
writing of Robbe-Grillet which, it can be said, has a place
to play in what might be considered Deleuze's concept of the
cine-novel. There is also a sense in which the
philosophy-cinema analogy drops away in the final two or
three chapters when the analysis begins again for a third
time with the discussion of sound and the audio-visual
relation. Finally, what seems to resonate as much as
novelistic aspects is the echo of other theories of cinema.
One such work which seems for me to drift just beneath the
surface of _Cinema_ is Bela Balazs's _Theory of Film:
Character and Growth of a New Art_, if only for reasons of
structural similarity. There is a similar progression
through an analysis of the components of the cinematic
image, as well as an emphasis on the specificity of the
cinematic image, and a search for the capacities of its
newness, of its distinctiveness. One could also chart a
decisive relation between the starting point of Kracauer's
_Theory of Film_ and _Cinema_. Deleuze resolutely
distinguishes the photographic-image from the
cinematographic image by insisting on the primacy of cutting
and shooting over the photo-realistic quality of the image,
but the attempt to define the image in its reality
remains. Bellour goes one step further and
explains the relations of the two volumes as a broad tension
between systematicity and singularity: 'what sense is there in supposing that
this extraordinary and singular system which really isn't
one is only valid for Deleuze and that he is the one who
invents it? How can we qualify in this way the only book
capable of grasping the history of cinema as a whole in
giving us such an impression of 'truth' in relation to each
one of the auteurs it treats and which has become, if we
think about it, the only global aesthetic today touching the
art of cinema in its entirety?' (69) This discussion then leads into a set
of questions around the genesis of the cinema, the
heterogenesis of the cinema. 'Nothing in this book expresses better
the way the genesis of _Cinema_ in two volumes allows us to
understand the philosophical attachments of cinema . . .
than the haunting of arrest perpetually at work. It is this
haunting that cinema averts in itself and progressively,
passing from the ancient conception of movement made of
discontinuous poses to its modern conception conceived
according to the equality of any-instant-whatevers, and
affirming itself in the various openings of montage. It is
this haunting . . . which is the force of time itself, in a
cinema of the seer devoured by his own vision, by pure
optical and sound images' (71). In the end, for Bellour, this book
remains philosophy, albeit a 'book of philosophy
incorporating cinema in a way that had never been done
before or since' (73). But calling _Cinema_ a philosophy
'incorporating' cinema seems to be an essentially lopsided
view of the work, because in the end the productive
encounter between philosophy and cinema is sidelined for a
reflection on the possibilities of philosophical expression.
The cinema does not figure as a means to do philosophy
differently but as a non-philosophical thought which
nevertheless crosses over with philosophy at certain
moments. It is what is done with these moments which
presents an opportunity to create new relations between
philosophy and cinema, film theory, and film criticism. I
would argue that this principle is evident in the interview
between Deleuze and _Cahiers du cinema_ -- 'The Brain Is the
Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on _The Time-Image_'
-- where Deleuze insists that the encounter between film and
philosophy constitutes the work as 'a system of relays'
(49): 'The encounter between two disciplines doesn't happen
when one of them sets about reflecting on the other, but
when one realizes that it must resolve for itself and with
its own means a problem which is similar to that which is
posed in another' (49). This problem, which is similar for
philosophy and cinema, is the demand that movement must be
introduced into thought. 'How could there not be a
conjunction with cinema, which introduced 'true' movement
into the image?' (48) To finish off this discussion I want
to draw what might seem an odd connection between the cinema
and Deleuze's statements about Palestine. At the time of
writing this essay, Australia, and particularly Sydney, is
in a frenzy of Olympic rhetoric. 'Sydney is the Olympic
City' everyone says again and again as good marketers must;
the site of a momentous global event. The eyes of the world
will be on us: and attention, as Jonathan Beller reminds us,
is value. [13] So as a counterpoint to the frenzied
narrative of species domination I take this opportunity (in
a context such as the _Film-Philosophy_ discussion salon) to
focus attention on Sydney as a site which is also being
actively suppressed, through 'Olympics' legislation which
gives special police powers to the military to break up
demonstrations and to prohibit access to certain areas
without the proper documentation, and other means. The
Sydney I am talking about is colonial Sydney, Australian
Sydney (parochial Sydney), site of British invasion, and of
continuing colonial processes of political and territorial
domination (read urban consolidation, domestic renovation a
particular passion of young Sydney homeowners). In 'Wherever
They Can See It' Deleuze writes: 'The Americans made of
Israel a super-production in the Hollywood manner: they
conceived of the land as a *terra nullius* awaiting the
arrival of the ancient Hebrews, its only occupants being a
few Arab settlers keeping guard over the place's sleeping
stones. In this way they were pushing the Palestinians
toward oblivion.' (34) Terra nullius is a fundamental concept
of the colonial invasion of Aboriginal lands and a
cornerstone of the juridical attack on Aboriginal law,
custom, and existence. Sydney is founded on terra nullius.
If, as Deleuze argues, the Americans propagated the fallacy
that the Palestinians 'came from elsewhere, and could very
well return there' (34), the British and all the governments
henceforth propagate the fallacy that there was nobody here,
that the people and nations never existed at all. The policy
of removal of Aboriginal children from their families (the
policy of forced removal now known under the term The Stolen
Generations) is part of an ongoing process which is indebted
to the principle of terra nullius. At the time of writing the Federal
Liberal Government has resolutely refused to apologise for
this policy -- which was government sanctioned and
administered, and which involved churches who removed
'educated' and 'housed' the children, police who oversaw the
encampment policies, landowners who benefited from the cheap
labour and who siphoned off the meagre wages of the
labourers, and of course the population at large who now
hold freehold title over Aboriginal lands and who renovate,
renovate, renovate, like characters out of Peter Carey's
_Illywacker_ -- or to accept responsibility for 'actions of
the past' (strangely, though, it has no problem with
claiming a direct link between the present state of the
nation and the past actions of ANZACS for
instance). My question here is to what extent
terra nullius is evident in Australian cinema. Marcia
Langton's essay, 'Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it
on the television', [14] powerfully shows that the
concept of terra nullius is particularly pronounced around
questions of shooting on location, and in differing concepts
of the documentary representation of events. Langton shows
how film crews often stampede areas that are already
embedded with cultural and social value as if they were
blank spaces on which the camera can write or inscribe its
own story. Her example is the filming of _Crocodile Dundee_,
but she shows how the social organization of films shot by
and for Aboriginal people is precisely structured by
relations of location. There is an entirely different
division of labour than in the standard film shoot and this
division is not based on expertise but on social relations
within the community and custodial relations with regard to
history and the land. Location is not where the film is shot
but determines every aspect of the shooting itself, who gets
to do what and who is not allowed to do what. And here there is a curious if
tangential relation to _Cinema 2_. It has often been
remarked that Deleuze's film history is somewhat loose and
even a bit bodgy. This criticism often centers on the
strange place that the Second World War occupies both in the
history of cinema and in its aesthetic transformations. One
explanation for this is that, although it is never stated
explicitly, there does seem to appear a politics of location
which affects the aesthetic trajectory of _Cinema 2_. It is
clear that Deleuze is interested in the relation between the
cinema and fascism, and that the interest in cinematic time
is an interest in representing or rendering visible the
trauma of the war. He not only chooses films and filmmakers
who present images of this trauma (Rossellini's trilogy,
Resnais's _Hiroshima mon amour_ -- the characteristics of
the crisis of action-image seem to be a response to these
historical conditions and how they affect the very geography
of the cinematic image, how narrative becomes an inadequate
cinematic tool), but there seems to be an interest in
charting the way trauma transforms the spectatorial
relation, how the image resists assimilation. It may even be
plausible to divide the two volumes along the axis of a
cinema of the future and a cinema of the immediate past, the
cinema as the art of the new and the cinema that confronts
(before philosophy and other arts) the very possibility of
art in the future. My query would be to what extent the
philosophising of _Cinema 2_ can contribute to a project
which seeks to render visible the concept of terra nulius as
it works in the cinematic image. The decision to define
modern cinema with Italian neorealism indicates an emphasis
on issues around location and the documentary potential of
cinema. Deleuze's interest though is clearly in how the myth
of action led to the ruination of numerous locations, which
is of course a different inflection of the question to that
of re-telling narratives that have been suppressed in
history and cinema. During the Olympics, many Sydneysiders
were convinced that Reconciliation had taken place or at
least been moved along by the Opening Ceremony, that *we*
had progressed as a *people* beyond the bounds of the course
and hollow notions that rule in Canberra (the national seat
of government). Sydney now calls itself 'the spiritual home'
of the Olympics. What kind of location is this? As a concept
it sounds as 'course as a hollow tooth', if only because it
was a collective performance for the rest of the world and
had very little to do with the here and now. It also shows
that the trick today is not to become a star, anyone can be
a star, the trick is to remain obscure, to go about one's
life but to remain obscure. University of New South
Wales Sydney, Australia Footnotes 1. Deleuze, _Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy_, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1988), p. 1. 2. Deleuze, 'Afterword', _Bergsonism_,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), p. 115. 3. Ibid. 4. See Patton, Review of Gilles
Deleuze, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_ and _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_, _Screen_, vol. 32 no. 2, 1991. 5. Deleuze, _Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy_, p. 4. 6. Ibid. 7. See Fisher, 'Deleuze in a Ruinous
Context: German Rubble-Film and Italian Neorealism', _Iris_,
no. 23, Spring 1997. 8. Deleuze, _Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
185. 9. Ibid., pp. 76-77. 10. Ibid., pp. 26-27; quoted by
Bellour in _Discourse_, p. 65. 11. Deleuze, _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(London: The Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 1-2. 12. Ibid., p. 39. 13. See Beller, 'Cinema: Capital of
the Twentieth Century', _Postmodern Culture_, vol. 4 no. 3,
May 1994 <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.594/beller.594.html>. 14. Marcia Langton, 'Well, I heard it
on the radio and I saw it on the television', Australian
Film Commission North Sydney, Australia, 1993. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Richard Smith, 'The Philosopher with
Two Brains', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol.
5 no. 34, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n34smith>.
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