User:Aitantv/Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image

Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image. Tomlinson, H & R Galeta (Trans). University of Minnesota Press.

• 'Give me a body then': this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life. (Deleuze, 1989, p189)
• What is important is less the difference between poles than the passage from one to another, the imperceptible passage of attitudes or postures to 'gest'. It is Brecht who created the notion of gest, making it the essence of theatre, irreducible to the plot or the 'subject': for him,the gest should be social, although he recognizes that there are other kinds of gest. What we call gest in general is the link or knot of attitudes between themselves, their co-ordination with each other, in so far as they do not depend on a previous story, a pre-existing.plot or an action-image. On the contrary, the gest is the development of attitudes themselves, and, as such, carries out a direct theatricalization of bodies, often very discreet, because it takes place independently of any role. The greatness of Cassavetes's work is to have undone the story, plot, or action,but also space, in order to get to attitudes as to cate- gories which put time into the body, as well as thought into life. When Cassavetes says that characters must not come from a story or plot, but that the story should be secreted by the characters, he sums up the requirement of the cinema of bodies: the character is reduced to his own bodily attitudes, and what ought to result is the gest, that is, a 'spectacle', a theatricalization or dramatization which is valid for all plots. (P192)
• The body is sound as well as visible. all the components of the image come together on the body (p193)
• Godard's solution is different, and seems at first sight simpler: it is, as we have seen, that characters begin to play for themselves, to dance and to mimic for themselves, in a theatricalization which directly extends their everyday attitudes. The character makes a theatre for himself. (p194)