Deleuze explica el cine a partir de dos nociones claves: imagen-movimiento e imagen-tiempo. Con las dos, quiere a grosso modo explicar el cine hasta la Segunda Guerra Mundial como un cine que se concentra en acción y movimiento, a diferencia del cine de Posguerra, que se ha vuelto reflexivo y pivilegia la presencia del tiempo. Deleuze afirma que ha tomado ambos conceptos de Bergson, y especialmente de su obra Materia y memoria. Este artículo explicará brevemente algunos rasgos fundamentales de estas (...) nociones en Deleuze, después abordará a Bergson para ver en qué sentido él era creador de estas nociones y, finalmente, regresará a Deleuze para precisar las nociones en cuestión y sus alcances en la explicación del cine. (shrink)

Preface to the English Edition \ Translator's Introduction \1. Beyond the Movement-Image \ 2. Recapitulation of Images and Signs \ 3. From Recollections to Dreams: Third Commentary on Bergson \ 4. The Crystals of Time\ 5. Peaks of Present and Sheets of Past: Fourth Commentary on Bergson \ 6. The Powers of the False \ 7. Thought and Cinema \ 8. Cinema, Body and Brain,Thought \ 9. The Components of the Image \ 10. Conclusions \ Notes \ Glossary (...) \Index. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface to the English edition \ Translators' Introduction \Preface to the French Edition \ 1. Theses on Movement: First Commentary onBergson \ 2. Frame and Short, Framing and Cutting \ 3. Montage \ 4. TheMovement-Image and its Three Varieties: Second Commentary on Bergson \ 5. ThePerception-Image \ 6. The Affection-Image Face and Close-Up \ 7. TheAffection-Image: Qualities, Powers, Any-Space-Whatevers \ 8. From Affect toAction: The Impulse Image \ 9. The Action- (...) class='Hi'>Image: The Large Form \ 10. The Action-Image:The Small Form \ 11. Figures, or the Transformation of Forms \ 12. The Crisisof the Action-Image \ Glossary \ Notes \ Index. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logics and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception by Dorothea E. OlkowskiElodie BoublilOLKOWSKI, Dorothea E. Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logics and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. 180 pp. Cloth, $63.00; paper, $28.00[End Page 152]Dorothea E. Olkowski's latest book carefully examines "the relationship between the creation of ideas and their actualization in relation to semiology, logic and (...) the cosmos in the philosophies of Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty." However, this work is neither an extensive or historical account of Deleuze's, Bergson's, and Merleau-Ponty's philosophies, nor an attempt to homogenize their views on space, time, or perception. Instead, it subtly compares their differences and similarities to move beyond metaphysical dualism, and fruitfully rethinks the relations between formal logic and ontology. Indeed, the author aims to draw a "theory of form," based on the logic of sensation, ultimately designed "to take the place of a theory of the real, of material physical forces."Chapter 1 retraces the history of postmodernist claims and their philosophical legacy. Olkowski explains that postmodernism is not first and foremost a political worldview or a debunking of objectivity in natural sciences. Instead, "it begins as a formal system or series of formal systems." Olkowski explores how Deleuze draws on the knowledge of modern science and logic (Bolzano, Cavaillès) and on Bergson's critical analysis of it to elaborate his logic of sensation. Bergson's conception of affectivity impacted Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of corporeality and sensation, and their understanding of perception. Bergson's concept of "body image" specifically influenced Deleuze's elaboration of the concept of "movement-image," through which he tried to overcome the dichotomy set up by mind–body dualism.Chapter 2 focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of logic as an attempt to find a third way between idealism and materialism and to overcome the disconnection between formal logic and lived experience. It reviews their critique of Euclidean geometry, their objections to formal logic as set out by Frege and Russell, and their assessment of phenomenology in order to eventually show Deleuze's affinity with Peirce's pragmatist approach. Then, the author aims to determine if Deleuze's attempt could be compatible with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson's understanding of quality and multiplicity.Chapter 3 focuses on Bergson. Recalling the controversy with Russell, Einstein, and Langevin, Olkowski refers to Merleau-Ponty's defense of Bergson's concept of intuition to prove the accuracy of his reflection on creative forces and pure duration. As she explains, "[T]he intent here is to clarify the relations between these different aspects of Bergson's thought and draw out how Deleuze makes use of these structures derived from Bergson's philosophy." This leads her to explore, more specifically, how Deleuze reworks the concept of "multiplicity" along the lines of Bergson's analysis of the élan vital.In chapter 4 the author focuses on Deleuze's work on cinema to deepen the philosophical correlation between Bergson's concepts, Deleuze's analysis, and the influences of Merleau-Ponty and Pierce. It aims to rethink the relation between movement and time, notably through the notions of time-image and movement-image. Olkowski notably showcases Deleuze's concept of destiny, "which is the pure power of time that [End Page 153] overflows all possible reaction. It defeats, immobilizes, and petrifies figures in their own affectivity; it sends them to their fate, destroying conventions along the way. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Bergson, acts are still possible in a network of temporal relations so that motion and time are destiny but differently than for Deleuze."Chapter 5 addresses the Phenomenology of Perception and how Merleau-Ponty provides an opportunity to rethink perception. In this book and his Courses on Nature, Merleau-Ponty "does not dismiss either position—that of objective science or that of the natural attitude—but argues that although each contains an element of truth, it is perception and only perception that allows us to bridge the gap between physical reality and behavior/comportment." Deleuze will depart from... (shrink)

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image and The Time-Image maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference (...) to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored. (shrink)

Texts and interviews from the period that saw the publication of Deleuze's major works. People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American “revolution” failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.—from (...) Two Regimes of Madness Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life, the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts. This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus, Cinema I: Image-Movement, Cinema II: Image-Time, all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy?. Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics. Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: “One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian.” This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last. This volume restores the full text of the original French edition. (shrink)

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image and The Time-Image maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference (...) to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored. (shrink)

Deleuze’s two Cinema books explore film through the creation of a series of philosophical concepts. Not only bewildering in number, Deleuze’s writing procedures mean his exegesis is both complex and elusive. -/- Three questions emerge: What are the underlying principles of the taxonomy? How many concepts are there, and what do they describe? How might each be used in engaging with a film? -/- This book is the first to fully respond to these three questions, unearthing the philosophies inspiring Deleuze’s (...) classifications, exploring every concept and reading a film for each. -/- Clearly and concisely mapping the Cinema books for newcomers to Deleuzian film studies, as well as opening up new areas of enquiry for expert readers. -/- > An interpretation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory through Deleuze’s Bergsonism describing the ground of Deleuze’s film-philosophy > A reading of Peirce’s semiosis from Pragmatism and Pragmaticism explicating the genesis and components of the movement-image > An examination of Deleuze’s syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition illuminating the genesis and components of the time-image > Concise engagements with each of the cinematic signs to assist reading Deleuze’s Cinema books, as well as commentaries and monographs that draw upon them > 44 film readings – one for each cinematic sign – to clarify their application. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a profound (...) influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

Film, Samuel Beckett's 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as ‘The Greatest Irish Film’, is a seminal text in the latter's cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean time-image of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keaton's body, and more importantly his face, (...) as a means of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, ‘non-human becoming’. Beckett's film is predicated on Bishop Berkeley's fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is ‘played’ by the camera itself, which ‘stalks’ Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree ‘angle of immunity’ (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the film's final close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Film's denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby filmic suture – the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial ‘viewing-views’ into a unified field of vision – gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective body dies, the work of filmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. (shrink)

"In an article on montage written for Cahiers du cinéma , Jean-Luc Godard made an observation that has been quoted many times in many contexts: If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat…what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time….Cutting on a look is…to bring out the soul under the spirit, the passion behind the intrigue, to make the heart prevail over the intelligence by destroying the notion of space in favor of that of time. (...) This passage appeared in 1956, almost three decades before Gilles Deleuze published Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image in 1983 and 1985, respectively. Yet despite the distance between those dates, the young critic’s remark anticipates key aspects of the philosopher’s film-theoretical stance. The need to displace the notional bias toward space with a conception of time as a concrete and dynamic force is the single most vital element in the thinking of Henri Bergson, whose ideas about this subject – ramified into such areas as affect, memory, perception, language, and the ontological properties of mind itself – play indispensable roles in Deleuze’s writings on cinema and allied areas of immanence, multiplicity, and difference...". (shrink)

According to conceptual metaphor theory, there are two basic metaphorical models for conceptualising time in terms of space: the ego-moving model maps our movement through space onto our imagined movement through time, while the time-moving model represents time as an entity moving through spatial locations, the ego being just a passive observer. The aim of this article is to investigate how time is conceptualized in film where ego, movement, time and space also play basic roles. I compare the two linguistic (...) models to Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of filmic time: the movement-image and the time-image. While the movement-image and the moving-ego metaphor directly map spatial structures onto the domain of time, the time-image and the moving-time metaphor correlate only in their basic structures and involve different levels of conceptual integrations and conversions. Due to film techniques such as a mobile camera, montage and image manipulation, the time-image seems to transcend the constraints of natural perception and maps onto mental rather than external space, thus giving rise to a new reverse metaphor where space acquires characteristics of the time domain. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the meaning of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism by means of the kind of experience that his project opens up for us – an experience that I want to call transcendental. Primarily on the basis of his works on cinema, famously dedicated to freely investigating Bergson's thought, I argue that Deleuze's notion of the time-image, together with his search for its real and necessary conditions, consists in the liberation of experience from its Kantian limitative conditioning. I (...) then examine both the new kind of subjectivity (the fissured ego) that emerges from this enlarged experience and the new conception of temporality (time out of joint) that subtends it. Finally, I try to bring out the concrete relations between (transcendental) experience, thought and the brain that Deleuze brings to light in his analysis of great cinema's reinvention of the relationship between time and movement. (shrink)

The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and (...) his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come. (shrink)

In Cinema 1 Deleuze creates the taxonomy of the movement-image by extending Henri Bergson's account of the sensory-motor process in Matter and Memory through the semiotic system of Charles Sanders Peirce. Through this nexus of Bergson and Peirce, Deleuze can account for each image and sign, their impetus and their relationship to one another. In contrast, the taxonomy of the time-image, the focus of Cinema 2, is given no such genesis. Rather, the images and signs appear in (...) situ, as if ready-made. This article proposes that the impetus for the taxonomy of the time-image lies in the account given of the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, and that the nine aspects of the passive syntheses can be seen to correspond to the nine proper signs of the time-image. (shrink)

En La imagen-movimiento y en La imagen-tiempo Deleuze presenta una filosofía del cine basada en el pensamiento de Henri Bergson. En el presente artículo desarrollaremos la concepción del movimiento y de la imagen del filósofo de la durée y el modo en que Deleuze se apropia de estas nociones para la hermenéutica del fenómeno cinematográfico. A modo de ejemplificación y siguiendoa este último, recurriremos a Film, de Samuel Beckett, obra en la cual se refleja la imagen-movimiento tal como es en (...) sí misma.---“The Movement-Image. Deleuze and the Beckett-Bergson relationship”. In The Movement-Image and in The Time-Image Deleuze presents a philosophy of cinema based on the thought of Henri Bergson. This paper will develop the conceptions of movement and image of the philosopher of the durée and the way in which Deleuze makes these notions his own for the hermeneutics of the cinematographic phenomenon. As an example and following the latter, the paper refers to Film, by Samuel Beckett, film in which the movement-image is reflected as it is in itself. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze tells us that philosophical problems ‘compelled’ him to look to the cinema for answers, but he doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In this thesis I argue that the problems in question turn on the foundational role that Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion plays in the development of Deleuze’s ontological conception of difference – specifically in his 1956 essay “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” The consequence of Bergson’s characterisation of human thought, perception and language as cinematographic (...) in their orientation is that any philosophy that seeks to grasp being in its own terms must overcome or surpass the human to do so. This necessity plays itself out across the Deleuzian oeuvre in diverse formulations in relation to the Nietzschean themes therein. In doing so, however, the human is ‘left behind,’ such that Peter Hallward is able to contend that the human and properly human concerns have no place in Deleuzian philosophy. My argument is that Deleuze turns to the cinema to think through the question of the human relation to being, on the basis of difference as such. Deleuze argues that the essence of the cinema is to be free of the cinematographic illusion - it ‘thinks’ in terms of real difference first of all. On that basis, it is able deduce the genesis of that illusion, and of the cinematographic orientation of human being and thought. The classical cinema dramatises the history of philosophy insofar as it remains subject to the cinematographic illusion and subordinates time to movement, but the modern cinema reverses this subordination in terms that do not ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ the human, but rather constitute its exposure to being as real difference. The modern cinema dramatises in turn the experience of what Kant calls the “fractured I,” which experiences its own thought not as spontaneity or power, but as time as the form of change. Deleuze’s Cinema books can thus be read as a response to the demands laid out in Solomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, locating the Cinema books and their treatment of the history of philosophy firmly in the context of Deleuze’s post-Kantian project. At the same time, the Cinema books thereby map out the relation of the human and properly human concerns to the difference of being as a creative and productive force that bears on those concerns without being reduced to them – the thought of being as the event of thought. (shrink)

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. -/- I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of (...) difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. -/- A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. -/- Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. -/- Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. (shrink)

Cinema, thought and time -- Deleuze's cinema books -- Technology -- Essences -- Space and time -- Bergson, time, and life -- The movement-image -- The history of time and space and the history of cinema -- The movement-image and semiotics -- Styles of sign -- The whole of movement -- Image and life -- Becoming-inhuman, becoming imperceptible -- The deduction of the movement-image -- Art and time -- Destruction of the sensory motor apparatus and the (...) spiritual automaton -- Time and money -- Art and history -- Monument -- Framing, territorialization, and the plane of composition -- Politics and the origin of meaning -- Transcending life and the genesis of sense -- Beyond symbolic and imaginary -- Shit and money -- Exchange, gift, and theft -- The fiction of mind -- Collective investment and group fantasy -- The time of man -- The intense germinal influx. (shrink)

Through the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, my paper explores a different theory of time. I reconstitute Deleuze’s paradoxes of the past in Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism to reveal a theory of time in which the relation between past and present is one of coexistence rather than succession. The theory of memory implied here is a non-representational one. To elaborate this theory, I ask: what is the role of the “virtual image” in Bergson’s Matter and Memory? Far from (...) representing the simple afterimage of a present perception, the “virtual image” carries multiple senses. Contracting the immediate past for the present, or expanding virtually to hold the whole of memory (and even the whole of the universe), the virtual image can form a bridge between the present and the non-representational past. This non-representational account of memory sheds light not only on the structure of time for Bergson, but also on his concepts of pure memory and virtuality. The rereading of memory also opens the way for Bergsonian intuition to play an intersubjective role; intuition becomes a means for navigating the resonances and dissonances that can be felt between different rhythms of becoming or planes of memory, which constitute different subjects. (shrink)

Plotinus and the Moving Image offers the first philosophical discussion on Plotinus' philosophy and film. It discusses Plotinian concepts like "the One" in a cinematic context and relates Plotinus' theory of time as a transitory intelligible movement of the soul to Bergson’s and Deleuze’s time-image. Film is a unique medium for a rapprochement of our modern consciousness with the thought of Plotinus. The Neoplatonic vestige is particularly worth exploring in the context of the newly emerging “Cinema of Contemplation.” (...) Plotinus' search for the "intelligible" that can be grasped neither by sense perception nor by merely logical abstractions leads to a fluent way of seeing. Parallels that had so far never been discussed are made plausible. This book is a milestone in the philosophy of film. (shrink)

One has the distinct feeling that Deleuze and World Cinemas was already in the works when David Martin-Jones published Deleuze: Cinema and National Identity in 2006. In that earlier study, he married Deleuze with Homi K. Bhabha to produce constructive readings of both canonical and popular films. He considers these texts to be hybrid films that display qualities of both the movement-image and time-image, two Deleuzian concepts he deploys in showing how narrative time fashions national identity in distinctive (...) ways. The final chapter of this earlier work departed abruptly from discussion of Hollywood and Western European cinema to engage with films from East Asia, a move that charted a specific future course. In... (shrink)

Popular Indian cinema provides a test case for examining the limitations of Gilles Deleuze's categories of movement-image and time-image. Due to the context-specific aesthetic and cultural traditions that inform popular Indian cinema, although it appears at times to be both movement- and time-image, it actually creates a different type of image. Analysis of Toofani Tarzan (1936) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) demonstrates how, alternating between a movement of world typical of the time-image, and a (...) sensory-motor movement of character typical of the movement-image, popular Indian cinema explores the potential fluxing of identities that emerge during moments of historical complexity. (shrink)

Introduction -- How orphans believe: Deleuze, national cinema and Majidi's The color of paradise. Deleuze: on realism and movement-Image -- Deleuze: neorealism (and a brief analysis of Kiarostami's life and nothing more) -- Majidi: The color of paradise -- Deleuze and Majidi: the faith of Mohammad -- "What are filmmakers for in needy times?" On Heidegger and Kiarostami's Taste of cherry -- An overview of Kiarostami's Taste of cherry and the question of the medium -- Heidegger on art and (...) truth -- Heidegger and Kiarostami -- Committed perception: Merleau-Ponty and Children of heaven -- Carroll on emotions -- Merleau-Ponty and embodied Imagination -- Censorship and Children of heaven -- Perception and ideology. Regarding you: Lacanian gaze and ethics in Kiarostami's Close-up -- A brief overview of Close-up -- Misreading Lacan's gaze -- The three orders: real, symbolic and imaginary -- The Lacanian gaze -- Gaze in Close-up -- The ethical function of the gaze in Close-up -- Stolen Jouissance: Lacan, feminism and Meshkini's The day I became a woman. A brief overview of The day I became a woman -- Hava: the birth of desire -- From Hava to Ahoo: from demand to desire and jouissance -- Traversing the fantasy: from Hoora to Meshkini -- Meshkini: the fourth woman of the story -- Deafening silence: Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles can fly and marginal politics -- Bahman Ghobadi and Turtles can fly -- The abject -- Can Ghobadi speak? National cinema and national mission, once again -- Hegemonic movement: on the way to the Green Movement -- The future of Iranian cinema is the future of the Green Movement. (shrink)

In his analysis of memory, Henri Bergson introduces the key concept of ‘virtuality’, understood as a non- actual reality, an unpredictable and pre-human élan vital. Several years later, the virtual will play a key role in the way that Gilles Deleuze tries to conceive the notion of a ‘plane of immanence’, that is, a whole that guides an inexhaustible process of actualisation. Deleuze, however, refers not only to Bergson but to Gilbert Simondon and to his concept of ‘preindividual field’, which (...) corresponds to a metastable state, full of potential energy, from which a structured process can arise. This article undertakes an analysis of the different theoretical pathways leading to the concept of the virtual in Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. It will investigate the transformations of this concept by focusing on the memory of the present individuated by Bergson, then applied to the cinema of the time- image by Deleuze, and on the figure of the crystal as an emblematic materialisation of the virtual, deeply present in the philosophy of both Deleuze and Simondon. The intention is to show – apart from the inevitable differences ‒ the significant continuity between these three authors, who share a common attempt to build an affirmative ontology of life. Combined Bergsonian and Simondonian influences lead in Deleuze to a metaphysics of becoming, where virtuality is always on the point of actualising itself in percepts, affects and concepts. (shrink)

Profondeur et temps chez Merleau-Ponty et DeleuzeDans une note en bas de page de son second livre sur le cinéma, L’imagetemps, Deleuze admet que sa compréhension de la profondeur – qui est l’une desnotions centrales du livre et donc de sa théorie du temps et de sa présentation au cinéma – remonte à Bergson et à Merleau-Ponty. La référence à Bergson n’est pas surprenante étant donné sa dette à son égard, mais celle à Merleau-Ponty mérite une attention particulière car, comme (...) on le sait, les références de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty sont plutôt rares et généralement négatives.Dans cet article, j’examine la portée de cette référence de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty. Comment les deux auteurs comprennent-ils la nature temporelle de la profondeur? Dans le cas de Merleau-Ponty, je tente de répondre à cette question en lisant, dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, les passages qui concernent la vision de la profondeur et ceux qui se rapportent au rappel d’un souvenir. La « théorie » deleuzienne de la profondeur, quant à elle, peut être trouvée dans son analyse de la technique cinématographique de la profondeur de champ, présente notamment dans les films d’Orson Welles. J’examine quels caractères de la profondeur de champ en font une “image-temps” et j’analyse sous cet angle Citizen Kane de Welles et Muriel ou le temps d’un retour de Resnais. Les distinctions faites entre ces deux films aident à comprendre les différences qui existent entre les conceptions de la profondeur de Merleau-Ponty etde Deleuze.Profondità e tempo in Merleau-Ponty e DeleuzeIn una nota del suo secondo libro sul cinema, L’immagine-tempo, Deleuze riconosce che la sua comprensione del fenomeno della profondità – una delle nozioni centrali del libro, dunque della sua intera teoria del tempo e della sua presenza nel cinema – può esser fatta risalire a Bergson e Merleau-Ponty. Il primo di questi riferimenti non può sorprendere, dato il debito profondo che Deleuze contrae col pensiero bergsoniano. Il secondo riferimento, quello a Merleau-Ponty, merita particolare attenzione proprio perché, com’è noto, i riferimenti di Deleuze a questo filosofo sono rari e in gran parte critici. In questo articolo mi propongo quindi di esaminare la portata di questo secondo riferimento. In che modo Deleuze e Merleau-Ponty comprendono la natura temporale della profondità? Per quanto riguarda Merleau-Ponty, cercherò di rispondere a questa domanda esaminando tutti quei passaggi di Fenomenologia della percezione in cui è questione della visione in profondità e dello sforzo necessario a richiamare alla memoria un ricordo. La “teoria” deleuziana della profondità può invece essererintracciata nell’analisi che Deleuze propone della profondità di campo nel cinema, in particolare nel cinema di Orson Welles. Cercherò di mostrare come proprio certi caratteri della profondità, facciano sì che immagini di questo genere possano essere definite immagini-tempo; e in questa prospettiva analizzerò Citizen Kane di Welles, e Muriel ou le temps d’un retour di Alain Resnais. Le differenze che sussistono tra i due film potranno d’altra parte contribuire a mettere a fuoco le differenze tra le due maniere in cui Merleau-Ponty e Deleuze rendono conto dei problemi della profondità e del tempo. (shrink)

Profondeur et temps chez Merleau-Ponty et DeleuzeDans une note en bas de page de son second livre sur le cinéma, L’imagetemps, Deleuze admet que sa compréhension de la profondeur – qui est l’une desnotions centrales du livre et donc de sa théorie du temps et de sa présentation au cinéma – remonte à Bergson et à Merleau-Ponty. La référence à Bergson n’est pas surprenante étant donné sa dette à son égard, mais celle à Merleau-Ponty mérite une attention particulière car, comme (...) on le sait, les références de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty sont plutôt rares et généralement négatives.Dans cet article, j’examine la portée de cette référence de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty. Comment les deux auteurs comprennent-ils la nature temporelle de la profondeur? Dans le cas de Merleau-Ponty, je tente de répondre à cette question en lisant, dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, les passages qui concernent la vision de la profondeur et ceux qui se rapportent au rappel d’un souvenir. La « théorie » deleuzienne de la profondeur, quant à elle, peut être trouvée dans son analyse de la technique cinématographique de la profondeur de champ, présente notamment dans les films d’Orson Welles. J’examine quels caractères de la profondeur de champ en font une “image-temps” et j’analyse sous cet angle Citizen Kane de Welles et Muriel ou le temps d’un retour de Resnais. Les distinctions faites entre ces deux films aident à comprendre les différences qui existent entre les conceptions de la profondeur de Merleau-Ponty etde Deleuze.Profondità e tempo in Merleau-Ponty e DeleuzeIn una nota del suo secondo libro sul cinema, L’immagine-tempo, Deleuze riconosce che la sua comprensione del fenomeno della profondità – una delle nozioni centrali del libro, dunque della sua intera teoria del tempo e della sua presenza nel cinema – può esser fatta risalire a Bergson e Merleau-Ponty. Il primo di questi riferimenti non può sorprendere, dato il debito profondo che Deleuze contrae col pensiero bergsoniano. Il secondo riferimento, quello a Merleau-Ponty, merita particolare attenzione proprio perché, com’è noto, i riferimenti di Deleuze a questo filosofo sono rari e in gran parte critici. In questo articolo mi propongo quindi di esaminare la portata di questo secondo riferimento. In che modo Deleuze e Merleau-Ponty comprendono la natura temporale della profondità? Per quanto riguarda Merleau-Ponty, cercherò di rispondere a questa domanda esaminando tutti quei passaggi di Fenomenologia della percezione in cui è questione della visione in profondità e dello sforzo necessario a richiamare alla memoria un ricordo. La “teoria” deleuziana della profondità può invece essererintracciata nell’analisi che Deleuze propone della profondità di campo nel cinema, in particolare nel cinema di Orson Welles. Cercherò di mostrare come proprio certi caratteri della profondità, facciano sì che immagini di questo genere possano essere definite immagini-tempo; e in questa prospettiva analizzerò Citizen Kane di Welles, e Muriel ou le temps d’un retour di Alain Resnais. Le differenze che sussistono tra i due film potranno d’altra parte contribuire a mettere a fuoco le differenze tra le due maniere in cui Merleau-Ponty e Deleuze rendono conto dei problemi della profondità e del tempo. (shrink)

The notion of ‘rhetorical bodies’ argues the cause of the rhetorical elements in the material and the material elements in the rhetorical in ways that can be seen as analogous to the bi-partite modes of Deleuzian film philosophy, ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’. Tamil films of the 1940s and 1950s bear the strong imprints of the rhetorical elements of the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidian Movement, which took root in different versions during the 1920s–60s. The narrative locations of the bodies in (...) the Tamil films of the 1940s and 1950s provide interesting theoretical and analytical challenges if one seeks to combine the Deleuzian notions of ‘movement-image’ with the notions of material rhetorics. The coming together of these notions provides new pointers to the understanding of an important phase in the history of Tamil cinema for its implications on the long-running nexus between politics and films in the state of Tamil Nadu. The Deleuzian trajectory in film philosophy provides more than enough pointers to examine early Tamil cinema's attempts to construct ‘movement-images’ through rhetorical bodies. This paper seeks to examine the contexts of ‘movement-images’ and the role of ‘rhetorical bodies’ in constructing the same in Velaikari, scripted by C. N. Annadurai. Popularly known as Aringnar Anna, C. N. Annadurai was the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and the Founder of DMK, the party which unseated Congress from power in Tamil Nadu in 1967, and the state remains out of reach of the national parties ever since. (shrink)

In his temporal philosophy based on the writing of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze describes duration ( durée ) as a becoming that endures in time. Reifications of this complex philosophical concept become artistically expressed, I argue, in the form and content of South African artist William Kentridge's series of 'charcoal drawings for projection.' These exhibited art works provide intriguing and illuminating 'philosophical' examples of animated audio-visual media, which expressively plicate distinct images of movement and time. The composition of Kentridge's films (...) at once illuminate a regime of animated 'movement-images' that can trace their aetiological roots to classical forms of film and animation, whilst concurrently folding in complex philosophical expressions of time as duration which invoke the crystalline 'time-image' concepts of philosophers such as Bergson and Deleuze, as well as literary authors like Marcel Proust. Over and above these co-existent regimes of movement and time, Kentridge's artistic technique and exhibition practices further expose a multifarious 'geology' of other embedded time lines that serve to enrich/complicate these temporal expressions. I argue here that diegetic time- and movement-images ostensibly co-exist alongside different 'archaeologies' of time relevant to the context and creation of the artworks. For this reason, the animated drawings formulate intriguing artistic/philosophical expressions that muse on the nature of matter, memory, time and space. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze's writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This ciné-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. Deleuze and Cinema presents a step-by-step guide to the key concepts behind (...) Deleuze's revolutionary theory of the cinema. Exploring ideas through key directors and genres, Deleuze's method is illustrated with examples drawn from American, British, continental European, Russian and Asian cinema. Deleuze and Cinema provides the first introductory guide to Deleuze's radical methodology for screen analysis. It will be invaluable for students and teachers of film theory, film history and film forms. (shrink)

The first section of this article focuses on the treatment of “time travel” in science-fiction literature and film as presented in the secondary literature in that field. The first anthology I will consider has a metaphysical focus, including (a) relating the time travel of science fiction to the banal time travel of all living beings, as we move inexorably toward the future; and (b) arguing for the filmstrip as the ultimate metaphor for time. The second anthology I will consider has (...) a more political focus, arguing that the “special effects” form of science-fiction films, rather than the visual or narrative content of science-fiction-films, is truly imaginative and futural. The second section of this article ties together a variety of concepts and insights between time-travel cinema and Deleuze’s Cinema 1, suggesting (among other things) that (c) time-traveling characters in cinema function as a redoubled phenomenon of the “mobile sections” of Bergsonian duration (in reference to Henri Bergson), and (d) time-travel cinema vividly illustrates the imagistic nature of the entire world. (shrink)

Review of Olkowski, D. (2021). Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception. Indiana: Indiana UP.

This article develops an argument about the time-image in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and relates it to a broader Continental philosophy of technology and culture, including Kant, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Antonio Negri. After grounding a consideration of Deleuze in relation to Heidegger's thesis concerning technology, a constructive interpretation of the time-image is developed in the context of Deleuze's work. The time-image is related to Deleuze's early work on Kant's philosophy and his (...) book Difference and Repetition, as well as to his important books on cinema, in which the time-image is opposed to the movement-image. The time-image is seen to make up the heart of subjectivity, because it concerns not only external technologies, but also how the self relates to itself internally. This understanding of the time-image is then contrasted with the work of Baudrillard and Virilio. Finally, the contrast between the time-image and the movement-image is shown to possess political implications, partly with the help of Negri. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(3) 2005: 176-188. (shrink)

The reversal in the relation of time and movement which Deleuze describes in his Cinema books does not only concern a change in the filmic arts. Deleuze associates it with a wider Copernican turn in science, philosophy, art and indeed modern experience as a whole. Experience no longer consists of an idea plus the time it takes to realize it. Instead, time is implicated in the determination, literally the creation of the terminus of any movement of experience. Deleuze describes this (...) open movement structure as determinable virtuality. Because it is determinable, experience as a whole is neither actual nor actualisable. The whole is virtual. I use the phrase determinable virtuality as a kind of organizational device with which to organise a study of the reversal of time and movement in Deleuze's work. I study the concept of determinability as it appears in Deleuze's reading of the relation of time and movement in Kant's description of the whole of possible experience, or the Transcendental Ideas. In a following section I take up the idea of virtuality which I trace back to Duns Scotus who uses the idea of the virtual to distinguish between univocal and equivocal movements, forms of movement which, I argue, anticipate the kinostructures and chronogeneses, or movement and time-images which Deleuze places at the center of his work on cinema. (shrink)

When formulating the concept of the impulse-image, Deleuze never tires of asserting that these images are saturated with death and obsessed by degradation. They stand at a curious intersection in the taxonomy of images, a constitutively in-between space: they are formally inserted between affection-image and action-image in The Movement-Image, but produce a direct passage to the time-image. However, they do not reach the time-image due to obsession by the negative effects of time. This article (...) introduces the concept of the impulse-image in Deleuze's work on the impulse and death instinct, in his fundamental texts of the 1960s and 1970s, including his collaboration with Félix Guattari. The death instinct in the late 1960s was a transcendental principle that acquired the form of the groundless or crack-up essential for the production of difference. It is at this time that Deleuze publishes Zola and the Crack-up, an embryonic essay for what would later become the impulse-image. In the 1970s, Deleuze, along with Guattari, fought the need to include a groundless force in the mould of the death instinct. Speaking of cinema in the 1980s, which is when he returns to the impulse theme, one finds characteristics of both preceding periods, especially the structure conceived in the 1960s, associated with the criticism of the 1970s. However, Deleuze now stands apart, recognising a naturalistic image and admiring a practice of symptomatology, but pointing out that his own understanding of the world does not lie in it. With the impulse-images, Deleuze also plays a relevant role in studies of film naturalism, shaping a powerful concept for studies of contemporary naturalistic symptomatologies that emerge in situations of misery of civilisation. (shrink)

Although Gilles Deleuze is one of France’s most celebrated twentieth-century philosophers, his theories of cinema have largely been ignored by American scholars. Film theorist D. N. Rodowick fills this gap by presenting the first comprehensive study, in any language, of Deleuze’s work on film and images. Placing Deleuze’s two books on cinema—_The Movement-Image _and _The Time-Image_—in the context of French cultural theory of the 1960s and 1970s, Rodowick examines the logic of Deleuze’s theories and the relationship of these theories (...) to his influential philosophy of difference. Rodowick illuminates the connections between Deleuze’s writings on visual and scientific texts and describes the formal logic of his theory of images and signs. Revealing how Deleuzian views on film speak to the broader network of philosophical problems addressed in Deleuze’s other books—including his influential work with Félix Guattari—Rodowick shows not only how Deleuze modifies the dominant traditions of film theory, but also how the study of cinema is central to the project of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a unBergsonian ontological one. In this essay, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that “a director makes only one movie (...) in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a “vanishing image,” only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body —one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about “attitude” as well as “gesture” and “mime.” We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions. This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a conception of Deleuze’s two volumes dedicated to film – Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: The Time-Image – as protracted expressions of his political philosophy. In this context, I will elaborate the difficult and entwined political claims Deleuze makes on behalf of cinema: that it is capable of engendering a tentative ‘belief in the world’, such as is the necessary correlate of political action; that it captures the contemporary political fact that (...) ‘the people are missing’, as a unified or coherent political agent; and finally that it might reveal those ‘impossible’ or ‘intolerable’ situations which would provoke such a people into being. In advancing this conceptual triumvirate, I will argue that the claims made here on behalf of cinema overspill the art form itself, linking up with Deleuze’s broader political ontology of thought and constituting a generalised political philosophy proper to so-called ‘late-capitalism’. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a conception of Deleuze’s two volumes dedicated to film – Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: The Time-Image – as protracted expressions of his political philosophy. In this context, I will elaborate the difficult and entwined political claims Deleuze makes on behalf of cinema: that it is capable of engendering a tentative ‘belief in the world’, such as is the necessary correlate of political action; that it captures the contemporary political fact that (...) ‘the people are missing’, as a unified or coherent political agent; and finally that it might reveal those ‘impossible’ or ‘intolerable’ situations which would provoke such a people into being. In advancing this conceptual triumvirate, I will argue that the claims made here on behalf of cinema overspill the art form itself, linking up with Deleuze’s broader political ontology of thought and constituting a generalised political philosophy proper to so-called ‘late-capitalism’. (shrink)

The present study examined whether cinematographic editing density affects viewers’ perception of time. As a second aim, based on embodied models that conceive time perception as strictly connected to the movement, we tested the hypothesis that the editing density of moving images also affects viewers’ eye movements and that these later mediate the effect of editing density on viewers’ temporal judgments. Seventy participants watched nine video clips edited by manipulating the number of cuts (slow‐ and fast‐paced editing against a master (...) shot, unedited condition). For each editing density, multiple video clips were created, representing three different kinds of routine actions. The participants’ eye movements were recorded while watching the video, and the participants were asked to report duration judgments and subjective passage of time judgments after watching each clip. The results showed that participants subjectively perceived that time flew more while watching fast‐paced edited videos than slow‐paced or unedited videos; by contrast, concerning duration judgments, participants overestimated the duration of fast‐paced videos compared to the master‐shot videos. Both the slow‐ and the fast‐paced editing generated shorter fixations than the master shot, and the fast‐paced editing led to shorter fixations than the slow‐paced editing. Finally, compared to the unedited condition, editing led to an overestimation of durations through increased eye mobility. These findings suggest that the editing density of moving images by increasing the number of cuts effectively altered viewers’ experience of time and add further evidence to prior research showing that performed eye movement is associated with temporal judgments. (shrink)