Film as Poetry

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze’s contribution to film theorizing was largely ignored within the field of film studies during the decade following the publication of Cinema 1 and 2. In an era of film writing which was seeking to distance itself from the theoretical excesses of the 1970s, Deleuze’s approach seemed to lack both the empirical rigour and the modesty of aim which was required of any critical engagement with film form. The problem with such a wholesale rejection, however, is suggested by Annette Kuhn in her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Screen, in which she claims that the retreat from Grand Theory that has occurred within film studies over the past three decades has also ‘entailed a wholesale distaste for the essential activity of conceptualization, of theorizing’ (p5). Thus, in turning away from any over-arching theory of cinema and its institutions, we are forced to question what constitutes film analysis’ proper object of enquiry. Is film analysis an exercise in description, seeking to isolate discreet elements of the cinematic process for empirically verifiable analysis? Or is its nature always inevitably prescriptive, containing within its forensic enquiries an implied vision of the cinema that could be? In distinguishing between ‘Theory’ and theorizing, Kuhn seeks to move beyond any one ‘hypostatized’ image of Theory for an understanding of theorizing as an open-ended process of enquiry. For if a fixed notion of ‘Theory’ works to close down what may be considered knowledge, the task of the film theorist nevertheless remains to produce new knowledge through theorization, through the creation of concepts. It is Deleuze’s commitment to concepts that perhaps explains the belated ‘Deleuzian turn’ within film studies since the turn of the millennium. For Deleuze, the goal of film theory is to create concepts that ‘relate only to cinema…Concepts proper to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically.’ If, by the 1980s, Theory in its dominant forms struggled to yield useful new insights into the cinematic experience, then Deleuze’s cinematic concepts have offered film studies the possibility of a reconnect between the filmic object and the theorizing process. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the use value of Deleuze for film studies. It considers some of the insights of his two Cinema books into the nature of the cinematic process, focusing in particular on cinema’s privileged relationship to time. However, it also acknowledges the impossibility of separating Deleuze’s writing on film from his wider body of work and examines how film theorists have productively applied his understanding of difference or the process of schizoanalysis to a variety of texts. Any understanding of Deleuze’s impact upon film studies must necessarily address the relationship between his ideas and the other key explanatory frameworks that have dominated the discipline, in particular psychoanalysis. However, underlying any such comparisons or evaluations are the questions raised regarding the nature of film theory and its proper goal. To this end, this chapter ultimately argues that Deleuze offers us an understanding of film theory as creative intervention and an ethical standpoint towards the history of the image which is predicated upon an adequate understanding of time.

In demoting Deleuze’s ‘philosophical cinema’ to a mere cinema of philosophy we might be forgiven for supposing that Badiou has effectively ‘deconditioned’ film, thereby cementing its status as an art ‘beneath’ art. Before we jump to such a conclusion, however, given the purportedly transitory-repetitious nature of these concepts, we would do well to consider precisely what it is that con- stitutes Deleuze’s theory of movement and time. Moreover, given the fact that Badiou appropriates Deleuze’s various theses on movement (immobile, false, global, etc.) in his own cinematographic writings, we should examine how these concepts are (implicitly or explicitly) rethought in Badiou’s own philosophy. Or again, we know that Badiou effectively ‘borrows’ the movement-image from Deleuze, but in what form precisely? And what can we say of the time-image?

2007

1-iow <loes the cinemacic cl1ange our idea o f art? Citing Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin begins his great 1934 essay on mechanical reproduccio11 witl1 tl1is question.1 Tl1e problem was not so much whether cinema is an art, the so-called seventh 01 1e, but ho\.v, starcing in the nit1eteenth century, it helped transform what \ve think art is, and in particular how one thinks in the arts or with tl1e arts. Fo r Benjamin, ilie pro blem o f the cinematic was already inseparable from the whole question, at once aesthetic and policical, of how one thinks with the 11ew mass industrial audio-visual means of film and pro jection. We might think o f G illes Deleuze as taking up cl1is questio n again after World War I l, when there arose not simply a new cinem a in Fran ce but also new styles of thinking -a new 'image of thought'. The 'upheaval in general sensibility' that followed tl1e War wo uld lead 'to new dispositions o f tho ught'. 2 Filmmakers invented new ways of thinking with film and pro jec tío n, at ilie same time as those in other domains started to invent related ideas, creating a whole new zone o f interference and exchange. Deleuze's two volumes o n cinema are a monumental attempt to see the new European cinema in terms o f this constellation, to isolate 1 W. Benjamin, 'The Wo rk o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction', in [// 11minalions (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 2 Such are the words that struck Deleuze in 'Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo', in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and fnlerviews 1975-1995 (ed. D avid Lapoujade, trans. Ames H odges and Mike T~'"> rmi na) , Ne w Yo rk: Semiotext(e), 2006, p.327. They ace also suggestive fo r his larger encounte r with Maurice Blanchot and Margue rite Duras. 240 JOHN RAJCHMAN 090 the notions of image, space and time they involved, and so show the distinctive ways filmmakers took part in tl1is larger mutation in thought Even though D eleuze wrote l1is study of cinema in the 1980s, the basic philosophical notio ns he uses go back to his 1956 essay on the p roblem of differen ce in H enri Bergson, written ata time when Alain Resnais was making docum entaries like Var1 Gog/1 (1948), liis great study of the art:ist's suicide, as well as, of course, Night a11d Fog (1955). These ftlms "vould play a key role in Deleuze's analysis o f cinema, in particu lar by dem onstrating the princip ie that ' the cinematographic image is never in the present'. 3 D eleuze thought Resnais had perhaps gone the furthest with tl1is principie for, in his documentaries as well as in the fiction films he would go on to make, we find not only new kinds of images but also a new function for them : that of rendering a past, at once indeterminate and violent, irreducible to anyone's memory, any prise de conscie11ce. The War is thus a dividing point not only for Deleuze's inventory of new signs and images in cinematic t11inking, but also for his sense of a particular problem in post-War philosophy and in his philosophy: the problem of the peculiar 'time that takes thought'. 4 In effect, cinema m akes visible the problem philosophy developed at the same time, for which Deleuze liimself would try to work out a new logic of 'events' and their sense. If, especially in France, p ost-War cinem a developed in tandem with post-War phi.losophy, following its pec11liar twists and tums through p syc hoanalysis and Structuralism, it was because, Deleuze sugges ts, post-War cinema was itself an original audio-visual way of thinking -a peculiar relation o f thought to aisthesis, a wl1ole aesthetics. That is why the great filmmakers needed to b e confronted not simply with writers or painters but also with thinkers an d questions of thought The signs and images they invented involved a new sense of what a creative image is ai1d what it means to tl1ink Even tl1e crisis in cinema brought on by television, and later by digital images, had to be posed on this aesthetic level -as a problem of images that don't force us to think or which keep us from thinking, as with the 'presentifying' tendencies 3 Deleuze explicares this principie of the cinematographic image introduced in G11e111a 2, chapter 5, section 2, in G. Deleuze, T wo Rtgimes of Madness, op. cit. pp. 290-91. See Gilles D eleuze, , 0 11i111a 2: L ímage-temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985; or Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

This essay discusses the central historical proposition of Gilles Deleuze's cinema books, the " sensorimotor break " that separates the classical cinema of the movement-image from the modern cinema of the time-image. That proposition is more or less in line with dominant accounts of the politics of periodization in twentieth-century aesthetics. Jacques Rancière's thought offers a powerful challenge to any such notion of a break or rupture, and Rancière pays particular critical attention to Deleuze's work on cinema. A work by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (The Mirror) is introduced in order to show up some shortcomings of Rancière's critique insofar as it impacts Deleuze's project, and to illustrate the difference between understanding cinema as a medium of thought and as a practice.

'A study in choreography for the Camera' illustrates Deren's acknowledgement to film art in an abstract, subtle way. Using the mechanism of the camera as an entity with parallelled importance to the choreographed figure, Deren guides the viewer with in a manner echoing the movement of the dancer and the environments they are placed within. I explore how and why she does this and where her influences derive. I examine this in the context of her other films and the films of some of the artists she influenced.

Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, 2013

The three books under review here testify to the rapidly growing corpus of the newly emergent field of film-philosophy, an interdisciplinary conjunction of philosophical research and film studies. Two of them, written by Felicity Colman and David Martin-Jones, the leading scholars in the field, deal exclusively with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema and its application to culturally and historically diverse cinematic contexts, while New Takes in Film-Philosophy offers a collection of fourteen essays on various aspects of this interdisciplinary relation.

2004

2009

This thesis establishes Maya Deren (1917-1961) as a screendance theorist and practitioner based on the formal attributes of her work. Acknowledging Deren's multi-faceted persona as an activist, poet, dance enthusiast and photographer before starting to make films and as a documentarist, anthropologist and advocate of Haitian Vodou, the thesis focuses on the under-researched screendance qualities of Deren's filmmaking practice. Accordingly, Deren's six completed screenworks from the period 1943 to 1955 are analysed alongside her related publications. The study aims to identify the distinctiveness of Deren's theoretical viewpoints with a dual dance and cinema methodology that is primarily concerned with the formal parameters of the artist's work; a formalist screendance perspective that addresses terminological and methodological issues related to screendance as an artistic genre. Furthermore, the study develops a formal model of screendance analysis that introduces new concepts and a vocabulary for the examination of screendance artistry. Through close investigation of the production stages of screendance, the kinetic and choreographic capacity emerging from the synthesis of dance with the cinematic medium is identified and analytically discussed in both visual and audio terms. The application of this model to Deren's completed screenworks provides a new reading of her work which highlights its innovative screendance qualities. Overall, the originality and consistency of Deren's theory and practice and its affiliation to screendance art in the 1940s and 1950s establish Deren as one of the earliest and most significant screendance theorists and practitioners.

Film-Philosophy

In this edition of Iris serious attention is paid to the film theory of Gilles Deleuze. As D. N. Rodowick correctly notes in his introduction, Deleuze's film