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.

The time image

• "In the first place, the question is no longer that of the association or attraction of images. What counts is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it. Godard's strength is not just in using this mode of construction in all his work (constructivism) but in making it a method which cinema must ponder at the same time as it uses it." (Deleuze, 1989, p179)
• "For, in Godard's method, it is not a question of association. Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new." (Deleuze, 1989, p179-80)
• "It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or the association. Film ceases to be 'images in a chain ... an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of the next', and whose slave we are (lei et ailleurs). It is the method of BETWEEN, 'between two images', which does away with all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, 'this and then that', which does away with all the cinema of Being = is. Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible (Six fois deux)." (Deleuze, 1989, p179)

(Deleuze, 1989, p179-80)(Deleuze, 1989, p179-80)Godard draws all the consequences from this when he

declares that mixing ousts montage, it being understood that

mixing does not just consist of a distribution of the different

sound elements, but the allocation of their differential relations

with the visual ~lements. Interstices thus proliferate everywhere,

in the visual image, in the sound image, between the sound image

and the visual image. Body Camera

• '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)