Part III: SEMIOTICS and the ARTS the GRAND DELEUZIAN FOG: A

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Part III: SEMIOTICS AND THE ARTS

EDWARD DIMENDBERG

THE GRAND DELEUZIAN FOG: A REVIEW OF CINEMA 1: THE MOVEMENT IMAGE BY GILLES DELEUZE*

Cinema 1: The Movement Imaged is a provocative book of the sort which encourages one to imagine violent skirmishes be- tween its champions and critics after reading only the first few pages. Best known in American critical circles as the co-author of Anti-Oedipus, a polemical debauch directed against the psy- choanalytic reduction of desire to the familial, Gilles Deleuze is a noted French philosopher and cultural critic whose many books include studies on Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, Sacher-Masoch, the painter Francis Bacon, Proust, and the theory of meaning.2 This translation of the first half of The Movement Image I The Time Image, his two-volume study on cinema, makes quite heavy de- mands upon the reader with respect to both its style and the philo- sophical and cinematic knowledge it presupposes. Crucial concepts and terms are often introduced in a single elusive sentence, only to disappear several pages later, by which time other equally shadowy notions have entered the discussion. As to the films treated in the text, many of them will be familiar to film scholars and cinephiles, yet an acquaintance with the broader contours of

* Many thanks to Teresa de Lauretis and James Clifford for their helpful comments on an earilier version of this review. 1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). All citations in parentheses refer to this text. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1972). A brief introduction to Deleuze's thought is found in Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 152-67. world film culture is clearly an asset when Deleuze analyzes the work of lesser known directors such as Jean Gremillon and Mikhail Romm. What remains most troubling about the project developed in Deleuze's book is the absence of any confrontation with film theory as it has developed over the past two decades through the convergence of semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and the theory of the subject. This exchange was less concerned with formulating final judgments about film (or even various theories), than with rethinking certain problems from the stand- point of what Philip Rosen (following the Russian Formalists) calls "a 'dominant' ... a constellation of issues, concerns, and arguments which served as an organizing matrix of discussion . .. composed of conceptualizations of narrative in film, of the cinematic apparatus, and of ideology...."3 The existence of this body of theory is acknowledged by Deleuze in a single sentence dismissing the work of Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour (p. 25). Can one write a book that purports "to isolate certain cinematographic concepts ..." (p. ix) without taking into account the most significant developments in film theory of the past twenty years? This is precisely what Deleuze has done, and the boldness with which he pursues this course will persuade some readers and infuriate others. Yet the absence of theory from the book suggests less Deleuze's ignorance of its existence than a deliberate choice of strategy. In earlier books such as Difference and Repetition, Proust and Signs, or A Thousand Plateaux (also with Felix Guattari), Deleuze signalled his divergence from the tendency to read cultural sign systems as immutable, overdetermined expressions of oedipal sexuality, power, or ideology which characterized much French semiotic theory under the powerful influence of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser during the 1970s. Through concepts such as "deterritorialization" or "double be- coming" and entities such as the "rhizome," "machinic assem- blage," or "the body without organs," Deleuze embraced the ideals of a dispersed subjectivity and a fluid desire embodied in the

3. Narratiae, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), p. viii. One must in fairness to Deleuze note his discussion of film semiotics in L'Image-Temps, (Paris: Les Editions De Minuit, 1985), pp. 38- 61. Yet given its implicit presence throughout the first volume of his study, some form of greater engagement with it in the text would have been desirable.