Martin-Jones, David (2002) Becoming-Other in Time: the Deleuzian Subject in Cinema

Martin-Jones, David (2002) Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2738/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Becoming-Other in Time: The Deleuzian Subject in Cinema. David Martin-Jones Ph.D. in the Faculty of Arts The University of Glasgow Department of Film & TV April 2002. © David Martin-Jones 2002 2 Abstract. Through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema, this thesis explores how the notion of labyrinthine time is represented differently in movement- and time-images. Part I contrasts the different types of subject that are created in the narratives of the two types of image. This begins with an exploration of the philosophical conceptions of time behind the two images and the subjects they create. Chapter two focuses on the role of memory in the creation of these subjects, drawing on the works of Henri Bergson, and using films by Hitchcock and Fellini. The third chapter delves into the recent re emergence of the debate over spectator positioning, and questions what Deleuze can offer this field. Here the thesis most comprehensively negotiates its place within the field of film studies, through its interaction with psychoanalytical theories of the subject, and the debate over what exactly constitutes suture. Part II focuses on the movement-image. In particular it explores characters' attempts to perform their present identities differently, by falsifying their past and taking a new direction through the labyrinth oftime. Chapters four and five analyse the way in which this performativity is represented in, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, The Talented Mr Ripley and Memento. These recent films are seen to draw a broad distinction between female performativity, which is sanctioned, but only for a brief while, and male performativity, which is represented as getting away with murder. Movement-images are thus found to uphold a very traditional gender binary, by reterritorializing the labyrinth's subversive potential into a legitimizing straight line and its marginalized, labyrinthine other. This is a conclusion that had already been suggested in chapter three. The thesis concludes in chapter six, with a return to concerns that arose in the first chapter. It examines how the historical and metaphysical context in which the movement- and time-image emerge has ensured the continued global dominance of the movement-image. 3 Contents. Abstract. 2. Preface. 6. Acknowledgements. 9. Part I: Both Time and Movement. Chapter 1. Ungrounding Cinema. 11. Two Histories: Kovacs and Restivo, is Deleuze's theory linear, or episternic? One Cinema: The movement-image as indirect expression oftime. Two SUbjects: Rodowick on Sherlock Jr. and Lajetie. Two Times: Borges' labyrinth. Two I's: Kant on Descartes. Two Foucaults: Deleuze's Foucault, from Power-Knowledge, to PowerlKnowledge. Two Planes: A Thousand Plateaus and the all reterritorializing movement-image. Two Pasts: History and genealogy on the two planes. Two Cinemas?: Can the time-image ever challenge the movement-image? One Thesis: An overview. Chapter 2. Remembrance of Film's Past. 57. Bergson: Matter and Memory, habit and attentive recollection. Hitchcock: Return of the past as return of the same. The recollection-image in Vertigo. Deleuze: The three syntheses of time. The empty form of time. Fellini: Return of the past as return to difference. The sheet oftransforrnation in 8Yz. Chapter 3. The Incredible Shrinking Spectator. 92. Ungrounding Psychoanalysis: Rodowick's Ciline et Julie. Julie and Celine, Ciline et Julie: A Deleuzian reading of Ciline et Julie. Spectator - Movement-Image: Heath on Oudart and Dayan. 4 Rivette's deconstruction of shot/reverse shot in the movement-image. Spectator - Time-Image: Rivette's alternative suture. The becoming other of the spectator of the time-image. Haunted House of Fiction: The Sixth Sense, reterritorializations continue in the contemporary movement-image. Part II: Either Movement or Time. Chapter 4. Helen and Lola's High School Reterritorialization. 142. Science and Philosophy: Bergson and Einstein, Prigognine and Stengers, Bohm and Deutsch, Sokal and Bricmont, Deleuze and Guattari. Running and Sliding: Sliding Doors and Lola Rennt. Bakhtin's carnival. The Mamie tradition. ll. Please Step Back in Line, Ma'am: Urban, national and global reterritorializations. It Was All a Dream: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. Patriarchal reterritorializations of the female masquerade. Chapter 5. Don't Mess with Mr. In-between. 204. Getting Away With Murder: Reterritorializing sexual transgression. Closeting homosexuality in The Talented Mr Ripley. Habitual Criminal: Memento. A return to Descartes under the cover of noir-ness. ll. His and Hers Watches: Possible Worlds, a meta fictional expose of cinema's lawful narrative reterritorializations. A Total Lack of Respect for the Law: Liar, the independent other. Chapter 6. Reterritorializing Cinema. 258. Musical Heirs: Reterritorializing America's European heritage in The Music Box. All A-Ryan, All Arne-Ryan: Mapping US history onto the European labyrinth. Nothing to Kill or Die for: 5 Post Fortress Europe in Un heros tres discret. The self conscious use of the labyrinth to re-impose national history. Conclusion. 305. Select Filmography. 316. Bibliography. 327. 6 Preface: On reservations. For the Anglo-American film studies scholar, reservations immediately arise when reading Gilles Deleuze's cinema texts. Perhaps the most obvious of these are, their veneration of auteur cinema at the expense of the popular, and their almost complete disregard of the national and social context into which many of the films discussed emerged. Their use of cinema to form an assemblage with philosophy in order to further Deleuze's own conceptual ends will also make them inaccessible texts for many readers. These caveats notwithstanding, however, the 1990s has seen the emergence of a growing body of work on Deleuze in Anglo-American film studies. After Steven Shaviro's The Cinematic Body (1993) came D.N. Rodowick's Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997), and Laura U. Marks' The Skin a/the Film, Barbara Kennedy's Deleuze and Cinema, and The Brain Is the Screen (a collection edited by Gregory Flaxman) all appeared in 2000. The problem that all these works had to negotiate, to a greater or lesser degree, was how to discuss Deleuze's ideas on cinema, and the ramifications thereof, without first having to explain Deleuze's entire philosophical outlook, and the position held by the cinema texts in his oeuvre. With interest in Deleuze continuing to grow in film studies, however, Deleuzian terminology is slowly beginning to gain a common currency, as the works listed above bare witness. Moreover, the influence of Deleuze on disciplines which have common ground with film studies, in particular, theories of gender and sexuality - such as those of Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Dorothea Olkowski, Rosi Braidotti et. al. - all ensure that his concepts are becoming recognizable (if such a DeleuzianJaux pas can be permitted) to film studies. For these reasons, this work will attempt to keep the description of Deleuze's philosophy to a minimum, and concentrate instead on the way in which it can help us to understand cinema. 7 That said, and although this work remains on a somewhat abstract, or universalized plane - ensuring that, like Deleuze's work, it has difficulty negotiating its conclusions in respect of national and cultural contexts - it is not meant as an all-encompassing theory of cinema. Indeed, the bias towards European art cinema and the Hollywood mainstream which informs the work is obvious. The exploration of the subjectivities that are created in the narratives of these films, then, is typically "western" in orientation. The conclusions that this work draws would not, for instance, be applicable to most third, or diasporic cinemas. Indeed, it could not even be said to represent all the cinemas that are produced in Europe, particularly Southern and Eastern Europe, and is certainly not nuanced enough to be applied to African or Asian cinemas. The rather curious Deleuzian monster 1 that this work creates, then, is an assemblage of Anglo-American film studies, the French philosophies of Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault, and a range of predominantly American and western European films. The common link between the disparate approaches upon which this thesis draws is their obsession with negotiating the construction of gender, sexuality and subjectivity in relation to the law. Neither is the discussion of cinema which this work undertakes, whilst it deals in grandiose, universal terms like those of the time- and the movement-image, meant as a replacement for the many different trajectories that already exist in film studies. In fact, it is perhaps best seen as a bifurcation of the direction which the works cited above have already taken within film studies. The discussion which follows utilizes Deleuze's thoughts on time in order to analyse the way in which character subjectivity is constructed in certain types of film narrative. It also attempts to understand the reason why certain constructions of the subject are represented in specific ways by "western" cinema as a whole. It is for this reason that whilst it occasionally rubs up against already existing theories within film studies, such as those informed by psychoanalysis, it is in order to draw parallels and contrasts between the two that this is done.

Load more