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, p180)
• "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 elements. Interstices thus proliferate everywhere, in the visual image, in the sound image, between the sound image and the visual image." (Deleuze, 1989, p180)

+ Thus the language of continuity is used against itself to create interstice. The expectation that a cut is rational - that one image necessitates the next - is all called into question through this discontiunous form. Between the two disassociated imaged, within this disjunction, a third idea emerges. When the image of Golde Meir is juxtaposed with Hitler's screaming rants a third possibility emerges. The viewer struggles not to associate these two political leaders. Yet what they represent is so very contrasting that it's clearly an exercise in juxtaposition, as opposed to relativism. In Godards film essay 'Here & Everywhere' 'Ici et ailleurs', the viewer is forced to confront the tension embedded in these histories of resistance - between palestinian rebel forces and the founding of the state of Israel - between the viewer in europe sitting at home watching image of violence after dinner and the concrete reality those images of violence are extracted from. Through this language of disjunction, the viewer is forced to confront the disjunctions surrounding them - as opposed to being fed a continuous, unified, tale or narrative that seamlessly connects the conflicting layers of reality.

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)