Using Deleuze: The Cinema Books, Film Studies And Effect

3books, “Deleuze’s influence is now becoming more visible within film theory” (AnIntroduction 257). Still, many of the “complaints” and “concerns” about the cinemabooks remain, and a guiding principal of this dissertation is to provide a “way in” toDeleuze’s work in the cinema books, or a key to assist in unlocking and unpackingDeleuze’s cinema project. To this end, I: a) analyze Deleuze’s approach in the cinemabooks because it illuminates his metaphysics; b) provide an explication of key elementsof Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired metaphysics; c) clarify Deleuze’s views on “movementimages” and “time-images;” d) demonstrate how certain Deleuze terms can be used infilm criticism; and e) provide evidence that Deleuze’s work might represent an alternativeto theoretical models used in film studies (such as psychoanalysis, linguistics,cognitivism and empirical studies), specifically proposing that Deleuze’s ideas abouttime-images might suggest new ways to think about the affective qualities of films. Ibelieve that my study offers a unique perspective on the cinema books and my approachas well as selection and interpretations of Deleuze terminology addresses elisions inexisting Deleuze scholarship, contributing significantly to the growing body of work onDeleuze and his project concerning cinema.Throughout my study I venture to demonstrate that Deleuze’s work can apply tospecific contemporary films and not just the oeuvre’s of master filmmakers discussed byDeleuze such as Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Renoir, Fellini and Visconti. To thisend, I utilize examples from films such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), MaryHarron’s American Psycho (2000), and The Matrix (Wachowski Bros., 1999). Themajority of examples by far, however, come from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Ringsfilm trilogy (2001-2003).1

4In my effort to ease an entry into the cinema books, I attempt to address a numberof the more significant barriers to putting them to use in film studies. These include theirbroad scope, a philosophical basis that is difficult to classify, writing style, methodology,terminology, complex “metaphysics,” and the difficulty of positioning them within filmstudies. I lay the groundwork for this endeavor in this Introduction by providing basicexplanations of key points to my study in an outline, by presenting qualifications, and bydiscussing my own rationale, methodology and theoretical framework (though thesebecome more developed over the course of this study since Deleuze’s own theoreticalframework and methodology is difficult to describe without elaborate explanation of avariety of issues).In Chapter I I provide an overview of Deleuze scholarship to date, focusing onhow Deleuze’s work, including his collaborations with Félix Guattari, have been utilizedin film studies. I provide brief descriptions of each book that concentrates specifically onDeleuze’s cinema books (a number of which are also my most significant secondarysources), and discuss how my study differs as well as contributes to this body of work.In Chapter II I address the broad scope of the cinema books, discussing theirrelationship to science, art and philosophy. Deleuze “borrows” many terms from avariety of scientific disciplines, and draws heavily on the works of French philosopherHenri Bergson, particularly Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1908) and CreativeEvolution (1911), who was attempting to develop a metaphysics that would becompatible with scientific developments of his time, including Einstein’s theory ofrelativity and “space-time.” Whatever fields or disciplines Deleuze may engage in hiswriting, the cinema books are first and foremost works of philosophy, and he utilizes film

5to help him describe his philosophy of world. D. N. Rodowick posits that the cinemabooks “can be read as a resume of Deleuze’s philosophical work of the previous 25years,” and as “part and parcel” of his life’s philosophical project. Since Deleuze’s arebasically works of philosophy and not film theory per se, a basic discussion of his“position” within the broader field of philosophy can assist in reading the cinema books.One key idea of Deleuze and Bergson that I utilize to assist in discussingDeleuze’s philosophical bent is their position that our daily actions and thoughts aregoverned by a “sensory-motor schema,” or dependence on and belief in the necessity ofstimulus-response, definable action and dependable reaction that regulates our normal,everyday, habitual mode of existence. By necessity, it presupposes a perceiving subjectand perceived object. For Deleuze and Bergson, however, the sensory-motor schema,even if a necessity, is not the only mode of perception and thought. In discussing otherpossible modes of existence, I utilize their claim for an “originary” or “transcendental”form of time, where time itself is not linear and chronological, but the past, present andfuture “exist” simultaneously in every present moment, and their claim that “everythingis image.” The claim that everything is image may be best described in terms of the workof Jacques Derrida. If, for Derrida, everything is language all the way down, for Deleuzeand Bergson, everything is image all the way up. An implication to philosophy of theclaim for originary time and the idea that everything is image involves a problematizingof the concept of a transcendental subject and therefore also the subject/object binary,which bears not only on Deleuze’s philosophy in general but on the classification ofDeleuze as a particular “type” of philosopher.

6With Chapter III I propose a relationship between Theodor Adorno’s concepts of“parataxis” and “constellation” and Deleuze/Guattari’s “rhizomes” and “multiplicity” inthe belief that an understanding of these ideas can illuminate the “difficult” writing styleand methodology of the cinema books, as well as Deleuze’s metaphysics. This difficultyas well as the complexity of the cinema books stems from Deleuze’s “paratactical”approach to writing and argument, and on a more fundamental level, his views onparatactic thinking or modes of thought. A familiarity with “parataxis” and how itapplies to Deleuze can not only shed light on his writing style and the organization of thecinema books, but also his theories of cinema and his philosophy of world. I posit thatDeleuze’s account of the formal strategies of movement-images can be related closely totraditional and logical strategies of description and argument. Time-images, on the otherhand, exhibit formal strategies that disclose Deleuze’s affinity with the tenets ofparataxis, constellation, multiplicity and rhizomatics.The purpose of my work in Chapter IV is to describe the regimes of movementimages and time-images in broad strokes. A major tactic of Deleuze’s project in thecinema books is to identify two extremely broad categories of “images” of the “world.”2One of these categories of images Deleuze calls alternately “the movement-image,” the“regime of the movement-image,” and “the organic regime” (M-I 11; T-I 127). The otherhe calls “the time-image,” “the regime of the time-image,” and “the crystalline regime”(M-I 11; T-I 127). Whereas Deleuze may be concerned with concepts of “the cinema”(the cinematic apparatus, the history or development of cinema, certain cinematicmovements such as Italian neo-realism, or auteurs’ bodies of work), I am concerned with“film,” meaning I focus on specific films or even portions of specific films. Therefore, I

7use the expressions “movement-images” and “time-images” as opposed to “themovement-image” and “the time-image.” For Deleuze, there are not just many kinds ofmovement-images, time-images or crystal-images, there are eras in the history of cinemafrom which there developed each of these kinds of cinematic images. In writing about“the movement-image” and “the time-image,” Deleuze is making broad claims aboutdifferent kinds of cinema as they have emerged and developed over the history ofcinema. For example, however, I utilize Deleuze’s concept of “the time-image” todescribe “time-images,” regardless of when films were made and without making claimsas to the development of cinema or any general kind of cinema. I believe this approachallows me to concentrate on specific concepts from the cinema books without describingDeleuze’s entire cinema project or oeuvre or undermining Deleuze’s work in the cinemabooks.When it comes to discussing film, I profer that a helpful manner with which toclarify between and describe Deleuze’s two “image regimes” is in terms of their formalstrategies, particularly their “narration” and “montage” strategies, and I frame much ofmy discussion of Deleuze’s project in these terms. “Montage” involves far more than filmediting, and involves the connection between any and all “images.” For Deleuze, we,film and the world are all the same “stuff” – images – moving, changing images. Hisproject is fundamentally concerned with how film models the functioning of perception,memory and thought. When he speaks of the difference between “movement-images”and “time-images” regarding film, he is ultimately and basically invoking the idea ofdifferent formal strategies that can represent different modes of these activities of humanconsciousness.

8A brief definition of movement-images is that they exhibit formal strategies oftemporal and spatial continuity, are regulated by the sensory-motor schema, and presuppose linear and chronological time. Time-images, on the other hand, are images thatissue from and exhibit a conceptualization of time as Bergson’s “originary time,” and Ipropose that they provide viewers with the possibility of a meaningful experience ofhuman temporal and spatial existence.I am primarily concerned in Chapters V through VII with describing Deleuze’sbasic metaphysics of the world. Though Deleuze’s cinema books may be gaining infamiliarity, any work dealing with them generally requires more extensive explanation ofthe basic theory than studies working within more recognizable frameworks. This isevidenced by the large percentage of many works on the cinema books that is devoted toexplication rather than application. Therefore, a major portion of my study is dedicatedto addressing key concepts of Deleuze’s Bergsonian “metaphysics of world” and howthese concepts relate specifically to cinematic movement-images and time-images. Icover some of the same ground as previous studies of the cinema books, but I believe myapproach and interpretations are somewhat novel and that I broach subjects not addressedin previous research on Deleuze and film. Many film scholars working with Deleuze’swriting concentrate on concepts developed by Deleuze in collaboration with FélixGuattari that are not directly addressed in the cinema books, such as: becoming-other,molecularity versus molarity, de-territorialization, haecceity, refrain, nomadology,differenciation/differentiation, monads, cinema of the body and the body without organs,and schizoanalysis. I focus almost entirely on the cinema books themselves, though mystudy does touch upon Deleuzian or Deleuze-Guattarian concepts that are not discussed

9in the cinema books such as “rhizomatics” and “multiplicity.” In addition, I draw uponworks of Henri Bergson as well as theoretical writings of Theodor Adorno.I concentrate on what I feel are fundamental aspects of Deleuze’s metaphysics asthey apply to film and from which most of the multifarious, even bewilderingcharacteristics, implications or symptoms of “movement-images” and “time-images”arise. I attempt straightforward explications of these concepts and utilize examples fromcontemporary films to illustrate. An important aspect of my approach to writing thisstudy is to work outside of Deleuzian language; to describe Deleuze’s concepts in afamiliar vocabulary as much as possible and provide clear definitions of terms andconsistency of terminology.I also develop connections and through-lines between concepts in the cinemabooks in an effort to provide a consistency and coherence to certain aspects of Deleuze’swork that may be obscured by style, terminology, methodology and scope. Thisendeavor involves making associations between seemingly disconnected or unrelatedconcepts, concentrating on how these relate to the differences between movement-imagesand time-images. Certain concepts are dropped or seemingly forgotten as Deleuzeproceeds through the cinema books, and at times it seems that terms change in theirdefinition from one part of the cinema project to the next. I therefore attempt to extendcertain concepts relating to movement-images through time-images, as well as describewhy it is I believe the meaning of certain concepts may seem to change. Throughout mystudy I endeavor to “fill in the gaps” in Deleuze’s cinema books as well as addresselisions in the current body of scholarly work on them.

10I concentrate in Chapter V on Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “image,”“movement,” matter, energy, time, space, the “plane of immanence,” the “special (living)image,” and “signaletic matter.” Chapter VI is arranged in sub-sections that explicate“consciousness,” “memory,” “perception,” and “recognition.” In Chapter VII I describeDeleuze’s six movement-image types (“perception-images,” “affection-images,”“impulse-images,” “action-images,” “reflection-images” and “relation-images”), as wellas the “sensory-motor link” and “thought.”In my reading of Deleuze, his entire project of utilizing film to explicate hisphilosophy relies upon four very basic claims, which he draws from Bergson. The first isthat everything is “image.” The second is that everything changes, which is roughlyequivalent in Deleuzian terms to stating that everything “moves.” Together, everything is“image” in motion, or what I dub “moving images.” In my reading of Deleuze,“movement” should be understood as involving and arising from the activity of attentive,intentive, selective human consciousness. Human beings generally and most of the timeperceive and think of the moving images of the world as “movement-images.” Intent perse results in “a

Deleuze’s work in the cinema books, or a key to assist in unlocking and unpacking Deleuze’s cinema project. To this end, I: a) analyze Deleuze’s approach in the cinema books because it illuminates his metaphysics; b) provide an explication of key elements of Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired metaph