I Am...The Regime of the Tear the Queer Thoughts of the Time-Image

Poteas 1 I Am...The Regime Of The Tear The Queer Thoughts Of The Time-Image Author: Supervisor: Dimitrios Poteas Patricia Pisters Second Reader: Abe Geil MA Thesis Media Studies: Film Studies Department of Humanities June 24, 2016 Word Count: 22970 Poteas 2 Poteas 3 Contents INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................. 4 1. THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE ..................................... 12 1.1 IDEAS AND TIME IN THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE ..................................................................................................... 12 1.2. NEUTRALIZING QUEERNESS IN THE RELATION-IMAGE .................................................................................. 20 2. NEW QUEER THOUGHT ........................................................................................................................ 28 2.1. FROM HITCHCOCK TO KALIN, FROM THE WHOLE TO THE OUTSIDE .......................................................... 29 2.1.1. Living Between ................................................................................................................................................. 31 2.1.2. Thinking Outside the Body .......................................................................................................................... 36 2.1.3. Do Robots Think of Electric Sex? .............................................................................................................. 43 2.2. FINAL THOUGHTS ................................................................................................................................................... 50 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................. 52 NOTES ............................................................................................................................................................. 54 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................................... 56 FILMOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................................. 59 Poteas 4 Introduction In the preface of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, published in 1983 as the first part of a project that would be completed two years later with Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze makes a striking comparison: “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” (xiv). Already from the preface, Deleuze elevates cinema above the other arts and gives it a great sociological and philosophical importance. It’s only fitting then that Deleuze in his two cinematic books will not follow an orthodox attempt at creating a film theory or a historiography of cinema. His aim instead, is to create a new language and methodology for talking about cinema, one that would befit the status of cinematic images as units of thought. It is not an approach of cinema through a philosophical filter, nor cinema analyzed in sociological terms. Deleuze may be referring to these fields, as wells as science and semiotics, but he does so only to contextualize the cinematic concepts and terms cinema gives birth to. This might seem limiting at first: what use is a theory that approaches cinema as a self-contained unit that has little to do with technological, ideological or political issues? But it’s a limitation only if we don’t take into account that in Deleuzian thought nothing is completely self-contained. At the very least a set might be artificially closed, but never fully isolated from other sets and relations. If Deleuze creates a completely new cinematic vocabulary, it is exactly because he leaves the door open for a productive meeting of this vocabulary with other disciplines. A theory of cinema, he reminds us, should be “about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices” (Cinema 2 280). Deleuze treats cinema as a machinic assemblage whose connections with other epistemological fields await their exploration by a visionary seer. Or, to borrow another one of his terms, we can say that Deleuze harvests the crystalline seeds that blossom in the cinematic screen and can be transplanted to impregnate different milieus. In a way then, Deleuze’s project was not completed with the publication of Cinema 2, but remains perpetually open. My own attempt to productively exploit this openness will see me discussing another kind of openness: the open, diffused identity and subjectivity of the spectator, engendered by a new relation between cinema and thought that the time-image allows; a relation that as I will posit is inherently queer. This openness and perceived inaccessibility of Deleuze’s cinematic theory however, has generated criticisms about its usefulness and influence, with commentators mentioning the impossibility of trying “to apply' Deleuze, to simply 'translate' analysis into a Deleuzian Poteas 5 language", and theorists treating it as a footnote in the history of film, merely as an "orthodox historiography of style" (Stam 262; Bordwell 116). Similarly, the supposed apolitical philosophy of Deleuzian thought has created harsh but misguided criticisms and notable scholars such as Slavoj Žižek have labeled Deleuze “a highly elitist author, indifferent towards politics”, while Peter Hallward famously proclaimed that “those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere” (20; 164). It is true that in his Cinema books, Deleuze avoids, with the exception of a short chapter on minor cinema, a direct involvement with politics. A closer reading however can disclose the unspoken political implications of his theory as well as a more overt consideration of cinema as a political tool that, unlike Hallward’s claim, can lead to change. But as we’ll see, it’s a different change than the one Hallward was envisioning. The clearest and most useful to us politicization of Deleuze’s theory comes in Cinema 2, where the time-image brings forth a new relation of cinema with thought, the body and the world. When acknowledging the Marxist criticism of the apolitical evolution of Neo-realism and Japan cinema -a criticism that was based on the inaction of the characters- Deleuze offers his own vision of what constitutes meaningful political involvement: For him, it is exactly the characters’ inaction that allows them to see what a man of action can’t. It is through action Deleuze claims, through one’s ability to turn away from what she should confront, to rationalize that which should be condemned, that oppressions exist and multiply. What the Marxist critics refer to as passivity then, for Deleuze is a creative mental activity. Thus, his analysis of a cinema populated by ailing neurotics that are mentally confused, falsifying forgers who can’t be trusted and aimless heroes who are passively strolling is by default a political cinema. It is these political anti-heroes who can become seers and uncover the unbearable situation that actions hide. That isn’t to say that Deleuze condemns action per se. What he opposes is the automatically, habitually produced chain of perception-action. What Deleuze proposes is that cinema, as a pure optical and sound situation that immobilizes the audience, should function as the pure optical and sound situations that the characters of the film confront. The inter- assemblage film-audience is a babushka doll: a pure optical and sound situation that fractures the sensory-motor schemata of the audience, and should contain pure optical and sound situations that weakens the sensory-motor schemata of the characters. The optical and sound situation that is the film, should reveal then the intolerable in the same way that the opsigns and sonsigns of the film reveal the intolerable to the characters. What is important, Deleuze stresses, “is always that the character or the viewer, and the two together, become Poteas 6 visionaries” (Cinema 2 19, my emphasis). Deleuze doesn’t ask for the passivity of the spectator but for the action of watching filmic images to become an act, a mental relation. His cinematic theory is not apolitical but proposes a reevaluation of our political and cinematic perceptions (and affections). It is a different version of politics that Hallward got only partially right: It can empower people by divesting them of what is perceived as power. And it can’t bring change to the world, but like the time-image, it can change our relations with – and within- it. Deleuze is clear in that. The world doesn’t need to be transformed. Only our belief in the world needs to. It is a provocative proposition that is worth examining a little bit further. How does Deleuze understand our relation with the world and why is the severance of the sensory- motor schema and its reevaluation necessary for this relation to change? And why through cinema? To answer this, we should shortly analyze some aspects of the human consciousness that form the basis of Cinema 1 and how they compare with the consciousness of the camera. Deleuze states that montage “is the assemblage of movement-images” (Cinema

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