Der-leuze

Discuss Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the movement-image and time-image, with at least three examples drawn from the history of cinema.

“Of all the arts, cinema is the one Deleuze examines most thoroughly” [Bogue,2003:11]. While he wrote extensively on the subject of cinema, no publication was as thorough as his two books Cinema 1:The Movement Image(1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image(1989). Deleuze believes “cinema tells stories with blocks of movement-time” [2001:100] which explains the titles, and focus of the cinema books. However, this also suggests his books should not be seen as separate studies, but rather two volumes of the same book exploring his conceptualisation of the cinema as “together they constitute…one of the finest contemporary reflections on the liveliness and grandeur of the modern cinema” [Deleuze,1989:xv].


Despite mentioning numerous films and commenting on the “development of cinema from the silent era to the modern age,” [Bogue,2003:11] Deleuze sees the two volumes not as a study of the history of cinema, but rather as a “taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs” [1986:xiv].


Having such as strong focus on, and interest in, the cinema can be attributed to the fact Deleuze saw the “great auteurs of cinema” as comparable to not only “painters, architects, and musicians, but also to thinkers…[who] think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” [1986:xiv].


“Deleuze does not propose rigid or neat classifications” [Totaro,1999] which often makes forming a comprehensive understanding of his ideas difficult, especially due to his penchant for creating new, and multiple terms, for the same concept, however this essay will attempt to outline the fundamental characteristics of the movement-image and the time-image as established by Deleuze in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.
There is no denying Deleuze borrows heavily from the philosophies of Henri Bergson (throughout his life’s work), and, it is suggested the reader is given the “sense the two books align themselves with the Bergson book that most influenced Deleuze, Matter and Memory: movement-image(matter) and time-image(memory)” [Totaro,1999].


Deleuze begins his book Cinema 1 with an explanation and discussion of Bergson’s theory that “slicing time into a sequence of static moments, or immobile cuts, and then somehow melding them back together again” will give a sense of movement. Deleuze disagrees, believing that when an image is projected onto the screen it is not seen as a set of static moments to which motion has somehow been added later, but rather as an image actually, and immediately in motion; what he calls the movement image. Both Bergson and Deleuze believed in “any-instants-whatever”, based on the idea that time does not consist of a “string of indivisible, quintessential moments, but of a sequence of equidistant, indifferent, and interchangeable instants,” none of which is privileged over any other [Bogue,2003:21-23].


In the book Deleuze On Cinema Ron Bogue defines perception as “a means whereby living images receive movements, and perception is always linked to action” [2003:30]. This definition helps clarify Deleuze’s summary of the body as “nothing but an assemblage [agencement] of three images, a consolidate [consolidé] of perception-images, action-images and affection-images” [1986:66]. While this assemblage refers to the ‘sensory-motor’ perception of the brain, and the reactions of “living images or matters [matiéres]” [Deleuze,1986:61], he also utilises it in his conceptualisation of cinema to describe the three types of movement-image. Deleuze believes a “film is never made up of a single kind of image: thus we call the combination of the three varieties, montage” [1986:70].


In terms of cinema, the ‘perception-image’ is a focus on what is seen, the act of looking, “a framing, whereby some elements are ignored and others rendered visible” [Bogue,2003:35]. Three sub-types of the perception-image are established; ‘solid perception’, ‘liquid perception’ and ‘gaseous perception’, solid being the regular perception of the human eye, liquid being where images flow together, and gaseous being something beyond the human eye [Pisters,2003:227]. In terms of all three they are expressed cinematically through the use of the ‘long shot’.


Even though “one passes imperceptibly from perception to action” [Deleuze,1986:65] “there is no perception without affection.” [2003:37]. The affection-image is the “interval between incoming perception and outgoing action”, what would be referred to within the ‘sensory-motor’ schema for the ‘living image’, as consciousness, decision, or choice. In cinema “the affection-image is the close-up and the close-up is the face.” It is concerned with emotion, not only expressed in the face, but cinematically expressed in “any-space-whatever”; as a ‘facialising’ of an object takes place [1986:37,87,109].


The ‘action-image’ relates to narrative, or structure, and exists in two forms as established by Deleuze. The first is the “large form” which is ‘SAS’ (situation-action-new situation) and the second is the ‘small form’ which takes the shape of ‘ASA’ (action-situation-new action). In cinema, obviously, it is easiest to differentiate between structure utilising genres which is exactly what Deleuze does. He associates the ‘large form’ with the psycho-social film, film noir, nation and historical films, the actor’s studio, burlesque (the works of Buster Keaton) and the western. While he sees direct-cinema, police films, comedy, burlesque (the works of Charlie Chaplin) and the neo-western as belonging to the ‘small form’. In camera, Deleuze defines the action-image as being expressed by the ‘medium shot’ [Pisters,2003,227].

Cinematically speaking Deleuze summarises the three elements of the movement-image thus: “the long shot would be primarily a perception-image; the medium shot an action-image; the close-up an affection image” [1986:70].


Angelo Restivo in his chapter ‘Into The Breach: Between The Movement-Image and The Time-Image’ found in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, attempts to create an understanding of what happened not only between Deleuze’s writing of the two cinema books, conceptually, but also “historiographically”, as the movement-image gave way to the time-image [2000:171].


“Deleuze places the crisis of cinema history at the end of World War II, in the European reconstruction” [Cubitt,2004:244]. The “collapse of the paternal function”, is the reason for the death of the classical movement-image in cinema, as for audiences the “unities of situation and action [were] no longer [able to] be maintained in the disjointed post-war world” [Deleuze,1989:xv]. This “demise of the action-image is what allowed the cinema finally to fully realise itself: liberated from the grip of narrative” [Restivo:2000:180,175]. While Deleuze felt “Italian neorealism set the conditions for the appearance of direct images of time in the cinema,” [Rodowick,1997:79] he saw the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock as work which perfected, and brought to completion, the movement-image, while anticipating the time-image [Restivo,2000:179]. Hitchcock’s work created a “cinema of perfect thought” as “everything in the Hitchcockian universe is caught up in symbolic exchange…[where] objects…exist only to ensure that the system of exchanges continues to function” [Restivo,2000:179].


While Deleuze is “known as a philosopher of space and place, more than time and history” it is impossible to ignore “his writings on Bergson, and the concept of duration” [Grosz,2005:94], especially considering his “principal thesis in the Movement-Image and the Time-Image, is that cinema has a special relation to duration” [Rodowick,1997:86]. When cinema is broken down to its very fundamental elements, it is simple to see “time becomes the basis of bases in cinema, like sound in music, like colour in painting” [Bogue,2003:11].


In Deleuze’s book Bergsonism, published in 1988, he states: “duration is essentially memory, consciousness and freedom” [1988:51]. This seems to be the most straightforward, and yet most vague, definition he provides. Bogue, extrapolates on Bergson’s notion that “durée, or duration, [is] the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time” by establishing that the human experience of time is actually that of durée, the experience of “a dynamic continuation of a past into a present and toward a future” and not actually the experience of time proposed by the hands on a clock face [2003:12-14]. Deleuze also calls this “virtual coexistence” [1988:60].


In his book Cinema 2 “Deleuze does not offer a singular definition of the time-image, or give a clear indication of what he means by a ‘direct image of time,’” [Totaro,1999] but he does, as always, offer up many new and interchangeable terms with which the time-image is created and explored. While the time-image essentially arose from the ‘demise’ of the movement-image, the movement-image did not die out completely, rather the movement-image remains in the most prevalent cinema of the day: the Hollywood Blockbuster. Despite arising from a crisis Deleuze sees the “time-image [as] redemptive” [1989:270] and it is the severing of the “relationship between (narrative) action and the diegetic world of the film…that lies at the heart of the time-image” [Restivo,2000:176]. No longer does cinema need to see “time subordinated to movement”, but rather a reversal of this is able to take place, coherence and a one directional construct of time no longer rules the screen, as Hamlet says, “Time is out of joint” [Deleuze,1989:xi].


Deleuze discusses the idea of montage in relation to the time-image, rather than in the movement-image where ‘immobile’ cuts are pieced back together with an attempt to hide the difference between the two, the time-image utilises a reversal of this idea where “the image is unlinked and the cut begins to have an importance in itself” [1989:213]. In terms of the ‘sensory-motor’ schema of the human brain the ‘affect’, the process of the decision is no longer passed over unseen as perception becomes action. Cinema no longer feels the need to fill in, disguise, or hide this interval, but rather chooses to embrace the gap in an attempt to make the audience pay attention. The cinema of the time-image also attempts to de-link not only image from image, but also image from sound.


With the cinema of the time-image the montage also becomes “montrage”, as it can no longer relate to perception, affection and action, rather it must deal with the recollection-image, and the dream-image, expressed through flashback, and the ‘metamorphosis of the real’ respectively, elements of disruption to the traditional pattern of time [Pisters,2003:228]. These “disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition” are expressed, Deleuze believes, in European cinema through the exploration of concepts such as “amnesia, hypnosis, hallucination, madness, the vision of the dying, and especially nightmare and dream” [1989:55].


Deleuze’s Cinema 2 “largely concerns only three kinds of signs: lecto signs, chronosigns, and noosigns” each of which can be related back to “philosophical problems of description, narration, and thought” [1989:2]. All three signs are defined rather simply, and yet again are not so easy to equate with real life examples. In Patricia Pisters’ appendix to The Matrix of Visual Culture she defines them as follows: a ‘chronosign’ is an image in which time ceases to be subordinate to movement and appears for itself (the whole idea behind the time-image), while a ‘lectosign’ is a visual image which is ‘read’ as much as it is seen, and finally a ‘noosign’ expresses an image that goes beyond itself toward something which can only be thought [2003:231].
The most interesting, and most simple, concept of the time-image Deleuze puts forward in Cinema 2 is the idea of the ‘crystal-image’, or the ‘virtual-image’, developed in Chapter 4 ‘The Crystals of Time’. It is also the idea which is easiest to discuss in terms of tangible examples from film, as most, if not all, Deleuze’s writings on cinema, and the work of others concerning his philosophy on cinema, make reference to Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Orson Welles’ Lady From Shanghai (1947), and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962).


Pister’s definition of the ‘crystal-image’ as the “uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished” seems deceptively simple when compared to the rest of Deleuze’s concepts of cinema [2003:232]. Although perhaps it is just because to a 2007 mind the idea of not being able to distinguish between the actual and the virtual is (frighteningly) no longer a distant subject with cyberspace, computer technology, and the proliferation of digital media, it seems Deleuze’s ‘crystal-image’ has stepped off the silver screen, onto the computer screen, and even further than that has intruded into what we tentatively refer to as ‘reality’.


The idea that the “world is shown as a crystal trapped in endless mirror reflections” is illustrated beautifully in the final sequence of Lady From Shanghai. Delueze declares that the virtual image is expressed in its pure state in the famous ‘Magic Mirror Maze’ where multiple mirrors assume the actuality of the two characters, and the only way they can claim back their actuality is to smash the virtuality, but then find the actuality of each other, which then must die anyway [1989:70]. It is interesting to think that if the actual or the virtual image are so intertwined in the ‘crystal-image’ if they can indeed survive when separated.


Totaro defines the ‘crystal-image’ as being a “shot that fuses the pastness of the recorded event with the presentness of its viewing” where the virtual image is “subjective, in the past and recollected” while the actual image is “objective, in the present and perceived” [1999]. This concept is interesting to consider in terms of the opening and closing sequences of La Jetée (despite the film is a series of still photographs) where, in both cases, it is the Narrator as a young boy witnessing the death of himself as an older man. The virtual image seems to be the memory of his youth, and the actual image is his older self, and yet for his older self to be present in his childhood memory, it would seem to suggest that his older self is also virtual, for having this recollection. The inability to distinguish between the actual and the virtual of the same character is a great example of the crystal-image, constantly reflecting itself.


Deleuze says “in Last Year in Marienbad we can no longer tell what is flashback, and what is not” [1989:122]. Not only is the crystal-image ‘reflected’ by the ‘narrative’, for lack of a better term, but the two important “theatre scenes are images in a mirror, and the entire Marienbad hotel is a pure crystal” [1989:76], a literal representation of a world caught up in reflections, and repetitions. While Deleuze was specifically talking about ‘neo-realist’ cinema, the following can be applied to the time image in general, especially in terms of Last Year in Marienbad which has been identified as “the last of the great neo-realist films”;
“We no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental…not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” [1989:7]
The crystal-image not only confuses character, place, and time, within cinema, but also the audience. If we try to hard to pull apart the virtual from the actual then perhaps we will lose both of them, and as Rodowick says of the representation of time and space in Last Year In Marienbad, “we are only confused of disappointed to the extent that we cannot or will not adapt to this new logic” [1997:103].


Deleuze believes there exists a “cinema of philosophy” [1989:209], which is quite obvious from the amount of work he, as a philosopher, put into attempting to conceptualise cinema so precisely. I happen to agree with Totaro when he proposes that even though Deleuze does not offer the reader one dominant theory, or philosophy of time which can be followed through critical film studies, there is so much generated within the philosophical ideas he raises just waiting to be explored further by film theorists, historians and academics [1999]. Deleuze’s theories may not always be the easiest to form a comprehensive understanding of straight away, but thanks to his extensive references, drawn from hundreds of films, Deleuze leaves the reader with tangible examples of both the movement-image, and time-image, from the ‘reel’ life in their ‘real’ life to further their understanding of his concepts.


References

• Bogue R, 2003, ‘Ch.1: Bergson and Cinema’ in Deleuze and Cinema, Routledge, London.
• Cubbit S, 2004, The Cinema Effect, MIT Press, Massachusetts.
• Deleuze G, 1986, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Athlone Press, London.
• Deleuze G, 1988, ‘Memory as Virtual Coexistence’ in Bergsonism, Zone Books, New York.
• Deleuze G, 1989, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Athlone Press, London.
• Deleuze, G, 2001, ‘What is the Creative Act?’ in French Theory in America, (eds) Lotringer S and Cohen S, Routledge, New York.
• Grosz E, 2005, ‘Ch.6: Deleuze, Bergson and the Virtual’ in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Pisters P, 2003, ‘Appendix A and Appendix B’ in The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working With Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
• Restivo A, 2000, ‘Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and Time-Image’ in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, (ed) Flaxman G, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• Rodowick, D, 1997, ‘Ch.4 Time, Memory, Orders and Powers’ in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Totaro D, 1999, ‘Part 2: Cinema 2 – Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project’ in Offscreen [e-journal], http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2.html.


Filmography

• La Jetée, 1962, Chris MARKER, France, Argos Films.
• Lady From Shanghai, 1947, Orson WELLES, USA, Columbia Pictures.
• Last Year in Marienbad, 1961, Alain RESNAIS, France, Argos Films.