Cinema and Control

Cinema and Control Phillip Roberts Dissertation submitted towards the award of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University, February 2013 Summary This thesis explores the political implications of Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume work on the cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [2005a] and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [2005b]). I argue that counter to the common reading of these works as being primarily concerned with aesthetics and philosophy, Deleuze’s cinema books should be understood as a political critique of the operations of cinema. I outline the main arguments set out by these works as a political formulation and argue that they should be directly related to Deleuze’s more explicitly political writings. In particular, I argue that these books should be read alongside Deleuze’s later ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), which re-addresses some of the most significant aspects of his earlier work on cinema following a transformation in media technologies and social organisation. I argue that Deleuze’s time-image and his later conceptualisation of control should be understood as forming the two poles of his theorisation of cinema and visual culture. When addressed as connected concepts, a significant political dimension emerges in this area of Deleuze’s thought, focusing on a time-image that opens a range of possibilities for the future ordering of the world and a system of control that will recurrently close and eliminate these possibilities. Through a series of studies of film texts I will develop the political implications of Deleuze’s thinking on cinema and visual culture in order to show how the forces of control and the time-image operate and how these concepts can be systematised and further integrated into Deleuze’s wider political thought. Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction: Deleuze’s Cinema Project is Politically Motivated 1 Chapter 1: Control and the Time-Image 32 (Hour of the Wolf, Germany Year Zero and Tokyo Story) Chapter 2: Cinema and Territoriality 78 (Jaws and The Searchers) Chapter 3: Jean-Luc Godard and the Cinema of Cliché 125 (Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo, Histoire(s) du Cinéma and Une Femme Mariée) Chapter 4: Glauber Rocha and the People to Come 170 (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol and Antônio das Mortes) Conclusion: The Limits of the World 229 Bibliography 236 Filmography 250 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Ian Buchanan for his help in researching and developing this thesis. Without his experience and enthusiasm, not to mention his ability to spot a viable research project in a very roughly composed collection of ideas, this thesis might not have been possible. I also owe gratitude to Dr Marcelo Svirsky, for his encouragement and determination to see the best in my work, and to Dr Carl Plasa, whose attention to detail is faultless, and whose patience and editorial skills have been of the greatest value. I would also like to thank Lindsay Powell-Jones for reading and listening to practically everything I have written, read or thought about for four years. Thanks are also due to Tom Harman, Claudio Celis and Dr Aidan Tynan, whose many discussions on the most frustrating and confusing ideas have equally challenged and clarified my own understanding of many difficult things, and to Angus McBlane for numerous interesting evenings filled with debate and wild conjecture. Introduction: Deleuze’s Cinema Project is Politically Motivated This thesis will focus on Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (2005a) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (2005b), Gilles Deleuze’s landmark philosophical enquiry into the status of cinematic art in the history of thought in the twentieth century. In these books Deleuze advances a relatively simple thesis: that the history of cinema is made up of movement- images, the pre-war classical conception of cinema that makes the time of a film subordinate to the movements that fill it, and time-images, the modern post-war conception of cinema that allows time to be seen for itself. Deleuze draws this basic proposition from Henri Bergson and develops it into a broader meditation on time and thought. Deleuze’s cinema project argues that it is not until after the emergence of the time- image that the supposedly temporal medium of cinema is able to grasp time fully.1 The audiences of the classical movement-image cinema had never had cause to take notice of time, as it was chopped up and shortened, obscured and enslaved to the narrative drive of a motion picture. But as cinema came of age and entered into its modern era, time would gradually be called forth by the image, allowing audiences to perceive its 1 The main points of Deleuze’s cinema books as they relate to my own argument will be covered in some detail throughout this thesis. For a more general explanation and overview of Deleuze’s work on cinema see Deleuze on Cinema (2003) by Ronald Bogue, which offers a clear discussion of the main points of Deleuze’s cinema project, and Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (2003) by David Rodowick, which connects the books to both Deleuze’s wider work and visual theory and philosophy more broadly. 1 own passing.2 In cinema’s modern age the time of the shot lengthens, the narrative exoskeleton that held each element of a film in place is removed, characterisation, the establishment of location and the actions and gestures of characters are weakened so as to become all but insignificant. Deleuze shows how the departures from the classical cinema schema made by Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ozu Yasujirō, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Robert Bresson and many others have changed something in cinema. The result of such film-makers, Deleuze shows, is not exactly a new time-image schema, but a new way of thinking about what cinema is and what cinema can do. Deleuze praises the new cinema on both of these points. He argues that the construction of a cinema-world (and as I will explain in Chapter 2, all films are in the business of building a world of some sort) changes in cinema’s modern age, bringing us closer to the poverty and misery that permeates existence for so many, making visible a world that is not romantic or exciting or comedic or intriguing, as it was in the old cinema, but that is intolerable. Poverty and misery had often been the topic of films long before the emergence of the time-image, but the new aesthetic offers a strikingly different depiction of these things. No longer are these simple plot details or narrative settings; no longer do we simply see a poor neighbourhood or a hungry character. The time-image opens film up to its outside, drawing us closer to a world beyond the motion-picture theatre and the invisible forces that circulate there. The new cinema offers poverty or 2 Deleuze’s motivation for dividing the history of cinema into classical and modern cinema (Deleuze says movement-image and time-image) should be understood in philosophical rather than historical terms, and as forming two interrelating aesthetics rather than a strict binary. Whilst the two forms are both formally and philosophically distinct from one another, there are likely to be elements of both in many films. Whilst Deleuze highlights 1945 as marking a shift in cinematic thought, we cannot posit a simple break between pre- and post-war cinema due to the continuing quantitative dominance of the movement-image in post-war cinema and the existence of a number of pioneers who had developed an aesthetic something like the modern time-image in the pre-war years. I will address this point in more detail in chapter 1. 2 misery or any number of other forces as something that is felt as well as seen, and strips back the formal grammar and organisation of cinema that had for so long offered ways of coping with such things – individualising characterisation to cope with hopeless poverty, cut-away editing to cope with unspeakable horror, narrative resolution to cope with unthinkable suffering. By stripping cinema of the chains that had shackled every part of a film to narrative movement and sequential action, the time-image makes these forces directly visible, like time, in and of themselves, and builds a very different world to that of the closed romantic worlds of the classical cinema. The new cinema, in Rossellini and Bresson and Youssef Cahine and Wai, offers a world in which suffering or sorrow is made to confront the spectator directly. For Deleuze the time-image marks a monumental shift in the manner in which cinema (and visual culture more generally) is thought. The modern cinema offers an image that is not anchored in the formal and narrative construction of film, giving an often indiscernible image as obscure and contradictory as the world in which it circulates. The time-image is irrationally organised and not subject to any strict formal logic. It offers a world of difference and mutation that is without any centre, and through which images and actions can be organised. In classical narrative cinema an organising principle would typically be a significant plot device, a main character, or some other formal foundation upon which to develop the film. The time-image has no need of any formal anchoring, instead offering a changing and contradictory world without centre. A similar series of analyses of the changing nature of the world can be seen across Deleuze’s later works, particularly in his books on Michel Foucault (2006a) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (2006b), his work with Félix Guattari (2004a, 2008, 2004b 3 and 1994), and the short essay ‘Postscript on the Society of Control’ (1992).

Load more