TOWARD a TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA by J

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ABSTRACT

LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA

by J. Motts

This thesis, written in English, proposes an ethico-affective theory of the sound event in film in an effort to rethink the relationship of film and spectator in terms of listening. The movements of the argument progress through an analysis of a two-minute scream from Maïwenn’s 2011 film, Polisse, that works to demonstrate the ways in which resonances in theoretical language on film, sound, affect and music, specifically as they relate to the interstice from Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: the Time-Image, help us to think of the spectator in terms of her active participation in film’s material. This step away from cinematographic analysis forces us to scrutinize the methods through which film directly affects the senses of its spectators in ways that confound their ability to “read” the image. As such affections, as Baruch Spinoza suggests, influence how the spectator perceives her own capacity to act in the world, this thesis concludes that listening for sound events in film allows us to perceive the ethical dimensions of film and spectatorship.

LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

J. Motts

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2017

Advisor: Dr. Elisabeth Hodges

Reader: Dr. Jonathan Strauss

Reader: Dr. Mack Hagood

This Thesis titled

LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA

J. Motts

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts and Science

and

Department of French and Italian

______Elisabeth Hodges

______Jonathan Strauss

______Mack Hagood

Table of Contents entry point 1

I. sounding off 7 Brisez le silence. Finding a pulse and trying not to stare

II. sounding out 19 examining bodies getting spiritual limits in-between resonance / rhythm

III. sound bridge 34 lending an ear (im)mediate auscultation we a choice echo, an opening 48

Works Cited 51

iii

to Blanche Motts and Le Sacré du printemps

Acknowledgements

To the Miami University Department of French and Italian, Department of English, and Department of Media and Culture;

To my advisor and mentor, Dr. Elisabeth Hodges, and committee, Drs. Jonathan Strauss and Mack Hagood;

To my many mentors in language and art;

To Nicolette Utsinger and Irvin 001;

To my friends and colleagues who listen;

To my parents Sue and Dave, my brother Kyle, my (elected) sisters Jordan and Gwen;

If only a “thank you” were adequate to express my gratitude for the ways in which you have motivated me to grow as a thinker and writer and human being in the world. To be in your orbits, whether through the last 2, 5, or nearly 24 years, was and is daily inspiration, and it is my earnest hope that this project accurately reflects the influence of our conversations and shared experiences upon my ideas and voice.

You have helped to lead me here; for that, I cannot thank you enough, and I carry your legacies with me as I continue in this wild exploration of art and of life.

entry point

An audiovisual din shifts about the young boy’s body; and suddenly, he screams. At first, the sound attacks: the young boy’s voice unleashes itself upon the characters and soundscape who surround him, colliding into the near silence that had preceded its arrival. Its high volume and pitch reverberate from the walls of the room in which he stands, sits and squirms, the combination of his image and sound seeming to communicate displeasure, pain, frustration. But then, the sound continues: it elongates into a full two minutes of guttural noise— shouts, cries, tears that evolve and overlap—and, in terms of the sound’s link to the image, it appears to devolve, divorcing itself from the young boy’s story and dissociating itself from any representational “meaning” the sound might have contributed to the visual cues that surround it.1 The listener may understand the sound to be coming from the young boy—he is a fictional character in a narrative film, and the listener can watch his image writhe in tandem with the eruptions of the scream upon the screen—however, the sounds that continue to quake from his chest no longer seem constrained by the 1920:1080 frame of their visual environment. Now, the scream is embedded within the senses of the listener as much as it had once seemed inscribed into the images of the film; it has become the noise of listening, of sound sounding into ears,

1 Experimental musician and sound theorist Michel Chion calls this association of sound and film image “added value,” a term which proposes that the editing of sound in film, though technically separate from that of the image, often enhances the spectator’s perception of the image in the way that it appears to be a pre-existing, “natural” component of the visual environment. He continues in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia University, 1994): “Added value is what gives the (eminently incorrect) impression that sound is unnecessary, that sound merely duplicates a meaning which in reality it brings out, either all on its own or by discrepancies between it and the image” (5). In “added value,” then, sound’s “meaning” stems from its confirmation of the visual world, suggesting that any value added to the image by sound leads also and at the same time to a devaluing of sound as its own, separate entity. 1 colliding into the perception of we, the spectators, who no longer look, but listen. What do we hear in our experience with film?

In this thesis, I propose a theory of the sound event in order to rethink the relationship of film and spectator in terms of listening. I propose this term and methodological shift in film theory in the effort to demonstrate that a vocabulary of listening enables us to theoretically (and finally) address our active and immediate participation in film’s material. As such, the analysis of a scream consumes this project: I dedicate the entirety of my thesis to the dissection of a two minute-long scream embedded in Maïwenn’s 2011 film, Polisse. In the term sound event, I call upon the Deleuzian understanding of the Event as it perpetuates change and differentiation (Beck and Gleyzon 329); by drawing out the linguistic links between theoretical texts on film, sound, affect and music, I argue that, in the sound event, the duration and recurrence of a given sound or sound pattern in a film shocks the spectator into an affective experience with sound that subverts the spectator tendency to “read” the film with the distanced terms of cinematographic analysis. Instead, the spectator is forced to become a listener, and the sound she hears no longer serves to confirm the visual world she sees, no longer “signifies” in accordance with an expectation established by the image. A structural and methodological upending has occurred: in the experience of the sound event, the listener transcends the status of passive observer, for she collides into the collective becoming of the film and her own sensory perception, realizing her status as an active participant in the film’s material. The affective element of this event comes from Baruch Spinoza, whose 17th century writings established the basis of what is now understood (thanks to the development of scholars like Brian Massumi, Gregory Seigworth, Melissa Gregg and Patricia Ticineto Clough) as Affect Theory (Sound 6). In Spinoza’s Ethics (studied in this thesis through an analysis of Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy), the philosopher defines affect in terms of colliding bodies, wherein each collision influences the involved bodies’ perceived capacities to act (S 192). By

2 A note on abbreviations: As this thesis references multiple works from Deleuze, I have implemented the following guide for understanding in-line citations: S will stand for Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (translated by Robert Hurley, City Lights Books, 1988); IM will replace Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement (Éditions de Minuit, 1983); and IT will replace L’image-temps (Éditions de Minuit, 1985). For all citations of French texts in this work that include translations, the page number listed in the in-line 2 analyzing the sound event of Polisse’s scream in terms that favor listening to collisions over reading signs, I propose that the relationship of film and spectator is ultimately a matter of ethics, which is to state that our experiences with film can (and do) amplify our capacity to act in the world. In this way, this ethico-affective3 argument suggests that a more focused scrutiny of the ways in which media affect our bodies also—and more importantly—calls into question the ways in which we perceive our ability to act and interact as part of a media multiplicity. It is for this reason that I shall articulate my argument as often as is appropriate in terms of we. I would like to emphasize here that this we is not a universalized consideration of spectator subjectivity; such a universalization would commit the grave error of erasing the specific and intersectional cultural influences that nuance the perspective from which each spectator approaches media. Rather, my we works to actively recognize and remind the reader of the multiplicity inherent in affect and central to the ethical potency of this argument. Even if our respective responses to media are undoubtedly and individually nuanced, we cannot deny that we are all, in some way, exposed to media through the input of audiovisual stimuli, called to action by way of sensory appeal. This thesis listens for the potentials embedded within such a call. In the spirit of listening, resonances in language across theoretical disciplines hold a central role in the framework of this theory: I play with the echoes of shock, vibration and rhythm as they appear in the descriptions of Gilles Deleuze’s interstice, Henri Bergson’s durée, Spinoza’s affect, and experimental musician Pierre Schaeffer’s musical object to gesture toward a trans-sensory conception of cinema. This last term, coined by Chion, presents perception through the ways in which one sensory perception often triggers and travels along many of the other senses, rendering futile the effort to link a perception to any single sense (in the way that

citation addresses the French text; the page number included in the translated footnote, the English translation. 3 This term appears in Marie Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound: Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017), in which Thompson works to consider the ways in which noise functions and influences the listener outside its common discursive “tethering… to ‘unwantedness’ and ‘badness’’ (3). She continues: “This alternative approach is intended to be broad enough to allow for noise’s qualitative variability – its capacity to be loud and faint, audible and inaudible, perceptible and imperceptible – while also avoiding a collapse into a relativist end point where noise can be anything to anyone” (ibid.). Whereas Thompson’s work focuses on noise as it is framed in theory, art and cultural discourse, this project shall focus upon a theory of the sound event as it influences both the spectator and the discourse surrounding the art form in which it participates – that is, film. 3 the thinkers I describe often do) (SA 3304). By working toward a trans-sensory cinema, then, I posit that the listening I theorize is not merely a concern of the ear, but instead animates the entire body—as well as the body politic—through the act of perceiving. With this in mind, and as we shall come to understand, an analysis of film affection led by listening must ultimately forego the reflex of cinematographic analysis, a method which often looks for film’s participation in signifying systems of “representation” and frames audiovisual material as the “mechanical reproduction” of art and lived experience.5 Though many important strides in film theory have resulted from the dissection of power structures embedded in the language of the lens,6 the theory I propose is not rooted in a mistrust of images, but rather, belief in the body: it takes as its focus the experience of film, as it is lived in the exchange between the medium and its spectator. Film affects us; our encounter with it concerns our ears, skin, and organs as much as our eyes, as evidenced in our goosebumps and increased heartbeats at the right use of strings in a horror film. A theoretical inquiry in this vein no longer asks what the images of film represent, but rather what the body of film does, the particular methods through which the combination of sounds and images that define cinematic experience collide with our existences. And if we wish to examine this body that no longer represents motion,7 but moves, we require an analytical approach that no longer reads in retrospect, but listens in real time. At the core of this theory of listening, however, is the interstice, a concept of montage from the second cinema volume of Gilles Deleuze (The Time-Image, 1985) that considers the ways in which the gaps between edited images and sounds can redefine our experience with film.

4 This thesis cites two works from Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia, 1990), which will be abbreviated in citations as AV; and his 2013 article from the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Oxford University), “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Media,” which will be abbreviated in citations as SA. 5 This tendency is exemplified in one of film theory’s early commentaries, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written by Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin just one year after the first film screening. In the essay, Benjamin comments on the dissolution of the aura of art through photography and film’s “mechanical reproduction” of images (5). “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics,” Benjamin writes, unveiling “entirely new formations of the subject” (17). 6 A famous example (among an extending list) can be seen in Laura Mulvey’s “scopophilic gaze,” a term that served as a guiding light for many critiques and commentaries within feminist film theory. This term, from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), aligns the lens of the camera with a male gaze, one that seeks to fetishize the female subject through objectification (Mulvey 6). 7 Some of the earliest films seemed possessed with the task of capturing the motion that characterized their historical context: The Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1896) and Sortie d’Usine (1895) displayed, respectively, static shots of a train’s arrival at a station and a bustling crowd of people leaving a factory (L’Arrivée, Sortie). 4

Deleuze’s work is essential to a consideration of the experience of film, as his work directly considers the internal workings of images as they exist outside the grasp of phenomenological or representational language (Marrati 3); the interstice brings to our attention the ways in which the scream both displays and participates in a generative process set in motion by the violent collision of film’s formal elements. And as shocks, vibrations and rhythms are central to these collisions and their implications, they will also be central to the articulation of this project, sometimes shocking, shaking, or slyly maneuvering the reader through webs of sounds that do not always seek linguistic clarity. Chapter one, sounding off, opens with the arrival of the scream as a sound event in Polisse and introduces the concept of the interstice, establishing first: the necessity to listen to the scream through the terms of the interstice, and next: the problem of the interstice’s grounding in visual language. Chapter two, sounding out, begins to consider how listening to the sound event can lead to a redefinition of the relationship of film and spectator, taking care to link the ways in which Deleuze’s image-oriented language betrays elements of sound and touch and engages Spinozist terms of affect in a way that expands the dimensions of the scream. Chapter three, sound bridge, then develops those betrayed elements of sound, touch and affect to locate direct echoes in Pierre Schaeffer’s language on musical objects, working to highlight the truly trans-sensory understanding of film that arises from the interstice and makes the scream’s event into a music rooted in bodily rhythms—rhythms in which the spectators’ bodies, through listening, also become implicated. In this way, my method adopts in part a Deleuzian approach, avoiding the subject- oriented terms of psychoanalysis and phenomenology to consider the ontological question of the becoming of film and spectator; however, this ontological question expands to become an ethico- affective consideration, providing a platform for addressing the ethical dimensions of listening as a methodological imperative in film analysis: that is, that listening leads to collective experience, for every listening act involves at least two bodies; within the action of that multiplicity lies a potential, and that potential’s increasing vibrations, like the mysterious sound at the door that scatters the rats in La Fontaine’s fable, hints at change.8 Well over one hundred years after the birth of film, at a period during which the silver

8 French philosopher Michel Serres dedicates an entire work to an analysis of this fable in Le Parasite (The Parasite, 1980), in which he begins his ontology of noise through the effect of an unidentifiable sound upon the scene of the rats’ feast (Serres n.p.). 5 screen that once defined cinema palaces has shrunken to fit on our wrists and in our pockets, our eyes may feel overwhelmed by the call to look. However, the recent development of music videos into cinematic productions, evidenced in Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes (2012), Alright (2015) and Lemonade (2016), and the incorporation of experimental moments of sound and scoring in films by Houda Benyamina (Divines, 2016) and Céline Sciamma (Bande des Filles, 2014) suggest that something is happening between sound and image in this moment of film history. The sound events surround us, and they require our ears. Will we listen?

I. sounding off

« Nous voici donc parvenu à cette question finale que nous nous étions pourtant bien promis de ne pas poser ». (Schaeffer 643)9

Brisez le silence. The boy cries out, and the walls begin to resonate. The range of his frequencies arrive in waves that crash and break against his frame, shaking our senses in a hint that something might live within the images we watch, hiding in plain sight. We feel that something’s pulse as the boy’s cry rises, a frantic, interior element we might not have thought to seek and may not want to find has torn its way into our eardrums, shaking our skull until we, too, throb. This rhythm, it whispers, and it tells us a secret our vision might have missed: that our sense of hearing can interpret light’s electric waves; that “in plain sight” may mean more to an ear than we may have expected; and that, then, if we truly wish to discover that “something” that Ousman’s cries begin to uncover, we should start by giving it a good listen. This scene occurs at a central point in Maïwenn’s Polisse, a narrative film released in 2011 that treats a tough subject to screen: the day-to-day challenges of the Belleville BPM (Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, or Child Protection Unit), the police squad tasked with addressing cases of child abuse and molestation. In the scene, a young boy, Ousman, is separated from his mother after the BPM cannot find a shelter where the two could stay together; as Ousman watches his mother walk out the door, he releases a gut-wrenching scream that

9 “And here we are at this final question we had promised not to ask;” as the translated edition of Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects was not yet in circulation at the time of my research and drafting process, the rough translations included in this project are my own (developed with the assistance of my advisor, film and Renaissance scholar Elisabeth Hodges). 7 evolves and renews to stretch over two minutes of the roughly two hour-long film. And then the film continues, cataloguing our brief ten-minute encounter with the young boy as one of the many cases that occupy the BPM’s daily tasks. This is how Polisse progresses: from beginning to end, we follow the various and unconnected cases assigned to the BPM with only the relationships of the officers and a general state of trauma to link each moment to the next. Though Polisse is not a documentary, many of its stylistic elements resemble what we might expect from a nonfiction film: the opening credits remind us that what we are about to see is “inspiré de faits réels” (Polisse);10 the film’s plotline seems to drop in on the lives of its characters, following their quotidian activities and relationships in a way that does not showcase any particular character or plot arc; the handheld and Steadicam cinematography that follows the film’s action and dialogue puts us in mind of a journalistic lens; and, perhaps most interesting, the director herself is a character within the film, playing a photographer named Melissa who accompanies the squad members during their work with a ready camera in hand to record their experiences. The effect of this documentary style might lead one to think that a question of representation is at the foundation of this film, that Polisse uses its wandering plotline to interrogate the ability of the image to represent lived, traumatic experience. Even the characters within the film reinforce this possibility: when Melissa/Maïwenn chooses to photograph the squad members during their break from a mission to locate an abducted infant, the character Fred—played by JoeyStarr, who becomes Melissa’s unexpected love interest in the film— explicitly calls attention to the photographer’s function when he blatantly states that her photos don’t capture the “complexity” of their experiences: “J’ai l’impression qu’elle ne prend pas les bonnes choses” (Polisse).11 And this is not the first time Maïwenn has played such a role in her work; in fact, nearly every project of the director’s filmography (which is small, as the actress has only recently begun leading her own projects) portrays Maïwenn as a central, camera- wielding character within the narrative of the film.12 This trend could suggest that Maïwenn is

10 “Based on real-life cases” (Polisse). 11 “I don’t see her getting the right shots” (Polisse). 12 Maïwenn plays a documentary-directing character in both All About Actresses (Le Bal des Actrices, 2009, in which Maïwenn plays herself) and Pardonnez-moi (2006), which has been described as “semi- autobiographical” (Emory 2). Though the director does not have an on-screen role in her most recent film, My King (Mon Roi, 2015), it seems as if she may have considered it, ultimately deciding against a self- casting because the “energies” of directing and playing the role “were too opposite” (Emory 3). 8 inviting us to question her role as a filmmaker, leading us down a visually written path that shimmers with hints of mechanical reproduction.13 Even if we may be tempted to pursue this path, the young boy’s scream stops us in our tracks. When we find ourselves in the experience of this extending and eventually unintelligible sound, the shock of the sound’s collision with our senses sends away any question of signifier and signified. The terms of representation cannot fully account for what occurs between film and spectator through a two-minute duration of guttural noise; something turns in the shadowy in- between of sound and image as Ousman’s voice reaches the attentive listener, suggesting that the film’s internal components may express something that surpasses its own narrative web of subjects and objects. In order to unpack this internal suggestion, the search for answers must begin in Ousman’s scream. As audience members of the film, we witness the entire process of Ousman and his mother’s separation – from the moment the mother requests to leave her son at the Police Station because she “[doesn’t] want him to be like [her]” (“Je ne veux pas qu’il devienne comme moi”) (Polisse); to the increasingly tense search (without success) for a shelter that would house both a son and mother; and finally, to Ousman’s scream when his mother must leave the room. The pain that erupts from the young boy is not only audible in this final moment; it seems visible as well, for it bleeds into the expressions of the characters who surround him and vacates the normally-packed composition of the frame in a way that breaks the pace of the film’s rapid, action-following montage. It seems as if even the image wishes to escape the sound, jumping from character to character until there is nowhere left to look but the sound’s source. However, nothing about Ousman and his mother’s entrance into the frame heralds the arrival of scream and the shock it inspires. When the sequence begins, the film’s audience finds itself, as usual, among the members of the BPM, and everyone seems to be at ease—if not a bit bored. Even the first line of dialogue seems to wonder after the necessity of the scene, for the character Gabriel comments, “Mais c’est étrange qu’ils nous aient filé la perme un jour ferié,

13 However, the director’s comments suggest that this is likely not the case: an interview with Maïwenn included with the DVD release of the film reveals that her idea for Polisse began first with the frame of the love story that develops between JoeyStarr and her own character in the film (Polisse), a detail that seems unrelated to a larger philosophical question related to the representation of “reality” in film. In an interview with Observer, Maïwenn also expressed a reticence to position herself politically in her directing work: “As much as I can say I’m a victim of misogyny I don’t want to be a spokesperson, I don’t want to be a militant, I don’t want to make documentaries,” she states (Adams 2). 9 non?” (Polisse).14 The visual elements of the scene aren’t immediately attention-grabbing, either: the handheld or Steadicam perspective of the camera gives the impression of a human perspective in its subtle movements and abrupt pans, the montage tends to follow the spectator’s desire to view the person speaking, and the framing of each character as the audience follows his or her mundane conversation does not betray any wild departures from what over one hundred years of motion pictures have led spectators to expect from narrative film. There are no strange superimpositions, no curious filters, no unexpected camera positions; the scene’s visual storytelling unfolds in a way that seems to fit a well-established continuity logic. In fact, the cinematography of Polisse—a film nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and 10 César awards in 2012 (“Polisse” 1)—would not seem to leap from the image in the manner of many of its contemporaries in the last decade of French cinema. The film’s framing does communicate a sense of immediacy in the way that its montage hurries the spectator along in pursuit of its characters, but a spectator accustomed to the more experimental elements of the French arthouse film canon could find it difficult to see how Polisse’s formal elements could enter into the same critical conversations as the long takes of, for example, Amour, a film directed by Michael Haneke that won the Palme d’Or one year after Polisse was nominated, or the innovative three-dimensional camerawork and elliptical editing of Goodbye to Language by Jean-Luc Godard that won the Jury Prize one year after that.15 For many, Polisse’s dialogue- heavy narrative structure may simply seem too thin to unpack, too “mainstream” to merit a close reading. But perhaps, if it is Ousman’s scream that our analysis addresses, we require a methodological approach that departs from “reading.” The continued and evolving waves of the boy’s scream shock our senses through their unexpected duration, and the initial “non” upon which we once grasped for linguistic understanding disintegrates into unintelligible noise as the sound stretches and maintains its elevated volume; in this way, the scream becomes a point of differentiation, as it marks a departure from any representational lines of inquiry that might have been implied by the characters’ comments in the way that it directly appeals to and relies upon the spectator’s sensory perception. Ousman’s scream thus presents a sound event, the radical overturning of representational

14 “It’s strange us being on call on a holiday, isn’t it” (Polisse)? 15 Polisse also won the Jury Prize at Cannes (in 2012). 10 discourse in favor of lived-in collision. When I engage event, I do so in the spirit of Deleuze, who presents the term “both in the sense of statements and the becoming of the world” (Zourabichivili 172): For the sound event as a term is both the naming and the evolving of an affective experience between film and spectator (or rather, listener), wherein sound, through its sustained and repeated appeal to the spectator’s senses, wrests the spectator of the words she might have applied to describe what she hears to herald an experience within and among bodies. The sound event, at its most essential state, does not symbolize, mean, or suggest experience, but rather, IS the direct unfolding of experience in time with the active interaction of the listener. We cannot capture the sound event in just a glimpse, a coup d’oeil—or, should we say, a coup d’oreille, “cut of the ear”—for the sound’s extended duration and repetition calls us instead to feel its rhythm. To observe such a rhythm requires a patience on the part of our sensory perception, a stretching of the short attention span that characterizes our current scrolling media culture16 in a sustained and attentive engagement with a sound. As we cannot give a name to what we hear other than the name that signifies the becoming we cannot yet name, we must forego our desire to hear a meaning in the sound in favor of listening to our interaction with it. In order to empower such a methodological shift with critical depth and ethical necessity, I will need to trace the theoretical roots that brought and continue to bring this listening to life. But before these roots can be traced, we must consider the scream that initiated our search. finding a pulse From a cinematographic standpoint, the framing and montage that characterize the sequence of the scream do not shock the spectator: from the moment the scene begins, the audience follows a series of conversations between Baloo (the squad leader), Ousman’s mother, Fred and the other members of the BPM almost as a bystander, accompanying the characters in the various rooms in which the sequence takes place. This is demonstrated through the proximity of the handheld lens that captures the events: most of the decisions in camera movement and montage work to follow the action and dialogue that motivate the sequence, remaining no closer

16 In one 2014 study published in Time, it was found that the majority of web users (55%) dedicates less than 15 seconds of their active attention to a given webpage (Haile 3). Though a more recent study published in i-Perception shows an increase in this attention span when it comes to time spent observing a work of art at the museum (a mean viewing time of just under 33 seconds, a higher average than observed in a lab setting (Carbon 1)), the study takes care to note the importance of social setting upon this result: “In a very real sense, the museum context can provide a situation of great sociality” (Carbon 13). 11 than a medium-close framing. This fast-paced framing holds true for much of Polisse, suggesting almost a monotony to the traumas that the BPM witnesses with each new case.17 But then, Ousman screams, bringing this pace to a screeching halt. The scream breaks the perpetual motion of the sequence’s cinematography, for it offers the lens neither dialogue nor a variation in action to follow. Even if the camera searches for a response from the characters as the montage jumps to follow their anxious expressions, the lens is ultimately forced to watch a sound, calling the spectator to become a listener. By enacting this radical shift in the pace of the film and requiring that the spectator engage more than just the eye in her analysis of the scene, the scream marks itself a sound event. To better understand its resonance, then, we must shift our analysis away from cinematography to study how the scene evolves in sound, closing the eye so as to better open the ear. Within the sonic environment of the scene that surrounds Ousman’s scream, the evidence of an unsteadily rising energy presents itself to the ear. Though the initial conversation between Baloo and Ousman’s mother does not surpass the volume of a mundane interaction and thus may not catch the listener’s attention (save for a few harsh grammatical corrections on Baloo’s part), when Baloo calls the squad to action, a well-defined sonic shift occurs: suddenly, there is no sound, and then, in what feels like a harsh jump forward in film time and space, the sound editing carries the listener into the hum of an office at work. More than one person is on the phone, and even the characters can’t hear each other effectively due to the din – an environment emphasized by the fact that one of the characters even repeats his line word for word. The din rises in both volume and pitch, and arguments, interruptions, insults begin to cut into the scene. The fluctuation of this commotion continues; moments of silence arrive unheralded upon the scene, and the conversation volume varies from overlapping tirades to broken whispers. Any sense of time and space is established by the introduction of new voices, the reappearance or disappearance of specific ambient environments (the shuffling of papers and hum of voices on the phone, for example), and the unexpected eruptions of silence in the string of surging commotion. From these fluctuations in sound, the listener is exposed to an audible, uneasy energy that amplifies with every shift in soundscape; whether the voices shout, whisper, or go silent, each step forward into a new or evolved sonic environment increases the anxiety

17 In fact, it is nearly impossible to predict the climax that ends the film, as the events continue in this constantly renewing trend of trauma until one of the characters unexpectedly ends her life (and the film) by leaping from a window of the BPM (Polisse). 12 embedded within the sequence. Something tosses and turns in the space of each break, and it feels like that something yearns to dance its presence on the insides of the listener’s closed eyelids. As soon as Baloo must report the BPM’s inability to find a shelter for the son and mother, the pent-up potential of that anxious energy collides into the listener’s eardrums, rushing forth through the sound event of Ousman’s scream. It begins in a single “Non” (“No”) that grows in fervor to drown out each and every attempt from the squad members to calm him down; it rises, falls, restarts, and endures, slicing into the irregular fluctuations that had previously characterized the scene. When the film returns to a dialogue-filled environment in the sequence that follows, the din does not feel as monotonous, for it now stands out as a sonic contrast to the scream. In this way, the duration of the scream not only strengthens the listener’s perception of the din that preceded it, but it enhances the listener’s awareness of the fluctuations in sonic pace that characterize the audiovisual structure of Polisse in its entirety. Other sound events within the film begin to emerge: for example, when unexpected soul music18 overtakes the soundtrack as the BPM celebrates the survival of an abducted infant, or when the volume and intensity of an argument between two officers, Iris and Nadine, requires the intervention of every character on (and off) the screen (Polisse), the listener is made aware of a break in montage pace and is forced into a state of extended listening. It is as if each of these events participates in the next event’s becoming, serving as a reset for the perpetual motion of chatter and action that surrounds them. Through the resonances of these sound events, it becomes clear that the exercise of sonic analysis brings out a key formal element to understanding the affective pull and critical depth of Ousman’s scream: rhythm. The pace of the scene that surrounds it is not evenly measured (like the ¾ time of a classical waltz), but it nevertheless pulses with a palpable energy. When the listener opens her eyes and experiences the scene with a newfound awareness of this rhythm, the visual thresholds within the images she sees amplify the variations in the sounds she hears; not only does she cross a temporal and spatial threshold each time the image cuts to a new space, but she finds the overall mise-en-scène of the BPM to be filled with walls, windows, and screens. The partitions of cubicles separate each squad member, doors and windows lead the listener in and out of different spaces within the office, and—most notably—Ousman and his mother are

18 “Stand on the Word” by the Joubert Singers (1985). 13 sequestered in a different room while they wait for the word from Baloo. The visual breaks of these thresholds in space suggest isolation, delimitation, trapping the characters in a way that emphasizes their inability to influence the situation that surrounds them (as evidenced in the squad’s inability to help the family). The break introduced by the sound event, however, leads past of this framework of delimitation, for it attracts the listener’s attention instead to rhythms that link moments of sonic differentiation. In listening to the scream, the audience member experiences the energies that run throughout the film as a product of sound’s affective vibrations. This is neither an energy that belongs to the characters nor a language to be decoded, but is rather the becoming of film itself. and In the sound event, we hear the importance of sound in film as its waves penetrate the images we watch: while the scream may announce a break in the regular rhythm of dialogue that had preceded Ousman’s sequence, it also forms a bridge. This bridge brings together the characters through a collective pain that registers on each squad member’s face, but more important, it reveals the larger filmic body that supports the scream’s formal violence. Its audiovisual shock resonates with an energy that reaches our senses, and though we may remind ourselves that sound and image belong to separate departments in the cinema, we cannot ignore the sonic attack’s synesthetic suggestion: that it is through our attention to the scream and its resonance that we can begin to witness the expanse of the film in its rhythmic becoming, a becoming that ultimately implicates our presence. And as we listen through this film that is now music, we hear the call of an outside that language cannot yet conceive; as sound theorist Marie Thompson writes, “there is always something more to the scream than what we perceive of it” (Sound 148). The scream calls us away from our signs and into our senses, urging us to feel the immanence of collective experience. It will be the effort of this thesis to trace the ways in which the sound event marked by Ousman’s scream can carry the spectator to this yet-unnamed “outside,” addressing how film might be thought of in terms of bodies, how those bodies collide in sound, and how the multiplicity of those collisions suggests a music. To begin, we shall seek theoretical definitions, considering the ways in which the intricacies of these terms resonate across disciplines. Deleuze provides a theoretical framework through which we might analyze the bodily,

14 aural and musical dimensions of Ousman’s scream: the interstice. This term participates in the Deleuzian cinema project, a theoretical effort to provide an analysis of the ways film works within itself; it is “une taxonomie des images et des signes”19 through its intense study of theoretical and creative movements in film. Deleuze produced two cinema volumes as a result of this study (Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement, 1983; and Cinema 2: L’image-temps, 1985); it is in the second volume, in a chapter called “La Pensée et le cinéma” (“Thought and cinema”), that we find the interstice. In the interstice, Deleuze argues that we no longer witness merely the “in-between” spaces that link images in montage—the process of cutting and organizing images and sounds into cohesive (or disjunctive) sequences—but we see instead how each of those in-between spaces becomes (in modern cinema) what he refers to as and (235): “Il ne s’agit plus de suivre une chaîne d’images, même par-dessus des vides, mais de sortir de la chaîne ou de l’association… C’est la méthode du ENTRE, ‘entre deux images,’ qui conjure tout cinema de l’Un. C’est la méthode du ET, ‘ceci et puis cela,’ qui conjure tout cinéma de l’Être = est. Entre deux actions, entre deux affections, entre deux perceptions, entre deux images visuelles, entre deux images sonores, entre le sonore et le visuel: faire voir l’indiscernable, c’est-à-dire la frontière (‘Six fois deux”). Le tout subit une mutation, parce qu’il a cessé d’être l’Un-être, pour devenir le “et” constitutif des choses, l’entre-deux consitutif des images” (235, my emphasis).20

By engaging with Deleuze and bringing his language into conversation with a metaphor that thinks the sound event of Ousman’s scream in terms of bodies in collision, I wish to argue that the interstice opens up a space for understanding how the spectator may play a more active role in his, her or their relationship with film. In the interstitial conception of montage, each break does more than link one image to the next in an unending cycle of storytelling and meaning-making; it also serves to expose a space in which we can finally catch the traces of an internal film logic, a logic that also reveals the affective organization of the world around us. The interstice thus marks both a border and a bridge; what once was a means to meaning-making (a link in montage) is now a catalyst to the associative logic of “organic” film structure proposed

19 “…a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs” (xvi) 20 “It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or association… It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images,’ which does away with all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all the cinema of Being = Is. Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the invisible, that is the frontier, visible (Six fois deux). The whole undergoes a mutation, because it ceases to be the One-Being, in order to become the constitutive ‘and’ of things, the constitutive between-two of images” (180). 15 by Sergei Eisenstien, wherein the oppositions of each image contribute to a poetic whole, a larger “interior monologue” (IT 207-208). When we follow Deleuze and consider the dimensions of each break in montage as and, we begin to understand the ways in which a single sequence in film does not progress in a linear fashion, as a revolving film reel or digital timeline may suggest, but rather in a continuously expanding and contracting plane of layers. Through these layers, one and does not simply gesture to that which immediately preceded and will soon follow; it illuminates the broader terms of the film in its entirety so as to consider what lies beyond. Each and within a film may stand alone or refer to any other, for all ands participate in an in-between logic unique to the terms of montage; it is a space of the cinema, in a realm apart from that of its viewers until the moment it shocks us into active participation. The ands are the film; the film is and. Although Deleuze is keen to recognize that sound plays a role in the formation of the interstice, the language that he uses to bring this role to life does not depart from the realm of the visual. As he describes the possibilities of interstice, he adds “… entre deux images visuelles, entre deux images sonores, entre le sonore et le visuel,”21 noting that the interstice acts to “faire voir l’indiscernable; c’est-à-dire la frontière” (235).22 Deleuze may be recognizing in this moment that we can also hear the interstice through the ways in which separate sounds collide and interact with their visual backdrops, but his language does not stray far from a few key words: image (image), visuel(le) (visual), and voir (to see). trying not to stare Deleuze’s reliance on the term image is likely the consequence of his theory’s relationship with the work of Henri Bergson, a French philosopher from whom much of the theoretical foundations of Cinema 1 and 2 stem (IM 7). Though I shall describe in greater detail this relationship and its links to time and rhythm in the chapter that follows, it is important to recognize here that Bergon’s philosophy in his 1896 work Matière et Mémoire begins by defining all objects in the world as images. He writes, “… pour le sens commun, l’objet existe en lui-même et, d’autre part, l’objet est, en lui-même, pittoresque comme nous l’apercevons:

21 “…between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual” (180) 22 “make the invisible, that is the frontier, visible” (180) 16 c’est une image, mais une image qui existe en soi” (7-8).23 After this moment, the image becomes the term around which Bergson’s theory of body and mind revolves, and each of the essay’s four chapters pursues a different facet of the term—the term image, in fact, is ever- present in each chapter’s title.24 With this link in mind, it seems only fitting that Deleuze’s image-based cinema theory would find inspiration in Bergson’s work. And this link is hardly implicit –in the first moments of the first chapter of his first Cinema volume, Deleuze introduces his understanding of the cinematographic image through Bergon’s theories on movement and time, a choice that announces the tie of his work to the visual perception that is so predominant in Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire. Subsequently, the term image holds just as strong a presence in the language of Deleuze’s chapters and the titles of his books; after all, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 differentiate themselves through their exploration of different kinds of images: L’image- mouvement (the movement-image) and L’image-temps (the time-image). As logical a progression as this may seem, this visual language echoes an ages-old problem in film theory and criticism: in upholding cinematography as a central focus in the practice of film analysis, film theory privileges vision. This is beginning to change in recent decades: among others, Laura U. Marks proposes haptic visuality to emphasize the inherently tactile aspect of a spectator’s contact with a film (xi) in the appropriately titled The Skin of the Film (2000); professor Tarja Laine theorizes a cinematic emotion in Feeling Cinema (2011) by considering through phenomenology “how the film directs our attention toward what cannot be seen, that which can only be detected by means of intersubjective sharing of experience” (4); Chion underscores in Audio-vision: Sound on Screen the ways in which sound contributes to and complicates the film image’s signifying system, stating, “Sound is the rubber stamp that marks the image with the seal of instantaneity” (61). The world of multisensory film theory is not only present, then, but it continues to expand; however, the terms in which such theories evolve often remain somehow linked to terms of the image, as sound theorist Jonathan Sterne describes in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins

23 “For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: the image it is, but a self-existing image” (xii). 24 “De la séléction des images pour la représentation. – Le Role du corps” (Bergson 13, my emphasis); “De la reconnaissance des images. La mémoire et le cerveau” (60); “De la survivance des images. La mémoire et l’esprit” (102); and “De la délimitation et de la fixation des images. Perception et matière. Âme et corps” (136). 17 of Sound Reproduction (2003), a volume that follows the cultural history surrounding sound reproduction’s development. “While visual experience has a well-developed metalanguage, sound experience does not,” he writes, “We have abstract words to describe color, texture, shape, direction, shading, and so forth. Most of the language to describe elements of auditory phenomena is metaphoric” (Sterne 94). It would seem that a turn away from the image sends one into the void of a metalinguistic lacuna. Perhaps unexpectedly, the terms of Deleuze’s interstice respond to this lacuna, but they do so in understated echoes. It will become our task to more boldly pronounce and link these echoes to established principles that pertain to affect and sound. For although Deleuze makes clear that he may not always mean “image” in the strictly visual sense of the term and engages the idea more so as it relates to perception—as we observe in the curious term, “images sonores,” within his description of the interstice (IT 235), and his subsequent example of disjunctive sound’s ability to dissolve our conception of a unified, off-screen space (ibid.)—the language of his work in Cinema 1 and 2 nevertheless relies heavily upon visually-oriented metaphors and analyses to communicate its arguments. As Deleuze explains the interstice, he suggests that our misunderstanding of his term’s dimensions is “…peut-être la preuve que nous ne sommes pas encore mûrs pour une veritable ‘lecture’ de l’image visuelle” (234).25 Our potential ignorance is thus the product of an under-developed ability to read visual images; and while Deleuze explicitly attaches cinema “literality” to both image and sound in his earlier writing (IT 34), we cannot deny that the normative conception of “literal” tends more toward its root in the “letter,” “smeared on parchment” (Skeat 252), linking the action of reading to vision in a way that your eyes now illustrate. To the image-oriented echo of his suggestion of our illiteracy, I respond: perhaps our inability to consider the dimensions hidden within the interstice stems from the fact that we have yet to fully confront the audio that rounds out the visual in the media we “read.” As we proceed forth in our effort to understand the effect of Ousman’s scream on our relationship to film, let us embrace our illiteracy as it pertains to the sound event and interstice and follow shocks, vibrations and rhythms in place of signs.

25 “But this is perhaps proof that we are not yet ready for a true ‘reading’ of the visual image” (179). 18

ii. sounding out

examining bodies In one long scream, it would seem, Ousman not only throws the spectator into shock, but he sends a history of philosophical terms and debates hurtling into collision. The questions that result from a reiteration of these terms and propositions will guide the theoretical inquiry of this chapter. We began with a scream, experiencing the shock of a sound as it stretched over a two minute-long segment of Maïwenn’s Polisse. Our sonic analysis of the scene, which considered as its focus the sound event that characterized the sequence, drew out the development of an irregular but palpable energy within and among the sounds, a kind of rhythm emphasized by the event—and through the duration—of Ousman’s scream. This sudden rupture and the shock it inspired not only announced sound’s influence upon image in the way that the sound seemed to affect the characters and montage, but its duration revealed the rhythms of the larger filmic body in which the sound was implicated. This understanding gave way to two considerations: first, that the spectator’s affective experience with the scream and its act to gesture toward (and outside) a larger, filmic body necessitates a framing of the sound that thinks in terms of bodily collision; second, that Deleuze’s work on the movement-image and the time-image in cinema, especially as it relates to montage and the interstice, provides crucial philosophical grounding for such an approach. However, as the titles of Deleuze’s cinema works alone suggest, this experiment cannot rely

19 entirely upon one thinker for its terms; the menace of image- and representation-oriented language looms, threatening to distract from the transitive, in-between state of relations that I aim to bring to life. The current task of this thesis, then, is to address the ways in which Deleuze’s language can be thought in terms of bodies and sound, all in the effort to make more evident the ethical dimensions of our relationship with film. This leads us to a series of important questions, questions which it will become my goal to answer. In what ways can a scream resonate with a theoretical depth normally attached to images? How is a scream also an interstice, as Deleuze understands it, and how can we begin to unpack that interstice in terms that listen to bodily collisions? Finally, how can such a specific rethinking amplify the density of our relationship with film? To begin to address these inquiries, we require both a closer look at the dimensions of Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image—paying particular attention to the ways in which the interstice complicates the becoming of film—as well as a definition of affect and affection that will give philosophical weight to framing film as body. For these terms, I shall rely primarily upon the work of Spinoza as it is presented in Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970), a work that offers a glossary of the Baroque philosopher’s thoughts as they are expressed in his Ethics (1677). By favoring the immanence of affective relations over the semantics of signifier and signified, I plan to demonstrate the interplay of time, space, and spectator in film. getting spiritual In order to address how Ousman’s scream interacts with the spectator, I must (again) take us back to the shock that initiated this inquiry. I do so not only to register the effect of such a long scream upon the spectator’s sensory perception, but to recognize that shock becomes an essential term for Deleuze as he describes the ways in which the movement-images of cinema come into contact with spectators. It is important here to note that Deleuze engages the term movement-image to emphasize the inherent internal workings of film images as they vibrate in time and space (IM 33); to Deleuze, images in the cinema are automatically in motion, animated with dynamics of perception, affection and action that we experience in our interaction with them but do not cause in our act of perceiving (IM 95-96). Though he dedicates his entire first cinema volume to an explanation of the dimensions of the movement-image, the term and its automatic function resurface near the conclusion of his second volume in a chapter entitled “Le

20 pensée et le cinéma" (“Thought and Cinema”); it is also in this chapter that we find the interstice. When Deleuze begins his quick review of the movement-image, he does so first in order to emphasize that it is the automatic nature of the film image’s movement that shocks our thought process, “communiqu[e] aux cortex ses vibrations, touch[e] directement le système nerveux et cerebral” (IT 203).26 The violence of the shock draws out the spiritual automaton in us, a term Deleuze draws from Spinoza,27 relating us to the image through a reverberating evolution of thought and affect; this noochoc, as he calls it (IT 204), “forces” the mind to think, to arrive at the “JE PENSE cinématographique: le tout comme sujet” (IT 205-206).28 In this way, the effect of noochoc leads the mind of the spiritual automaton to arrive at an idea of the movement-image as its own subject and being, partaking in the larger whole of the film. The shocking image attacks our senses, and in our experience of the shock, we perceive the larger body in which the image participates. This is the movement from percept to concept, the first effect of noochoc on the spectator (IT 205). In this brief description of noochoc, the reader may begin to note a few strong hints of representational language: would it not seem as if this movement from percept to concept resembles synecdoche, in which the part (here, the noochoc) comes to gesture to the whole (the film), leading to an imagining of “le tout comme sujet,” “the whole as subject” (IT 206, 158, my emphasis)? It is true that the spiritual automaton may seem to arrive at a perception of the larger body of the film through a system of poetic signification, developing an initial idea of the body that just affected her through her memory’s imagination, however: this initial concept of film is also the product of a “passion,” that is, an “inadequate idea” developed in retrospect on the part of the spiritual automaton as a product of being acted upon (S 27) that does not fully grasp the experience of the affection itself.29 The language of this first movement of noochoc, then, though helpful in facilitating a discussion that brings us closer to film affection, is insufficient;

26 “communicat[es] vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” (156) 27 As Deleuze describes in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, it is from the spiritual automaton that “ideas” issue; however, these “ideas” or “signs” are indexical in nature, “indicating” the state of the affected body through the engagement of memory and imagination but not “expressing the essence of the internal body” (74). For this reason and through its use of signs, the ideas developed by the spiritual automaton are inadequate to communicate the affect her body undergoes, leading to the reactionary development of “abstractions, fictions” within her mind (Spinoza calls such abstractions “passions,” which I shall soon discuss in greater depth) (ibid). 28 “I THINK: the whole as subject” (158) 29 Ref.: note 26. 21 our analysis must push further, listening as best we can to the scream as we live through our collision with its body. And in the same moment, the reader cannot ignore the links to sound and the body in the language of the movement-image’s description, even if these links are never brought to light by Deleuze himself: the image “vibrates,” an action that evokes both a sound and a bodily sensation; and it also “directly touches” the nervous system (IT 203, my emphasis), a gesture that leaves no room to doubt that the movement-image is an acting body, capable of affecting—directly—the bodies into which it collides. Through this linguistic framing that synesthetically grants an image both sonic and tactile qualities, the space for a resonant film body begins to open. The scream not only shocks the body of the film, actively colliding into the rhythm of the sound mixing and montage and exposing the ways in which its own resonance evolves in space and time, but its immediate violence catches the spectator in perceptive transit, suspending her in the shock of its initial attack and leaving her aloft until she has a chance to register what has just occurred. The spectator cannot see what she experiences in this shock, for she is left to feel; and what she undergoes is feeling itself, a kind of affective buffering in which the body’s response is yet-to- come but nevertheless on-its-way. The spectator-turned-listener is now in-between, encountering a potential as a product of bodily relations. Deleuze also has a term for this phenomenon, however linked it may still be to visual language: the affection-image. The affection-image is also an element of the movement-image, occurring between what he terms—not surprisingly—the perception-image and the action-image. While an entire chapter (or book) could be dedicated to peeling back the complex layers of these terms and their relationships to each other (and to the spectator), I shall focus our search upon Deleuze’s definition of the affection-image in Cinema 1 as an expression of a potential (139). Citing Charles Sanders Peirce’s Priméité (“Firstness”) as a way to understand his term (and also why it is so difficult to seize the affection-image in language), Deleuze writes, “La Priméité, c’est donc la catégorie du Possible: …elle exprime le possible, sans l’actualiser” (IM 139).30 Later, he equates the affection-image to this description, stating, “Or l’image-affection n’est rien d’autre: c’est la qualité ou la puissance, c’est la potentialité considérée pour elle-même

30 “Firstness is thus the category of the Possible… it expresses the possible without actualising it” (98) 22 en tant qu’exprimée” (ibid.).31 Within the affection-image resides a potential that catches our affective response as it is evolving in lived time. Film scholar Anna Powell elaborates: “The affection-image ‘is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth strips our sensory-motor capacities’. As the sensory-motor function is suspended or breaks down, deeper insight occurs” (119). Under the influence of the affection-image—or, in our case, the shock of the sound event—we may not be able to adequately verbalize the experience we undergo as spiritual automata, as we have not yet had the time to fully process it. However, as Powell suggests, this sensory buffering leads us elsewhere by way of the body, through the force of affect. missing intensities The affection-image is hardly the only place in which affect announces its importance in Deleuze’s cinema theory, however; in fact, in Deleuze’s breakdown of noochoc, affect characterizes the second movement of the spiritual automaton-film exchange. The philosopher describes that, in this moment, the spectator’s thought as she processes the movement-image returns from concept to affect, considering no longer the larger body of the film, but rather the multitude of interactions that grant it force (IT 206): “Le tout n’est plus le logos qui unifie les parties, mais l’ivresse, le pathos qui baigne et se répand en elles” (IT 207).32 From the enlightenment that was its realization of the film’s body, the spectator’s mind hurtles into disorientation, the “drunkenness” of the body’s inner machinations as they collide into each other. And we, as spectators, grope in this darkness after nothing other than a feeling, an affective experience we cannot name but nevertheless undergo in our interaction with the image. Deleuze continues to describe that this second movement, from concept to affect, is inherently implicated in the first movement (from percept to concept), but in the spiritual automaton’s perception of the parts, she suddenly cannot determine which element of the film she perceived first – its “tout,” the all-encompassing whole of the film, its body; or the “images agitéees, brassées” (IT 206-207)33 that bring about that whole’s becoming, the expanse of

31 “Now, this is exactly what the affection-image is: it is quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as expressed” (ibid.) 32 “The whole is no longer the logos which unifies the parts, but the drunkenness, the pathos which bathes them and spreads out in them” (159) 33 “the agitated, mixed-up images” (ibid.) 23 audiovisual parts that alter and shift with every moment. We begin to ask ourselves: is it possible to perceive the parts without also perceiving the body within which those parts expand and contract? When the spectator experiences the violence of noochoc, does she not also experience the body in shock that develops behind it, and when she has arrived at a perception of that body, does the violence of the collisions through which that body functions not become more shocking, and do we, the larger body of spectators, not also then wonder how we might collectively—and adequately—recover? Ousman and his scream offers its example: as the sound rips into the audiovisual environment that surrounds him, we become more aware of the way in which his sound participates in the greater corpus of the film, bringing out the rhythms established by the rapid cuts and fluctuating BPM din that preceded him. We perceive the tout in the shock of the scream; and in the same instant (and perhaps before, though we shall never know), we experience the shock’s affect and discover the violence that becomes the tout. We fumble about in this drunken lucidity, enlightened by the incoherence of colliding screams and commotion and disoriented by the body, the “musique visuelle” (IT 207)34 that springs forth from the noise. What is peculiar about Deleuze’s engagement of affect in this moment is its short lifespan; though he essentially blasts open our understanding of film experience as not just a movement toward clarity, but an adventure into the noise that would confound that knowledge, he spends only a few pages in description and exemplification. “Il s’agit de redonner au processus intellectuel sa ‘plénitude émotionnelle,’ ou sa ‘passion,’” he writes (IT 206);35 yet the reader has but three pages to cover the expanse of the emotional plenitude he engages. Perhaps it is the thinker’s intention to leave his readers in a state of incoherence, intoxicated by the speed of his theoretical progression; however, as this experiment with the scream places affect at the center of its study, this argument must inhabit the overwhelming relations of his language in an effort to better perceive its dimensions. We cannot close our ears to Ousman’s scream, after all. It is clear from both Deleuze’s footnotes and in-line citations that he draws most of his inspiration for this second, concept-to-affect movement from the work of Eisenstein in Film Form (1949); however rapid his mention of the Soviet filmmaker’s theory and creative work may be in this passage, the French philosopher leaves his readers enough evidence to trace the

34 “visual music” (159) 35 “It is a matter of giving ‘emotional fullness’ or ‘passion’ back to the image” (158) 24 moment of affect he evokes to Eisenstein’s language on the “intellectual cinema” theory. This theoretical “ne plus ultra,” as posited by theorists studying silent Soviet cinema, “set before it the task of ‘restoring emotional fullness to the intellectual process’… [offering] a broad, perhaps even a too broad, generalization of a series of possibilities of expression placed at our disposal by the methods of montage and its combinations” (Eisenstein 125, my emphasis). Such a focus, one that looks through the mediated content of film to study the ways in which the mediation itself unfolds, in abstraction from the whole to which it contributes, carries the spectator to “a limit, reductio ad paradox” in which the “fullness” that presents itself for discovery would seem to be the greater mystery of cinematographic expression (ibid.). To truly perceive such fullness, then, would not be to perceive a specific, communicable emotion or effect in cinema, but rather the affective means through which cinema can communicate, means that come across in the spectator’s experience with film but cannot be fully brought across in the language she with which she is left to describe them. This resonance in “emotional fullness” makes clear that Deleuze draws theoretical inspiration from Eisenstein in this moment of Cinema 2, but the implications of such an allusion pose a larger and more perturbing question, one that Eisenstein pronounces outright (125): if the “ultimate”, ne plus ultra experience with cinema that we pursue in our exploration of film affection brings us to a paradox, in which the crux of what we can perceive is the means to our subsequent perception—ultimately, experiencing experience experiencing—why bother? Why perform such perceptive gymnastics, why leap through these flaming hoops of theoretical echoes, if the goal toward which we work is total disorientation, feeling the vibrations of intensities we cannot pin down in language? Both Eisenstein and Deleuze hazard a response to this question; but if we wish to raise the stakes of such an inquiry and its response to include the ethical and political dimensions that make that inquiry matter, we need to consider yet another echo in Deleuze’s language, one that explicitly links his theory to bodies in motion. limits “Il s’agit de redonner au processus intellectuel,” Deleuze writes, “sa ‘plénitude émotionnelle,’ ou sa ‘passion’” (IT 206).36 The mystery surrounding emotional fullness may

36 “It is a matter of giving ‘emotional fullness’ or ‘passion’ back to the image” (158). 25 have lead us to Eisenstein, but another thinker calls out to us in the use of “passion,” a thinker who is never explicitly named throughout the chapter but nevertheless interacts with Deleuze’s theory of cinema: Spinoza.37 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970), Deleuze provides us with an overview of terms proposed in Spinoza’s philosophical theory, and in particular, his Ethics (1677). In the Ethics, experience is defined through the relations between bodies, that is, the way one body—which does not only mean the human body, but also one idea or thing capable of acting upon another— both acts upon and is acted upon by the bodies around it (S 19). These relations or interactions between bodies, understood as affections, give way to what Spinoza calls “passions” in the mind of the affected spiritual automaton; as I have prefaced earlier in this thesis, these “passions,” however related they may be to the direct interaction of bodies, only serve to gesture toward the perceived influence of bodies upon each other, and are therefore an inadequate response to the ethical task of seeking “the material of the idea… not in a representative content [as in the passion’s indication] but in an expressive content” (S 74). In this way, Spinoza’s passion rounds out Eisenstein’s emotional fullness, for both terms confront a limit in the capacity of the spectator (or spiritual automaton) to effectively express her experience with film. Thinking of these terms as they echo from Deleuze’s cinema work, the description of the movement of our thought from concept to affect as we experience film vibrates with even fuller relational intensity: it becomes apparent that Deleuze seeks to highlight not a harmonic alignment of cinematic forms that leads to perceptive clarity in the mind of the spectator, but instead a wild layering of affective collisions that exposes the limits of our language of perception. We return affect to film in an effort to recognize its relational becoming, feeling the resonance of its shifting states because we, too are acted upon by the bodies of its parts, even if our passions are insufficient to describe their effects. When Ousman screams, his voice does not just tear into the sounds and images around him; it collides into our own experience and announces the inadequacy of our analytical terms, challenging our states to pass into something else—something, perhaps, greater.

37 Not only did this 17th century philosopher theorize the terms of affect that we wish to consider in our experience with Ousman’s scream and Deleuze’s theory, but his theories also inspired multiple books of close reading (centuries later) from Deleuze himself: Spinoza: Philosophie Pratique (studied in this thesis and published originally in French in 1970) and Spinoza et le Problème de l’Expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968). 26

By understanding the interrelated nature of the film’s formal elements as constantly shifting and colliding parts of a larger body, we find a way to understand Deleuze’s third and final movement in the film-spiritual automaton interaction. For in this final movement of thought, the pensée-action, we consider “le rapport de l’homme et du monde:” the way in which we ourselves participate in a greater body, our own existences becoming the colliding parts of the body that make up the cinema audience (IT 210-211). Suddenly, it is we who are the movement-images, the shifting parts within the sprawling body of Nature, a shock in a film to which we hadn’t realized we were contributing until we collided into the echo of our becoming in audiovisual material. The shock of the scream’s violence has carried us from the Pensée- critique that helped us hear film’s larger body, through the disorientation of the Pensée- hypnotique that surrounded us in internal reverberation, to leave us at the Pensée-action (IT 212), the thought that leads us to our own vibrational contribution to the greater body of the world around us. If we were to leave our understanding of Ousman’s scream, Deleuze’s image, and our own participation in film at the conclusion of this thought circuit, however, we would neglect a crucial contributing factor to the sound event, the Deleuzian film image, affect, and their implications: time. in-between When Deleuze guides us through Spinoza’s terms in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, we hear the echo of a key word in the thinker’s descriptions of affection and affect: duration. The former term, affection, considers bodies in collision, “not separable from the duration that attaches them to the previous state and makes them tend toward the next state” (48-49); the latter term, affect, is the transition of the states of bodies during these collisions, implying “an image or idea”, though “not confined to the image or idea; it is of another nature, being purely transitive, and not indicative or representative, since it is experienced in a lived duration that involves the difference between two states” (S 49). Affect embeds itself within affection, the latter allowing the former’s lived transition. And, as the echo of “duration” in the definitions of affect and affection declares, both terms are inextricably linked to time, as they unravel in time, coming from a moment in time to arrive at and unfold within another, ricocheting through the chaos of lived experience. Under such conditions, the affected body would appear to be always in transit,

27 tending toward a new state and gesturing toward a former state with every successive encounter. In agreement with trends in resonance we have heard thus far, this inherent link to time presents itself in Deleuze’s writing on cinema as well; in fact, the exact term that establishes the grounding element of affect and affection—duration, or durée—is also the essential component of cinema images in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.38 To Deleuze, montage is at the center of understanding film’s tout, and at the center of montage is time: “Ce qui revient au montage, …c’est l’image indirecte du temps, de la durée” (IM 47).39 This understanding of durée comes from Bergson, who defines the term in Matière et Mémoire (1896) as a kind of indivisible immensity; in the expanse of the durée, “[l]a matière se résout ainsi en ébranlements sans nombre, tous liés dans une continuité ininterrompue, tous solidaires entre eux, et qui courent en tous sens comme autant de frissons” (Bergson 159).40 In this definition, the ricocheting bodies of Spinoza’s terms come to life, vibrating with what sounds like an electric energy, with neither chronological order nor spatial specificity, yet inherently linked to time and space as their condition of existence. Deleuze scholar Ronald Bogue addresses this seemingly paradoxical situation with a nuance that brings us back to the body, writing that the “vibrational whole” of Bergon’s durée “contracts to form the fixed and discrete entities of the spatial world and dilates to form the temporal dimension of a universal past surging through the present and into the future” (3). The metaphor of expansion and contraction more explicitly incorporates movement and thresholds into an understanding of the durée, and these elements make all the more apparent the importance of the durée to Deleuze’s images. Space concretizes the movement-image, helping the spectator to interact with the movement-image on a relational plane which then expands through montage infinitely outward in a layered continuum of past, present and future through time. In this way, the spectator’s interaction with film images—or sounds, as we consider in the

38 Deleuze’s image-cristal, one of the most central terms to his second cinema volume, works through an idea of time as it relates to the “virtual” and “actual” dimensions of the film image (IT 107); for more, ref: “Les cristaux de temps” (IT 92-128). 39 “What amounts to montage… is the indirect image of time, of duration” (29). 40 “Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body” (276)

28 event of Ousman’s scream—evolves on what Deleuze terms a “plane of immanence,”41 a map made up of affective intensities as they collide and overlap in time and space (Powell 20). Applying this to our understanding of the relationship between film and spectator under noochoc, the Pensée-critique (the movement from percept to concept) would occur in space; the Pensée-action (linking man to world and image to film) would occur in time; this leaves the Pensée-hypnotique, that which lends affective density to the film and allows the spectator to realize the collisions of its separate images, aloft in transit. We have just perceived the body of the film through its shock to our senses, though we have yet to arrive at an understanding of how we might relate to that body and its parts; we have heard how the violence of Ousman’s scream reveals the formal collisions within Polisse, though we do not yet understand the ways in which we are implicated in their resonance. And so here we are, caught up in the raw material of affection in its becoming, experiencing the act of expression as its resonance ripples through our being-affected bodies. We are in-between, living the duration, so to speak. So to speak: for the language that would attempt to represent this experience is always already inadequate. This is because, as this in-transit moment endures for two minutes, we arrive at the interstice, the and from our point of entry that is now leading us to an outside from within. We are not experiencing the “in-between” that merely links a before to an after and a larger body, as might have been the case in early cinema;42 now, we are attempting to discern “l’indiscernable, c’est-à-dire la frontière” (IT 235).43 By colliding with this glimpse of filmic becoming, we have arrived at a threshold, a limit; there is something we do not know embedded in our affective experience, demonstrating to us that there is an outside to our understanding, an unfamiliar within us as a result of an intimate relation with another body,44 and it resonates to us from the epicenter of that collision, that image, that scream: the interstice. The becoming of affect vibrates before and with our eyes and ears, and we would say that we “cannot look away,” but the truth of the matter is that we cannot really see it. We are experiencing expression, living the duration of and, finally in contact with time. For, as Deleuze

41 A term that Deleuze also links to Spinozist philosophy in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. He writes, “Spinoza’s ethics have nothing to do with morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of immanence” (S 125). 42 Deleuze uses Eisenstein’s film and theory as an example of this concept (IT 237). 43 “…the invisible, that is the frontier” (180). 44 Deleuze references French author and theorist Maurice Blanchot in relation to this idea of “… un autre penseur dans la penseur” (IT 219). 29 reminds us, while the tout of classic cinema offers us an indirect representation of time in its gesture to a larger filmic body, the interstice “est la présentation directe du temps, ou la continuité qui se concile avec la suite des points irrationnels, selon les rapports de temps non- chronologique” (IT 237, my emphasis)45. Time is no longer suggested, but announced outright; and our contact with these irrational points surrounds us in a noise that disorients our former understanding of tout. If we are lucky, we shall realize we have wandered, hands outstretched, into a linguistic void with no other company but the innumerable velocities of time as they graze our senses. In this echo chamber of sorts, perhaps the only thing we might perceive is a sense of multiplicity; of what, we cannot yet be sure, but we cannot deny the resonance of differentiation that reaches our ears. rhythms / resonances Even if one can follow the development of Deleuze’s thought progression as it advances from percept to concept, affect, world and beyond, it may be difficult to grasp how his ultimate perception of time can actually spring from the shifting material of a sound event. But here’s the punchline: the experience Deleuze describes began with us, in our affective experiences with Polisse’s sound event. We arrived at a direct presentation of time in advance of Deleuze’s language; although he may have written his second Cinema volume in 1985, we likely collided with audiovisual media before we had a chance to consider his text (or, perhaps, any text at all). We may not yet realize it, but we have already undergone the progression of thoughts Deleuze outlines in our own experiences with film; this inquiry did not begin with the Cinema books—we were led to them by the sound event that began this thesis. Let us now reconsider that event with the assistance of Deleuze’s terms. For, as Laura Marks writes, “Cinema exists on the border of language, and language must bring it across in order to have a conversation with it” (xvi); this linguistic exchange cannot fully comprehend a lived collision with film, but its bolstering of theoretical and poetic vocabulary allows such experiences in affect to extend to wider audiences and continue the interaction on a more expansive plane.

45 “…is the direct presentation of time, or the continuity which is reconciled with the sequence of irrational points, according to non-chronological time relationships” (181). 30

The initial moments of Ousman’s scream collides into the sequence that frames the young boy’s separation from his mother, bringing out the rhythms of the din that characterized the BPM (and Polisse in its entirety) through a sonic contrast. The spectator, or spiritual automaton, experiences the effects of noochoc as a product of her experience with the sound event, first perceiving the scream’s connection to the formal elements of Polisse in a Pensée- critique and then experiencing the perceptive buffering, the Pensée-hypnotique, that occurs as her mind struggles to realize the ways in which she might understand her position in the world through the sound in a Pensée-action. The spectator is caught in affect, for she finds herself in between her perception of the scream and her understanding of its influence; the binary of signifier and signified cannot apply to her experience, for she exists within a threshold, thinking in terms of the collision of sounds, images, film and spectator. This is the effect of the sound event: to undermine not only the dominance of image in the perception of the spectators, but also the semantic networks that once decided their gaze.46 A whispered visual element of the mise-en-scène adds an ironic twist to this understanding, one that emphasizes the ways in which the sound event’s influence concerns more than the spectator’s sense of hearing: just behind Ousman’s head, a poster shows the profile of a face with words escaping from its mouth in an undulating wave. The poster reads: Brisez le silence, “Break the silence” (Polisse). When Ousman screams, then, the visual and sonic elements of the scene seem to collide, for the young boy breaks his own silence in a way that the poster recommends. Through this audiovisual juxtaposition of mise-en-scène and sound, the spectator understands with greater acuity how the sound and image, however separate in the technical production of the film they may be, interact within the same, expanding and differentiating body. The sensory experiences offered to the spiritual automaton by film, as emphasized through the affective force of the sound event, are neither simply visual nor aural, but truly trans-sensory (SA 330), engaging chains of perceptions with every moment of noochoc they inspire. The violence of the sound event thus creates a space for listening, offering the spectator the film’s pulse; this pulse is a rhythm, “the essential trans-sensory dimension” (SA 330) that, however irregular it may seem, allows the listener to more fully understand the film as a

46 We might think of Mulvey’s “scopophilic gaze” as just one example. For more, ref.: note 5 (p. 7). 31 functioning body, complete with internal elements that escape our visual perception and semantic assignments. The spectator has progressed from the Pensée-critique that reveals the body of the film that enables the collision to the Pensée-hypnotique that brings her closer to the parts whose internal collisions allow that body to function. And while she contemplates how this body might bring us closer to our own, and to the broader body within which she participates in her collisions with Nature in Pensée-action, Ousman’s scream collides into two minutes of the spectator’s attention. With every successive moment of its duration, the sound event challenges the listener to consider the differentiation that becomes the film’s rhythm as much as it renews the shock of its violence upon the listener. The immediacy of the shock and the potential of the duration is what then offers a direct presentation of time, as these elements participate in a rhythm that plays out as the spectator listens beyond the images before her eyes. While the scream does shock the spectator-turned-listener’s senses, its continued resonance estranges her from the narrative fabric into which it is woven, enacting an affect that underscores her inability to engage cinematographic analysis. The sound no longer confirms the image she sees, linking one piece of filmic information to the next as an “in-between” entity in the manner of Eisenstein’s organic cinema montage; the sound is now an interstitial and, an opening and a layer and all of film and its becoming. It leaves the listener at a loss for words, forcing her into this strange event with sound as she lives its duration. And just as Ousman’s scream resonated throughout Polisse to identify other sound events, his scream resonates throughout film itself, calling out other affective moments in sound across film history that break the grasp of the image and its language. One of those events echoes from the traffic jam of Godard’s Weekend, carrying the spectator to a country road far from the sound of Ousman’s scream. In this scene from the 1967 film, there is much to fascinate the eye—blood, maimed bodies, flames, and a family picnic, to name a very few images (Weekend)—but a decision to listen to the scene opens the listener to a similar affective attack. For the entire duration of the nineteen-minute long progression down a jammed country road, the sound of honking horns assaults the listener. Many other sounds populate the scene (a few lines of music, the revving engine of the main characters’ car, children laughing, and others), but the horns maintain a constant, overwhelming presence within the audiovisual landscape (ibid.). Their sound’s effect, then, is not unlike Ousman’s scream; though

32 it initially shocks the listener’s senses through a sudden collision, its extended violence lures the listener into a trance-like state. It is in the experience of this trance, this realm in which what the listener hears is no longer a sound she can name, but rather an awareness of her active listening, that that of which she is most aware becomes that which she realizes she cannot yet know. In this way, the nineteen minutes of Weekend’s horns begin to blend with the two minutes of Ousman’s scream, and in the listener’s collision with one, she is carried to and from the other, vibrating with affective intensity. The listener’s understanding of time is no longer linear, but relational, and she ricochets from one irrational point of interstice to the next (IT 237) as the resonance builds through her act of listening. And the more that she perceives and pursues these events, the more she becomes aware of her own internal resonance with the event’s rhythm; that is, she begins to feel her own participation in film’s music through the event of her attention to her own perception. In the breaks of the listener’s linguistic understanding, a new presence evolves; and though its in-transit evolution prevents her from any immediate possibility of giving it a name, it nevertheless belongs to her, woven into our lived experience in time. The rhythms and resonance that allow us this realization would seem to suggest that a listening approach to film spectatorship is not just an interesting experiment, but an essential methodology. When we choose to listen, we begin to catch the pre-linguistic echoes of time as they stretch from one film to the next—visual language and its symbols, icons and indexes would prevent our perception from arriving at these differentiating layers, for their effort to clearly indicate would lead us away from lived, in-time transit to its imagined representation. When we lend an ear to the potential of duration, we contribute to an energy produced by an infinite number of bodies and their collisions; and through that energy, if we so choose to feel it, an essential connection emerges. We realize the fullness of the world through affection, through the goosebumps that rise on our skin, our heartbeat that quickens, our ears that ring; we are inherently linked to a larger set of relations, erasing any belief that we could exist in vacuum. Perhaps this is why Deleuze insists upon the body’s importance at a central point of “La pensée et le cinéma,” proposing, “Rendre les mots au corps, à la chair” (IT 225)47 as a way into believing in the world that surrounds us; if we listen to the rhythms that stir within the film’s body, we open ourselves to an outside our eyes had not been able to explore. How, then, might spectatorship shift to recognize this realization?

47 “Give words back to the body, to the flesh” (173). 33

iii. sound bridge

“Car si Orphée ne sait pas où il va, il doit connaître qui l’y pousse, et ce qui l’inspire” (Schaeffer 643)48 lending an ear

In the last chapter, we examined how Deleuze defines the interaction of film and spectator, listening to his terms so as to identify the traces of Spinozist affect that echo from his word choice and expand those terms to come into conversation with the sound event. We began with an examination of noochoc, the element of the movement-image which shocks the spiritual automata (or spectators) into first perceiving the larger body of the film (the Pensée-critique), then considering the sounds and images that collide to enable the becoming of that body (the Pensée-hypnotique), and finally realizing the ways in which the spectators interact in Nature in a manner that resembles the shock’s interaction in film (Pensée-action). We then described how the sound event carries us through these stages, identifying the initial moment of Ousman’s scream as an affection-image through its capacity to place us between perception (our sense of hearing’s immediate recognition of the sound) and understanding (our ability to name the sound and its effect) through the sheer force of the shock it enacts upon our senses and the difference it marks from the audiovisual elements that precede its arrival. The concept of duration and its link to continuity complicated this idea, for the two-

48 “For if Orpheus doesn’t know where he is going, he ought to know what propels him there, and what inspires him.”

34 minute length of Ousman’s scream allowed us to consider the sound event in terms of the interstice through its capacity to bring out both rhythms that contribute to the pace of the film and other moments within the film that herald points of differentiation from those rhythms. We concluded thus that the interstice and the sound event point past the body through the body to suggest a realm outside our immediate linguistic understanding that evolves through collision- based rhythms (IT 237). In this final movement of the thesis, we shall consider how it is a methodology of listening that enables a realization of the sound event’s trans-sensory engagement of the spectator, demonstrating that such an engagement brings out the ethical dimensions within the relationship of film and spectator by reorienting the binary terms of viewer and screen toward a more interactive understanding of media participation. To do this, we shall make music of film’s bodily rhythms and bring Deleuze’s images in contact with Schaeffer’s musical objects. Even if Deleuze’s language remains oriented toward the image throughout his Cinema work, the philosopher does not completely overlook the importance of sound: moments after he mentions the interstice, he discusses the ways in which sound can “impose an interstice” with the visual by setting itself at odds with the image and no longer serving to indicate an “off-screen” (hors-champ) space (IT 235). He continues, stating that Godard has suggested that “le mixage détrône le montage” (236).49 In this citation of Godard, Deleuze emphasizes the ability of sound mixing—the organization and layering of different sounds to create the sonic environment of a scene, as exemplified in the volume of Ousman’s scream compared to that of the squad member’s voices and shuffling feet50—to overcome montage. In these situations, sound “ousts” the images in its act to attract the spectator’s attention to discrepancies between what she sees and what she hears. However, any hope that the reader may foster for a thorough discussion of sound in

49 “…mixing ousts montage” (181). 50 From a technical standpoint, recording (during production) and then controlling (in post-production, where the “mixing” occurs) a sound like Ousman’s scream can be challenging, as the sound recordist must be careful to adjust the microphone sensitivity (known as “gain”) so that the character’s voice does not “clip,” or overload the mic with information and distort. When the sound is then mixed with all the other recorded sounds from the scene, the mixer must work with the audience in mind, adjusting the levels (and other elements) of each individual sound so that the audience member will both believe the sonic environment of the scene and not lose a bit of their hearing to a too-loud sound while doing so. Chion elaborates on the importance of mixing in its establishment of space when he describes “elements of auditory setting” (AV 54-55); for more, ref.: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. 35

Cinema 2 enjoys a (too) brief lifespan: this proposition almost immediately transitions to develop the argument in a different dimension; it seems that the glimmer of the image’s “ousting” in favor of a sonic rift is but a distant echo, buried in the rapidly expanding web of ideas and examples that Deleuze puts forth to conclude his chapter. If we wish to pursue the interstice of Ousman’s scream through a method of listening, we cannot stop our search for sound where Deleuze leaves us. In a desire for resonance, this inquiry listens again to echoes in theoretical language. Perhaps, like the interstice, the break that has for so long separated sound from image in theory and philosophy can shift from an in-between to and, establishing a rhythm among sensory perceptions that leads to a greater, trans-sensory becoming. There is more to be said about sound, bien entendu. It is important to note that Godard’s “ousting” citation is unexpected in context with the rest of Deleuze’s work; it disagrees with the frame of visual language that surrounds it, but it also seems to disagree with several thinkers from whom Deleuze draws his inspiration. For example, Eisenstein’s discussion of an “intellectual cinema” (from which the “emotional fullness” of the image stems in Deleuze) relies on a study of silent films, and the Soviet filmmaker takes care to note that this is not simply a product of the historical context that surrounds his project: as he describes the ways in which techniques in montage contribute to intellectual cinema, he adds in a footnote that those techniques “fell [in skill] perceptibly from the moment of transition to sound film” (134). While his idea may lend itself to the learning curve that had to occur in the industry as filmmakers learned to mix sound and image (Eisenstein wrote the chapter roughly seven years after the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, appeared in theatres), it nevertheless ties Deleuze’s theories on noochoc to visual foundations. What’s more, Eisenstein is not alone in his preference for images: Bergson may have been writing long before the advent of sound film (in fact, Matière et Mémoire appeared just one year after the first film screening in Paris), but his language reflects a similar dismissal of sound as he works to conclude his theory of matter and memory. To Bergson, experience in the world is tied to a universal continuity, the constant, reciprocal mediation of information to and through the body (150); however, as Bergson makes this point, he is keen to note that the sense of sight and touch are the most central to the body’s participation in that continuity, as they are “celles

36 qui s’étendent le plus manifestement dans l’espace” (ibid.).51 Sound, smell and taste cannot be routes to understanding the fullness of the universe, for they, according to Bergson, are plagued with vides, moments where sensory perception halts in the absence of information. The continuity is interrupted; movement ceases; experience breaks down. Specifically as these gaps relate to sound, he writes, “Il y a des intervalles de silence entre les sons, car l’ouïe n’est pas toujours occupée” (ibid.).52 Pardon? Thinking back to the sonic environment that preceded Ousman’s scream, the listener begins to hear the problematic ring of Bergson’s statement: the moments of silence that separated the BPM’s commotion actually contributed to the sequence’s rhythm, introducing breaks that amplified the fluctuations in commotion that characterized the scene before the sound event. Their influence upon the sequence’s sonic structure functions in a way that exemplifies experimental musician Michel Chion’s writing: “…silence is never a neutral emptiness. It is the negative of sound we’ve heard beforehand or imagined; it is the product of a contrast” (AV 57). Silence not only is a sound that one perceives, then, but it does partake in a continuity through the sonic contrast it presents against noises of higher decibels. It is not an empty gap, but a perception-sharpening point of difference.53 Ousman’s scream functions in a similar manner: it is a shocking break to the din of the sequence, but not in such a way that it destroys the movement of sound in the scene. Less a vide, and more a trou: not a nothingness, but an opening to a something else, something within that leads outside. While the scream complicates our understanding of the film’s continuity in the way that it introduces an unknown, an “impensé dans la pensée” (IT 237),54 it still allows us to perceive the expanse of the film’s colliding bodies before we arrive at a point just past them.

51 “… those which most obviously have extension in space, and the essential character of space is continuity” (259). 52 “… There are intervals of silence between sounds, for the sense of hearing is not always occupied” (259) 53 Pierre Schaeffer staunchly defends listening’s constantly active status as well, stating, “« …l’oreille vivra le temps de l’œuvre en termes de ‘suspenses’ ou de dénouements d’énigmes ou d’évidences. Elle ne prête jamais aux sons une attention impartiale parce qu’elle n’est jamais passive : elle prend connaissance non point de quelque chose qui se débiterait au mètre ou à la seconde, mais de divers événements qui lui sont proposés” (258). 54 “…an unthought in thought” (181) 37

(im)mediate auscultation Bergson’s vocabulary seems to be involved in sound as well. As he continues to explain the relationship of matter to memory, he writes that matter ultimately consists of ébranlements, vibrations that interact within an uninterrupted continuity (159). This term, ébranlement, (coming from the verb ébranler, a derivative of branler, “to swing, to shake” (Pick 58, 14)), naturally calls up the sense of not only touch, but also hearing, as we can listen to wavering vibrations as much as we feel them. If the listener imagines the effect of a song’s bass line as she sits in a car, she recalls the rattling it enacts in the head and chest, the sound that fills and challenges the eardrums, and then—if the bass is deep and loud enough—how it comes to shake the image reflected in the rearview mirror. A similar phenomenon occurs in film: consider the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park, who vibrates the scene with the potential of his appearance before he physically enters it. First, the spectator hears a thumping in the distance; then, the characters announce that they may have perceived it first through touch, when Tim asks his sister, “Do you feel that” (Jurassic Park)? And it is only after these sonic and tactile hints that the spectator sees the vibration, evidenced in the quaking surface of a nearby cup of water (ibid.). And while Spielberg could easily have filmed the scene beginning with the water cup, his audience’s affective experience with the vibration increases in intensity as a result of his choice to withhold the image of the affect. Lived and filmed experience point to sound’s presence in vibration, suggesting that sound is perhaps even more immediately present in vibration than is image. And even past ébranlement, yet another point of resonance presents itself between Bergson’s language and sonic phenomena: he links the durée—a term already engaged in this experiment’s exploration of the interstice—to rhythms (Bergson 54). It is true that rhythms can be visual and tactile, as Bergson describes them (as evidenced in the 24 frames per second of a film reel, or the feeling of a drumbeat in one’s chest), but rhythms often relate to specific sounds—in music as well as in everyday life.55 Bergson may not intend to draw out this sonic consideration, but we shall see how his thoughts on rhythm become just as involved in sound as they are in image. To Bergson, the movement that mediates experience occurs within durée through

55 Henri Lefèbvre dedicates an entire project, Rythmanalyse (1992), to this latter relation of rhythm to life, though the Marxist positions his analysis as a critique of Bergson’s durée (Lefèbvre 73-74). 38 rhythms in perception; and though he characterizes consciousness as occurring at a certain rhythm that lags behind “pure,” immediate perception (54), he also indicates that this particular rhythm is not the rhythm of durée. There are many rhythms within durée, an infinite amount, all of which bring about the various ébranlements of the durée’s density (épaisseur) (Bergson 158). He challenges the reader to seek these vibrations, to search for them in experience, writing, “…vous obtiendrez de la matière une vision fatigante peut-être pour votre imagination, mais pure, et débarrassée de ce que les exigences de la vie vous y font ajouter dans la perception extérieure… Le changement est partout, mais en profondeur; nous le localisons ça et là, mais en surface” (159).56 “Change is everywhere, but inward” (277), and its vibrations only offer us superficial impressions through which to grasp its deeper evolution, an evolution that challenges our ability to perceive. Just like that, we have returned to the sound event. Through the ways in which the sound event calls out to other films, enabling one scream to resonate with the honking horns of a traffic jam, for instance, we perceive that filmic bodies and their relationship to spectators evolve through collective rhythms established around the affective attacks of sound events. By listening to the densely layered and colliding vibrations that animate this internal life between film and spectator and occur outside our representative language, we hear experience as it occurs to us and around us, in the most immediate and renewing sense. In the fullness of durée’s density, within the interstice, we undergo the direct presentation of time through the rhythms brought out by the sound event. It is not a space our signs can capture (even here and now), but a duration our bodies must feel. At this moment, the reader might ask how it is that one scream, a single sound event can present this experience of time so directly, when time as it is understood in the durée would seem to be made up of such events, suggesting that the scream’s event is a mere part that refers to the whole in the spirit of synecdoche (as we have already seen in the movement-image’s “le ‘tout’ comme sujet” (IT 206)) and therefore could only function representationally. This is an important observation, for it voices the exact tendency in symbolic language that is upended by the sound event and interstice: in synecdoche, as in signs, there is a privileging of the whole (the signified) over the indexical part (the signifier), which is to say that the whole is already known

56 “you will thus obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure, and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception… The change is everywhere, but inward, we localize it here and there, but outwardly” (276-7) 39 to she who refers to it; this poetic language is representational, as its gesture resurrects an already-acknowledged and part-subsuming subject. It is true that the sound event is a break that participates in a larger rhythm, one of many frissons in a wild durée; however, in the way that it functions interstitially through affect, the sound event’s collision does not announce the rhythm in which it participates through any other method than its active, immediate participation in real time. The listener cannot name the rhythm during the collision of the sound event, for she is living the collision as an element of the rhythm; in the initial impact of the event, she cannot be aware of any other vibration than the one with which her own body interacts. This is not to deny the existence of a larger, vibrational continuity, but rather live its evolution, become, in time, with that continuity. In a direct presentation of time, the whole and the parts arrive at an equilibrium, for the whole is in each part at the event of its part-ing as much as each part evolves into the whole. It is for this reason that listening to the sound event makes film a matter of ethics: within each spectator is also every spectator, suggesting an inherent multiplicity within the experience of film. Time plays a nearly identical role in the work of Pierre Schaeffer, an experimental musician and fundamental figure in the world of sound theory. In Traité des Objets Musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects, 1966), the work which introduced the famed unseen sounds of “l’acousmatique” (among nearly 700 pages of other terms, tests and graphics), Schaeffer directly links sound to time. He writes, “Les objets sonores, contrairement aux objets visuels, existent dans la durée et non dans l’espace: leur support physique est essentiellement un événement énergétique inscrit dans le temps” (Schaeffer 244, my emphasis).57 He also notes that it is our experience with sound objects that allows us to perceive the “phenomena of audition:” “L’un d’eux,” he writes, “pratiquement inaperçu jusqu’à ce jour, met directement en cause notre sentiment du temps : ce qui est avant, après” (216, my emphasis).58 Here, listening becomes the direct route for an experience in time, and images are assigned a more spatial significance.

57 “Sound objects, contrary to visual objects, exist in duration and not in space: their physical material is essentially an energetic event inscribed in time.” This is later echoed in Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, when the musician writes, “The eye perceives more slowly because it has more to do all at once; it must explore in space as well as follow along in time. The ear isolates a detail of its auditory field and it follows this point or line in time… in a first contact with an audiovisual image, the eye is more spatially adept, and the ear more temporally adept” (11, my emphasis). 58 “One of them,” he writes, [goes] almost undetected up to/even today, [it] directly challenges our impression of time: what comes before and after.” 40

Listening in this way, paying mind to the “résultats bruts”59 of perception (ibid.), does not offer us a representation of time, but directly treats our experience in time. This is also what distinguishes the movement-image from the time-image in Deleuze’s theory; whereas the movement-image offers an indirect representation of time (IT 236), the time- image and its interstices present time for our direct, immediate perception (IT 237). Decades and disciplines may separate Schaeffer and Deleuze (to such a degree that their terms sometimes seem at odds), but their arguments as they concern time appear to be almost in conversation, the former’s sonic language rounding out the latter’s visual terms to pen a truly audiovisual understanding of the durée. This conversation vibrates with even greater intensity with a consideration of the dimensions of Schaeffer’s durée. Similar to Bergson—and, subsequently, Deleuze—Schaeffer characterizes the durée through its particular density: for Schaeffer, the listener’s ability to recognize a given sound of significant duration is largely related to the density of sonic information it offers (253). He writes: “Du point de vue de la durée perçue, les sons longs s’échelonnent entre deux extrêmes: ou bien trop semblables à eux-mêmes, ils lassent l’oreille qui reconnaît vite qu’elle n’a plus rien à en apprendre… Ou bien, trop chargés d’information, ils obligent l’oreille à se mobiliser à chaque instant, en ne lui laissant aucun temps d’intégration, de repos, de récapitulation: la durée perçue correspond alors à un essoufflement symétrique de l’attention: c’est du bruit” (254).60

This description of duration as the listener perceives it in sound demonstrates a series of important considerations for our understanding of the intersections of the interstice, sound event and affect: First, that the given “density” of a sound inspires the ear to “mobilize itself”—a reflexive se mobiliser, communicating that the ear is an acting body in the exchange—in a way that implies the listener’s active participation in the perception of a sound in its becoming (much like the spiritual automaton’s response to the movement-image); next, that sounds charged with too much information overtax the listener’s capacity to listen, resulting in a perception of

59 “raw data” 60 “From the point of view of perceived duration, long sounds extend between two extremes: they are either too similar and tire the ear that quickly recognizes that it has nothing more to learn from them… or, they are too overwhelmed with information and make the ear to mobilize itself at every instant, allowing no time for integration, rest, summary: perceived duration thus corresponds to a symmetrical exhaustion of attention: it’s noise.”

41 unintelligible ‘noise’ (much like the reader’s difficulty to ‘imagine the vision’ of Bergson’s vibrations); and finally, that the difference in density between the sounds of this example points to a diversity of densities in the world of sound, placing the listener in a reverberating realm of colliding and layered information each time she chooses to listen. A plane of immanence, perhaps. For upon this plane, one that Deleuze describes in both his Cinema volumes and his study of Spinoza (and ultimately establishes as one of the pillars of his theoretical work), acting bodies collide in waves of “speeds and slowness,” where experience is defined not through signs or forms, but “as a complex relation between differential velocities” (S 123). Deleuze uses music as a direct example of such relations, adding that, “It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else” (ibid.). When we address our own bodies’ alignment with musical relations through listening to sound events and the rhythms brought out by them in film, we begin to understand the capacities of our own vibrations to extend and layer upon those of other spectators and film forms that interact in the evolution of perception in time. Deleuze continues: “One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms” (S 123). The sound event, in its upending of the image through affective collision, offers an entry point to an already becoming body, suggesting our active perception takes up and contributes to its rhythm. Call them rhythms, call them densities; call them movement-images, call them musical “attacks” (Schaeffer 127): through the shock affective experience enacts upon our immediate perception, we come to realize the degree to which we, ourselves are and were always already in transit, occupying ands as we fly into and among screams and traffic jams. And if we listen, we catch the sound of time as it whistles past our ears. In lending an ear to the sound events of film, we discover a way to perceive this relation in a more direct and adequate manner than language’s retrospective reading; and through our acting and perceiving, we participate in the film’s and as well, entering its body through the sound event and taking up the rhythm of its internal music, even if only for a moment. we It is clear that the eye alone is inadequate to the task of perceiving the density of film.

We need to listen to Ousman’s scream, which is not to say rely entirely upon our ears. As we have noticed through the thematic and linguistic resonances between Deleuze, Schaeffer, Bergson, Eisenstein, and Spinoza, one cannot reduce the spectator’s experience to one sense; just as the image’s rhythm would hardly be as complex without sound, sound would lose crucial density in the absence of the image. Ousman’s scream might be overwhelming all on its own, but the windows, walls and screens that surround the sound’s eruption complement the concept of threshold that gives the sound event such affective force. And our immediate perception occurs through the collision of those sounds and images with our body, enabled by our respective movement to act upon them. It is neither simply sound nor simply image that allows us to perceive the rhythm that generates from Ousman’s scream, and we should not forget touch; all three senses are involved in our experience as spiritual automata, and as such, it becomes necessary to address the isolation of these senses in philosophical thought, as we have, and discover the ways in which such senses and ideas are nevertheless linked. Chion highlights this consideration through his proposal of the term, trans-sensory perceptions: “…those perceptions that belong to no one particular sense but which may travel via one sensory channel or another without their content or their effect being limited to this one sense” (SA 330). As the listener’s experience with Ousman’s scream—and film images, and musical objects—engages more than one sense in unpredictable vibrations of affective connection, Chion’s term points that our experiences as spiritual automata are not simply visual, nor are they aural or tactile; they are trans-sensory, within each and every sense. And in proposing this term, Chion also poses a similar question to the one that drives this inquiry’s search for a method that might recognize a world of film beyond representation: “Why has it taken so long for film theory to acknowledge and consider this dimension ‘beyond sound and image’” (329)? For Chion’s term—and lamentation—engage directly with the collisions toward which we have been working to give language to our experience with Ousman’s scream, all of which argue that an experience with cinema is centered within the body—both the body of the streamed content and that of the spectator streaming—and in time. Thinking of the scream as a sound event allows us to hear, see and feel those dimensions: not only does such a term consider time as it plays out in the rhythms of the film’s audiovisual environment, but it lives out the constant motion that occurs within and between bodies, acting in both reflexive and reciprocal dimensions. Our attention to the and of the sound event may

43 enable the becoming of the film’s rhythm, but this is because the abyss of that ever-opening rhythm also invites us to become within it. Without the body and the densities of its internal music, this exchange would not be possible. This dimension—that of the lived-in, acting and acted upon body—is the dimension that Bergson misses in his understanding of musical rhythm, as Henri Lefèbvre aptly states in his project on the political influence of the rhythms of life and production, Rhythmanalyse (73-74);61 however, it is this same bodily dimension that Deleuze upholds as a basis for understanding the world that opens up within film—that is, our world, lived-in and immediate, resonating with electric vibrations that animate our own bodies. He writes: “Ce qui est sûr, c’est que croire n’est plus croire en un autre monde, ni en un monde transformé. C’est seulement croire au corps. C’est rendre le discours au corps, et, pour cela, atteindre le corps avant les discours, avant les mots, avant que les choses soient nommées: le ‘prénom,’ et même avant le prénom… Notre croyance ne peut avoir d’autre objet que la chair” (IT 225, my emphasis).62

This is where the unthinkable thought leads us: outside the signs of language and into our bodies and those of others, into the confines of experience that sometimes raise the hairs on the back of our necks without explanation, cause us to cringe at a child’s scream even when our mind might scream back that we may be engaging too intimately with mechanical reproduction. Pierre Schaeffer echoes this same sentiment as he describes musical structures’ distance from description, expressing, “elles s’écartent du monde descriptif, avec une sorte de pudeur, pour n’en parler que mieux aux sens, à l’esprit et au coeur, à l’être entier, de lui-même enfin” (662);63 Jean-Luc Nancy continues in Listening (2007), almost as if he is completing Schaeffer’s sentence: “The intimacy of music is an intimacy more intimate than any invocation or evocation. But for that very reason, it remains exactly at the distance of music from words” (59). Whether

61 “Much has been spoken and written about musical time, especially after Schopenhauer and Bergson, in accordance with their philosophies of temporality. When the narrow relation between musical time and lived time was described – with music offering more to life than an image, therefore a regal gift, obscure life transformed into a work of art – everything was said and nothing was said. Rhythm does not enter or it enters badly into account. The relation between musical time and rhythms of the body is required” (Lefèbvre 73). 62 “What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named: the ‘first name,’ and even before the first name” (172-3). 63 “They distance themselves from the descriptive world with a sort of prudishness, so as to speak better to and only to the senses, to the mind and to the heart, to the entire being, finally, to the self.” 44 one speaks of the noochoc and interstice of Deleuze’s cinema or the music of Schaeffer and Nancy’s theory and philosophy, one discovers a reciprocal and reflexive relationship between the spectator and the film and its music. The film and music speak to the body from the terms of the body, from their own bodies; and in our responses, we are allowed a trans-sensory perception of self. Free from the confines of language and colliding into the energies of audiovisual matter, we discover our own experiences unfolding: “C’est l’homme, à l’homme décrit, dans le langage des choses” (Schaeffer 662).64 In this way, the direct presentation of time experienced in the sound event is a gesture to our own multiplicity, a becoming within each of us we shall never fully know; when we choose to listen to the music of the filmic body, as opposed to “reading” the “signs” of its “representative” “images,” we may catch the call of our multiple and expanding experiences in time. This is why it is all the more important that our wager unravel in terms of we: for we is not merely you and I, but me and myself, reverberating in the layered experiences of time that expand before our relational existence. I am inherently multiple in my experience of film’s corporeal music, an experience that extends beyond the reverberations of one scream and traffic jam to carry their resonance into every new collision. When we take up the role of spiritual automata, we are not merely spectators, locked into place and tasked with the translation of sounds and images. No: as the shock of the sound event demands, we are participants, contributing to a music that arrives at and in our bodies through audiovisual rhythms. It is when we choose to listen, to be shocked, to feel these rhythms and allow ourselves to lose our language within them, that we allow ourselves the possibility of a response with ethical stakes. Although it is important to focus our study upon film due to the artistic medium’s capacity to access and affect mass audiences, this ethical dimension should not

64 “It is man, to described man, in the language of things.” It is true that a kind of “language” is brought to life in this sentence, which may seem to contradict the experience’s unfolding “free from the confines of language;” but the reader might think of such a “language of things” in the spirit of Jane Bennett, who animates “things” with the term “vital materiality” in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University, 2009). In Bennett’s book, which aims “to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things” (viii), the author writes: “By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (ibid.). A “language of things” as it is framed by Bennett would not communicate through the use of already established semantic networks, then, but rather through a method of affecting and acting that is unique to the “thing” itself. We experience such a language in the shock of the sound event. 45 be limited to film, but extends into all affective relations engaged by art. As Pierre Schaeffer writes, “L’Art n’est que le sport de l’homme intérieur… Comme le sport, l’art est un travail sur lui-même: de la perception sensorielle à la consommation spirituelle, des cinq sens à la triple conscience intellectuelle, affective et active” (Schaeffer 661).65 Art engages the entire body in sensory perception a way that persuades she who perceives to think in terms of body. a choice When Jean-Luc Nancy begins Listening (2002), he poses the question, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (1)? This is an interesting consideration, as one might assume that listening would be inherent in philosophy; is it not philosophers who dedicate their lives to studying texts, ostensibly “listening” to the language of their predecessors in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Yes, Nancy responds, but not quite: he continues to demonstrate how the term entendre in French communicates both “to hear” and “to understand,” implying through language that the definitions could be interchangeable (6). But this would mean that perception and intelligibility are implied in hearing, he continues, “as if in all ‘hearing’ there had to be a ‘hearing say,’ regardless of whether the sound perceived was a word or not” (ibid.). In his move to resist such an understanding of entendre, Nancy reverses the terms of “hearing” and “understanding” with striking finesse, indicating that it is saying that communicates the presence of a hearing, and within hearing exists “a listening,” one which reduces the importance of the information communicated by the sound to favor the communication itself, “resonance” (ibid.). Applied to Ousman’s scream, this would mean that any information the listener might expect his cries to communicate—his emotions upon being separated from his mother, the inability of the BPM to protect children from pain, the resonance of the room in which Ousman sits, for example—does not concern listening as much as one would originally think. But we have approached Ousman’s scream by way of the body, perceiving the sound event through our lived, corporeal response to its collision. We have arrived at the abyss of its opening into time through our ears, realizing all the more the importance of the body in our relation. We have

65 “Art is but the sport of the inner self… As in sport, art is a work about its self/self-reflexive : from sensory perception to spiritual consumption, from the five senses to the consciousness, -- intellectual, affective and active.”

46 heard the rhythms of its music, even if we cannot name a single cadence. We have listened. What listening requires, then, is our uninhibited embrace of complete disorientation. When we listen, we find ourselves before the thresholds of our expression, constantly attacked by the unknown until we give it name and shape, inscribe it into the symbolic order that tames it into terms of representation. For this reason, we might be persuaded to return the scream to Polisse, to consider “what it all means” in context of the film’s narrative, to write the sound event back into the story. But as soon as we decide to name these sounds in such a way, we are no longer listening, but hearing, or better, looking, assigning identities to our sensory perceptions, halting the relational velocities that might have been making us too dizzy for comfort. As Nancy suggests, “Perhaps we never listen to anything but the non-encoded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode” (36). In decoding what she hears, the listener reels the sound event in with language, reduces its density, diminishes its rhythm to the pace her consciousness can manage. Let our listening multiplicity think of film as a body of music, then, not only to recognize its synesthetic material, but to better enable our listening to bring about the dethroning of symbolic reduction in favor of affective attack. Listening thus comes down to a choice: to choose to resist one’s fear, to submit oneself to the music of experience, to enter the void of the sound event and its evolving rhythms. To choose to “believe in the body,” believe in the world that gives it affective depth and relational immanence (IT 225). And this choice is made with the advance understanding that any language (including that which covers this page, and the former, and the next) will be late to the party, as the body is always already first to come, “même avant le prenom” (ibid.).66 It is faith, though not a moral faith, grounded by a position within our separate bodies as perpetually in relation to, participating in the larger body that we come to perceive as a result of our lived experiences with the sound event. This is how the “mise en question radicale” of the interstice leads us back to the world we cannot see; it guides us back to the body, stripping us of language in an act of emancipation, opening our senses to the social and political implications of being implicated, of collective becoming.

66 “…even before the first name” (173) 47

echo, an opening

The reader has perhaps realized that this scream has taken us far from Maïwenn, Ousman and Polisse to explore instead the experience of film as it evolves outside the finite timeline of the narrative’s frame; and it is here that this thesis will conclude, allowing the sound event to open and evolve with the mind and body of the reader.

Our act to participate in film and its sound events comes down to an ethical consideration: that, when we listen beyond the image, beyond the call to read and the search for clarity, when we actively seek the affective noise that confounds the representative signal, we incorporate our bodies within a music that allows an escape from linguistic assignments. When we begin to consider ourselves in relation with film, as living mid-collision, and colliding with more than merely the audiovisual material that we immediately experience, we can no longer ignore what being affected might mean. Which is to say: an event is happening, and it happens to not you, not me, but we; not us in the first-person plural but a larger and simultaneous multiplicity, all in relation in one instant of time and the next and the former, and again. And with that designation arrives the responsibility to tend to it, to carry and be carried by this ephemeral potential, to be becoming within the music of our various vibrations. And this becoming, though not yet realized, buried in the noise of colliding rhythms, implies the arrival of change through a refusal of binary reduction.

Within the abyss of the film’s music, we may catch a quick hint of the we in whom are already becoming incorporated; but as soon as we perceive this multiplicity, we are already on our way to another outside. Through this ethical sensation, we, the media participants, can transcend the language of subject and object and begin to feel the whole-ness of being part. For the film and our relation to and with it, as it is presented through the collision and contrast of the sound event, is no longer a mechanical reproduction or gesture that represents or indicates a lived experience of greater discursive value; it lives its own experience, exuding its own aura through the rhythms that emanate from the collisions of its sound mixing and montage and our perception. This call to listen is not, however, a rallying cry for the complete disavowal of language; after all, it is language that enables our current interaction. Michel Chion warns “that sound, much more than the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation” (AV 33-34); Nancy demonstrates this most directly when he dedicates a chapter of Listening to a study of the propagandist music of Nazi Germany.67 And it is true that over one hundred centuries of film and theory have shown that language can provide a platform for resistance, articulating analyses of films that oppose hegemony and unmask insidious power structures.68 These presences are crucial to film studies and should not be neglected. This being said, as Marks reminds us, the necessity of a theoretical framing of the sound event stems from the fact that “Cinema exists on the border of language” (xvi). Affect exists in a transitory state: if we wish to “bring across” our experiences among a film’s interstices, we must first approach the threshold of our capacity to express experience, one that exposes us to an opening between perception and understanding, and listen to the collision of our interactions with sound events despite the representational terms that would prefer to organize us in terms of

67 In this chapter, “March in the spirit of our ranks,” Nancy also links this historical context to an imagining of sound and music as a purely signifying system, alienated from its affective link to the senses: “What truly betrays music and diverts or perverts the movement of [music’s] modern history is the extent to which it is indexed to a mode of signification and not to a mode of sensibility… [this signifying imposition], in order to come to an end, can allow nothing to be resonant or dissonant, since there is no more room for anything but utterance and persuasion of a sense through a form supposed to constitute the adequate expression of this sense itself regarded as content” (57-58) 68 In just one of many contemporary examples, film theorist Mary Ann Doane studies the ways in which modes of capitalist production wrote itself into the evolution of our understanding of time and its “representability” in film in The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, contingency, the archive (Harvard Univ., 2002). She proposes an “interdependence” “between abstraction/rationalization and an emphasis upon the contingent, chance, and the ephemeral… in the structuring of temporality in modernity” (Doane 10-11). 49 binaries and isolate the senses in different realms of theoretical thought. To do this, we had to begin with Ousman’s scream: its sound event presented our perception the first shock of an event whose affective collision with our senses challenged our descriptive language. And as the scream endured, it made clear that it was not concerned with the narrative content of Polisse, of the intentions of the film’s director, of our interpretation of its “purpose” in the scene; it was the opening of an interstice, of duration, of time lived in the immediate, directly. It presented us a wager, daring us to choose to listen and live with the rhythms in which it participates, rhythms not constrained to a single film, but instead expanding upon an immanent plane of film and art. And even though our choice to listen might mean that we venture into the unknown, we do so among the differentiating vibrations that hint at a multiplicity and suggest that we do not venture alone. The music of the multiplicity that rings from the sound event in film echoes a rhythm we recognize: it is both our bodies and their bodying, and they call us to consider our collective becoming, to feel the chance at change that evolves within our senses, to challenge the images that once held us captive within their signifying systems and separated us from our own collective potential. At this current moment in cultural history, when binary language is increasingly leveraged to prevent interaction,69 the sound event challenges us to think of film in ways that help us to connect and reflect upon a plane of perception that such terms cannot touch. The sound events resonate their rhythms in our direction: Will we listen?

69 We think of the nationalistic chant, “This is our home,” that accompanied the campaign of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National (France’s far-right party) (Nossiter 1); we also recall the campaign slogan of President Donald Trump, “Make America great again,” which implies (among other things) a before and after to a period of prosperity in the United States. 50

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