Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)

Original treatment of problem of time in cinema.

Broad history of film style and history of film theory.

An original film semiotic.

Movement-image and Time-image The senses of movement:

1. physical movement in space

2. essential movement of matter and light

3. movement as creative evolution, change through time, the unpredictable appearance of the new and unforeseen

4. movement in the sense of thinking and remembering as temporal acts.

The movement-image (organic regime)

Empirical form of time: Chronology and linear succession in space. The arrow of time as the continuous elaboration of past-

present-future. Indirect presentation of time through physical

movement in space Sensory-motor situation indirect image of

time montage of rational intervals action reaction organic composition “truthful” narration

Model of the True

Muybridge: Human Locomotion (1884-87)

Movement-image:logic of rational intervals

The time-image (crystalline regime)

Transcendental or pure form of time

Direct presentation of time through false or aberrant movements

Pure optical and sound situation direct image of time

Powers of the false

The time-image (crystalline regime)

Transcendental or pure form of time Splitting of time as three incommensurable points

• the passing present• conservation of the past• indeterminate protention of the future

Time as change or eternal recurrence: “the immutable form of change and movement”

Time as a nonspatial perception; “impowers” of thought

The time-image (crystalline regime)

Direct presentation of time through false or aberrant movements

Pure optical and sound situation direct image of time montage of irrational intervals (interstice) disconnected spaces (any-space-

whatevers) serial composition fabulation or falsifying narration

1. A slow track left finds X dressed in black tie among a group of people debating the story of one year ago when the ponds froze.

2. The second shot frames X in medium close-up to the left of an ornamental mirror. As he glances off right, A appears framed in the mirror, dressed in a black evening gown and necklace.

3. After X relates what he has heard, a matched angle shot finds A in a soft-focus medium close-up.

4. A and X then appear on the balcony overlooking la grande allée, A in the foreground left with her back to the camera, X facing her in the right middle ground. She interrupts his story by saying "What do you want from me, then? You know its impossible."

5. At this point, there is a cut to A, still dressed in black, in a soft-focus medium close-up that repeats exactly the framing of the third shot. Although it is not yet unambiguous, the location has shifted to A's bed chamber as X shifts the subject of his story: "One night, I went up to your bedroom. . ."

6. The sixth shot finds A in the bedroom in long shot. The composition is lit in deep focus with high key lighting. She stands, still in black, slightly left of center frame where a dressing table with a large mirror predominates. In this "imaginary" space, she addresses X-- "Leave me alone, I beg of you ..."

7a. --continuing with the next cut, ". . . leave me alone." This last shot frames X and A in a two-shot back in the hotel with the ornamental mirror between them. The camera is placed to the right, more or less over A's shoulder. But now she is dressed in white and A is wearing a dark suit and tie. He continues as if he has not heard her response: "It was almost summer. Yes, you're right. Ice would be out of the question."

7b. The camera then follows behind X and A in medium traveling shot as they walk down the hallway toward the concert salon. They pause and look off right.

7c. A pan right follows A as M arrives from the right hand side of the frame. He says, "Are you going to the concert?" She responds, "I'll meet you later for dinner."

7d. Then there is a pan left and track as she rejoins X. As this point a voice-over begins and continues until X and A exit left into the concert salon: "This entire story is now already past. It is accomplished. In a few more seconds it will freeze forever in its marble past, like these statues, these gardens carved from stone, this hotel itself with its rooms hereafter empty. . "

The time-image (crystalline regime)

Powers of the false: (description; narration; judgment) indiscernability of real and imaginary inexplicability of differences in the present undecidability of truth or falsity of different

versions of the past incompossibility: in deciding the necessity

or contingency of possible or probable interpretations

Photographic and acoustic parameters in L’année dernière à Marienbad

SOUND Voice-off --- Image

CAMERA Moving --- Still

LIGHTING High key --- Low key

CHARACTER MOVEMENT Still --- Moving

----------------------------------------------------------

VOICE Voice-off --- Sound off

SOUND PERSPECTIVE Close --- Distant

DIEGETIC SPEECH Off-screen --- On-screen sound

Sound --- Silence

MUSIC Atonal (organ) --- Romantic (orchestral)

Principal concepts of themovement- and time-image

Idea(immanence of thought in the image)

Movement-image Time-image

plane of immanence universal variation eternal recurrencetime’s passive syntheses

abstract machine automation of movement in image autotemporalization of imageplane of consistency(relation with Whole)

open totality in movement(whole is open)

seriality(whole is the outside)

noosigns association;integration and differentiation

relinking on irrational divisions(series);nontotalizable, asymmetrical insideand outside

--logic of intervals rational irrational--relation between interval and whole commensurable:

whole is the openincommensurable:whole is the outside

spiritual automata psychological automaton;dialectical automaton

spiritual automaton;impower of thought

values (will to power) will to truth powers of the falsebelief model of the True belief in this world and its powers of

transformation;ethics of time

image of thought thought without image

Deleuze’s critique of Metz

Notion of the sign disappears in a tautological definition of cinema and language

because the grande syntagmatique must assume that image is analogous to an énoncé, filmic images become énoncés because they can be grouped into syntagmatic categories.

Narration defined as a “structure” external to cinematic movement, images, and signs.

This structure is both static and universal

Instead, narration must be defined as immanent to images and signs, and the forms of their combination.

Immanence of movement to the image

The movement-image is not analogous in the sense of resemblance. Rather it is the modulation of the object: "movement-image is the thing itself caught in movement as continuous function"

The “double articulation”of movement-images differentiation: a changing whole established between objects--

the whole constantly divides into objects and objects are constantly reunited into a whole. (absolute movement)

specification: the interval in its creation of perception-, action-, and affection-images. How various signs can be deduced from intervals of movement that vary with respect to a center of indetermination. (relative movement)

The movement-image is an “utterable” or signaletic material.

First pure semiotic The two senses of movement-IMAGE:

universal variation (present Image) and derivation of images & signs (relation of interval to a center

of indetermination)

Universal movement-image is already a fundamental appearing in a process of constant change--a signaletic material

The“present Image” as identity of matter with movement and light: an Image is already in things

The “special image”: subjectivity appears in the distinction between matter and the perception of matter

The sensorimotor situation as the opening of an interval as a center of indetermination: indetermined because the act of choice or will intervenes in between.

Deleuze’s (Bergsonian) reading of Peirce

Images and signs as mobile sets or ensembles. the range or extensiveness of the set can vary widely. images can mix and combine various kinds of signs.

Three modes of the image (firstness, secondness, and thirdness).

Three aspects of the sign (representamen, object, and interpretant).

Following Peirce, Deleuze defines the sign as “an image [representamen] which stands for another image (its object) [referent], through the relation of a third image which constitutes ‘its interpretant,’ this in turn being a sign, and so on to infinity.” (Time-Image 30)

Peirce’s three categories of consciousness

Firstness as quality or possibility: an immediate pure perception or experience.

Secondness is consciousness of effort and resistance, action and reaction, of things that exist in immediately affecting our senses as well as themselves producing physical effects.

Thirdness is the category of thought as relation with respect to a future action. Thirdness refers to itself by comparing one thing to another, establishing in that comparison a synthetic “law” in the sense of a predicative concept.

The ordering of the three categories is cardinal as well as ordinal: firstness is included in secondness, both are included in thirdness.

The special status of the perception-image

The perception-image constitutes a “first” image that extends necessarily into the other types of image.

The other types of cinematic movement-images are defined as sensorimotor wholes where perception extends spatially in the following way:

what begins as perception may be executed as an action (secondness);

what cannot be converted into action occupies the interval as affection (firstness);

what reconstitutes the whole of movement with respect to all aspects of the interval is relation (thirdness).

Four types of movement-image

0. Perception-image1. Affection-image2. Action-image3. Relation or mental image The deduction of signs from images

Each category of image presupposes a genetic sign, whose logic derives from its origin in the deduction that follows from zeroness, firstness, secondness, or thirdness.

There will also be, for each image, at least two signs derived from the bipolar composition of image:

relative movement tending toward spatial centers and solid frames;

absolute movement that tends toward the dissolution of the frame into larger wholes or sets.

The action-image

Genetic sign is the imprint: the internal link between a situation and an action.

Space is now determined or actualized in milieu or situations; affects are realized in embodied modes of behavior.

Large form of the action-image: SAS’. From situation to modified situation as transformed by an action.

synsign: an englobing space whose every part is motivated by the action to take place; a situation established with respect to a protagonist.

binomial: the functional division of this space by action, conflict, duality.

The action-image

Small form: ASA’. An action only partially discloses a situation, and, moving from action to action, the situation only gradually, if ever, becomes clearly and fully developed. Index as sign of composition: “the link of an action

(or of an effect of an action) to a situation which is not given, but merely inferred, or which remains equivocal and reversible” (Movement-Image 218).

indices of lack: withholding of information indices of equivocity: ambiguous connections

between actions and situations.

The second pure semiotic

Genetic element of the first pure semiotic derives from the qualities of the universal movement-image, a regime of universal variation, relative and absolute movement, etc.

Genetic element of the second pure semiotic is the force of time:

primordial act of memory a present that passes (into perception on one side and

memory on the other) pure form of time as division internal to the subject (“Je est

un autre”) the force of time as change or eternal recurrence--virtuality

Postwar crisis of the action-image

Opsigns break with the sensorimotor situation in such a way that what is seen can no longer be extended into an action.

Mnemosigns or recollection-images fall “within the framework of the sensory-motor situation, whose interval they are content to fill, even though lengthening and distending it; they seize a former present in the past and thus respect the empirical progression of time, even though they introduce local regressions into it (the flashback as psychological memory)” (Time-Image 273).

Onirosigns or dream-images affect the whole: “they project the sensory-motor situation to infinity, sometimes by ensuring the constant metamorphosis of the situation, sometimes by replacing the action of characters with a movement of the [dream] world” (Time-Image 273).

Direct image of time Hyalosigns or image-crystals present a direct image of

time through a pure description; the actual image is indiscernible from its own virtual image.

Chronosigns where time is no longer subordinate to movement:

Order of time• facies, sheet or aspect: coexistence and topological

transformation of layers of the past• point or accent: quantic leaps between a present of the present,

present of past, and present of future Times as series

• genesign, or the direct time-image as becoming or potentialization of powers, rather than coexistences or simultaneities

Direct image of time

Noosigns of time-image go beyond themselves toward something that can only be thought rather than perceived. These noosigns include: “the irrational cut between non-linked (but

always relinked) images, and... the absolute contact between non-totalizable,

asymmetrical outside and inside” (Time-Image 278)

Lectosigns construct a stratigraphic space, which must be read as well as seen, from the irrational and nontotalizable disjunction between sound and image.