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October 25, 2004
Now that I have some more time to myself I can do a bit of reading.
I've started reading Gilles Deleuze and his Cinema 1: the movement image book. I have Deleuze's, Cinema 2: The Time-Image waiting for me at the bookshop. Some (ie., those who teach cinema are way way ahead of me on this.
This statement by Deleuze is my signpost:
"Film criticism faces twin dangers: it shouldn't just describe films but nor should it apply to them concepts taken from outside film. The job of criticism is to form concepts that aren't of course 'given' in films but nonetheless relate specifically to cinema, and to some specific genre of film, to some specific film or other. Concepts specific to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically." (C2 p.280)
The cinema as an art form is quite unique, and deals with its subject matter in ways that no other form of art is capable of, particularly as a way of relating to the experience of space and time.
What initially attracts me to these texts is that Deleuze suggests a way of looking at film that explodes static views of the film that make it akin to the work of art such as a painting or photograph. Rather than "representing" something, film, for Deleuze, has the potential to create its own fluid movements and temporalities.
The second sign post is the way Deleuze uses these concepts to understand the history of film. Amy Herzog describes it well. She says that Deleuze's cinema books map a rift in filmmaking which can be roughly situated at the end of World War II. This split, however, cannot be reduced to a historical shift, but exists instead in differing configurations of movement and time.She adds:
"The movement-image, according to Deleuze, is exemplified by classical Hollywood cinema. Time proceeds only as dictated by action (the action of narrative, of cause and effect, of rationality). Temporality in the movement-image, for Deleuze, is governed by the "sensory-motor schema."... All movements are determined by linear causality, and the characters are bent toward actions which respond to the situations of the present. Even when temporal continuity is momentarily disrupted (e.g. in a flashback), these moments are reintegrated into the prescribed evolution of past, present, and future. The movement-image is structured, not only by narrative, but by rationality: closed framings, reasonable progressions, and continuous juxtapositions."
This makes sense of what I've struggled against, and transgressed with in Hollywood cinema---linear causality of the narrative and the closure of the cinema rationality.
What do we step into when we leave the world of Hollywod cinema behind? Amy says that we step into what Deleuze calls Tthe time-image, which breaks itself from sensory-motor links. The emphasis shifts from the logical progression of images to the experience of the image-in-itself. She says that what we find here are pure optical and sound situations unfettered by narrative progression, and empty, disconnected any-space-whatevers. This move from "acting" to "perceiving" carries over to the characters in the film, who cease to be "agents" and become, instead, "seers."
I'll have to read more about that. I'm not quite sure what it means.
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