Deleuze and Film 9780748647460

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Deleuze and Film

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Deleuze Connections ‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND – stammering.’ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues General Editor Ian Buchanan Editorial Advisory Board Keith Ansell-Pearson Rosi Braidotti Claire Colebrook Tom Conley

Gregg Lambert Adrian Parr Paul Patton Patricia Pisters

Titles Available in the Series Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature Mark Bonta and John Protevi (eds), Deleuze and Geophilosophy Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds), Deleuze and Space Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary World Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance Mark Poster and David Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contemporary Art Laura Guillaume and Joe Hughes (eds), Deleuze and the Body Daniel W. Smith and Nathan Jun (eds), Deleuze and Ethics Frida Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds), Deleuze and Film Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee (eds), Deleuze and Law Forthcoming Titles in the Series Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies Inna Semetsky and Diana Masny (eds), Deleuze and Education Visit the Deleuze Connections website at www.euppublishing.com/series/delco

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Deleuze and Film

Edited by David Martin-Jones and William Brown

Edinburgh University Press

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© editorial matter and organisation David Martin-Jones and William Brown, 2012 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4121 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4120 8 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4746 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5091 1 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5090 3 (Amazon ebook)

The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1

2 3

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5

6 7 8

9

Introduction: Deleuze’s World Tour of Cinema William Brown and David Martin-Jones An Imprint of Godzilla: Deleuze, the Action-Image and Universal History David Deamer Philosophy, Politics and Homage in Tears of the Black Tiger Damian Sutton Time-Images in Traces of Love: Repackaging South Korea’s Traumatic National History for Tourism David Martin-Jones The Rebirth of the World: Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann Richard Rushton ‘There are as many paths to the time-image as there are films in the world’: Deleuze and The Lizard William Brown In Search of Lost Reality: Waltzing with Bashir Markos Hadjioannou The Schizoanalysis of European Surveillance Films Serazer Pekerman Fictions of the Imagination: Habit, Genre and the Powers of the False Amy Herzog Feminine Energies, or the Outside of Noir Elena del Río

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18 37

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88 104 121

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vi Deleuze and Film 10 The Daemons of Unplumbed Space: Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 173 Anna Powell 11 Digitalising Deleuze: The Curious Case of the Digital Human Assemblage, or What Can a Digital Body Do? 192 David H. Fleming 12 The Surface of the Object: Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 210 Seung-hoon Jeong Notes on Contributors Index

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Acknowledgements

We would very much like to thank our friends and contributors for their hard work, patience and collegiality with the development of this project. Thanks also to Ian Buchanan for encouraging us to take up the project with Edinburgh University Press. Chapter 3 is a developed version of an article that previously appeared in the journal Asian Cinema: David Martin-Jones, ‘Traces of Time in Traces of Love (2006): South Korean National History and the Timeimage’, Asian Cinema, 18 (2) (2007): pp. 252–70. It is reprinted here in a modified form with the kind permission of Professor John A. Lent, editor of Asian Cinema and Chair of the Asian Cinema Studies Society. Our thanks to John A. Lent and ACSS for kindly granting permission for this piece to be reprinted in developed form.

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Introduction: Deleuze’s World Tour of Cinema

William Brown and David Martin-Jones

In Deleuze and Film, Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, particularly though not uniquely those outlined in his Cinema books, are taken on a world tour during which they encounter cinemas from around the globe. To paraphrase the title of William Brown’s contribution, the purpose of this tour is to demonstrate that there are as many roads into Deleuze’s film-philosophy as there are films in the world. This collection, then, creates Deleuze and Guattarian assemblages through encounters with films from various countries, and spanning a range of genres. They include: a Japanese monster movie; a Thai western; a South Korean disaster-cum-road movie; Baz Luhrmann’s Australian and American auteur pictures; a popular Iranian comedy; an Israeli animated documentary; transnational European art films; European and American melodramas; American film noir; and two chapters on digitised productions from contemporary Hollywood. The notion of a world tour, albeit a whistle-stop one, is not intended to suggest a tourist’s interaction with different cinemas (the complexities of such encounters being something we discuss below), nor that this collection is intended as a totalising cinematic map of the world. Rather, the tour carries the reader to a (modest) range of different portals, doorways, or pathways into Deleuze’s film-philosophy. The globally inclusive approach of Deleuze and Film continues the process of opening up new frontiers in the interdisciplinary research area of Deleuze Studies, which is a feature of the Deleuze Connections series. Thus the focus of this particular collection on cinema adds a visual dimension to existing work in the series on such related topics as music, space, literature, politics, history and the contemporary world. The new transnational, film-philosophical assemblages constructed herein indicate the current state of an ongoing interrogation of the findings of Deleuze’s exciting, stimulating, brilliant, but at times Eurocentric

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2 Deleuze and Film and ahistorical conclusions regarding cinema. Accordingly, Deleuze and Film not only explores the myriad ways in which films can be said to ‘think’ (about such topics as history, national identity, geopolitics, ethics, gender, genre, affect, religion, surveillance culture, digital aesthetics, the body, and our philosophical interface with the image), it also explores the international diversity of forms taken by this process of ‘thinking’ through cinema. Critically engaging with Deleuze in this globally oriented manner, Deleuze and Film demonstrates the continued relevance of Deleuze for our understanding of cinema worldwide.

From Collected Editions to Edited Collections It is now thirty years since Deleuze’s Cinema books were published in France. Scholarly work on Deleuze and film is around two-thirds that age. Dudley Andrew (2008) has outlined the emergence of three generations of scholars in Anglo-American academia who have worked on Deleuze and cinema during this period. To provide our own history of English-language work on Deleuze and film, we might principally mention Steven Shaviro, who pioneered the appliance of Deleuzian ideas to cinema with The Cinematic Body (1993), and D.N. Rodowick, whose Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997) marked the first major philosophical investigation into Deleuze’s thoughts on film. There has followed an impressive bibliography of Deleuzian film scholarship, an extensive if not exhaustive list of which might include work by Laura U. Marks (2000), Barbara M. Kennedy (2000), Alison Butler (2002), Patricia Pisters (2003), Ronald Bogue (2003), Anna Powell (2005; 2007), David MartinJones (2006; 2011), Martine Beugnet (2007), Garrett Stewart (2007), Elena del Río (2008), John Mullarkey (2008), Patricia MacCormack (2008), Timothy Murray (2008), Paola Marrati (2008), Amy Herzog (2009), Damian Sutton (with Martin-Jones 2008; 2009), Gregg Redner (2011), Felicity Colman (2011) and Richard Rushton (2012). This is in addition to three other edited collections by Gregory Flaxman (2000), Patricia MacCormack and Ian Buchanan (2008), and D.N. Rodowick (2010); work on film that uses Deleuze without it being the primary focus; and the wealth of journal articles on Deleuze and cinema, including many published, since 2007, in Deleuze Studies. The above list may seem excessive, but we deliberately foreground it here for the very reason that it is so rarely seen in print. By emphasising the substantial and still growing body of work on Deleuze and film, we want not only to demonstrate the ongoing influence of Deleuze’s work, but also to point out that Deleuzian film studies have extended

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Introduction 3 far beyond Deleuze’s initial ideas, a process that the chapters collected herein continue to develop. Deleuze and Film provides further consolidation of this field, in particular by introducing works from a fresh-faced and vigorous ‘fourth generation’ – if we follow Andrew’s terminology – represented here by William Brown, David Deamer, David H. Fleming, Markos Hadjioannou, Seung-hoon Jeong and Serazer Pekerman. Being an assemblage of authors from different, but recent, ‘generations’, each of whom inevitably brings their own temporality to Deleuze’s work, the essays in Deleuze and Film therefore manifest the various ways in which the field continues to grow. Many of the routes into Deleuze’s filmphilosophy on offer here develop upon the existing lines of flight that individual authors are pursuing in their independent research. However, as befits the newer generations, Deleuze and Film also offers novel interpretations of and approaches to Deleuze. The diversity of films explored, in combination with the novelty of the approaches offered, means that Deleuze and Film is noticeably different from the three existing edited collections on Deleuze and cinema. Most apparent is this collection’s emphasis on films from beyond Europe and America, the two geographical regions that provide the primary structuring groupings of both the Cinema books and the three previous anthologies. This is not to claim that we have comprehensively covered the entire planet. We are conscious, for instance, that films from Latin America and Africa do not appear. This is due in large part to the expertise of those currently engaging with Deleuze and cinema, although work is beginning to emerge on such cinemas (for example, Pisters 2006: 180–91; Martin-Jones 2011: 69–99). It also speaks to the relative lack of international distribution that the cinemas of these regions receive, at least in comparison to those from the global north. Nevertheless, an attempt geographically to expand Deleuze’s film-philosophical connections has been made. This distinctive approach is joined by a marked emphasis on popular cinemas, which stands as a direct challenge to the oft-held belief that Deleuze’s Cinema books are most directly applicable to European art cinema. This filmic style was the primary focus for Deleuze’s development of the concept of the time-image in Cinema 2, against which the negative foil of the movement-image is sometimes thought to have been developed in Cinema 1 (the writing of Cinema 1 necessitating the preexistence of the idea for Cinema 2, after all), and in contrast to which the greater philosophical complexity of the time-image was arguably made to shine brighter in Cinema 2.

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4 Deleuze and Film Therefore, in line with the current realities of cinema worldwide, and as per the original dual emphasis of the Cinema books themselves, the movement-image (especially the action-image) has as central a presence in this collection as the time-image. However, as these image categories are explored in relation to various films from around the world, the very distinction between them is also reconsidered and somewhat refined, this being one major advantage of the world tour. In this way Deleuze and Film adds a further dimension to the assemblages made between Deleuze’s concepts and ‘philosophical friends’ (Rodowick 2010: xiv) in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, through the construction of new assemblages with a range of international ‘filmic friends’.

Deleuze Visits Hong Kong When taking such a deliberately expansive approach to a global range of cinemas there is an immediate concern raised over the Eurocentrism of Deleuze’s conclusions, which were developed in relation to what would now be considered a rather old-fashioned US/European cinematic canon. Further issues are raised by Deleuze’s reliance upon a similarly Western heritage of philosophical friends, or conceptual personae (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 64), to explore cinemas from ‘Other’ countries. These are very legitimate concerns, forming part of an ongoing debate in film studies related to the particular difficulties that arise – for example, accusations of elitism or cultural imperialism – when studying world cinemas (Martin-Jones 2011: 1–19). The theoretical debate over Western interpretations of Chinese cinema enables us to begin to outline what we consider to be the benefits of the approach taken by Deleuze and Film. A prominent scholar of Chinese cinema, Rey Chow, observes that Western film critics can ‘produce studies of films from cultures whose languages they do not know, whereas it is inconceivable for non-Western critics to study the French, German, Italian, and Anglo-American cinemas without knowing their respective languages’ (Chow 1995: 27). Bearing this imbalance of what we might term critical legitimacy in mind, Chow goes on to apply Western methods of close reading to Chinese-language films. Chow is not Western, per se, since she identifies herself as being from colonial Hong Kong. In her own words, however, she is ‘a foreigner, who, while having been born and raised in the languages and cultures of modern China, will nonetheless always remain a kind of outsider, a barbarian whose interpretations carry within them the risk of illegitimacy and impropriety’ (Chow 1995: 51). Yet, particularly in light of criticism

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Introduction 5 from Esther C.M. Yau (1987), who rails against readings of Chinese films that use Western theories, Chow asks: [W]hy should ‘native’ critics reading with the instruments they have at hand – even though these instruments are Western – feel guilty about what they are doing? If these instruments are bloodied with the history of Western imperialism, it is our task to confront that history rather than pretend that there is some pristine, as yet uncorrupted, ethnic ‘raw material’ on the other side of the Western world. Pushed to its extreme, the guilt-ridden logic of Yau’s rhetoric would have to mean only one thing – that we should not and cannot read a Chinese text in the West at all. (Chow 1995: 86)

This seems a legitimate question, not least because in a globalised world in which ideas and texts travel with greater freedom than ever before, it arguably becomes possible to talk about ways in which ‘transnational’ or global levels of culture exist, which include not only films themselves, but also the theoretical frameworks that we might use to talk about films. In other words, why would a scholar not use transnational methods of film criticism that can help her to evaluate cinema from her ‘native’ culture? It does not seem inappropriate, for example, when Stephen Teo invokes Deleuze to describe the ‘irrationality’ of the cinema of Johnnie To: [To’s cinema is] an idiosyncratic, irrational cinema: irrational by virtue of culture and locality (Hong Kong as the intersection of East and West is by this very fact an irrational culture and place) but also irrational by dint of a formal structure where the ‘images and sequences are no longer linked by rational cuts . . . but are relinked on top of irrational cuts,’ as Deleuze defines the ‘regime of the new image.’ While Deleuze is referring mainly to the post-war cinema of the West, he might as well be talking of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, a cinema of irrationality that is inherently postmodern. (Teo 2007: 209)

Indeed, Teo is not the only scholar to use Deleuze to look at Hong Kong films; Ackbar Abbas (1997), Ka-Fai Yau (2001), Janice Tong (2003), Gina Marchetti (2007), Meaghan Morris (2007) and Martin-Jones (2006, 2011) have all also used Deleuze in their considerations of Hong Kong cinema. However, since Hong Kong occupies a very intricately intertwined position between China and the West, any discussion of the applicability of Deleuze’s work to its cinema is extremely complex. How can we untangle the local and global histories that intermingle in the colonisation and development of the territory as a British Crown Colony, or indeed in its current status as a global financial powerhouse, sufficiently to say that an interpretative framework drawn from Deleuze is an appropriate tool for analysing its cinema?

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6 Deleuze and Film Yet it is because such an exploration of Hong Kong provides precisely a Deleuzian ‘limit situation’ (Deleuze 1989: 18), in which it can seem almost impossible to know how to act, that it is informing for this discussion. For Deleuze and Félix Guattari, an example seemingly as innocent as the mutual becoming of the orchid and the wasp is in fact far from innocent with respect to the relative de- and reterritorialisations that each party acquires through their interaction (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 10). With this in mind, even though any theoretical assemblage between Deleuze and Hong Kong is more than likely to lead to some form of unequal exchange – not least because of the spectres of neo-colonialism, Eurocentrism, ethnography and cultural tourism that haunt any such move – nevertheless dialogue should still be attempted. Such an interaction, after all, has the potential mutually to enhance each side of the assemblage. We might even go so far as to argue that such an interaction is the only way in which we can begin to become aware of how we can engage in the ‘unthinking’ aspect of our otherwise ‘unthinking Eurocentrism’, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) have so influentially advocated. More to the point, perhaps, nowadays a great many films are designed precisely to engage international audiences, both to enable them to recuperate costs of production, and/or to turn a profit. Like most films from Hong Kong, the films discussed in this collection reach out around the globe to make contact with various audiences. In many cases they are made specifically with a view to seeking out interaction with Western audiences, while Western audiences are nowadays rarely the sole target market for any film industry, including Hollywood. Admittedly, production possibilities remain unevenly distributed worldwide. The international distribution network is massively uneven in terms of the global film industry’s centres and peripheries. Not only do the transnational conglomerates that own the Hollywood studios play a part in this network, but so too do the film festival circuit, the independent cinema chains, DVD and all other forms of distribution – each of which constitutes a market. In addition there is an ongoing struggle intellectually to determine the extent to which filmmakers conform to the demands of these markets in a way that once again provokes the return of arguments concerning Eurocentrism, neo-colonialism, autoethnography, the co-opting of oppositional forms of articulation, canon formations, cultural tourism, and various other complex political positions in which the identification of agency on the part of the peripheral filmmaker is tricky at best. Nevertheless, the films have been made, and will be seen worldwide.

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Introduction 7 In such a context it is inevitable that we will view a film through the lens of our own experiences (which are culturally and historically relative), and it is perhaps equally as inevitable that our philosophical interpretation of cinema will be inflected as a result. What we receive in exchange for our interpretative efforts, however, are revelations pertaining to our own ways of thinking, which are fed back to us by the films with which we engage. It is at this point that the unequal exchange inherent in such dialogue has the potential to shift our thinking. Whilst it might be too idealistic or naïve to believe that our learned beliefs in our respective cultures may be shaken to the core by such exchanges, there is the possibility, at least, that they will be expanded to incorporate a new awareness, if not understanding, of something ‘Other’. What prevents this process from being uniquely a capitalist one of expansion through cultural colonisation is that it is not simply one-way. If watching a film broadens one’s centre, the experience that one has with the film also broadens its ‘centre’. A reading of a film deepens the range of meanings that that film has. Furthermore, if a film does represent a worldview that is somehow beyond (and no doubt only imperfectly captured by) the film itself, then readings of what is represented deepen the film’s range of meaning, too. In short, the film expands our worldview; we expand the film’s worldview. Whilst inevitably to some degree an unequal exchange, this is nevertheless a process of mutual becoming in which, from Deleuze and Guattari’s position in What is Philosophy?, ‘Dionysus becomes philosopher at the same time that Nietzsche becomes Dionysus’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 65). Ultimately it is in this spirit of dialogue and friendship that the collection’s many chapters on diverse cinemas beyond Europe and the USA should be read. As the contributions that follow demonstrate, each film has myriad possible interpretations many of which can productively and affirmatively include Deleuze. It is precisely because all films can affect us in new and unique ways that they can inspire in us new modes of thought. Put another way, there are as many pathways into Deleuze’s film-philosophy as there are films in the world.

Deleuze and Film as Singular Multiplicity To make such a claim for the rhizomatic or labyrinthine nature of Deleuze’s film-philosophy is to acknowledge that there are now many interpretations of, and opinions about, the Cinema books. Amongst scholars who work with Deleuze in relation to film, in whichever discipline they may be based, there are various readings, or perhaps, versions,

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8 Deleuze and Film of the Cinema books. As the diverse range of approaches taken by the authors listed above illustrates, there are different Cinema books for those who apply and develop his ideas and for those who seek to challenge them; different Cinema books for those whose concerns are more broadly philosophical and for those who are drawn to the aesthetic, or the political; different Cinema books for the art film, for genre movies, and for modern political or minor cinemas; different Cinema books for those interested in questions surrounding body/mind distinctions and for those more stimulated by affect; different Cinema books for those who like the rigour of taxonomies and for those who prefer explorations of time and movement. Indeed, it is noticeable that many of the authors collected herein also take inspiration from Deleuze’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written with Guattari (1984; 1987). For del Río, Powell, Sutton and Pekerman, concepts as diverse as the body without organs, the rhizome, non-Oedipal desire, nomadism, schizoanalysis and multi-plane existence enable provocative assemblages with the Cinema books. In each case there is a prominent emphasis on Deleuze and Guattarian deterritorialisation, which can take on a gendered (del Río), historical (Sutton), geopolitical (Pekerman) or aesthetic (Powell) role depending on the films explored. Thus, just as there are multiple entrances to the Cinema books, so too are there numerous ways into the labyrinth of Deleuze’s oeuvre more generally, at a rhizomatic intersection with which the Cinema books can here be seen to sit. In Deleuze and Film, the Cinema books continue to proliferate with the range of films explored. The volume begins its world tour with three pieces that focus on history, exploring how Deleuze’s image categories function to construct national histories in Japan, Thailand and South Korea respectively. As all three demonstrate, although discussion of the cinematic construction of history is a submerged element of the Cinema books, it is in fact integral to our understanding of the function of the action-image (Deamer and Sutton) and the time-image (Martin-Jones). The tour commences in Japan with David Deamer’s exploration of Gojira/Godzilla (Ishirô Honda, Japan, 1954). For Deleuze the decades immediately following the Second World War were those in which the European new waves explored the any-spaces-whatever (Deleuze 1989: xi) of the emergent time-image, commencing with the cities in ruins so famously explored by the Italian neorealists. In this historical moment Japanese filmmakers found themselves subject to the censorship and strictures of the US occupation. Akira Kurosawa, for example, omitted an originally planned scene of a thriving black market at the start of

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Introduction 9 the now world famous Rashômon/Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950) (Yoshimoto 2000: 189), presumably due to fears that this historical allegory probing the reasons for Japan’s defeat would otherwise be too easily spotted and censored as a result (Davidson 1969). The mainstreaming of such direct depictions of the post-war Japan in ruins had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s in yakuza movies like Jingi naki tatakai/Battles Without Honour and Humanity (Kinji Fukasaku, Japan, 1973). In Godzilla, however, we do encounter Japanese cities in ruins, the devastation of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki being replayed by the stomping feet of a giant prehistoric reptile. As Deamer’s chapter intricately teases out, a Deleuzian understanding of the way in which such action-images function demonstrates just how effective they are at negotiating history through popular devices like the monster. Deamer’s three readings of the film, following the three versions of history that Deleuze identifies in action-image cinema, culminate in a surprising and original interpretation of Godzilla as an ethical image that enables a reconsideration of the morality of the Japanese military, imperial past. Damian Sutton continues this examination of the ethical nature of the action-image, again in relation to a national past, in this instance that of Thailand. Recent Thai history is, like Japan’s, marked by a convergence of modernity and military rule. Like Deamer, Sutton also offers three readings of one specific popular genre film, Wisit Sasanatieng’s western Fa Thalai Jone/Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000). Assembling the Cinema books with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, utilising in particular the concept of the body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 10), Sutton proposes three ways of considering how Thai history is negotiated in the very versatile, at times aesthetically sophisticated, action-image. That is, history can be negotiated in such a way that the result is one or a combination of civilisation, totalitarianism or anarchy. Sutton’s chapter includes an examination of the way such Asian films are received by Western critics that again points to the need to situate world cinemas historically and contextually when exploring them through Deleuze’s work. This is a point taken up by David Martin-Jones in his analysis of the South Korean disaster-cum-road movie, Gaeulro/ Traces of Love (Dae-seung Kim, South Korea, 2006). Martin-Jones details how the time-image functions in this film to engage with national history, and to emphasise the curative possibilities of heritage tourism (both psychologically and economically), in the wake of the Asian economic crisis of 1997. Using this specific example, Martin-Jones argues

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10 Deleuze and Film for a reconsideration of the Eurocentric nature of Deleuze’s conclusions regarding the ramifications of the shift from movement-image to timeimage that he observed in American and European cinemas before and after the Second World War. Deleuze and Film then heads south to Australia, as Richard Rushton looks at the feature films of Baz Luhrmann through the Deleuzian lens. A central contribution to the collection, Rushton notes early on in his chapter that ‘there is more than one Deleuze in the Cinema books’, building around this position a considered argument as to why the widely held view that Deleuze thought the time-image aesthetically superior to the movement-image does not necessarily do justice to Deleuze’s love of movies more generally, including movement-images. Here, then, is further evidence of the proliferation of Cinema books that turns on the much-debated question of whether the distinction between movement-image and time-image across the two volumes demonstrates a linear history, an epistemic break, a qualitative judgement or an ethical difference. Initially considering how Deleuze’s admiration of Vincente Minnelli ensures that his films span both volumes of Deleuze’s Cinema project, Rushton joins Martin-Jones in troubling the split between movementimage and time-image cinema. For Rushton, neither type of image is the exclusive patrimony of any one type or period of cinema – as both Minnelli and Luhrmann’s films testify. Even though Luhrmann’s films might typically be thought of as movement-images, they are also capable of opening up into what Rushton defines, after Deleuze, as ‘other worlds’. That is, his films feature characters who are trying to create the conditions in which another world can be brought into existence – another world that is of their own creation as opposed to having been imposed upon them. Rather than this simply being an excuse for solipsism, though, these other worlds are crucially brought about, or completed, by another. Since the other worlds of Baz Luhrmann are completed not just by the main protagonists but by them having affirmative experiences with others, his films involve the potential not just to change the world, but, ethically speaking, also to create an inclusive, but not necessarily homogenising, collectivity rather than a world based on exclusion and imbalance. The next two essays in the collection bring us to Western Asia, or the Middle East, the diverse cinematic nature of which is reflected in the popular Iranian comedy and the animated Israeli documentary that they discuss. William Brown’s essay follows on from Rushton’s in arguing that mainstream cinema is capable of bringing about change in the

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Introduction 11 Iranian context. Looking at Kamal Tabrizi’s Marmoulak/The Lizard (Iran, 2004), Brown argues that this popular comedy, which is in part a critique of the Iranian clergy, serves what Deleuze would term a ‘minoritarian’ function both in terms of its content and in terms of its reception. That is, the film sees a thief disguised as a mullah bring together a community otherwise divided along class and gender lines. Furthermore, The Lizard’s popularity in Iran suggests that the film’s vision of Islam as a tolerant and progressive religion resonated with spectators, even if it did not with the authorities, who banned the film one month after its release. As such, this film, like Luhrmann’s oeuvre for Rushton, also has an ethical dimension in suggesting that there is in Iran the potential for an inclusive, tolerant and diverse society. Brown, however, differs from Rushton by suggesting that not only might Deleuze have drawn too sharp a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image, but also that the potential for original thought can be found in any film. As such, and in a manner that echoes one of the main refrains of The Lizard, Brown concludes that there are as many paths to the time-image as there are films in the world. Markos Hadjioannou’s essay on Wals im Bashir/Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel/France/Germany/USA/Finland/Switzerland/Belgium/ Australia, 2008), meanwhile, synthesises and takes in different directions aspects of Rushton and Brown’s essays. Most noticeably, like Brown, Hadjioannou invokes Deleuze’s concept of the ‘powers of the false’. Brown explains how, in the unlikely context of Iranian popular cinema, Deleuze’s Nietzschean concept of the powers of the false can serve a political function by helping to create an integrated and progressive community. Hadjioannou, moreover, offers a compelling account of how in Waltz with Bashir both the falseness of memory and the apparent falseness of the digital animated image can also help to induce new modes of thought. Thus he contends that cinema can allow us to see the world not simply as a representation of a space made up of fixed spatial and temporal coordinates, but as a dynamic and ever-changing flux. Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary, and as such we might be inclined to think of it as at the very least ambiguous with regard to its objectivity. However, Hadjioannou successfully posits a Deleuzian reading whereby the film is not so much interested in defining a strict boundary between the true and the false, or the real and the imaginary, in its investigation into director Ari Folman’s personal experiences as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon. Rather, the film productively utilises the ‘false’ and the digital images of which it is primarily composed, in order to question precisely the nature of what we might consider to

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12 Deleuze and Film be ‘objectivity’. An animated documentary is not the objective truth; but objectivity supposes a separation from the self and from the world that is simply not possible. As a result, Waltz with Bashir is not simply ‘subjective’ either. As Rushton and Brown argue for mainstream Australian and Iranian films respectively, then, Hadjioannou argues that an animated documentary, too, has a role to play not simply in the observation of reality, but in the ongoing creation of reality. Serazer Pekerman’s chapter on surveillance films brings the world tour to Europe, where the common thread that weaves throughout many of the essays remains the potential for change via productive encounters with the Other. To do this, Pekerman turns us away from the Cinema books once more, and back towards Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Elaborating upon the concept of the nomadic subject, whose existence is one of permanent deterritorialisation, Pekerman analyses three European art films, Red Road (Andrea Arnold, UK/Denmark, 2006), Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2006) and Salmer fra Kjøkkenet/Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, Norway/Sweden, 2003). In each film, the main protagonist is a surveillance expert who has a deterritorialising encounter with the people they observe. This in turn leads them to reject the imposed system of governance for which supposedly they work. As a result of this deterritorialisation, they are able to forge new partnerships and modes of existence with the Other. What is more, the plots of these films are reflected on the level of their production history: each being a European co-production, which also reflects upon the creative interactions that come about when filmmakers from different countries come into contact with their friends and neighbours. The three chapters that follow turn our attention back towards genre cinemas. Amy Herzog’s discussion of genre through the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder provides further transitional points in the collection (from art house back to popular cinemas once again, as well as from European to North American cinema), by exploring how both filmmakers encounter the conventions of melodrama in such a way that they produce original, affective cinema. While genre is often viewed as a stable or stabilising method for categorising films, Herzog unsettles this definition by arguing that the very stability of a genre sows the seeds of its becoming-other. Like Brown and Hadjioannou, Herzog uses the powers of the false as a means to clarify this. If it is the repetition of certain types of image that allows viewers to categorise films according to genre, then the forger is a figure who can manipulate this process in order to create images that seem to repeat,

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Introduction 13 but which in fact do not. ‘False’ images, then, might initially appear to reaffirm that which superficially they repeat – that is, to be clichés. However, this false repetition in fact opens up the possibility for subtle and intricate new modes of thought. If, as Herzog argues after Deleuze, repetition also changes the mind of the person contemplating that which is repeated (Deleuze 1994: 70), then the ‘false’ repetition only does this more so. Herzog here synthesises the powers of the false and the potential for change in repetition with the notion that Sirk and Fassbinder work within melodrama as a set of conventions to create clichés that do not simply ‘represent’ the genre, but which, through the use of light and the other affective qualities of the medium, have affects of their own. It is not, then, that these images are devoid of a representational, or clichéd element; in fact, it is the falseness of their images, their resemblance to the cliché, that allows them to subvert the genre that enabled them to exist in the first place. Herzog engages with work by Elena del Río (2008) in her Atlanticspanning analysis of affect in melodrama, and in the chapter that follows del Río further illustrates the closeness of European and US cinemas that is pivotal to the distinction Deleuze draws between movement-image and time-image. Indeed, as in Deamer’s chapter, del Río returns us to the moment in time just after the Second World War in which Deleuze posits the gradual emergence of the time-image in European cinemas, in a way that provides an additional international dimension to Deleuze’s argument. Exploring US film noir as a counterpart to Italian neorealism, del Río uncovers the same loosening of spatio-temporal coordinates of the emergent time-image that Deleuze observed in neorealism, only in film noir the psycho-social crisis that this depicts is focused around the uneasy dividing line of the law. Here the role of the femme fatale is crucial, her channelling of libidinal desires allowing an exploration of the ‘ethical possibilities of the powers of the false’ in a popular format. Thus del Río places gender at the heart of a chapter that illustrates precisely how the US action-image experienced its own crisis and transformation at the same time as the time-image was emerging in Europe. Anna Powell continues the process of recuperating the Cinema books for a positive reading of genre cinemas. Utilising Deleuze ‘against the grain’ of what many would agree is an elitist disdain for the popular, Powell focuses on the usefulness of Deleuze’s image categories for exploring different kinds of contemporary popular films, including Hollywood productions. The ‘mixed planes’ of Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2004) are seen to mix various of the ideas that run throughout Deleuze and Film. First, the chapter offers, like Rushton’s and

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14 Deleuze and Film Brown’s, a consideration of how Deleuze’s film-philosophy and popular cinema are not mutually exclusive, although here Powell turns her attention specifically to Hollywood cinema. Second, in so doing, she opens up a line of investigation into Hellboy’s specifically digital imagery, a line also pursued by Hadjioannou and, as we shall see, by Fleming. For Powell, digital imagery demands new ways of thinking. Third, as the films analysed by Pekerman involve productive becomings on the level of their diegesis, Powell analyses how Hellboy mixes steampunk, gothic, comic books, sci-fi and horror influences such that it, too, functions on what Deleuze and Guattari term in What is Philosophy? (1994) mixed planes. Like Pekerman, Powell delves also into A Thousand Plateaus to argue that Hellboy is a mixture of root, radicle and rhizome. Like the root, the film imitates the world (that is, it works on the level of representation). Like the radicle, Hellboy also self-consciously explores its roots, revealing its comic book origins within the film’s diegesis. Finally, like the rhizome, the film also makes conjunctive, inclusive and productive connections, in that it mixes these ‘planes’, shifting its level of meaning from the representational to the sensational, not least through ‘anomalous’ and hard-to-define images. The result is that Hellboy, like the classical melodramas and films noir analysed in the chapters preceding this one, produces new modes of thought. David H. Fleming’s contribution takes up the reins of Hadjioannou’s and Powell’s essays, offering a substantial analysis of digital technology’s power to create new forms of time-image. Using David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (USA, 2008) as a template, Fleming investigates the way in which digital technology also unsettles the representational elements of performance. Benjamin Button provides us with recognisable images of Brad Pitt in the lead role, but these are also combined with various other elements, including the software, or digital-beings, that are used to change Benjamin’s age. As a result, Fleming demonstrates that Pitt is not the shining star of the film, but that Benjamin instead constructs a twinkling constellation. The result of these conjunctions between flesh-world and digital-beings is that we encounter digital bodies that can affect us in new and unique ways. This happens not least because they conflate the boundary between such binaries as: actual-virtual, realism-surrealism, actors-animation, mimesis-abstraction, human-machine, subject-object, and viewer-character – once again, opening us up to new modes of thought. Finally, Seung-hoon Jeong brings the world tour to a close by exploring how ‘interfacial’ objects, reminiscent of the technology associated with the filming and screening of films, appear across a range of

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Introduction 15 cinemas internationally. These interfaces provide gateways through which viewers can pass from the actual world into the virtual, and in this way cinema provides us with a broader interface with the plane of immanence. Like Sutton, Pekerman and Powell before him, Jeong draws on A Thousand Plateaus, specifically the concept of the body without organs, to develop his argument for the existence and purpose of ‘quasiinterfaces’ through which spectators gain access to the virtual worlds of film. Jeong’s varied filmic examples recapitulate much of the geographical terrain covered in previous chapters – from Thai, Hong Kong and Taiwanese, through European, to US films – ultimately demonstrating that for all the cinematic pathways into Deleuze’s Cinema books (the myriad possible filmic routes into his film-philosophy), there are equally as many Deleuzian interfaces with film as there are spectators in the world. Deleuze and Film sets out to offer essays that not only illustrate Deleuze’s film-philosophy, but which also take it in new directions. For, as much as Deleuze’s film-philosophy is presented as the container that encompasses all cinemas (paths ‘into’ the Cinema books), in fact it is a catalyst for the uncontainable. Deleuze is a suitable framework through which to analyse various cinemas, but the conjunction of Deleuze and cinema produces new analyses that Deleuze himself might not have expected, particularly in the age of electronic and digital imagery of which Deleuze was so suspicious (Deleuze 1989: 265–6). As such, our tour of world cinema ostensibly ends in the USA, which many might feel is the home, or container, of globally dominant and predominantly movement-image cinema. Yet this is neither to suggest the inevitable reterritorialisation of Deleuzian film-philosophy within hegemonic filmmaking practices, nor is it to affirm the supposed aesthetic inferiority of the movement-image to the time-image. Rather, Deleuze and Film seeks to show that Deleuze can be put into productive partnerships with cinemas from all over the world, including Hollywood, such that the movement-image/time-image binary is repeatedly unsettled, and such that Deleuze’s film-philosophy is not a container but a catalyst for new ways of thinking. The pan-global approach adopted here also takes us to a more metaphysical level. From Asia to Australia, from the Middle East to Europe to the USA, and by extension we would argue from Latin American to Africa to Antarctica, Deleuze and Film speaks not of how certain images are more powerful than others, but of how there is infinite potential for thought and change in every image. Deleuze and Film conjunctively, affirmatively and productively explores the potential not of some, but

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16 Deleuze and Film of all cinemas. Rather than saying yes to some cinema and no to others, rather than containing anything at all, Deleuze and Film opens up these containers and celebrates what spills out.

References Abbas, A. (1997), Hong Kong, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Andrew, D. (2008), ‘La réception américaine’, in F. Dosse and J-M. Frodon (eds), Gilles Deleuze et les images, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, pp. 145–62. Beugnet, M. (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Cinema, London: Routledge. Butler, A. (2002), Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, London: Wallflower. Chow, R. (1995), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Colman, F. (2011), Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts, Oxford: Berg. Davidson, J. (1969), ‘Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon’, in D. Richie (ed.), Rashomon, New York: Grove Press, pp. 209–21. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso. Flaxman, G. (ed.) (2000), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herzog, A. (2009), Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kennedy, B.M. (2000), Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. MacCormack, P. (2008), Cinesexuality, Aldershot: Ashgate. MacCormack, P. and I. Buchanan (eds) (2008), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London: Continuum. Marchetti, G. (2007), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs – The Trilogy, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Marks, L.U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Marrati, P. (2008), Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, trans. A. Hartz, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2011), Deleuze and World Cinemas, London: Continuum. Martin-Jones, D. and D. Sutton (2008), Deleuze Reframed, London: I.B. Tauris. Morris, M. (2007), ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and

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Introduction 17 the Making of a Global Popular Culture’, in K.-H. Chen and C.B. Huat (eds), The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 427–48. Mullarkey, J. (2008), Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, T. (2008), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Patricia, P. (2006), ‘Arresting the Flux of Images and Sounds’, in I. Buchanan and A. Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 175–93. Pisters, P. (2003), The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze and Film Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Powell, A. (2007), Deleuze, Altered States and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Redner, G. (2011), Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge Between Film Theory and Music, Bristol: Intellect. Rodowick, D.N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (2010), ‘Introduction: What Does Time Express?’, in D.N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xiii–xxiv. Rushton, R. (2012), Cinema after Deleuze, London: Continuum. Shaviro, S. (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Shohat, E. and R. Stam (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London: Routledge. Stewart, G. (2007), Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sutton, D. (2009), Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Teo, S. (2007), Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Tong, J. (2003), ‘Chungking Express’, in C. Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus, London: BFI, pp. 47–55. Yau, E.C.M. (1987), ‘Yellow Earth: Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text’, Film Quarterly, 41 (2): 22–33. Yau, K.-F. (2001), ‘Cinema 3: Towards a “Minor Hong Kong Cinema”’, Cultural Studies, 15 (3/4): 543–63. Yoshimoto, M. (2000), Kurosawa, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Chapter 1

An Imprint of Godzilla: Deleuze, the Action-Image and Universal History

David Deamer

Cinema is not a representation. We just tend to think of it as such. Cinema does not reproduce. Cinema does not reflect. Rather, cinema is machinic. Films (be they classical realist, impressionist, expressionist, neorealist, modernist, postmodernist, avant-garde, or whatever) are little machines. And machines produce. This is how Deleuze understands cinema. And the task of a Deleuzian encounter with film is ‘a productive use of the . . . machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 106). To enable the film machine to produce we must conjoin it with other machines: ‘it is at the level of interference of many practices that things happen’ (Deleuze 2002: 280). And it is for this reason that Deleuze explores cinema through the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, and the film theories of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergei Eisenstein, amongst others. Writing about cinema should be ‘a montage of desiring-machines’, with the result that film theory becomes an ‘exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 106). This task seems particularly urgent with popular cinema. Take Ishirô Honda’s Gojira/Godzilla (Japan, 1954). Writing in the early 1960s, Donald Richie asserts that the mainstream Japanese film industry ‘has naturally used Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the [atom] bomb; but it has not done so in any constructive or convincing manner’ (Richie 1996: 28). Paradigmatic, for Richie, is Godzilla, a film ‘about’ the atom bomb that went on to spawn a popular action genre, the kaiju¯ eiga (mysterious creature film). None of these movies, Richie believes, digs deep into the Japanese nuclear event ‘in order to come to terms with it’ (Richie 1996: 30). This problem has its origin in narrative strategies that require ‘story-line’ films to ‘dramatise’, ‘distort’ and ‘falsify’ in order to entertain (Richie 1996: 30). Slightly more recently (though certainly not eclipsing such elitism) critics have begun to take popular cinemas far

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 19 more seriously, engaging with these texts using, for example, linguistic, psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist and postcolonial theory as a template. Given Godzilla was the first mainstream Japanese film to examine the atom bomb, such ongoing re-evaluations remain vital. Yet all these approaches, diverse as they are, share a tendency, or a common principle, namely, that of discovering the ‘truth’ of any film. Film theory is here conceived as an unveiling. The critic deciphers or decodes a representation (a re-presentation) in order to discover what lies beneath (or what could not be presented). Theory therefore establishes what is going on behind the entertainment. In Anti-Oedipus, however, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 106). Instead, reading a text, be it cinematic or otherwise, is a creative process. If the film is a machine, it should be conjoined with other machines in order to produce new readings. Deleuzian film theory does not therefore reveal meaning; it produces it. This essay, then, attempts such a Deleuzian encounter with Godzilla. I will begin by briefly contextualising the movie with respect to post-war Japanese history, as well as exploring some more recent critical reactions to the film. Rather than dismissing Godzilla (à la Richie), these responses (aesthetic, culturalist and psychoanalytical), as I shall show, all offer trenchant readings. And despite treating Godzilla as a representation, the crucial aspect will be that these differing approaches, through their divergent unveilings, indicate the productive forces at work in the movie, forces which can be brought into play through a Deleuzian approach. This will lead me to sketch an outline of the cinematic concepts (that is, the types of image and the component signs) that Deleuze creates in the Cinema books. This, as we shall see, is crucial, since each sign is also a little productive machine. Godzilla, I will claim, can be read through the sign of the ‘imprint’, a component of what Deleuze calls, in response to realist narrative strategies, the action-image (Deleuze 2002: 33). I will then go on to investigate how the action-image imprint can be conjoined with concepts from Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ in Untimely Meditations (2006). My aim is to explore how Godzilla can be used to gather up vast historical forces, forces that can be extracted from the text and used to productive effect to create a universal history through cinema.

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20 Deleuze and Film

The Atom Bomb, Godzilla, Critical Responses Many stories circulate about the origins of Godzilla. There is Tôhô producer Tomoyuki Tanaka flying over the Pacific during the Cold War hydrogen bomb tests, wondering about the effect on the oceans below (Verbeeck 2008; Roberto 2000/2003). Or there is the director Honda returning home as a prisoner of war, not in the sky above, but on the ground, passing through Hiroshima on his way back to Tokyo (Verbeeck 2008). Cinematic inspirations have been cited, such as the American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, USA, 1953), a movie about the awakening of a monster after nuclear testing in the Arctic (Noriega 1996). All these contested beginnings have one thing in common: Godzilla is an expression of Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the nascent Cold War between the USA and USSR – one of the original designs for the monster had a mushroom-like head, to bring to mind the cloud of an atomic explosion.1 On 15 August 1945, in a radio announcement, the Emperor of Japan stated the decisive reason for his nation’s surrender: ‘the enemy has recently used a most cruel explosive’ (Hasegawa 2005: 249). Nine days previously the USA had destroyed the city of Hiroshima with a uranium bomb, and three days later a plutonium bomb had been detonated over Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of people, military and civilian, men, women and children, were vaporised instantaneously in the intense heat of the explosions and burned alive in the firestorms that raged through the cities.2 And this was just the beginning of the suffering. Soon the effects of the radioactive fallout would be felt. Nine years on: Honda’s Godzilla hits the Japanese screen. Finally, popular Japanese cinema was able to address the atom bomb, using a man in a rubber suit. Yet we must resist dismissal. After surrender the country was occupied by the Allies until 1952. Dominated by an American leadership spearheaded by General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) was created to enforce media prohibitions. No mention of the war or the atom bomb was allowed (Hirano 1996: 103–19). When the USA finally returned sovereignty to the Japanese people, it might have been expected that many filmmakers would immediately turn, en masse, to this proscribed subject.3 However, the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty made Japan an ally of the USA and a vital strategic base for the Korean War (1950–1953). The funding of atom bomb films was not something the re-emerging mainstream Japanese cinema industry would encourage, dependent as it was upon government subsidies (Richie 1996: 20–37).

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 21 With Godzilla, Honda therefore overcame a matrix of problems in exploring the atom bomb by using an indirect presentation. The story involves the awakening of a mythical Japanese monster after hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific. Godzilla first attacks the Japanese fishing fleet, then the rustic Odo island, before discovering the Japanese mainland and destroying Tokyo – twice. The Japanese people must defeat this menace and it ultimately falls to one man, Ogata (Akira Takarada), to fulfil this role. However, Ogata faces opposition. There is the aging palaeontologist Dr Yamane (Takashi Shimura), who wants to study the beast. Then there is the reclusive experimental scientist, Dr Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), the inventor of a terrifying new technology, the oxygen destroyer, which he believes should never be brought to the attention of the military. There is also Emiko (Momoko Kôchi), who, in the wonderful narrative economy of the film, is Dr Yamane’s daughter, Dr Serizawa’s fiancée and in love with Ogata. Over the course of the movie Ogata manages to convince Yamane that the monster is too dangerous to be studied, persuade Serizawa to use the oxygen destroyer, and then finally to kill Godzilla. In the process Serizawa dies and Ogata gets the girl. Jerome F. Shapiro, attuned to Japanese aesthetics, believes the film ‘explores . . . the depths of the human condition in the early post-war environment’ (Shapiro 2002: 275). For Shapiro, two traditional complementary Japanese concepts inspire the organisation of the narrative. Taking Hayao Kawai’s definitions of mono no aware, which is defined as the ‘sorrow . . . directed at something disappearing’, and urami, which ‘looks toward the continuation of a process and is born out of the spirit of resistance’, Shapiro argues that the film achieves ‘completeness’ (Shapiro 2002: 274). In other words, Godzilla is an authentic Japanese attempt at representing a nation’s hope of achieving a ‘restoration of balance and harmony’ (Shapiro 2002: 275). Chon A. Noriega, meanwhile, takes a psychoanalytical approach to the film. Here the monster ‘comes to symbolise Japan (self) as well as the United States (other)’ (Noriega 1996: 60). Godzilla is not simply an embodiment of the atom bomb, but is both an effect of the bomb and is ultimately destroyed by atomic technology, thereby representing the ‘circuitous logic of the arms race’ (Noriega 1996: 60). Yet Godzilla is also a Japanese monster. For Noriega, this is the power of psychoanalysis as the ‘privileged critical tool’, since the film represents the ‘compulsion to repeat a traumatic event in symbolic narrative’ (Noriega 1996: 56 and 61). Ultimately the movie is ‘an attempt to link the “thinkable” monster to the “unthinkable” nuclear environment . . . [and it] allows Japan to

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22 Deleuze and Film examine repressed anxieties within a historical context’ (Noriega 1996: 71). In contrast to Shapiro and Noriega, Samara Lea Allsop believes the film to be thoroughly historical. Accordingly, Godzilla is a representation of Japanese post-war pacifism, ultimately located in the anti-war and anti-nuclear lobby that emerged in the years following the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Allsop 2004). All of these readings of Godzilla represent astute, compelling engagements with the film. They share a willingness to see a mainstream, popular monster movie as something more than entertainment. Moreover, each discovers something different in the text. For Allsop it is a direct representation of the Japanese peace movement. For Shapiro this reading is reductive, and the power of Godzilla lies in its narrative strategies of mono no aware and urami, which are embodied by the characters and played out in their actions which follow a trajectory from the chaos of reactionary Japanese militarism to a new post-war concord. For Noriega the narrative resolves nothing, and is instead marked by an axiological imperative to retain and spread ambiguities from monster, to characters, to climax – and these enigmas reveal, and engender, a substratal psycho-historical mass anxiety, the unconscious of the text. It is no doubt tempting to debate these readings, to decide which is ‘true’, which is ‘false’. A Deleuzian approach, however, will not provide succour. As Slavoj Žižek has noted: ‘Deleuze was well known for his aversion toward debate’ (Žižek 2004: ix). Indeed, as Alain Badiou explains, Deleuze prefers ‘ “collaboration” . . . in a context of convergence . . . [or] divergence’ (Badiou 2000: 5). So, for instance, we might argue that Deleuze would be interested in the way in which Shapiro sees Japanese traditional concepts at work in the organisation of filmic images. Deleuze would presumably not shy away from Allsop’s reading where actual onscreen images allow the story to be appreciated as simple allegory. Yet this surface text can be used, as in Noriega, to investigate complex and ambiguous forces at play, an essential Deleuzian procedure where actual onscreen images have a virtual offscreen adjunct. When we read the Cinema books, it is clear that Deleuze is open to prior cinematic readings. Indeed, he is a generous host. The crucial aspect, however, is that no ‘technical determination, whether applied (psychoanalysis, linguistics) or reflexive is sufficient’, either to exhaust the text or to ‘constitute the concepts of cinema itself’ (Deleuze 2005: 269). Rather, as we shall see, it is the concepts of cinema, little sign machines, that conjoin in strategic and tactical alliances with philosophical theory and other events to produce new readings of a film.

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 23

A Deleuzian Cineosis Deleuze’s Cinema books explore film through the creation of audiovisual signs. Deleuze produces a catalogue of these signs and defines their distinctive features as well as their relationships and correspondences. In this way a taxonomy is made possible, a sign system that describes cinematic processes, or what I have elsewhere called a cineosis.4 Deleuze’s starting point, inspired by Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1991), is the sensory-motor process. In cinema characters appear through images in which they see and are seen, in which they feel, think, act and react. Correspondingly, the spectator, when encountering these images, is orientated into this cinematic flow to see, feel and think with the film. This is the movement-image. Deleuze initially decomposes the movementimage into three domains: perception-, affection-, and action-images. Perception-images describe a cinematic seeing through camera elision, a character point-of-view shot or, more commonly, a looking at characters in environments. Affection-images express the intensive, which in its most common cinematic form is a close-up of the face. Action-images are the ways in which characters physically act in or react to the situation that encompasses them. Deleuze goes on to expand this cineosis in two ways: first by increasing the number of images, and then by giving each of the images a number of component signs. The categories of perception, affection and action come from Bergson’s unfolding of habitual memory, where the human body/brain is caught up in the logic of the sensory-motor process. Deleuze sees a correspondence to, and so aligns this with, the semiology of C.S. Peirce. For Peirce there are three states: feeling, reaction and thought (Short 2004: 214–40). Deleuze first overlays Bergson’s categories of affection and action with Peirce’s states of feeling and reaction, which then allows him to use Peirce’s state of thought to describe Bergson’s process of habitual memory. In this way Deleuze creates the relation-image, a way in which the movement-image expresses thought through onscreen images. The Peircian semiotic also allows Deleuze to create intermediaries, reciprocals and extensions of these images. So, between affectionimages and action-images there are impulse-images (which Deleuze aligns with naturalism and surrealism). The relation-image appears in a whole domain of onscreen mental images that include recollectionimages (flashbacks) and dream-images. It is the action-image, or realism, which comprises the largest domain and in so doing becomes the very centre of the movement-image. Large form action-images (where situations generate actions) interact with small form action-images (where

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24 Deleuze and Film actions reveal situations) and create images that transform each through allegory and theatricality, by reversing procedures and through questioning their own composition (attraction-images, inversion-images and discourse-images respectively). Realism, for Deleuze, is thus not a simple homogeneous cinematic procedure, but a complex interweaving series of action-images. Time-images, however, break from movement-images. Again taking inspiration from Bergson’s Matter and Memory, cinema can describe the collapse of the sensory-motor process though a crisis in the actionimage, where situations and actions, or actions and situations, no longer flow into each other. Correspondingly, the film is no longer organised through identifiable perception-, affection-, action- and mental images. Instead we get pure optical and audio signs, opsigns and sonsigns. The crucial aspect is that while the movement-image foregrounds the actual side of onscreen images through a cinematic flow, opsigns and sonsigns set free the potentials of the virtual. The virtual can be conceived as generating lectosigns, images that require the film to be read, rather than, as in the movement-image, simply be seen. Opsigns and sonsigns become the building blocks of a new taxonomy of images: hyalosigns, chronosigns and noosigns. Although the mechanism for the generation of the time-image remains opaque, we can say that images-in-and-of-themselves become hyalosigns; narratives become re-organised in complex forms as chronosigns; and narration is reconstituted through bodies and environments, creating noosigns. Noosigns inaugurate a new image of thought, positioning the spectator in a lectosignic relationship with the opsigns and sonsigns of the film: the time-image is thus a noosphere. Deleuze’s second expansion of this twofold taxonomy gives each image of the cineosis a triadic system of component signs. These signs are the way in which each image can be seen to move from its most chaotic aspect to its most organised. In other words, every image of the cineosis is a chaosmos, that is, every image is suspended between order and chaos, between the molar and the molecular, between territorialisation and deterritorialisation, between the compositional and the genetic. Deleuze specifies one genetic sign and two signs of composition, this compositional dyad itself describing a process of directional territorialisation/organisation. The crucial aspect in all this is that the cineosis does not place mainstream popular realist cinema and the modernist avant-garde in a hierarchy: ‘it cannot be said that one is more important than the other, whether more beautiful or profound’ (Deleuze 2005: 259). Nor can it be said that there is a homogeneous movement-image and a homogeneous time-image. Rather, what we get is a network of

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 25 movement-images and time-images that perform territorialisations and deterritorialisations within both taxonomic domains and within the very images themselves. Some image-signs will be highly deterritorialised (the genetic signs of time-images); while some image-signs will be highly territorialised (the signs of composition of large and small form action-images). Finally, any number of different signs can describe a film. A film is an accumulation or assemblage of signs. This occurs at every level: a single framed image is an assemblage of signs; a shot is an assemblage of signs; and so are both a sequence and an entire film. However, one sign will always dominate at the level of image, shot, sequence and film. In this way, we can say a film is dominated (but only dominated) by a certain sign. The first task of a Deleuzian exploration of cinema can be to designate the dominant sign of a film. Godzilla, it is clear, is a movement-image film; we can see defined moments of perception-, affection-, action- and mental images. The first appearance of the monster on Odo island is captured in an extreme wide shot, followed by a medium close-up of the faces of the characters. In Deleuze’s terms, a perception-image cuts to an affection-image. Then people scatter, running, falling, hiding: action-images. Later in the film Emiko tells Ogata about the oxygen destroyer, and the event is shown onscreen in flashback, or recollectionimages. In other words, the film is organised through the sensory-motor process, designed to create a smooth surface to ensure cinematic flow. The question thus becomes: which type of movement-image dominates? Mental images are, on the whole, limited to a single flashback sequence. Affection-images assemble around the Tokyo hospital scene, where the emotions generated by the dying parent and small child are expressed through the face of Emiko. We may believe perception-images to predominate when the monster is destroying Tokyo. However, these images depict monster-movements, collapsing buildings, people screaming, running, dying. Action pervades these sequences and in this way goes on to dominate the entire film. As we mentioned above, action-images have two primary reciprocal forms, the large and the small. The small form describes how actions reveal situations and is organised through the unveiling of events. The large form describes how situations engender actions which are organised through duels between characters, for example, the hero and the nemesis. Godzilla, with the duel between the monster and the Japanese people is clearly dominated by the large form of the action-image. Deleuze notates this as S→A, where a situation (S) creates forces that spiral down to produce character actions (A). These

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26 Deleuze and Film

actions in turn reconstitute the situation (S⬘), hence Deleuze’s full notation, SAS⬘. As we can see in Figure 1, the trajectory from S to S⬘ occurs for Deleuze through five laws which go on to create the triadic sign structure of the large form action-image.

Godzilla and the Action-Image Early on in Godzilla a map of Japan locates the last known position of a lost fishing boat, the Eiko. A radio voice announces the time ‘19:05 on 13 August’. A little later in the film we witness an exchange between commuters on a train: Woman: Godzilla! What if it attacks Tokyo? Man: You’ll be the first victim! Woman: Not me . . . not after what I went through in Nagasaki.

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 27 Space-time is coherently identified. The setting is contemporary postatomic Japanese civilisation, early 1950s. This determined milieu is the first law of the action-image. Deleuze describes the passage from situation to restored situation (S→S⬘) as a ‘great respiration’ at the level of montage (Deleuze 2002: 151). So, for instance, while Godzilla encompasses the entire Japanese nation, the film also distils the conflict down to the level of micro-situations: ‘the whole incurves itself around the group, the character, the home’ (Deleuze 2002: 151). At one point during the film Dr Yamane is asked the question ‘why has this monster suddenly appeared in Japan?’ His answer is that the American ‘H-bomb tests disturbed its peace’. A conflict erupts between a group of male government officials and female peace activists. While the officials want to keep Dr Yamane’s evidence a secret, the peace-activists want to inform the public. The male officials think it will trouble ‘international relations’, the women activists feel the truth must be exposed. This whole sequence – described in the milieu of a courtroom – funnels the situation of the post-Occupation Japanese polity, international relations, home affairs and gender roles into a delimited space. The crucial aspect in all this is that the passage from situation to restored situation (S→S⬘) is organised through alternative parallel montage, cutting between the milieus of different sets of characters. In Godzilla, the restored situation will be one that results in Japan surmounting the problems of the atomic age. Deleuze’s second law of the action-image traces the way in which the passage from situation to restored situation is embodied in action (S→A). If the first law depended upon parallel montage, here another aspect of alternate montage comes to the fore: convergence. As Deleuze puts it: ‘the global situation is first displayed in a determined and individuated space-time . . . but very quickly two points emerge from this milieu, then two lines of action which will alternate . . . from one to the other and form a pincer’ (Deleuze 2002: 152). The conflicts at the level of the situation are crystallised at the level of action, and it is here where the resolution (by confrontation) is achieved. In Godzilla, two primary lines are simple to identify. If the conflict between the nuclear threat and civilisation (chaos and cosmos) is the global situation, the lines of force that emanate from this are embodied in the monster and the action hero, Ogata. The first images of the film are of the Eiko, a fishing boat engulfed in flames. Inside the hull a radiographer sends a Morse code message to the coastguard for help before the boat slips beneath the water. Images trace a line from the situation (located at sea) to the embodiment of action (Ogata): the camera pans down a mast . . . then

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28 Deleuze and Film the interior of the coastguard station . . . the coastguard picks up a phone and dials . . . elsewhere, a close-up of a black phone ringing . . . a man answers: ‘Ogata, Nankai Salvage’. Correspondingly, the global situation of the nuclear threat extracts the monster, Godzilla, by first having it awakened by the hydrogen bomb tests, then trouble the fishing fleet, and finally attack Odo island during a raging storm. The third law, for Deleuze, ‘is like the reverse of the second’; while alternate convergent montage is necessary for the passage from situation to action, ‘at the very root of the duel, there is something which rebels against any montage’ (Deleuze 2002: 153). This is the logical conclusion of convergent montage. The lines of force embodied in the different sequences must meet: there must be a confrontation between the action hero and the monster. The second law traced the forces which embodied the situation in characters, and these characters must clash at A. And A – the final showdown – must necessarily come very close to S⬘. In Godzilla, Ogata destroys the monster in a final underwater battle. He emerges from the Pacific Ocean and claims the girl. The film ends. The characters of doctors Yamane and Serizawa introduce Deleuze’s fourth law, where ‘the duel is . . . not a unique and localised moment’ but rather ‘polynomial’, and so it is ‘difficult to mark out its boundaries’ (Deleuze 2002: 153). This is An, where a predilection for duels complicates the action, in that it is difficult to say which duel is the most important. For example, the centrality of the Godzilla-Ogata duel is decentred by Dr Yamane and Dr Serizawa who oppose the violent action proposed by Ogata. There are many duels within the economy of the film. Finally, in the fifth law, the duels ‘dovetail’ (Deleuze 2002: 154). All the duels are resolved in the final frames: Yamane realises that it is ridiculous to imagine that the monster can be controlled and studied, Serizawa dies, Godzilla is destroyed, and Ogata and Emiko come together in an embrace. In short, the space-time between the first and final moments of the film constitutes a gap (→) in which the protagonist discovers powers equal to that of the situation. When equal, actions create a new, modified situation. From these five laws we can see how the tripartite sign structure of the action-image will emerge. The second law (S→A) and fifth law (→) introduces a polarity into the composition of the action-image, the move from the situation-for-itself to action-in-itself. In this way the two signs of composition, the molar organisations, will be the milieu (S) and the binomial (A). The genetic sign, the molecular organisation, will accentuate the fourth law (An), where the polynomial will multiply the duels and in so doing introduce fractures back into the milieu, creating multi-

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 29

ple milieus. This is what Deleuze refers to as the imprint. As per Figure 2, the signs of the milieu, the binomial and the imprint are distributed across the cinematic images and structure of the large form action-image through its five laws. In Godzilla it is clear that while a defined milieu is established and immediately generates an initial binomial, the film tends towards the polynomial. In other words, while it might seem that the great duel between the monster and the people (as embodied by Ogata) dominates the film, in actuality it is the polynomial duels between Ogata and Yamane, and between Ogata and Serizawa, that drive → and structure S→S⬘. We could thus designate Godzilla as being an action-image film dominated by the sign of the imprint where An structures the action and divides it ‘into successive and continuous local missions (s1, a1, s2, a2, s3 . . .)’ (Deleuze 2002: 157). The multiple duels give the trajectory

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30 Deleuze and Film of the film a staccato feel, creating a series of determinate space-times (the ocean, Odo island, Tokyo). However, the imprint does not simply fragment; there is a secondary, but far more important phenomenon. Deleuze writes, with respect to the move from action-image composition to genetics, that ‘the cinema of behaviour is not content with a simple sensory-motor formula . . . It is a much more complex behaviourism which essentially took into account internal factors’ (Deleuze 2002: 158). Deleuze continues by saying that the imprint ‘is the inner, but visible, link between the permeating situation and the explosive action’ (Deleuze 2002: 159). This link, between milieu and behaviour, is made visible through a nexus of emotion and an object, creating an emotional object that links the characters to the situation. Godzilla, in this way, becomes the emotional object, a liminal entity, appearing as an imprint, a physical embodiment of the forces that describe the milieu and encompass character actions.

Godzilla and Universal History The designation of Godzilla as being dominated by the sign of the imprint is simply an initial move (and one we must hold in momentary abeyance). More immediately, the film-image-sign-machine must be conjoined to other machines, and for Deleuze the action-image emerging from the five laws can be seen as ‘putting forward a strong and coherent conception of universal history’ (Deleuze 2002: 151). Deleuze, here, is invoking Nietzsche’s analysis of late nineteenth-century historical practices in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. In this study Nietzsche identifies three tendencies: the ‘monumental’, the ‘antiquarian’ and the ‘critical’ (Nietzsche 2006: 67). From monumental history mankind learns that ‘the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again’ (Nietzsche 2006: 69). Crucially, then, it ‘makes what is dissimilar look similar’ and ‘it will always have to diminish the differences of motives and instigations’ (Nietzsche 2006: 70). In contrast, antiquarian history venerates the past in order to conserve it. In this way it can be seen to construct the traditions of a nation and national identity: mankind, ‘by tending with care that which has existed from of old . . . preserve[s the past] for those who shall come into existence after him’ (Nietzsche 2006: 73). The third tendency, the critical or ethical aspect, brings the past ‘before a tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it’ (Nietzsche 2006: 76). It designates good and evil with regards to the past, from the perspective of the present for the future. As in Figure 3, these three aspects

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of universal history can be conjoined with the five laws of the actionimage in order to read a film (Deleuze 2002: 151). Monumental history can be assembled with the first and second laws of the action-image (Deleuze 2002: 150). Situations appear initially static but under threat. The threat thus constitutes the beginning of the monumental narration, which will continue until the threat is either vanquished or triumphant. In this way it marks the passage from situation to restored situation (S→S⬘). However, this passage is always described through the deeds of great historical figures – the passage from situation to restored situation embodied in action (S→A). The tendency is that the structure is repetitive: these forces clash continually, form peaks and describe homogeneous phenomena. In Godzilla the conflict between Japan and America during the Pacific War and the Allied Occupation can be seen to provide one of the basic environmental coordinates of the

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32 Deleuze and Film film. In this way, Godzilla becomes an invading force. Yet these coordinates take on a monumental aspect through the very indirectness of the presentation. In other words, the very method by which the film loosens the coordinates of its historical engagement serves to universalise rather than particularise. Thus, the duel between Godzilla (a returning mythical invading force) and Ogata (the current embodiment of Japanese resilience) is just one embodiment of Japanese-American relations from the mid-1850s onwards. An embodiment that starts with the ‘awakening of Japan’ occasioned by the arrival, in 1853, of four kurofune (black ships) at Edo (now Tokyo) Bay (Jansen 2002). These ships were captained by Commodore Perry and their mission resisted by Abe Masahiro, daimyo (domain lord) of Fukuyama and head of the ruling Tokugawa power structure (Jansen 2002: 277). Monumental history gathers up the energy of this and other great Japanese-American conflicts (S→S⬘ and S→A) and disperses them through the indirect presentation of Godzilla. As a result we discover repetitions of this ‘awakening’, repetitions that annul difference. For instance, the economic embargo of Japan which came about as a result of the US State Department’s concern in 1941 that ‘Japanese superiority in the Far East would . . . mean the closing of the Open Door’ to Asia for American trade (Smith 2003). This, as Smith sees it, was a deliberate provocation to war, the only unexpected result being the success of the attack on Pearl Harbor later that year. This in turn leads to the Allied Occupation under MacArthur and his headto-head with the Japanese Emperor. In this way, the conflicts between America and Japan form a one-hundred-year parallel montage: interconnections through historical regress. Godzilla captures these forces: Godzilla-Perry, Godzilla-embargo, Godzilla-MacArthur. ‘The antiquarian’, for Deleuze, ‘runs parallel to the monumental’ in that it explores effects without causes and the duels between those forces. However, ‘antiquarian history is not satisfied with duels in the strict sense, it stretches out towards the external situation and contracts to the means of action’ (Deleuze 2002: 150). For Deleuze, then, it is the third and fourth laws of the action-image that can be seen to constitute an antiquarian perspective on history and thus to universalise. Duels are taken in themselves as structuring events. But, of course, duels are also polynomial and in this way antiquarian history selects events that – no matter how different – map a civilisation (thus homogenising heterogeneous tendencies). These duels are the archival data of a nation, and which are essentialised as traditions. Exploring Godzilla through the analysis of antiquarian history conjoined with the third and fourth laws of the action-image (A and An) describes a tension between homogene-

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Godzilla, the Action-Image and Universal History 33 ous and heterogeneous forces internal to the Japanese state that existed not only prior to the American Occupation but also prior to the ‘awakening’ of Japan (Hasegawa 2005). Since the 1600s Japan had been fundamentally divided between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: between Emperor and Shogunate; between reactionary and progressive forces; between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ perspectives. Indeed, it is this internal division that – paradoxically – provided a balance of forces that gave enough cultural stasis to modernise Japan from within (see Jansen 2002). These duels, binomial in essence but polynomial in their proliferation, form the very foundations of a national identity. Godzilla takes this antiquarian structuration as the basis for its internal constitution. The monster embodies the ‘old’. In defeating the monster, Ogata reifies the ‘new’. Thus it might be said that in one of its antiquarian dimensions Godzilla embodies the Emperor system while Ogata embodies the Shogunate; in another sense, Godzilla embodies the Shogunate while Ogata embodies the democratic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and/or Godzilla embodies the militaristic government of the war years, while Ogata embodies the return of democracy, via American intervention, to Japan. The monster is transformed from a monumental external force to an antiquarian internal force that explores the dynamic of the traditional and the modern. The crucial point here is that this dynamic is the very essence of the nation. Lastly ‘the monumental and antiquarian conceptions of history would not come together so well without the ethical image which measures and organises them both’ (Deleuze 2002: 150). This organisation, for Deleuze, equates critical history with the fifth law of the action-image, the gap (→) between situation and restored situation that organises all action. This trajectory describes ‘Good and Evil’, where ‘a strong ethical judgement must condemn the injustice of “things,” bring compassion, herald the new civilisation’ (Deleuze 2002: 151). So, with respect to monumental history, Godzilla as external threat must be defeated, and any action towards this end is justified. Godzilla, then, answers ‘yes’ to the use of the atom bomb in bringing a halt to the Japanese militaristic enterprise. In the film all attempts to defeat the monster fail, so the ultimate weapon – the newly invented, barely tested oxygen destroyer – must be brought into play. The film, in this manner, positions the atomic bombing as the only thing left for the Americans to do. Yet it is antiquarian history (the Ogata-Yamane and Ogata-Serizawa duels) that negotiates this response; and antiquarian history has transformed the monster into the essence of Japan itself. In saying ‘yes’ to the atom bomb and rejecting the ‘old’, militaristic forces, does not the ethical judgement

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34 Deleuze and Film shift the monster to instead embody that which shames the nation? In this way, Godzilla might be construed as becoming the image of the rape of Nanking in 1937, which Lord Russell of Liverpool has described as the ‘indiscriminate killing’ of 200,000 civilians of ‘both sexes, adults and children alike . . . [and the] rape of girls of tender years and old women’ (Russell 2005: 43). Godzilla becomes the forces that annexed Manchuria, China, French Indo-China, British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Thailand and Burma.5 Godzilla becomes that which actioned the death marches, industrial slavery, sexual slavery, cannibalism, vivisection and the mutilation of prisoners of war and the peoples of subject nations. Godzilla captures, and puts before a tribunal, the monstrous force of the Japanese militaristic regime. These divergent readings of universal history, as a consequence of the indirect presentation of the film, interweave throughout the five laws of the large form action-image that structure Godzilla. Yet there is one final move, concerning the way in which the genetic sign of the imprint, the domination of polynomial duels, gathers up and organises the forces of monumental, antiquarian and critical history.

Conclusion: Godzilla as Imprint The Godzilla-film-machine connected to the Nietzschean-historymachine through the Deleuzian-cineosis-machine produces a reading of the film that transforms the monster from American atom bomb to Japanese militaristic regime – and back again. And as we have seen, while organised through the five laws of the large form action-image, Godzilla tends towards the polynomial aspect and so the genetic sign of the imprint. The imprint describes a complex form of realism which extracts emotions and places them into an object. In Godzilla, this is the monster itself. Again, as we have seen, the polynomial accentuates an aspect of the antiquarian analysis of history, a reading that positions the monster as an assemblage of the heterogeneous powers of the ‘old’, of the reactionary forces, at different times, within Japanese society itself: the Emperor, the Shogunate and the authoritarian Japanese militarist regime of the war years. Godzilla, then, can be read as a radical attempt to explore and attack the reactionary, fascistic, authoritarian forces that threaten Japan from within.6 This is a markedly different conclusion to that reached by Noriega, Shapiro and Allsop. Yet it remains just one encounter with the Deleuze-cineosis-machine.7

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References Allsop, S.L. (2004), ‘Gojira/Godzilla’, in J. Bowyer (ed.), The Cinema of Japan and Korea, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 63–71. Badiou, A. (2000), Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. L. Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books. Deamer, D. (2009), ‘Cinema, Chronos/Cronos: Becoming an Accomplice to the Impasse of History’, in J. Bell and C. Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 161–87. Deamer, D. (2010), cineosis, available at www.cineosis.com (accessed 26 July 2010). Deleuze, G. (2002), Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (2005), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (2003), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, London and New York: Continuum. Goldberg, B. (2003), Barry’s Temple of Godzilla, available at www.godzillatemple. com (accessed 4 February 2011). Hasegawa, T. (2005), Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hirano, K. (1996), ‘Depiction of the Atomic Bombings in Japanese Cinema During the U.S. Occupation Period’, in M. Broderick (ed.), Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, pp. 103–19. Jansen, M.B. (2002), The Making of Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2006), ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–124. Noriega, C.A. (1996), ‘Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When Them! Is U.S.’, in M. Broderick (ed.), Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, pp. 54–74. Richie, D. (1996), ‘ “Mono no aware”: Hiroshima in Film’, in M. Broderick (ed.), Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, pp. 20–37. Roberto, J.R. (2000/2003), ‘Japan, Godzilla and the Atomic Bomb: A Study into the Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Japanese Pop Culture’, History Vortex, available at www.historyvortex.org/JapanGodzillaAtomicBomb.html (accessed 5 April 2011). Russell of Liverpool, Lord (2005), The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes, London: Greenhill Books. Shapiro, J.F. (2002), Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, New York and London: Routledge. Short, T.L. (2004), ‘The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Signs’, in C. Misak (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–40. Smith, A. (2003), ‘The Occupation of Japan’, International Socialist Review, 29 (May–June), available at www.isreview.org/issues/29/japan_occupation.shtml (accessed 23 October 2006).

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36 Deleuze and Film Verbeeck, G. (2008), ‘Gojira: The Art of Stomping’, Cult Reviews, available at www.cultreviews.com/horror-101/gojira (accessed 4 February 2011). Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, London: Routledge.

Notes 1. An image of this design is included with the special edition Gojira: The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. 2. There are many different estimates of the death toll. Ashley Smith writes that ‘the atomic bombs killed over 220,000 immediately and 120,000 more from the effects of radiation poisoning’ (Smith 2003). Donald Richie writes: ‘In [Hiroshima] some 240,000 were killed; in [Nagasaki] about 80,000. After the war those exposed to radiation continued to die: between 1951 and 1955, some 3,730’ (Richie 1996: 20). 3. There were a handful of atom bomb films prior to Godzilla. These were, however, independently produced and with limited distribution, financed by educational and political organisations not through any of the six major film studios of the time. There were two trends, elegiac and Marxist. Neither found an audience (Richie 1996: 20–37). 4. ‘Cineosis = cinema + semiosis’ (see Deamer 2010). 5. Manchuria (or more precisely Inner Manchuria which lay inside the Chinese border, becoming Manchukuo, a putative independent state); French Indo-China, now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; British Malaya, now Malaysia and Singapore; the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia; Thailand, known as Siam up until 1939, then once again between the years 1945 and 1949; Burma, now the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. 6. Nietzsche’s analysis of universal history is ultimately the examination of a crisis. The forces of monumental and antiquarian history annul difference, make history a series of repetitions, and in so doing condemn the future to the same. The future of the same positions critical history as fundamentally problematic: ‘every past . . . is worthy to be condemned’ (Nietzsche 2006: 76). For Nietzsche, universal history needs a forgetting in order to escape the repetition of the same and in order to live: ‘it takes a great deal of strength to live and to forget’ (Nietzsche 2006: 76). And it will take Deleuze’s time-image to explore this aspect of Nietzschean philosophy. The Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, such an avatar of the time-image, made no films about the atom bomb (see Deamer 2009). Correspondingly, at the time of writing, there have been thirty-three Japanese sequels to Godzilla. These divide into a number of series: Original Series (1954–74); Heisei Series (1984–95); Alternate Reality Series (1999–2001); New Generation Series (2002–). Each series returns to the origin of the monster and plays out a new timeline (Goldberg 2003). In the context of this essay, it is interesting to note that the Original Series sees the monster rehabilitated to become a friendly protector of the nation. 7. Thanks to William Brown, David Martin-Jones and Rob Lapsley for their assistance during the writing of this essay.

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Chapter 2

Philosophy, Politics and Homage in Tears of the Black Tiger

Damian Sutton

One of the most difficult features of film-philosophy as an emerging discipline is how it approaches the career of the philosopher as a dynamic, mutating and often contradictory series of concepts expressed through different writings, alone and in collaboration. The work of Gilles Deleuze in this regard is no exception, and over the course of his career he introduced such various and apparently conflicting concepts as the body without organs (a theory of organisation that precedes form) and the action-image (a theory of form in film that is reliant upon a highly structured organisation of situation and action). The first concept speaks openly to psychology and politics, as well as to philosophy, in offering a concept of organisation that disrupts the very idea of hierarchy. The second is an exercise in poetics, and in understanding how cinema developed a rhetorical system of its own during its first major wave of industrialisation. Deleuze clearly enjoyed himself in writing Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, a book in which he approaches cinema as both sacred and profane: alongside passages on Akira Kurosawa and Werner Herzog are commentaries on Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and burlesque parody (Deleuze 1997: 169–77). However, both Cinema 1 and its sequel, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, are heavily indebted to Deleuze’s collaboration with Félix Guattari, and the concept of the body without organs, an account of form and the individuation of radical political potential. In this chapter I explore the relationship between these two apparently contradictory Deleuzian positions, the action-image and the body without organs, through an analysis of Wisit Sasanatieng’s Fa Thalai Jone/Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000). Black Tiger stunned critics and audiences alike with its strange fusion of distinctive Thai references and its obvious homage to Hollywood westerns, especially the films of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as the ‘spaghetti’

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38 Deleuze and Film westerns of Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood. Set in 1950s Thailand, the film depicts historical Thai characters from the post-war period as western outlaws, complete with hand-tooled boots, embroidered shirts, and a gunfight over a girl. This combination, together with the film’s vibrant green-and-fuchsia colour scheme, immediately suggested for many Western critics (e.g. Wood 2001) that Black Tiger was a postmodern/postcolonial appropriation of Euro-American visual culture, high on both pastiche (because of the cinematic references) and camp. Western critics also floundered in locating the film’s message, with film historian Edward Buscombe saying that: ‘far from offering a commentary on sexual politics, late capitalism or any of the other favoured topics of art cinema, it’s a movie, ultimately, about nothing at all’ (Buscombe 2001: 35). However, this view is contested by scholars of Thai culture (Harrison 2005), who question reviews of the film made within the framework of postmodern irony and pastiche. In order to resolve this, Black Tiger demands serious attention, not least because of its different acting, editing and cinematographic styles, its unstable mise-en-scène, its unusual range of music styles, and the fact that the film also burlesques a true history of outlaw uprisings in Thailand in the immediate post-war period. That is, Black Tiger is not simply a comedic attempt to appeal to a knowledgeable art-house crowd, nor is it a film ‘about nothing at all’. Instead, Black Tiger is the product of a rich and varied visual culture, able to roll up past and present in a period setting, to disseminate a considered study of political possibilities. Black Tiger is a film that explores ideas and concepts of political nationalism, class and gender, in order to produce an ethical image, like those which Deleuze proposed. In his exploration of the grander forms of American film from the high point of the classical system, including genres such as the western, the gangster film and the ‘psycho-social’ thriller, Deleuze describes how they substitute the character of one person for the trials and travails of a community, or people. This is the case, for example, in his discussion of King Vidor’s The Crowd (USA, 1928), a story of the alienating effects of the city and the world of office work. This ethical image describes the future of the community, in demonstrating through the physical punishment of one body how any attempt to resist or change will ultimately return that body to its original situation. Gangster films, for example, demonstrate the cycle of violence that will continue unless a new way of thinking, and being, is found. This is often demonstrated through the rise and fall of one character, such as Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (USA, 1932) – memorably followed by Al

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 39 Pacino’s Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake. Crucially, the ethical form is an action-image in which the body of the individual and the body politic merge and become metonymic: a movement from ‘the collectivity to the individual and from the individual to the collectivity’ (Deleuze 1997: 144). The ethical form uses this movement to encourage us to read the story of a character as standing for the possible destiny of a community, a people or a nation. In this chapter I will argue that this is exactly what occurs in Black Tiger, with the period setting evocative of a critical moment in Thai history when it underwent a process of modernisation, Westernisation and apparent ‘civilisation’. The ‘wild west’ trappings allow the film to be read as a story of Thailand’s potential future as a militarist state, a fulfilled, educated nation, or a criminal fiefdom – all focused on the central figure of Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi), whose role as the governor’s daughter offers a deep political significance. It is through the character of Rumpoey that the ethical image offers a social story; it has both a tale to tell and a warning to give.

‘Bomb the Mountains, Burn the Huts’ Black Tiger is set in the Thai province of Suphan Buri during the 1950s. Bandits seua Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan) and seua Mahesuan (Supakorn Kitsuwon) assassinate a rival bandit and his followers, before Dum rides to a river sala (a sun or rain shelter) to meet his childhood sweetheart Rumpoey. Since Dum is late for the appointment, Rumpoey reluctantly leaves to become the fiancée of local army captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth). The jealous and resentful Mahesuan, who previously held favour ahead of Dum, challenges him to a duel, but after Dum saves his life the two reconcile and become blood brothers in a ritual at a Buddhist temple. In flashback, we learn how the young Dum and Rumpoey met, following her arrival from Bangkok to his father’s farm. Still in flashback, we see Dum escort the spoilt Rumpoey, who breaks his flute, to a lotus pond, where they discover the sala and where Dum fights off local bullies as Rumpoey nearly drowns. Whipped by his father for returning home late, Dum finds that Rumpoey has replaced his flute with a harmonica. Back in the 1950s present, Kumjorn stages an attack on the bandits’ camp. When this fails, the bandits’ leader, seua Fai (Sombati Medhanee), tasks Dum with executing Kumjorn. However when Dum finds out that Kumjorn is engaged to Rumpoey, he lets him go. Dum takes Kumjorn’s photograph of Rumpoey, but is stabbed and injured in the process.

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40 Deleuze and Film In another flashback, Dum and Rumpoey meet again at university, only for Dum to be expelled after protecting Rumpoey from the same bullies who attacked them at the sala. On his return to his village, Dum finds his father assassinated. Saved from suicide by Fai, who is bonded to Dum’s father through loyalty, Dum soon becomes the bandit leader’s right-hand man, earning the title seua (‘tiger’), and hence ‘Black Tiger’. Back in the present, Fai plans an attack on Kumjorn and Rumpoey’s wedding, whilst Mahesuan – perhaps because of his letting the captain escape – betrays and shoots Dum. The bullet is stopped by Dum’s harmonica. Dum infiltrates the wedding to warn Kumjorn, who tries to arrest him, and Dum is forced to hide whilst the bandit attack occurs. Many are killed and, at the end of the battle, Fai is killed by Rumpoey’s father (Pairoj Jaisingha). Mahesuan and Dum duel once again after Dum discovers Mahesuan kidnapping Rumpoey. Dum kills Mahesuan, only to be killed accidentally by Kumjorn, the bullet going through the photograph of Rumpoey. The interest raised by what was seen to be Black Tiger’s ‘postmodern’ or ‘camp’ style should not distract our attention from what was intended also to be an affectionate and meaningful period film, recalling for local audiences at least the stories and names of real bandits from a genuinely lawless period in the history of Suphan Buri. The representation of them as cowboy gunslingers is never taken seriously, and whilst the vivid costume and histrionic acting of Supakorn Kitsuwon as the villain Mahesuan is played for laughs almost from the outset, most allusions to Ford and especially Leone are quite affectionate. A monsoon drowns the first shoot-out, which is observed by a lone carabao/water buffalo, whilst the bandits later outflank government troops using rocketpropelled grenades. This might make the film seem half-baked to some viewers, but its apparent amateurism should not be accepted ahead of a representation of the more complex relationship that Thailand has with Euro-American culture. Whilst Buscombe, for instance, criticised the painted backdrops that dominate a key stand-off between Mahesuan and seua Dum (which nonetheless borrows heavily from Leone’s Dollars trilogy [Italy/Spain/West Germany, 1963–66]), he fails to note their homage to Thai likay folk theatre. Similarly, Mahesuan spits paan, or Betel nut juice, a Thai staple of masculinity but taken by Buscombe as a reference to Eastwood in his own Outlaw Josey Wales (USA, 1976). Similarly, ‘fa thalai jone’, Rachel Harrison reminds us, is also the name of a herbal remedy – andrographis paniculata – which is commonly used as an anti-inflammatory, and whose literal translation, ‘bandits attacked by rainy skies’, inspires the vivid image of seua

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 41 Mahesuan and seua Dum battling in the monsoon (Harrison 2005: 203). In fact, the film owes more to Thailand’s own brand of action films from the 1960s onwards, particularly those of Rattana Pestonji, than it does to classic and spaghetti westerns. Indeed, in the press notes supplied by Magnolia Pictures, the film’s US distributor, a biography of Rattana appears even before that of director Wisit and producer Nonzee Nimibutr. Wisit’s use of elaborate staging and digital colour grading combines both Hollywood and his own practice as a director and art director for television commercials with a nostalgic re-imagining of Rattana’s 1960s films: I thought it should be possible to combine retro elements – faithful to the old styles of filmmaking – with more modern pacing and film language . . . Dozens of such films were made then, and the genre became known (contemptuously) as ‘Bomb the mountains, Burn the huts’ movies. The idea that the hero should die, so that everyone cries on the way out, was a staple of those movies too. (Wisit, interviewed in Rayns 2001: 8–9)

In addition, Harrison runs through a series of allusions made by the film, which were lost on Western critics, and which serve to remind us that Black Tiger is indeed trying to be a genre movie – just not of the kind of which Westerners are commonly aware. These allusions include familiar shots of Parliament House and the beach at Bang Pu, publicity images recalling screen-printed 1960s lobby cards, and obvious references to the popular novel, Seua Dam/The Black Tiger (1995 [1948]), by Por Intharapalit (Harrison 2005: 201–2). Added to this is the inclusion of veteran Thai actors Sombati Medhanee, as bandit leader Fai, and Pairoj Jaisingha, as Rumpoey’s father, the governor. In what is surely an in-joke lost on most Western viewers, the governor/Pairoj, after killing Fai/Sombat, asks: ‘What? Don’t you recognise an old hoodlum?’ – a significant moment, as we shall see. In spite of these ‘Thai’ credentials, however, Europe represented possibly the most successful market for Black Tiger, given that it was only a modest success in Thailand and did not have a wide release in the USA. Miramax picked the film up for release after it had appeared at the Seattle and Sundance Film Festivals in 2001, only to shelve it until 2007. After winning the Tigers and Dragons award at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2000 and being included in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2001, it was firmly pigeonholed as an art-house film, to be viewed, reviewed and interpreted through a framework of irony and camp. This exhibition history of Black Tiger is the result,

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42 Deleuze and Film Harrison suggests, of there effectively being two films on release in the public imagination. One film, Tears of the Black Tiger, did indeed appear to be a kitschy, postmodern homage to the Hollywood western, with surface-value visual allusions and a title intended to score off the success of Ang Lee’s Wo Hu Cang Long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China, 2000). The other, however, is Fa Thalai Jone, a nostalgic period romp through Thai popular culture, drawing upon real and fictional histories, folk theatre and society, with, as we shall see, a warning to give about the political and class system.

Palimpsest, Kalatesa and the Modernist Text It is perhaps because they only consider Tears of the Black Tiger instead of Fa Thalai Jone that Harrison attacks reviews such as Buscombe’s, which view the film through a postmodern, art-house lens. Its mixed parentage of distant Thai action movies and Hollywood westerns gives the lie to interpretations of Black Tiger as a film which reflects a modern nation looking back on an historical period of social turmoil, namely the project of Siamese modernisation that occurred throughout the 1940s, and for which turning a face to the West was essential (Harrison 2005: 198; Van Esterik 2000). For Harrison, this is reflected in the concept of siwilai, an interpretation of the process of Western civilisation, mixing it with an archaic and exotic culture (Harrison 2005: 198). If, as Harrison says, the film’s allusions are ‘not indicators of a carnival of postmodern intertextuality, but instead refer to the appropriation of US cinema as a popular form of entertainment in twentieth century Thailand’ (Harrison 2005: 203), then the film’s appropriation of CGI to tell a story set in 1950s Thailand functions in a similar fashion. There are further narrative layers that suggest a review of history on the part of the film. The presence of Kumjorn’s governmental troops reflects both the bloodless 1932 coup d’état (with its People’s Party led by a military elite) and the political friction and bloody coup of 1975–76 (both are oddly prescient of the 2006 coup and subsequent political crisis). The film is never far from a reminder that modernisation comes with a militarised face, suggesting a particular kind of new world that presents the darker side of modernisation as Westernisation (Rumpoey’s scenes with Kumjorn are accompanied by the Largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony). To brand the film as postmodern without taking into account the specifically Thai elements of the story, then, is to apply to it a set of concepts (particularly those of the modern and the postmodern them-

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 43 selves) that in the West are coterminous with a capitalism historically reliant upon colonial trade and domination. As Penny Van Esterik notes, however, Thailand was never a colony, and it has been free of many of the conflicts that have troubled its neighbours during and after empire. Nevertheless, the process of modernisation, and the Pan-Thai movement, saw the end of Siam and the homogenisation of Thai culture and identity with a specific emphasis on relations with the West (Van Esterik 2000: 96). Van Esterik thus concludes that Thailand has been ‘informally colonised’ by the West, in a manner akin to what we might call cultural imperialism. The effect of this ‘informal colonisation’, she suggests, is better represented not through modernism or postmodernism, but through the pre-modern concept of the palimpsest, particularly the local use of the folded palm leaf, in which successive layers of writing bleed or show through to new ones, suggesting an ‘embeddedness’ and an ‘ “unfolding” of social time’ (Van Esterik 2000: 42). This perhaps reflects the deeper meaning of the critic Chuck Stephens’ assertion that Black Tiger is in fact a ‘modernist commentary’ on just the kind of genre movies that the film affectionately mocks (Stephens 2001: 17). Furthermore, instead of seeing the critical antagonism as being between modern and postmodern, or between palimpsest and pastiche, it is perhaps better to understand the ethical form in terms of America’s modernity for which the action-image develops as a solution to US cinema’s desire to express a narrative of Manifest Destiny. Therefore, to understand the manner in which the movement-image functions in its construction of national identity (the implicit reading inherent in Deleuze’s work on the US western as action-image) it is necessary to consider both form and content, both montage and narrative, in ideological terms. (Martin-Jones 2011: 30–1)

For David Martin-Jones, an understanding of the ideological role of the movement-image is essential to the analysis of the popular cinemas that have developed in its wake (whether colonised formally or ‘informally’). In adopting the schema of the movement-image, either via Hawks, Leone or Rattana, Wisit cannot help but adopt its political potential as an ethical image also. The Pan-Thai movement was spearheaded by the Prime Minster Phibun Songkhram (1938–44 and 1948–57) as part of a reinvention of Siam in order to be economically independent. As Van Esterik notes, ‘Thai’ means ‘free’, in the sense of both independence and adaptability, and Phibun’s politics involved embracing both Euro-American concepts of civilisation and progress, especially where this involved material gain

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44 Deleuze and Film and a growing middle class, and local/rural traditional concepts of propriety, central to which was the principle of kalatesa (Van Esterik 2000: 36–40). Kalatesa can be understood crudely as meaning ‘timeliness’ or ‘timespace’, or perhaps ‘appropriateness of time and place’, though it is more closely linked to fate and destiny. For this reason it is also used to refer to propriety and manners, rather than serendipity of being in the right place at the right time, in the sense that to violate kalatesa is wilful or neglectful, involving a loss of face (barami) (Van Esterik 2000: 39). Therefore much relies upon a person’s awareness of kalatesa. While not explicitly referencing kalatesa, the central plot of Dum and Rumpoey meeting across class boundaries in Black Tiger is an example of this, since Rumpoey is intended by her governor father to move in higher circles, while Dum is employed through his local chief father to be Rumpoey’s factotum. This is why Dum takes a beating from his father during the film’s first flashback, for whilst he saved Rumpoey from attack and from drowning, his trip with her to the sala violates kalatesa. Kalatesa was central to education for all children during the period of modernisation, but was especially important for women because it enabled many to fulfil the expectations placed on them via courtly life and its wider customs. It was also less culturally acceptable for women to withdraw or ‘escape to the forest’ than for men, who could make use of this outlaw identity as a specific means (as nakleng, or thug) (Van Esterik 2000: 41). As a story of love across class boundaries, Dum and Rumpoey’s romance hinges upon Dum being able to elevate his status by attending university, and succeeding in obtaining the wherewithal of kalatesa. When we first meet Dum, and he has already become nakleng, it is his behaviour as a bandit that traps him and causes him to miss his meeting with Rumpoey. He fails to comprehend both time and place at the sala. Nevertheless, it could be argued that this has greater import for Rumpoey. Caught between Dum and Kumjorn, and also Mahesuan, Rumpoey’s misfortune is to be the focus of three powers that reflect the situation of Thailand in that critical historical moment of the 1950s, represented by the university, the military state, and the bandit fiefdom: civilisation, totalitarianism and anarchy. In her study of Satyajit Ray and Chen Kaige, Sumita Chakravarty suggests that there is a certain political power of the erotic, one which is helpful in understanding Rumpoey’s position. Chakravarty asks ‘what are the implications of treating history as if it were a woman?’ and goes on to propose that the erotic, as an image of the

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 45 the patriarchal relations governing society . . . signifies a structural arrangement of forces in which the scenario of love and longing takes on a meaning only as part of a larger political project of self-understanding, simultaneously social and subjective. [In the historical film, the erotic] is the clash of the old and the new on the semantic body of the woman. (Chakravarty 2003: 82)

With this in mind, two senses of kalatesa can be seen to emerge, which suggest the philosophical potential of Black Tiger. The first is the principle of kalatesa as it is related most closely to propriety and gender roles. To Western eyes, this might be understood as the subordination of women. This is the principle that forces Rumpoey to accept Kumjorn’s offer and which allows Kumjorn to rape her on their wedding night. Conversely, it is this same principle that justifies Fai’s attack on the wedding night, and which provokes Mahesuan’s threat to carry off Rumpoey. The second sense of kalatesa refers to the specific idea of knowing the right, or best, time to act, beginning in the film with Dum missing the tryst with Rumpoey, his later escape into the forest, and his eventual betrayal of Fai. His return to kalatesa, represented by his infiltration of the wedding and his defeat of Mahesuan, in turn reflects the ethical image that the film presents. The final stand-off, culminating in Dum’s death, is witnessed by Rumpoey as the national body, as she remains to ‘bear the brunt of the vicissitudes of history [whilst] it is the men who are actually sacrificed in history’s slaughterhouse’ (Chakravarty 2003: 97). The power of the film as an ethical image lies in the exchange between the body of Rumpoey and the body politic, since the film’s narrative ends with the political order restored, and with Rumpoey unhappily in the position for which she was raised: in a good political marriage within her class boundaries. But its crucial moment lies not in the narrative’s conclusion but in its introduction, in medias res. Just as the film ends with a particular ethical image (the triumph of the military state), so it begins with the possibilities inherent in Rumpoey’s future as she waits for Dum at the sala and contemplates an unhappy marriage to Kumjorn.

Solving a Dilemma: The Body Without Organs What does this wait represent? As an extraordinary, enigmatic scene, Rumpoey’s waiting represents a considerable sensory gap, waiting to be filled by the narrative. It is attenuated by the young Dum and Rumpoey’s discovery of the sala, which prompts Dum to tell her a story

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46 Deleuze and Film about a woodcutter. After falling in love with a rich man’s daughter, a woodcutter begins to build a beautiful sala as a place for them to meet. However, when the girl is locked in her room by her enraged father, she takes her own life, and the woodcutter is left waiting for a love that will never come. The sala thus becomes a potential figure for the narrative to unfold, a glimpse of which we are given in the fairy tale. Films often use spaces like this to present narrative potentiality, by exploiting spaces that are un-formed. Examples can include open-plan office spaces, prison yards and canteens, and of course city streets. These spaces remove the constructed divisions and push people together, which results in the space becoming a figure of potentiality. The sala in Black Tiger brings its different time periods together – the present of Rumpoey’s wait gives way to their childhood, which in turn dissolves into the virtual image of the fairy tale. The sala is the body without organs of the film, the ‘full egg before the extension of the organism and the organisation of the organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 153). The principle of a narrative gap to be filled reflects a particular contradiction in Deleuze that Slavoj Žižek observes as being poorly resolved in his work with Guattari. For Žižek, the contradiction arises when Deleuze’s different approaches to becoming and affect meet each other in cinema. On the one hand, in Deleuze’s work affect (such as an aesthetic affect in cinema) is impersonal, and exists independent of any subjectivity. On the other hand, this affect is the product of material creation; it is put into the world by creative forces and intention. Cinema is the best example of this, since, for Deleuze, in a work of art an affect (boredom, for instance) is no longer attributable to actual persons, but becomes a free-floating event. How, then, does this impersonal intensity of an affect-event relate to bodies or persons? [E]ither this immaterial affect is generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming, or it is part of the virtual intensities out of which bodies emerge through actualisation (the passage from Becoming to Being). (Žižek 2004: 21)

The solution for Deleuze is the figure of the egg in cinema, the body without organs as a ‘vegetative milieu from which the animal acts out’ (Deleuze 1997: 156). The character is permeated by the situation in which they find themselves, and bursts out from it. It is this figure which gives narrative agency to character itself, so that its best expressions are in the Actor’s Studio and the films of Elia Kazan, in which the vegetative social situation (such as America’s deep south, or New York’s dockyards) gives rise to an extraordinary animal outburst, as in the ripping

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 47 of the shell from within the egg. The egg is a figure of forces only, rather than their shape or effects: ‘The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 164). The body without organs is a figure of organisation that Deleuze returned to, and refined, on a number of occasions. Introduced in The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]), Deleuze returned to it with Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1990 [1972]) and A Thousand Plateaus (1996 [1980]). It reflects in Deleuze’s work a passage from the ideal (The Logic of Sense) to the personal (as seen in the attack on psychoanalysis in AntiOedipus) and then to the political (A Thousand Plateaus). The concept addresses the subject and the organisation of identity as a process of becoming. In this respect, identity (whether personal, social, or understood as the object) is always coming into being through the production of bodies. ‘Organisation’, or ‘to organise’, involves creating form from immanent forces, creating strata or striations (chosen as figures of this organisation perhaps because of the principle of hierarchy which comes with layering). ‘To organise’ is to give an identity to forms within form – in the manner that the heart is an organ with a particular role and function within the body, useless if separated – as a process of individuation. Take these figurations away and one is left with only intensities or waves. The body without organs on a wider scale is a body from which societal organisation is produced, with larger and larger transhistorical strata that make up a totality as ‘the plane of consistency’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 157). The political value of the body without organs as a concept resides with the ‘socius’, in that the characteristics of society are the organisms/organisation on the surface of the body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1990: 10). This startling concept emerges early on in Anti-Oedipus, but it takes Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the subject in A Thousand Plateaus for it to have real effect. The move from the personal to the political is made effective in the philosopher’s move from the collective to the individual. In the processes of subjectivity, the body without organs ‘is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 150). Social reorganisation begins with the desire to slough off or lose societal organs, but it is the unanimism of the community that enables this to take hold of the organs of the state and to create a genuine revolution. We can loosely summarise this in three points: the socius is always coming into being; the socius will be organised and will become an organism; and we have the capacity to change the organism. This is why

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48 Deleuze and Film the body without organs becomes an attractive political concept, in that it exists both as the surface on which the organism is inscribed (‘capital is the body without organs of the capitalist’) and as the figure of the socius before organisation – even though the latter was a conclusion Deleuze and Guattari were careful to avoid (Deleuze and Guattari 1990: 10; 1996 164). So political change is a matter of acceptance and confidence, but, they infer, to dismantle the socius completely would be to leave an empty body without organs (a formless body politic). The final alternative to this is another potentiality: to impose a new socius would be to create a dictatorship in the image of a body politic (totalitarianism based on the sign) as cancerous. Hence we might understand the three routes for political change offered by the cancerous, the empty and the full body without organs: revolution as a tyrannical reconstruction (such as the reign of terror in France); revolution as an emptying out, or sloughing off, of all organisation (as in the criminal or gangster state); and/or revolution as a fulfilment, which keeps part of the organism from which to start again: You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn . . . if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 160)

In this way, the body without organs resolves the conflict between immaterial becoming as sense event and becoming as the production of beings. In the cinematic body without organs the sense event is never emptied out, never entirely without something of the material that has been dis-organised. This is one of the central features of the time-image, since it emerges as a glimpse of duration from the dismantling, deconstruction or ambiguation (as it were) of the form of cinema. This is why the time-image cannot exist without the movement-image, since in most respects it relies heavily on the intelligibility of the movement-image in order to afford this glimpse. However, what is often neglected in many analyses is the influence of this work with Guattari on Deleuze’s own discussion of narrative structure he outlined in his analysis of the actionimage, particularly his discussion of situation and action. As I will argue, the three possibilities that emerge in the action-image closely correspond to the three states of the body without organs. And it is for this reason that Rumpoey’s wait at the sala, and the rather drippy romance with Dum that it outwardly projects, is the body without organs upon which is written the story of the body politic as an ethical image.

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 49

The Ethical Image In his analysis of the action-image, Deleuze explores linked forms – large and small – that broadly correlate to particular genres and the ways in which those genres present the world through the realist text. The large form speaks to the collective imagination of US modernity through the western, the gangster movie, and ‘psycho-social’ films such as The Crowd. It is in this analysis that Deleuze introduces his SAS⬘ narrative structure as a way of explaining the passage from one state of affairs to another, through a narrative gap caused by a specific action or character. For this reason the figure of the hourglass, like the egg, is prominent as a structuring motif. Simply put, the narrative begins with a determinate milieu, or situation (S), which incurves to challenge a character (Deleuze 1997: 140). Such an ‘incurving’ is the servitude and class taboo for Dum as he falls in love with Rumpoey, but it is also the lawlessness of his father’s murder, since it encompasses or overwhelms him to the point of suicide. In the SAS⬘ structure, the central character must find a new mode of being; he or she must produce an action (A) in order to create a new situation (S⬘). Dum has several attempts at this: in defending Rumpoey from the nakleng/ thug boys; in going to university; in joining seua Fai; and finally (and tragically), in warning Kumjorn of the attack. Each, as we shall see, represents a different aspect of a changed situation, and it is within this realm of possibilities that the movement-image exists as an ethical form. Perhaps the simplest semiotic form of the SAS⬘ structure can be seen in the state of things as a synsign, in which it is the very nature of the encompassing situation that generates the need for action – as in the class taboo. The introduction of antagonistic characters leads to the principle of the duel in which characters confront each other once (as a binomial sign) or several times (or with several characters) in order to lead to a new situation (Deleuze 1997: 142). It is for this reason that Deleuze is drawn to the western in order to explain this in detail. In the western, the very appearance and brutality of nature can be overwhelming, especially if to this is added the threat of attack from without (natives) or within (capitalists as carpetbaggers, fraudsters and speculators, as well as fellow bandits): The passage from situation to action is thus accompanied by a dovetailing of duels in each other. The binomial is a polynomial. Even in the western, which presents the duel in its purest state, it is difficult to mark out its boundaries in the final instance. Is the duel that of the cowboy with the

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50 Deleuze and Film bandit or the Indian [sic]? Or with the woman, with the boyfriend, with the new man who will supersede him . . .? (Deleuze 1997: 153)

It is in those films in which parody or burlesque play a central role that this is perhaps most evident, since they make the mechanics of storytelling crack and split. When Deleuze turns to the small form, intending mostly to cover comedy, for instance, he proposes a new model based on unusual characters or actions (ASA⬘). Deleuze’s analysis comes a little unstuck, however, when he approaches Buster Keaton’s features, in which the burlesque arrives not through the small/ASA⬘ form, but is instead inserted directly into the large/SAS⬘ form (see Deleuze 1997: 173). In The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, USA, 1926), for example, the narrative is propelled by the immensity of the American Civil War and the overwhelming shame felt by Keaton’s character at not passing the draft (he does not realise that, as a locomotive driver, he has been passed as vital to the war effort in his own job). If, in The General, the burlesque furthers the sense of Keaton being overwhelmed by the world of the western (here, the American Civil War), it should not be surprising that a film such as Black Tiger should also adopt and exploit some of the semiotics of the western – and in a burlesque manner. In so doing, the film finds a way to address its own contemporary situation all the more keenly. Deleuze also explores other modes of the large form and their relationship to narrative resolution. Although the majority of action-image films adopt the SAS⬘ structure in keeping with Manifest Destiny and its legacy in US culture, it does not follow that this is always the case. As mentioned, ‘psycho-social’ dramas such as The Crowd, as well as epic cinema more generally, involve the central character returned/returning to the same oppressive state of affairs, often an overwhelming social, familial and/or personal situation (SAS). This may mean that the fight goes on (as in the revolutionary epic), that capitalism or modernity wins (as in the executive thriller), or that the socius is dystopic (postapocalyptic science fiction). Alternatively, the figure of the downward spiral or descent into anarchy (SAS⬙) occurs in gangster movies (with its parallel hierarchy and rule of law) or disaster movies (when survivors struggle to build new communities which are grotesques of the original). These three possibilities that present themselves in the large form action-image map on to the three socio-political possibilities of the body without organs outlined above: full (SAS⬘), empty (SAS), and cancerous (SAS⬙). This is what gives the ethical image its capacity for political reflection, and what gives it the ability to tell a story about how a socius

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 51 might reorganise. This political reflection is predicated on the narrative gap that exists ‘between the situation and the action to come [but which] only exists to be filled’ (Deleuze 1997: 155, emphasis in original). The narrative gap exists in Deleuze’s analysis because of the fundamental issue of the two conflicting positions regarding the impersonal intensity of the affect event: the new ethical image is the result of this conflict, rather than being its resolution. This is why Žižek focuses his attention on it as a quasi-cause: ‘In the emergence of the New, something occurs which cannot be properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. [This] quasi-cause fills the gap in the corporeal causality’ (Žižek 2004: 27). However, this is a natural contradiction for Deleuze to hold, in that he acknowledges the self-existence of objects that coincide with (but are not materially the same as) the subject’s engagement. It is the gap created by this coincidence that exists to be rent apart by new concepts or art works. For Žižek, Deleuze’s mistake is to forget that this quasi-cause is the pure signifier (phallus) that comes to stand for all other causalities: the organ comes before the body, in the same manner in which, in the Hollywood western, the gun comes before the body. However, as Jason Demers notes, Žižek ignores the function of the ‘without’ in the body without organs, which replaces the Lacanian Signifier with which Žižek tries to confront Deleuze and Guattari’s concept (Demers 2006: 156). In this respect we might argue that the body of the body without organs is the immaterial sense event – i.e. the affect – that is organ-ised by the production of beings. To create an art work is to expose the gap that realism outwardly seeks to bridge (even if one produces a photorealist painting or a photograph, it serves only to emphasise the gap as a potential ‘without’). To engage with political change is to engage with the principle of ‘without’, as if to say ‘what happens if we were without this organ of the state?’

Conclusion We can conclude by mapping the threefold schema of the large form of the action-image, as figures of the movement-image, on to Black Tiger, and therein appraise the politically reflective tale that the film has to tell. The film presents Dum with three narrative possibilities: Firstly, the situation Dum finds himself in as Rumpoey’s factotum requires a new mode of being (the pursuit of wisdom), which means he transcends his social status in order to be reconciled with her. In this scenario, he stays at university by avoiding the conflict with the nakleng boys (S⬘ – the full body).

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52 Deleuze and Film Secondly, the situation Dum finds himself in after the death of his father requires a new mode of being (the outlaw code), which means he either kills Mahesuan and takes Fai’s place, or he is murdered and Mahesuan takes his place as Fai’s deputy and his place with Rumpoey (S⬙ – the cancerous body). Thirdly, the situation Dum finds himself in after Mahesuan’s betrayal requires a new mode of being (an honourable intervention), which leads to his death at the hands of the state, whose representative Kumjorn claims Rumpoey as a prize (S – the empty body). What is perhaps even more significant about these situations is that they arise in sequence. Dum’s lapse of judgement in breaking the class taboo at the sala (phit kalatesa) is reflected in his horrible situation at university: to stand back from fighting the thugs might be appropriate, but it leaves Rumpoey to a horrible fate. Similarly, an ‘honest’ mistake out of misplaced loyalty to Fai causes Dum to miss his meeting with Rumpoey, forcing her to abide by the strictures of propriety, sending both towards their tragic destiny. The critical issue is revealed by the aforementioned knowing comment from Pairoj Jaisingha as the governor (‘What? Don’t you recognise an old hoodlum?’). This reminds us of the fact that this situation has been played out before, not least in the genre cinema of Rattana and others, and that it will be played out again. Rumpoey remains acted upon, as the semantic body of the Thai nation, which has also seen all of this before and will probably do so again. In this sense a whole narrative tradition (‘Bomb the mountains, Burn the huts’) becomes an ethical and political image. If we return to the principle of the narrative gap, which Žižek found so problematic, we can see that any difficulty is created by our expectation that the gap will be filled. We wish for and hope that Dum gets the girl, and that a new, different and more equitable society might emerge as a reflection of their union. However, if Dum gets the girl we have no tale to tell, no warning to give. For the ethical image, the gap cannot, must not, be filled. Perhaps Deleuze’s discussion of the SAS⬘ structure is only a practical framework created to afford him the opportunity to discuss more intriguing aspects of the SAS/SAS⬙ tragedies. This chapter has examined the role of naïve homage in Fa thalai jone/ Tears of the Black Tiger through Deleuze’s treatment of the movementimage. The film employs homage to Hollywood and to Thai drama and action cinema alike in order to mix the politics of nationhood and the politics of gender into a prima facie postmodern western. Its protagonist’s situation reflects on the historical possibilities offered by different

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Philosophy and Politics in Tears of the Black Tiger 53 political aspirations and the nation states they might create: honour, anarchy, order. At first glance the potentialities represented in Rumpoey and Dum’s desire reflect Deleuze and Guattari’s three states of the body without organs: full, cancerous and empty. However in order to exploit in narrative the political tragedy of such narrative trajectories, Wisit’s film is required to engage with the structures of the cinema of the period he examines, for instance the westerns of Ford and the movies of Rattana, rather than simply to pastiche them. This suggests that a careful exploration of Deleuze’s movement-image philosophy, in particular his analysis of the SAS⬘ narrative structure, can facilitate an appropriate and meaningful understanding of the role of homage as a tool of political as well as emotional cinema.

References Buscombe, E. (2001), ‘Way Out East’, Sight and Sound, 3–4 (September). Chakravarty, S.S. (2003), ‘The Erotics of History: Gender and Transgression in the New Asian Cinemas’, in A.R. Guneratne and W. Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 79–100. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, ed. C.V. Boundas, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1993), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1997), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1990), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1996), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Demers, J. (2006), ‘Re-membering the Body without Organs’, Angelaki, 11 (2): 153–68. Harrison, R. (2005), ‘Amazing Thai Film: The Rise and Rise of Contemporary Thai Cinema on the International Screen’, Asian Affairs, 26 (3): 321–38. Martin-Jones, D. (2011), Deleuze and World Cinemas, London: Continuum. Rayns, T. (2001), ‘Dinosaur, Get Out! An Interview with Wisit Sasanatieng’, trans. Duangkamol Limcharoen, Magnolia Pictures press notes, available at www.magpictures.com/films/blacktiger/blacktiger.doc (accessed 5 April 2011). Stephens, C. (2001), ‘Tears of the Black Tiger – Review’, Film Comment, 37 (3): 16–17. Van Esterik, P. (2000), Materializing Thailand, Oxford: Berg. Wood, A. (2001), ‘Thai Ho Silver’, Sight and Sound, 4–5 (August). Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, London: Routledge.

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Chapter 3

Time-Images in Traces of Love: Repackaging South Korea’s Traumatic National History for Tourism

David Martin-Jones

This chapter explores how time-images are deployed in Gaeulro/Traces of Love (Dae-seung Kim, South Korea, 2006) as a means of examining recent South Korean history. Traces of Love uses time-images that deliberately confuse events in the past and present to explore the recent trauma of national economic collapse and its potentially stultifying effect on the present state of the nation. The time-image is also integral to the film’s attempts to provide an upbeat message concerning South Korea’s future, a process in which the depiction of several sites of touristic beauty and national heritage are crucial. Thus this chapter demonstrates that although Deleuze’s ideas are rarely applied to Asian cinemas, they are key to understanding the way Traces of Love manipulates narrative time to explore recent South Korean national history. Moreover, this analysis of the specific function of the time-image in one particular Asian film gestures towards the greater need for a continued reconsideration of the broader, seemingly universal conclusions Deleuze draws in the Cinema books. This involves a conceptualisation both of the way the time-image functions, and of the reasons for its emergence in different contexts, that is somewhat different from Deleuze’s original theorisations.

Deleuze and Asian Cinemas Over the last decade a growing number of scholars have engaged ideas from Deleuze’s Cinema books with Asian films (e.g. Tong 2003; Chaudhuri and Finn 2003; Martin-Jones 2006: 188–221; 2011: 100–61 and 201–33). Even so, if one considers the rapid proliferation of books on Deleuze and cinema that has occurred more generally during this period, Deleuzian approaches to Asian films seem relatively few in number. Perhaps this is with good reason: scholars may have been wary

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 55 of the pitfalls of imposing a European philosophy onto Asian cinemas. The reticence may also have been due to the fact that Deleuze developed his ideas by drawing primarily upon films from Europe and the USA. The time-image is a case in point. In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that cinema demonstrates a shift in its conception of time, from a classical to a modern temporality, a shift brought about by the Second World War (Deleuze 1989: xi–xii). Deleuze specifically credits Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu as being the ‘first to develop pure optical and sound situations’ (Deleuze 1989: 13), which characterise many time-image films, and yet he rather rapidly leaves Ozu behind as his explanation of the time-image develops in connection with Italian neorealism and other post-war European new waves and auteur cinemas. We are left to wonder how this Japanese precursor of the post-war European directors fits into Deleuze’s conception of a temporal shift that is seemingly evident in European and American films, a lacuna indicative of the wider absence of discussion of Asian cinemas in the Cinema books. In Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006) and Deleuze and World Cinemas (2011) I have engaged directly with the applicability of Deleuze’s conclusions to films from India, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, variously arguing that at the intersection of these assemblages we can witness the transformation of Deleuze’s conclusions. Rather than extrapolating universal conclusions regarding any apparently globally applicable understanding of movement and time from Deleuze’s two categories (movement-image and time-image), I believe that we should consider Deleuze’s conclusions as being derived more from a European, or even a Eurocentric, position on cinema. After all, Ozu’s films are not the only example of Asian filmmaking that displaces the centrality of the American and European cinemas that lie at the heart of the distinction Deleuze draws between his two image categories. Undoubtedly the biggest challenge to his division of images around the turning point of the Second World War is popular Indian cinema (often referred to as Bollywood cinema), an aesthetic with a long history that does not conform to the movement-image/time-image distinction that Deleuze theorises by analysing American and European cinemas (Martin-Jones 2011: 201–33). That said, it has never been my aim to debunk the Cinema books. My point, rather, is to explore how Deleuze’s concepts can be usefully applied to different cinemas from around the world, including several different Asian cinemas, even if this means reconsidering or adapting them in the process. Accordingly, this chapter follows the direction I have taken in my

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56 Deleuze and Film previous books, but here focusing specifically on the use of the timeimage to examine national history in the South Korean film Traces of Love. Deleuze did not pursue this approach in his Cinema books, which only sketched a broader Eurocentric notion of late twentieth-century history against which to interpret film images, and in particular timeimages. I use Traces of Love, then, to show how the time-image enables the cinematic exploration of a national past, and also to posit the importance of tourism for national rebuilding and cinematic rebranding. This nationally specific function of the time-image indicates the need to consider the relative applicability of Deleuze’s conclusions regarding movement and time in the Cinema books, which is brought into sharp relief when his concepts are explored in relation to specific Asian films that are seeking audiences at home and abroad.

The Time-Image and South Korean National History In line with the model of time that Deleuze adopts from Henri Bergson, the crystalline or multi-faceted structure of the time-image is created by a matching, mirroring and indiscernible oscillation of the virtual past with the actual present. In other words, the past is most easily accessed when an image or event in the present triggers an association with a similar image or event on another layer of the past. As past and present merge in this recollection, the time-image appears. Thus, in contrast to the causal, primarily truth-revealing flashbacks of action-images (Deleuze 1989: 46), the time-image very often creates confusion between past and present, due to the temporal coexistence of these two moments. In the case of Traces of Love two techniques are primarily used to shift imperceptibly across this border between past and present; namely: a simple shot/reverse shot pattern (with the reverse shot revealing a different virtual layer of the past), and a static camera position, with characters leaving the shot in one time zone and other characters entering from another. Through these basic techniques of editing and cinematography, past and present are shown to coexist, becoming indiscernible in the time-image which they mutually inform. Yet it is also in this way that the time-image is used to explore the effect on the present of events of national significance in the past. To find such a play with time and national history in Traces of Love should perhaps not come as a surprise. Since the resurgence of South Korean cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of films have emerged that explore the relationship between the recent national past and the present. In particular, South Korean horror films and ghost

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 57 stories evidence the indiscernibility of the past and present that Deleuze observes in the time-image. Consider for example the high school drama Yeogo goedam II/Memento Mori (Tae-Yong Kim and Kyu-Dong Min, South Korea, 1999), the haunted house movie Janghwa, Hongryeon/A Tale of Two Sisters (Jee-woon Kim, South Korea 2003), and the Vietnam War story Arpointeu/R-Point (Su-chang Kong, South Korea, 2004). All three demonstrate the confusion over layers of the past that Anna Powell describes in Deleuze and Horror Film as characteristic of the genre, in which: ‘The past impregnates the present in a haunting which seeks to block the flow of present into future. The past threatens to dominate the present and also to shape the future in its own replicated image which brings stasis’ (Powell 2005: 11). Admittedly Traces of Love is not a horror film. Generically speaking it is a hybrid of melodrama, disaster and road movie, although it was packaged for international sales as an art film. Nevertheless, in Traces of Love a similar impregnation of the present by the past occurs, only without the stasis-inducing, retrogressive effect that Powell identifies in the horror film. Instead, the past merges with the present in order to inform it. Virtually visiting the past enables characters in the present to rebuild their lives after a past trauma that affected the entire nation. Indeed, it is this overt engagement with a traumatic event in the recent national past that sets Traces of Love apart from the previous films of director Dae-seung Kim – Beonjijeompeureul hada/Bungee Jumping of their Own (South Korea, 2001), and Hyeol-ui nu/Blood Rain (South Korea, 2005) – even though they both contain something of the confusion of temporal periods seen most clearly in Traces of Love. Thus a Deleuzian view of time is evident in Traces of Love, in which the copresence of different layers of the past is clearly constructed through the editing and cinematography, and is used to explore national history in order to posit a cure for a recent national trauma.

Traces of Love Traces of Love symbolically reconnects a young man, Hyun-woo (Ji-tae Yu) with his dead fiancée Min-joo (Ji-su Kim), through the physical presence of another woman, Se-jin (Ji-won Uhm). At the beginning of the film, Hyun-woo and Min-joo are a young couple, engaged to be married. Tragically, Min-joo is killed when a department store collapses. Hyun-woo lives with the knowledge that not only did he urge this meeting place on Min-joo due to work commitments (Min-joo initially arrives to collect him from work), but so too did his professional

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58 Deleuze and Film life delay his arrival at their rendezvous. Several years later, Hyun-woo becomes a dedicated prosecutor, refusing to be bought off when investigating high-level corruption and political lobbying surrounding a failed building venture, the Hanyang Global case, which has seen investment funds disappear offshore leaving many of its investors facing financial ruin. Although there is no loss of life involved, as there was with the department store collapse that killed Min-joo, there are similarities between the two cases in as much as it is ordinary people, this time the investors, who are once again shown to be the victims of unscrupulous, profit-hungry businessmen. However, due to his dogged pursuit of the truth Hyun-woo is taken off the case and sent on an enforced vacation before he can expose the high-ranking public officials implicated in the scandal. Just prior to leaving Seoul, Hyun-woo is given his deceased fiancée’s battered journal by her father. He follows a route described by Min-joo in the journal, retracing the steps of a journey she had planned for their honeymoon. Whilst on this journey of personal discovery, Hyun-woo meets Se-jin. Se-jin is following the same route as Hyun-woo. It transpires that Se-jin was trapped in the ruins of the department store along with Min-joo, and there inherited Min-joo’s journal, which she eventually sent to Min-joo’s father. As a tentative romance blossoms between Se-jin and Hyun-woo they both face the traumas of their shared past, and in so doing, begin to rebuild their lives. This interaction with the past is depicted using the time-image. The traumatic event of the department store collapse in Traces of Love references the real life collapse of the Sampoong department store in 1995, which killed over 500 people. Director Kim attempted to reproduce the actual event, spending around £0.5m of the film’s budget on building a one-fifth scale model of the department store to create a realistic impression of the catastrophe (Joo 2006). The reference is of essential importance to the film because the investigation into the real-life collapse revealed that, alongside planning and design abuses, bribery and corruption amongst city officials had contributed to the disaster. The parallels between this event and the story of prosecutor Hyun-woo are evident, ensuring that Traces of Love resonates with broader, national concerns over high-level corruption and financial mismanagement in public office. Hyun-woo and Se-jin’s confrontation with the past is, then, of national significance as Traces of Love engages allegorically with the aftermath of a national trauma. As I will further demonstrate, the setting of this traumatic recovery of the past in several beautiful tourist locations and other sites of South Korean national

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 59 heritage strengthens the national dimension of the allegory, whilst also attempting to promote the nation’s touristic vistas, as does the use of the time-image to explore personal traumas inextricably connected to a recognisable, tragic national event.

Time-Images in Traces of Love Time-images appear on numerous occasions in Traces of Love, the majority of them concentrated in the middle of the film as Hyun-woo and Se-jin retrace the journey outlined in Min-joo’s journal. After the collapse of the department store Hyun-woo regains a certain sense of direction to his life by becoming an incorruptible prosecutor, working to expose the kind of high-level abuse of public office that led to this disaster. However, Hyun-woo’s professional life is suddenly stalled when his investigation threatens to uncover the fact that the corruption may extend to very high-ranking public officials, possibly including the Mayor. When his boss forces him to take a vacation, Hyun-woo’s life begins to drift. He begins to wander through South Korea precisely as we would expect of a meandering protagonist of the time-image. This wandering takes him in search of an informing past that can cure his malaise. Hyun-woo’s sense of direction is ultimately determined by the presence of Min-joo’s battered journal, which provides him with a guiding influence from his past. As Hyun-woo follows the directions in Min-joo’s journal, his narrative is no longer his own. Following in the footsteps of his dead fiancée, travelling roads she mapped out for him in the past, his personal narrative is derailed and time invades the present moment, bringing him into contact with Min-joo in the past. Accordingly, it is here that the time-image begins to emerge, past and present coming together most clearly in the film’s conflation of its two female characters, Min-joo and Se-jin, as Hyun-woo encounters Se-jin on precisely the same journey as himself. The first time-image appears forty-five minutes into the film and equates Se-jin in the present with Min-joo in the past. The first notable disruption of narrative time by the time-image occurs when we cut from Hyun-woo driving away from Seoul to Se-jin – a character who has been briefly introduced to the viewer but whose narrative purpose is entirely unknown – sightseeing amongst the sand dunes at Poongsung, on Woohee island. We recognise Se-jin’s location because it was introduced in the very first scene of the film by the video diary report being filmed there by Min-joo and her colleagues.

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60 Deleuze and Film Se-jin walks across the dunes towards the camera, and passes a group of people setting up a video shoot very much like that seen the last time the narrative visited this particular location. Se-jin stands looking out at the sea. A reverse shot presents us with her point of view. This shot of the sea slowly dissolves into a point of view shot seen through a camera lens, which is gradually made obvious by markings that appear at the edges of the frame. A click of a shutter is heard, but the ensuing reverse shot reveals not Se-jin in the present, but Min-joo in the past. Through the subtle use of a shot/reverse shot pattern and brief dissolve we have slipped into the past in the time-image. The virtual nature of this layer of the past is emphasised by our entrance into it through the lens of a camera. We remain in the past to witness Min-joo apologise to her fellow video diary crew members for making them miss the last ferry off the island that night. A static camera shot shows the departing ferry in the middle distance, as Min-joo and her colleagues leave the dock in search of a hotel, departing from the shot past the static camera. The shot remains static, with only a slow zoom in to indicate that time has in any way passed, before Se-jin runs into the shot, in the present, realising that she has just missed the ferry. The reverse shot, when it finally comes, reveals that now we are back in the present, as Min-joo and her friends have entirely disappeared. Through an unobtrusive use of a standard shot/reverse shot pattern and a static camera with an almost imperceptible zoom, the time-image has emerged. This simple use of editing and cinematography enables the past to enter momentarily into a crystalline relationship with the present. In this way, Se-jin is conflated with Min-joo, prefiguring her ultimate status as Min-joo’s hand-picked replacement in Hyun-woo’s life. It is only now, with this relationship between the women in the past and present established, that Hyun-woo arrives on Woohee island. Following Min-joo’s journal, Hyun-woo also locates the spot where Min-joo took the photograph in the past. Although no time-image immediately appears, Hyun-woo also establishes a matching relationship between virtual past and actual present by comparing, and ultimately matching, the photograph in the journal with the scenery. Min-joo’s voice is then heard on the voiceover, narrating events in her journal. We again shift imperceptibly into the past. As Hyun-woo looks out to sea from the sand dune we cut to Min-joo, abruptly changing location to a winter setting in the snow-covered Soswaewon Gardens, Damyang. The sixteenth-century gardens are a popular tourist destination on the mainland, their leafy beauty contrasting markedly with the dunes of Woohee Island. Here, Min-joo drops a flower into a small stream. The camera

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 61 tracks the flower in close-up as it travels the course of the stream. The setting shifts from snowy winter to golden autumn and, predictably, the flower is retrieved at the end of its journey by Hyun-woo in the present. Here a technique usually deployed to demonstrate spatial continuity renders visible an easy slippage between sheets of time, from past to present. This particular time-image returns the narrative to the present, revealing an ellipsis in Hyun-woo’s journey (from Woohee Island to the inland Soswaewon Gardens) and, indeed, demonstrating that Hyunwoo and Se-jin are simultaneously occupying the same physical space, only on different layers of time. Time-images thus multiply in this middle section of the film in order to drive the narrative forward in an extremely circuitous fashion, the past emerging to propel Se-jin and Hyun-woo forward in the present. The narrative only settles into the present when Hyun-woo and Se-jin begin to travel together, after a series of coincidences thrown up by their mutual adherence to Min-joo’s journal itinerary. As Se-jin now begins to replace Min-joo in Hyun-woo’s life, the role of the past in propelling the narrative also slowly decreases. The few remaining time-images focus on exploring and purging the trauma suffered by Se-jin in the past, when she was trapped in the ruins of the department store with the dying Minjoo. As events in the past are thus investigated the two protagonists in the present are able to grieve, and as a consequence their agency gradually returns. In this way Traces of Love draws together its exploration of time through the time-image with its examination of the trauma of collapse in recent national history.

National Trauma, Road Movie, Time-Image The structure and progression of the narrative of Traces of Love hangs on the collapse of the department store that occurs twenty minutes into the film, as witnessed from across the street by Hyun-woo. In diegetic terms this is the key moment in the lives of the three protagonists. It also entirely derails Hyun-woo and Min-joo’s romance narrative and facilitates the emergence of the time-image. Correspondingly, the film’s pivotal moment is the long-awaited spectacle of devastation when the department store collapses, as seen from the perspective of those within its basement café. Thus when we finally do experience the collapse for ourselves, it is as it is remembered by Se-jin. These two moments of devastation bracket off the time-images, creating an extended temporal hiatus in which the national past can be explored. The film’s reference to the Sampoong department store collapse in

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62 Deleuze and Film 1995 actually evokes a larger ‘national economic collapse’ (Chang 1999: 31), which was the culmination of a period of exceptionally rapid modernisation under military rule now commonly referred to as South Korea’s experience of ‘compressed modernity’. Writing in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and discussing the general state of ‘collapse’ of South Korea in the 1990s, Kyung-Sup Chang notes that the legacy of South Korea’s recent experience of compressed modernity was that: South Koreans had to accept the unbelievable collapse of Seongsu Grand Bridge over Han River, Sampung Department Store and many other huge physical structures. While the immediate cause of most of these collapses has largely been attributed to the personal, political and administrative mistakes of the previous state leadership, a grave society-wide pessimism about renewed long-term economic and social development is haunting South Koreans. (Chang 1999: 31)

This view of the Sampoong disaster as a symptom of a larger national crisis in the recent past is echoed by director Kim in an interview. Kim notes his sensitivity towards the continued effect of the disaster on individuals who might see the film, emphasising the continued informing presence of the recent past on the present-day life of potential viewers. He initially alludes to the disaster as one of several ‘bizarre accidents that have happened in Korea’ (Kim 2006: 37), before specifically positioning it as a direct consequence of compressed modernity, stating that ‘the collapse accident in Korea may have been in process for a long period of time, perhaps since 1945. The history of the unforgivable mistakes and the irrational decision-making systems that we failed to eliminate ultimately resulted in this tragedy’ (Kim 2006: 37). In Traces of Love, the legacy of economic collapse is the ghost that haunts the lives of Hyun-woo and Se-jin through the temporal disruptions of the time-image. As they struggle to come to terms with the past, the film attempts to offer solutions to the widespread pessimism surrounding South Korea’s economic resurgence, which Chang observed during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis. The evocation of the Sampoong department store collapse establishes a past trauma that is of national significance in spite of being represented through a melodrama of personal relationships. Moreover, Hyun-woo and Se-jin’s respective journeys into the past take place on their road-movie-like journey through various sites of South Korea’s scenic historical and cultural heritage, thereby conflating their personal routes to therapeutic recovery with that of the nation.

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 63 As Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark note, typically the ‘road movie provides a ready space for exploration of the tensions and crises of the historical moment during which it is produced’ (Cohan and Hark 1997: 2). Indeed, as Kyung Hyun Kim’s detailed discussion of Korean road movies would suggest, Traces of Love is not the first film to explore the issue of national identity. Like its predecessors from the 1980s and 1990s that Kim discusses, the film depicts characters searching for a home ‘and by proxy a salient national identity’ in the context of Korea’s ‘painful and brutal history fraught with colonialism, war and modernisation’ (Kim 2004: 53–4). Yet in this instance, the two wounded characters are ultimately granted the ability to return home at the end of their journey, once they have confronted the past. At the close of the film, Hyun-woo in particular is absolved of guilt by Min-joo’s father. This is a markedly more resolved conclusion than is found in the previous films Kim discusses, including Nageuneneun kileseodo swiji anhneunda/The Man with Three Coffins (Jang-ho Lee, South Korea, 1987), Seopyeonje/ Sopyonje (Kwon-taek Im, South Korea, 1993), and Sae sang bakuro/ Out of the World (Kyun-dong Yeo, South Korea, 1994). Here the aweinspiring, picture-postcard settings of Traces of Love contrast most clearly with the often brutal ‘overwhelming landscapes’ identified by Kim in these previous films (Kim 2004: 53), as Traces of Love’s touristic aspect is promoted to national and international markets. Thus in Traces of Love, in contrast to the haunting of the present by the past noted by Powell of the time-image in the horror genre – ‘which seeks to block the flow of present into future’ – the pessimism that Chang observed to be ‘haunting South Koreans’ is directly addressed in order to posit a possible solution to stasis, a way of facilitating the movement of the present into the future. The cure that enables Hyunwoo to stand up to his boss, and return to his position as incorruptible prosecutor (a future guardian against the causes of such collapses as that of Sampoong), is directly effected through confrontation with the traumatic past whilst on the road. Similarly, through her meeting with Hyun-woo, Se-jin is also able to return to work. In this way the restored economic agency of both characters after a period of reflection whilst lost in the time-image is used to suggest the potential for ‘long term economic and social development’ in South Korea after the ‘national economic collapse’ of the 1990s. The time-image, then, enables an exploration of the national past in order to facilitate an articulation of the losses experienced under compressed modernity: the lives lost in physical collapses like the Sampoong disaster, the often-contested social transformations caused by rapid

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64 Deleuze and Film modernisation, and the devastation wrought by sudden economic collapse. It offers Hyun-woo and Se-jin the chance to delve into the past, to explore its injustices (as prosecutor, this is Hyun-woo’s chosen profession, after all), and thereby to find a way of articulating the ‘incommensurable experience of modernity’. Notably, towards the end of the film, Hyun-woo is finally able to express his great regret at insisting on the department store café as the place to meet Min-joo after work. For her part, Se-jin’s recounting of the department store collapse enables her to release her sadness, as she speaks about the trauma for the first time with Hyun-woo. These personal cures, however, are only possible through the encounter with the past offered by the time-image, the pivotal such image triggering the memory in which the store’s collapse is recalled. The first clue that Se-jin was trapped in the ruins of the department store when it collapsed is given when she and Hyun-woo drive through a tunnel, and witness the aftermath of a car crash. Se-jin begins to hyperventilate and has to leave the tunnel on foot. When Hyun-woo eventually realises the mutual link to Min-joo that exists between himself and Se-jin, he confronts her, and she directly recalls the collapse. As this initial allusion to her part in the trauma occurs in the underground tunnel, it might seem tempting to view it as an expression of a Freudian return of the repressed, an equation of the past with the subterranean unconscious. Indeed, when Se-jin does finally come to recall the past it is rendered as a flashback that is signalled in a very conventional manner through a prolonged close-up on her traumatised face staring into the middle distance, which then cuts to Se-jin and Min-joo buried in the pitch black ruins of the department store. This is decidedly not the same indiscernible mingling of the past and present in the time-image that we have seen up until this point in the film. However, close analysis reveals that, rather than a return of the repressed, Se-jin’s memory is actually brought on by a Bergsonian, or more accurately Proustian, mirroring of present with past. The scene in the present takes place in a dark underground tunnel, evoking Min-joo and Se-jin’s burial in the darkened ruins of the department store. The bodies on stretchers, the ambulance crews, sirens, and finally the banging of the ambulance doors (that resemble for Se-jin the sound of her own hand futilely banging on the wall as she attempts to reach the dying Min-joo) all mirror the previous scenes of rescue workers digging in the rubble of the department store. These optical and sound triggers illustrate the informing co-presence of the past with the present, creating a crystal of time in which the virtual past and the actual present begin to mirror each other. For the traumatised Se-jin they momentar-

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 65 ily become indiscernible (her hyperventilating body physically recalling her near-suffocation in the ruins) as she finally recalls the past. Thus the flashback to the collapse of the department store, although it is finally delivered in a conventional manner, also illustrates the coexistence of the past with the present found in Deleuze’s time-image. The function of this time-image, however, is specific to South Korean history and the nation’s experience of compressed modernity during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, rather than illustrative of a larger epistemic shift related to European identities or the aftermath of the Second World War.

Tourism and the Time-Image The carefully chosen locations of outstanding natural and historic beauty in which this exploration of the past takes place are also of importance for the functioning of the time-image. The last of the time-images that dominate the middle section of the film occurs in the Buddhist temple at Bulyoung, and appears immediately after Se-jin’s hyperventilation in the tunnel. Here again the time-image emphasises the link between Min-joo in the past and Se-jin in the present through a subtle deployment of the shot/reverse shot structure to switch imperceptibly between different layers of the past. However, the additional significance of the time-image that occurs in Bulyoung temple for the film’s meditation on national history is to be found in its relationship to tourism. The temple is introduced with the arrival of Hyun-woo and Se-jin, who are pictured sightseeing amongst other tourists. We then cut to the virtual past, seen initially through the viewfinder of a video camera as Min-joo and her colleagues interview a Buddhist monk. The filming is persistently interrupted by various noisy bystanders, whom we do not see, but assume to be tourists like Hyun-woo and Se-jin. Shortly after their visit to Bulyoung temple, Se-jin and Hyun-woo walk through the forested grounds together. Hyun-woo hears Min-joo’s voiceover in his head as Se-jin reflects on the way seasons, and in particular autumn, smell on the air. This moment soon leads to Se-jin and Hyun-woo’s realisation of their mutual connection to Min-joo, and this in turn will bring on the final flashback that places Min-joo and Se-jin together in the basement café of the department store as it collapses. The timing of this final time-image suggests that it is tourism, and in particular sites of national heritage as tourist locations, that provide the necessary cure for the nation’s traumas under compressed modernity.

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66 Deleuze and Film The development of South Korea’s Buddhist temples as sites for tourism began during the Fifth Republic, under the dictatorship of President Chun Doo-hwan, when monastic estates were turned into national parks and ‘extensive tourist resorts . . . were built at their front gates’ (Sørensen 1999: 139–40). As both Sørensen and Richard H. Robinson and Willard L. Johnson (1997: 236) note, this had an extremely disruptive effect on the everyday life of Buddhist monks, as we see in this sequence of Traces of Love. The scene is played for laughs as the monk grows increasingly agitated at the persistent interruptions of the bystanders. Reincarnation, the theme of Kim’s first feature, Bungee Jumping of their Own, is vaguely alluded to by this choice of setting. The monk’s discussion of the origin of the temple’s name in the reflection of the Buddha-shaped rock in the water (‘Bul young’ meaning ‘Buddha reflection’, as we are informed by Min-joo), suggests not only that a spiritual dimension remains in such remnants of South Korea’s Buddhist heritage but that this spiritual dimension also somehow facilitates, or at least explains, the film’s view on communication existing between past and present. This is the case even though tourism has apparently invaded the temple, and it has ceased to function effectively (or to be taken seriously) as a site of uninterrupted meditation. However, it is primarily tourism that provides the curative aspect to Se-jin and Hyun-woo’s journey. Throughout the film the journeying of the two protagonists through South Korea’s spectacular landscape – journeying both in the present and into the past – demonstrates the power of tourism as a form of therapy. This is most evident in the onscreen beauty of South Korea’s landscape in the present that contrasts so starkly with the darkness of the department store ruins of the past, which we visit in the final timeimage. In this way, Traces of Love maps out the curative tourist spaces and sites of national heritage that are available to the nation after its experience under compressed modernity. At several points in the film this extolling of the nation as a tourist destination becomes impossible to ignore. For instance, consider Minjoo’s phone message to Hyun-woo, in which the natural beauty of Naeyo˘n mountain is described: ‘I’m at Naeyo˘n Mountain now. It’s just north of Pohang city. This mountain really is beautiful. It’s got 12 waterfalls, all of them really pretty. Since it’s not too much of a climb you’ll like it too.’ The dialogue almost directly addresses the viewer, as though it were an advert aimed at potential tourists. In the same vein there is Se-jin’s verbatim rendering of Min-joo’s journal description of Highway Seven:

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 67 People say Highway Seven is beautiful because of the East Sea and the pine trees. But it’s these fishing villages and the people living here that make this road even more lovely. And maybe this is why I feel compelled to call out the village names along this road. If I don’t they might feel disappointed. Byung-gok, Hupo, Pyong-hae, Wolsong, Duksan.

In this instance the dialogue serves to create a map of the scenic route available along Highway Seven. In fact, conversations between characters even explicitly provide directions for travel: Hyun-woo: Is Bulyoung temple on the way to Wooljin? Se-jin: Yes. Hyun-woo: Do I take this road to Wooljin which forks out from Yangjung Beach? Se-jin: It’ll take much longer. Going from Mangyang Beach through Noumli is faster. The scenery is prettier.

There are several other such conversations and asides. Moreover, when Hyun-woo and Su-jin visit these locations, they are always comfortably busy with tourists (without being teeming), and the two characters are first brought together by the necessity of sharing a table in a busy restaurant. Most apparently, these discussions, set within what appears to be a thriving tourist industry, serve the diegetic purpose of demonstrating Se-jin’s familiarity with Min-joo’s planned honeymoon route from the journal, which she claims to have travelled three times in the intervening years. Yet it also illustrates a concerted effort on the part of the filmmakers to use Traces of Love as a platform on which to market South Korea as an accessible and beautiful tourist destination, suggesting both a rejuvenated economy and a sense that national heritage can bring South Koreans together. In this sense the journal functions in precisely the same way in the diegetic world as it does for the viewer of the film, as a pocket travel guide. This emphasis on tourism is facilitated by the narrative structure offered by the time-image. From the department store’s collapse to the revelatory moment in which it is remembered by Se-jin, the film is effectively a distended moment displaced from continuity in which the past and present commingle. This narrative hiatus provided by the timeimage takes the form of a meandering tourist’s journey that only ends with the return to work of its protagonists. When Hyun-woo finally tracks down Se-jin on their return to Seoul she is once again working as a café waitress, this time in a branch of Starbucks. Despite the traumatic experience she suffered whilst working as a waitress in the basement café of the department store, Se-jin has returned to her original trade.

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68 Deleuze and Film However, the film makes it clear that this has only become possible because of the curative journey she took through South Korea, and indeed, through her reliving of the past with Hyun-woo in the timeimage. Hence, when she and Hyun-woo meet again at the close of the film in Starbucks, which is one of the most internationally recognised brand names synonymous with globalisation, there is a suggestion that both characters have reconciled themselves to the rebuilding process that followed the national economic collapse of the 1990s. Not only is Se-jin back at work, but Hyun-woo’s forceful confrontation with his boss and the reassertion of his right to investigate the Hanyang Global case also demonstrates his return to agency after the tourist’s malaise of the time-image. Along with the film’s emphasis on selling South Korea as a tourist destination, then, its narrative illustrates a reconciliation in the present with the economic trajectory of compressed modernity, despite the traumas it has caused in the past. Having investigated the past, Hyun-woo has now become a prosecutor capable of weeding out the corruption that previously caused such collapses. Se-jin for her part is able once again to take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalisation, presumably feeling a lot safer about the risks that may be involved. Thus the film ends with a positive outlook for South Korea’s economic and social future.

Conclusion By this point it should be no surprise that Traces of Love, in many ways a shop window in which the nation’s tourist hot spots are displayed, was chosen to open the 11th Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) in 2006. As SooJeong Ahn notes, by focusing on Asian cinema, the PIFF has attempted to construct a specific identity within the world of film festivals. Part and parcel of this process has been the strategic programming of South Korean films in the opening gala in order to both brand these films as national products, and to enable them to circulate abroad (Ahn 2009: 73). Traces of Love was one of the first films sold (to Sony Pictures) through the Asian Film Market, which was launched at PIFF in 2006 precisely to facilitate the buying and selling of Asian films (Yoo 2006). When it went back into postproduction after premiering at the PIFF, the film’s producer Dong-kyu Ahn further demonstrated the film’s international ambitions by announcing plans to remake the film in the USA, with 9/11 replacing the Sampoong disaster (Frater and Lee 2006). The film’s international aims, in particular in relation to tourism, bring

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Time-Images, Tourism and South Korean History 69 this discussion back to the opening engagement with Deleuze’s formulation of the time-image out of his observation of various European art cinemas. We might consider Traces of Love’s time-images as a deliberate formal strategy targeted at the cine-literate film festival circuit. Yet, far from being evidence of a global post-war shift in the cinematic conception of time, which would link South Korean cinema to the European new waves of the twentieth century (were such a global shift possible to identify definitively), Traces of Love actually demonstrates how national cinemas deploy time-images to engage with national history and simultaneously to gain international appeal, in this case by very deliberately promoting the nation as a tourist destination. In the South Korean context, then, the time-images in this film are more usefully seen as negotiating the nation’s experience of the traumas of compressed modernity than as symptomatic of a global shift in the conception of time occurring around the Second World War (Martin-Jones 2006: 205–19; and 2011: 100–30). Yet it is only by assembling Deleuze’s ideas with Asian films that these kinds of fine distinctions can be drawn, and that – pace Deleuze’s Eurocentric conclusions – his Cinema books can return in difference.

References Ahn, S.-J. (2009), ‘Placing South Korean Cinema into the Pusan International Film Festival’, in C. Berry, J.D. Mackintosh and N. Liscutin (eds), What a Difference a Region Makes, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 73–86. Chang, K.-S. (1999), ‘Compressed Modernity and its Discontents: South Korean Society in Transition’, Economy and Society, 28 (1): 30–55. Chaudhuri, S. and H. Finn (2003), ‘The Open Image’, Screen, 44 (1): 38–57. Cohan, S. and I.R. Hark (1997), The Road Movie Book, London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Continuum. Frater, P. and J. Lee (2006), ‘ “Traces” of 9/11’, VarietyAsiaOnline.com (13 October), available at http://varietyasiaonline.com/content/view/147/53 (accessed 16 April 2007). Joo, J.-W. (2006), ‘The Opening Film of PIFF 2006 is . . . “Woman, Ji-su” ’ (my translation), Joins/JoongAng Daily (11 October), available at http://article.joins. com/article/article.asp?Total_ID=2472429 (accessed 27 April 2007). Kim, H.-S. (2006), ‘Absence of Lover: Presence of Love: Traces of Love, Kim Daiseung’, Korean Film Observatory, 20: 36–7. Kim, K.-H. (2004), The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2011), Deleuze and World Cinemas, London: Continuum. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Robinson, R.H., and W.L. Johnson (1997), The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction, London: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

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70 Deleuze and Film Sørensen, H.H. (1999), ‘Buddhism and Secular Power in Twentieth-Century Korea’, in I. Harris (ed.), Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth Century Asia, London: Pinter, pp. 127–52. Tong, J. (2003), ‘Chungking Express’, in C. Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus, London: BFI, pp. 47–55. Yoo, J.-S. (2006), ‘Busan Festival is Ready for a New Era’, JoongAng Daily (20 October), available at http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view. asp?aid=2830780 (accessed 16 April 2007).

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Chapter 4

The Rebirth of the World: Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann

Richard Rushton

Can Deleuze’s cinematic categories and analyses be useful for examining contemporary films and filmmakers? A preliminary answer to this question might be that Deleuze’s categories and classifications might have been useful for the specific cases he examined, but that such analyses cannot be extended to today’s cinema, not least because films themselves have changed since Deleuze wrote his Cinema books. From this perspective, one might argue that in the last thirty years or so the nature of cinema has been altered to such an extent that we need an entirely new set of analytical tools. To further this line of argument we might claim that the ‘progression’ charted by Deleuze from the movement-image to the time-image needs to be eclipsed by a further category or set of categories, such as the silicon-image or the digital-image. In other words, Deleuze’s analyses are appropriate for their historical period but now need to be updated. Naturally, adopting this kind of approach might even be necessary, and surely Deleuze himself would have updated his own categories and added new ones in light of the kinds of films that have been made since the 1980s. There might, however, be another way to proceed, for the categories and distinctions devised by Deleuze might still be relevant in many ways for contemporary cinema. This is what I intend to show here, since Deleuze’s investigations need not be restricted to those specific films and filmmakers from which they emerged. As implied above, such an approach will not necessarily work for all aspects of contemporary cinema, but I do believe, for example, that it works in helping us to understand the films of Baz Luhrmann.

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72 Deleuze and Film

Gilles Deleuze: Highbrow, Lowbrow or Both? To make this investigation part of a wider argument, we must ask what the continued relevance is of the large categories of the movement-image and the time-image. First of all, we might need to consider that the shift from the movement-image to the time-image is not necessarily one of progression or improvement. If, as might be argued, the time-image comes after the movement-image, then this is likely part of a wider historical shift that is realised in cinematic creations and which is certainly not part of cinema’s historical destiny. In other words, something that Deleuze calls a ‘time-image’ emerged out of specific historical processes appropriate to and utilised by the cinema, but there was nothing intrinsic or essential to cinema that brought about such a thing. Needless to say, we can wait for cinema to deliver new revelations for us; perhaps it already has, as Patricia Pisters (2003) and David Martin-Jones (2006) have suggested. We must also bear in mind that the kinds of films that Deleuze called movement-image cinema are still being made; indeed, by far the majority of feature films today are movement-image films. This perhaps leads some scholars to argue that the time-image should have replaced the movement-image, and that the faults, problems and negatives of the movement-image should have been (or should be in the future) replaced by the critical superiority of the time-image. Such positions are clear in works by D.N. Rodowick (1997) and Dorothea Olkowski (1999), which are open defences of the time-image over and above the movement-image. In the conclusion to Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, for example, Rodowick states: ‘To present a direct image of time as the force of change: this is the highest point of thought where cinema and philosophy converge’ (Rodowick 1997: 207). In other words, the timeimage, and its ‘direct’ image of time, are placed somewhat higher than the indirect images of time garnered by the movement-image. Such arguments might, on the one hand, stem directly from Deleuze’s own analyses. One reading of the Cinema books could conclude that the movement-image is a regime most crucially associated with the triumph of the American, Hollywood cinema, while the time-image is associated with European art cinema and the various cinematic new waves (for a summary, see Martin-Jones 2008: 78). However, while Deleuze himself equates Hitler to Hollywood and Hollywood to Hitler in Cinema 2, suggesting that the great auteurs, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein, have been replaced by mediocre filmmakers who do not do violence with images but who portray violence in images

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 73 (Deleuze 1989: 151–81), this is not, for me, the whole story. Indeed, it seems fitting for the co-author of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that there is more than one Deleuze in the Cinema books. While Deleuze may seem at times to distinguish between the movement-image and the time-image on the basis of quality, morality and politics (as the Hollywood–Hitler comparison above suggests), at other times he does not. Or rather, the focus of Deleuze’s distinction is not strictly qualitative, moral, or political, but is rather an attempt to delineate a historical trend or break, a break whereby a certain kind of film becomes possible in the time-image, a kind of film that was not available to, or was only implicit in, the movement-image. For this reason, John Mullarkey has pointed out that ‘Deleuze doesn’t practice what he preaches’ (Mullarkey 2009: 101), in that he fails to honour his own intention of avoiding a qualitative distinction between the two image regimes. But while Deleuze might give the impression of creating a hierarchy between the two image regimes, I should like here to make clear that his intention was not to do so. In light of this argument, the time-image is a new kind of image, but not necessarily a better kind of image than the movement-image. Deleuze claims, for example, that ‘from its beginnings, something different happens in what is called modern cinema: not something more beautiful, more profound or more true, but something different’ (Deleuze 1989: 40). Much movementimage cinema may well be mediocre, as Deleuze points out, but that does not preclude it from being good, as the examples of Hitchcock, Eisenstein and Gance hopefully make clear. In point of fact, for all of his apparent dislike of ‘mediocre’ cinema, Deleuze tried to remain humble in the face of cinema rather than to put himself above it, going so far as to say in one interview that ‘[t]he only thing that bugs me is the knowing laughter of cinephiles. This kind of laughter is supposedly on some higher level, a second level. I’d rather see the whole house in tears. How could you not cry at Griffith’s Broken Blossoms?’ (Deleuze 2006: 216). In other words, Deleuze acknowledges and fully embraces the power of cinema, whether it is popular and emotional, highbrow and intellectual, or anything in between. Deleuze’s project in the Cinema books is not that of mapping the superiority of some films over others; rather, it is to map the different kinds of images that the cinema has produced, as I have argued elsewhere (Rushton 2011: 126–47).

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74 Deleuze and Film

Minnelli, Deleuze, Luhrmann Where, then, might the films of Baz Luhrmann fit into this perspective? Luhrmann has directed four feature films: Strictly Ballroom (Australia, 1992), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (USA, 1996), Moulin Rouge! (Australia/USA, 2001), and Australia (Australia/USA, 2008). While I shall analyse each of these films separately below, I should like first to compare Luhrmann’s cinema to that of Vincente Minnelli, from whom Luhrmann in part seems to have inherited his filmmaking style. Minnelli, like Luhrmann today, was a filmmaker working in the most popular Hollywood genres, namely musical comedies and melodramas, and his most prominent films, such as An American in Paris (USA, 1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (USA, 1952), The Band Wagon (USA, 1953), Brigadoon (USA, 1954), and Gigi (USA, 1958), were among the most commercially successful of their time. And yet, despite being a popular Hollywood director, Minnelli is a filmmaker whom Deleuze analyses at some length in both Cinema books, but particularly in Cinema 2 (1989: 61–4), where he emerges as one of the key auteurs of the time-image in ways that other great Hollywood auteurs, such as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Hitchcock, do not. In other words, and in light of the preceding debate concerning his supposed high- and/or lowbrow tastes, Deleuze reserves a place in his book on the time-image for one of the most popular and successful postwar Hollywood directors, meaning that popular Hollywood cinema and the time-image are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, while Minnelli’s films might be looked down upon as ‘mere’ entertainment, they have also been considered highly artistic, a supposedly paradoxical combination that the subtitle of a recent collection of essays makes clear: Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (McElhaney 2009). Beyond reaffirming Deleuze’s own enjoyment of at least some postwar Hollywood cinema, however, Deleuze’s work on Minnelli also gives us the tools with which to analyse the films of Baz Luhrmann, a process that in itself reaffirms the ongoing and crucial contribution that the Cinema books can make to film studies generally. There are three defining tropes that Deleuze attributes to Minnelli’s films, and which are appropriate also for Luhrmann’s work. These include: resonances from the past; absorption via sound and colour; and ‘worldising’ or ‘societising’ (see Deleuze 1986: 62–4; 1989: 118–19). Resonances from the past can be summarised as the ways in which relationships with the past, which form the core of what makes them examples of the time-image, are articulated in Minnelli’s films. For

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 75 these films, the past does not reside solely as the past or in the past, but is evoked only in so far as it has determinative effects on the present and the future. This is not to say that what has happened in the past merely has consequences for the present. It is instead to declare that the past only ever emerges in so far as it resonates with the present: for Minnelli’s films, the past is rediscovered as a consequence of the present. This reconfiguration of the past can also then lead to a reformation of the present and future, as happens in the flashback structure of Madame Bovary (USA, 1949) and in the final dance sequence of The Band Wagon, in which Tony (Fred Astaire) and Gabrielle (Cyd Charisse) reconstruct the film’s own past in order to move forward together into the future. In these films, the past doesn’t merely exist in the past. Rather, it is constitutive of the present, and has consequences both for the present and the future. It is the constant re-newing and rediscovery of the past that turns out to be crucial also for Luhrmann’s films. With regard to absorption via sound and colour, Deleuze is more opaque than usual, although it might be useful to think about the term ‘absorption’ in ways intended by the art historian Michael Fried. For Fried, absorption is a characteristic of works of art that depict people as absorbed in one activity or another with the outcome that the art work itself will also be inward-looking, ‘absorbed’ as it is in its own tasks (see Fried 1980; Rushton 2009). If we can interpret such a move as offering a sense of ‘being caught up in’ a task, then Deleuze definitely intends to suggest that Minnelli’s films and characters offer ways of ‘being caught up in’ sound and colour. What Deleuze claims more explicitly is that there is a connection between absorption and colour, and we are assumed to oppose colour to line in accordance with the traditional opposition from art history (for more, see Bogue 2003: 131–60). What I believe Deleuze is trying to indicate is that Minnelli utilises colour (and sound) above and beyond the formal qualities of film – those we might associate with ‘line’, like montage or narrative divisions. Instead, what is essential for Minnelli are modes of expression defined by colour, so that for Minnelli colour becomes integrated into the dance of the musical numbers at the same time as it allows the film’s audience to become absorbed into the spectacle of the colour and dance. Alternatively, in non-musical films such as Some Came Running (USA, 1958), the expanse of widescreen colour overwhelms the story and its characters, especially in that film’s climactic scene at the town fair, in which neon signs and the whirling lights of the carnival sideshows become central to the film’s effect. Furthermore, colour allows the characters themselves to become absorbed into the world or worlds of the films as

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76 Deleuze and Film though the plots of these films are propelled by the sheer force of their expression. In addition to the above, Deleuze’s argues that in Minnelli’s films ‘characters [become] literally absorbed by their own dream, and above all by the dream of others and the past of others’ (Deleuze 1986: 118– 19). These kinds of claims come to the fore in some of Minnelli’s more outlandish films, like The Pirate (USA, 1948) or Brigadoon, in which a character (played by Gene Kelly in both cases) enters into a dream past as if entering an alternative, strange, enchanted world, a world dreamed by others. In attempting to define ‘worldising’ or ‘societising’, Deleuze argues that the world or society takes over a character’s actions and completes them for him or her. In contrast to films of the movement-image in which a character is typically defined by his or her ability to complete the necessary action, for Minnelli the lead characters fail, and their actions need to be completed by those around them, or by the world itself. The ending of Meet Me in St Louis (USA, 1944), where the family makes the decision for the father, against his wishes, to stay in St Louis, is pertinent here, for the father hesitates about making the decision himself, and instead it is his family who effectively makes the decision for him. And much the same can be said for The Band Wagon, when Tony thinks it’s all over for him; the show has been done, but he has not rediscovered his career and he is washed up. He leaves his dressing room, however, to discover the rest of the cast waiting for him to rescue and reinvent him; they complete the action he himself was unable to make. As Deleuze writes: ‘The world takes responsibility for the movement that the subject can no longer or cannot make’ (Deleuze 1989: 59). Finally, what holds all of this together? The three aspects are held together by, and feed into, one overriding aim in Minnelli’s films: how does one manage to get from one world to another? This, for Deleuze, is the persistent theme of Minnelli’s films: if a character begins at one place and in one situation, then the trajectory of the film is to try to work out how this character can get out of the place he or she is in so as to find another way of life, or another ‘world’, as Deleuze calls it.

The ‘Other Worlds’ of Baz Luhrmann Deleuze’s evocation of other ‘worlds’ in the work of Vincente Minnelli is precisely where our analysis of Luhrmann’s films can begin, since his films are centred around characters trying to find another way of life. This is reflected in the catch-phrase pop-philosophies to be found in

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 77 each of Luhrmann’s films: ‘A life lived in fear is a life half lived’ (Strictly Ballroom); ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return’ (Moulin Rouge!); and ‘Just because it is doesn’t mean it should be’ (Australia). These might be dismissed by some intellectuals as being far too simplistic and naïve, but if we have the courage to trust where Luhrmann is trying to take us (and to trust in the simplistic profundities of cinema), then perhaps ultimately we will see that they end in one quest: namely, to ‘tell your own story’, which is a theme made explicit in both Moulin Rouge! and Australia. In other words, Luhrmann’s characters learn to no longer fear the ways in which others have imposed a world upon them, and instead articulate what that world is from the perspective of their own triumph – or tragedy – within it. The other side of this treatment, common to Minnelli and Luhrmann, is that one can only tell one’s own story by virtue of having that story completed by another. In other words, the characters go from one world to another only by changing tack, which in other words means going somewhere they did not think they would. To find oneself can only be a consequence of losing one’s self; to tell one’s own story can only come out of renouncing the story you thought you wanted to tell, so that one discovers another story, a story that becomes one’s own only by first being the story of an other.

Strictly Ballroom In Strictly Ballroom, Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) discovers the ability to pass into another world – that is, to revoke the power of the Ballroom Dancing Federation and to dance new, independent steps. This is an outcome of his efforts to define those steps and his destiny in his own way and on his own terms. Furthermore, it is an outcome of his newfound ability to tell his own story, a story that resonates from his father’s own failed dancing career. Throughout the film Scott is torn between his desire to dance his own steps – and thus to incur the wrath of the Dancing Federation, whose members refuse to acknowledge his steps as legitimate – and a desire to become the Federation’s dance champion (which would entail the renunciation of his own steps in favour of those supported by the Federation). Late in the film he comes to understand that his father had faced much the same challenge: a potential dance champion, he had thrown his career away in favour of dancing his own steps. The outcome of this was that any sense of a positive life was crushed out of Scott’s father so that he became a weak and broken man.

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78 Deleuze and Film Strictly Ballroom’s rousing finale sees Scott face up to the Dance Federation in their major annual competition. In dancing his own steps, he effectively dismantles the legitimacy of the Federation. In other words, his dance moves destroy the world as it had been defined by the Federation, and he enters a new world, the contours of which are yet to be defined. And we should not be surprised, perhaps, that the way this is achieved is by the colour of the dance: the climactic dance by Scott and Fran (Tara Morice) is a swirling wash of colour, backed up by the rhythmic clapping of the crowd which rises in revolutionary fervour to overthrow the self-serving powers of the Dance Federation. All the crucial elements of Deleuze’s analysis of Minnelli are here: passing from one world to another; drawing on the resonance of the ‘past in the present’ (via Scott’s re-playing of his father’s historical dilemma); absorption via sound and colour in so far as it is the dance that confirms Scott’s triumph (a dance designed and practised during his night-time flamenco sessions at the home of Fran and her parents); that others complete Scott’s actions for him, whether this be Fran’s father teaching him the paso doble or the rhythmic clapping of the audience that brings the film to its climax. As Deleuze writes, and as already noted above: ‘The world takes responsibility for the movement that the subject can no longer or cannot make’ (Deleuze 1989: 59). And finally, Scott’s being worthy of his own story and actions means that he no longer lives a life in fear (of the Federation, of his own steps, of his father’s weaknesses...).

Romeo + Juliet William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet builds on the kinds of practices and themes pursued in Strictly Ballroom. Romeo + Juliet features a struggle between the old world – the family feuding between the Capulets and the Montagues – and a potential new world – the love of the young couple; this is the essence of the film’s charting of a passage from one world to another. For this film, however, Luhrmann was struck by the twin constraints of Shakespeare’s text and a deal with Twentieth Century Fox on which he was no doubt eager to capitalise. In short, he needed to make Shakespeare marketable and ‘hip’. Such concerns probably account for the film’s elaborate visual style, a style for which the delicacies of Shakespearian language take a back seat: for much of the film, the dialogue is either rushed, over-acted or babbled. We need not see such aspects as negatives, however, for they focus the tone of the film on visual and musical cues, which are key to Luhrmann’s approach. It is

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 79 certainly not going too far to interpret these visual and musical cues in terms of absorption via sound and colour for they act as counterparts to the ‘lines’ of Shakespeare (to again invoke the division between colour and line). (Alternatively, of course, we might see Luhrmann’s elaborate visual and sound design as modern-day equivalents of Shakespeare’s multi-layered, musical verse.) Luhrmann’s watery images come to the fore here, as Cook (2010: 77–8) and Lehmann (2001) have noted. In view of the key trope of finding one’s way to another world – a world beyond the CapuletMontague conflict – this is a film of borders crossed, gates pushed open, entrances violated, hidden tombs, churches, vaults, caravans and derelict zones explored, along with an ever-present desire for the protagonists’ escape to somewhere, anywhere, elsewhere. The watery imagery, however, acts specifically as a link between this world and another world in ways that can be clearly described, and which are evocative of the cinema of Jean Renoir. Deleuze describes Renoir’s ‘cracked crystal’ images, in which a potential escape into a new world is facilitated by a ‘crack’ in the fabric of the current world, as happens in Boudu sauvé des eaux/Boudu saved from Drowning (France, 1932) and Toni (France, 1935), among others (Deleuze 1989: 83–7). With regard to Romeo + Juliet, water seems to serve a similar function. Juliet’s (Claire Danes) first appearance in the film is from beneath water as she soaks in her bath. In so far as it is she who opens up a new world for Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) – which allows him to forget his supposed love of Rosaline – this watery introduction to her is as if of a spirit from another world (of Venus, perhaps, rising from the sea). At the Capulet party where Romeo and Juliet first meet, Romeo wakes himself from his drug-induced intensity by plunging his face into a basin of water. He awakens as if upon a new world, with again the passage from one world to another being marked by water. He sees Juliet for the first time, then, in what is the film’s signature moment, through the rainbow-coloured fish tank, with water again becoming the signal of an opening on to another world: the world of the love the couple will discover for one another. For the balcony scene in which the couple come to declare their love and intention to marry, Luhrmann again makes water central. Romeo and Juliet both plunge into the pool beneath the latter’s bedroom window as though the pool acts as a passage to another world. The rich blue that quenches the screen here is evocative of the colour tone that pervades the entire film: from the deep blues of the sky, to the wondrous blue of the fish tank, to the neon blue of the crucifixes at the film’s conclusion, this is a film bathed in blue (just as Moulin

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80 Deleuze and Film Rouge! is a film oozing with crimson-rouge and Australia characterised by the desert ochre). These are ways in which Luhrmann puts into play the Minnellian motif of ‘absorption by colour’. When Romeo kills Tybalt (John Leguizamo) the latter falls dead into a fountain’s pool of water (it can be noted that Luhrmann evocatively places the camera under the water as he does for most of the other watery scenes). Water here signals the escalation of the Capulet-Montague conflict, which necessitates – for Romeo no less than for Juliet – an escape into another world. Following Tybalt’s death, Romeo is banished from fair Verona: if he is to be with Juliet, then another world must be born, one beyond the current walls of the city. Furthermore, when Romeo visits Juliet on the evening before his flight, he makes his escape from her bedroom by again plunging into the pool beneath her window: the water signals or allows his passage to another world. And Juliet’s words here are indeed prophetic, for that other world, as we know all too well, will be a world of death: from her window, gazing at Romeo under the water, she claims that he seems ‘As one dead in the bottom of a tomb’. It is not only the watery imagery that is significant for Romeo + Juliet’s effect. Rather, it is the almost comprehensive replacement of dialogue with evocative images and sounds that cements the film’s originality. There are long periods of storytelling that lack dialogue entirely while there are other scenes – such as the scene in which Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) explains his sleeping potion to Juliet – which are reinforced and guided by elaborate visual montages. Another key scene that relies on a contemporary cinematic style, and much less on dialogue, is that in which Tybalt assaults Romeo and mortally wounds Mercutio (Harold Perrineau). The series of kickings and beatings Tybalt delivers to Romeo seems more indebted to westerns or gangster films – or even the martial arts genre – than anything that we might associate with Shakespearian dialogue. If we can declare nothing else here, we can certainly admire Luhrmann’s attempts to devise a rich, contemporary cinematic language with which to convey his Shakespeare. Romeo + Juliet also contains elements of what Deleuze calls ‘worldising’. These aspects are certainly there in Shakespeare’s text, but what does Luhrmann do with them? We could declare that ‘fate’ intervenes, in that a letter fails to reach its destination, and hence the world (as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’) takes over and deprives characters of their actions, which would be a traditional way of defining Shakespeare’s tragic effect (see, for example, Evans 1979). But I think we come much closer to Luhrmann’s design if we see the cinematic elements of visual style and music as those which give voice to characters’ actions above and beyond

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 81 ‘subjective motivation’ (the kinds of actions defined by ‘reactions’ to a situation, as Deleuze typically claims of the movement-image). We can see such elements in the pumping, distorted hip-hop music that defines the gang elements of the Montague and Capulet boys, along with the modified cars, elaborate costumes and weaponry. All of these are ways in which non-subjective elements determine and define characters’ actions. Overriding these cinematic elements, but which the cinematic techniques enforce or reinforce, is the historical element of the feud between the two families. This is a narrative-based milieu (as Deleuze would say) by means of which characters’ actions are mapped out by means seemingly beyond their control (and which they will never be able to control). Musical elements also define or push scenes and characters more so than do elements of a character’s motivated actions. The rendition of the song ‘Young Hearts’ opens the characters – and the audience – to the carnival qualities of the Capulets’ party, while at the same party the repeated refrain of ‘I am kissing you’, sung over Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting, acts as though it is completing these characters’ thoughts for them, and they will soon act on these thoughts, as though pushed to do so by the film’s aural beckoning. Most crucially, it is Romeo himself who constantly acts on the advice of others (and thus on whom the notion of ‘worldising’ or ‘societising’ is focused). Mercutio demands that Romeo go to the Capulets’ party, much against his wishes; Friar Lawrence advises and arranges his flight to Mantua; Balthasar (Jesse Bradford) brings him the (false) news of Juliet’s death and so leads him back to Verona; and finally, critically, it is the elaborate mise-en-scène of Juliet’s tomb, with its bravura display of neon crucifixes and myriad candles, which, to echo one of Minnelli’s key themes, demonstrates the way in which Romeo has been caught in another’s dream. And yet, in what or whose dream is he caught? He is, at one and the same time, caught in the dream – or nightmare – of the Capulet-Montague conflict, which dream has erected the gates around the difficulties that plague Romeo throughout the film. But he is also caught in the dream of another world, which he shares with Juliet, but which will end only in death. It is the first dream that defines the weight of the past upon the present: we might want to argue that the very problem of the play and its plot are those of the movement-image beyond which the film tries to go. The play’s fault is that of a present too heavily defined by an unchanging past, and the romance between Romeo and Juliet might be seen as providing a passage from a world defined in terms of the movement-image to one defined by the time-image in which

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82 Deleuze and Film the shackles of the past would be broken so that the present and the future could be defined anew. This would certainly be one way of interpreting the film’s rich visual style, its playfulness with time periods and its baroque excesses. We could even argue that this is precisely what the film achieves at its end with the supposed reconciliation of the warring houses. If this is a dream of another world, then its price is the death of the star-crossed lovers. Luhrmann makes this deathly dream another world: Romeo rushes to the Capulet family tomb while being chased by myriad police cars and even a police helicopter, with the sound of gunfire all around. Then, all of a sudden, all is quiet, the gunshots cease, and Romeo is at the door of the tomb. He opens the doors to reveal a sea of candlelight and the blue neon-lit crosses, as though he might already have entered a Heaven shorn of the conflicts and noises of Earth. For Romeo + Juliet, one can pass into another world only by way of death. But it is not the deaths of others that cleanse the world; rather, it is the deaths of the main protagonists that allow them entry into another world beyond. It is significant that Luhrmann chooses to include Shakespeare’s lines of the conjoining of love and death (‘Shall I believe / That unsubstantial Death is amorous / And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps / These here in dark to be his paramour?’), for this is the culmination of the film’s (and the play’s) dream, along with its nightmare.

Moulin Rouge! In Moulin Rouge! we have a similar unfolding. The two central characters, Christian (Ewan McGregor) and Satine (Nicole Kidman), wish to enter other worlds, the former by way of becoming a writer, the latter by being lifted from the underworld of the cabaret to the higher realms of ‘real’ acting. The film thus charts the attempts of these characters to pass to that other world. If ever there were a case of this transformation being propelled by absorption in sound and colour – for the music of the dance is paramount here – then surely this is it: Moulin Rouge! unfolds in a quite inexplicable register that is at one and the same time completely superficial and candy-coloured yet, in addition, utterly captivating, absorbing, and – in parts – full of emotional intensity. Cliché is piled upon cliché; Pam Cook, for example, refers to Luhrmann’s penchant for ‘hyperbolic hyperbole’ (Cook 2010: 64–5) – a swirling vortex of bad taste – that nevertheless carries a weight of conviction. Two key early moments of the film set in play the modes of absorption: Christian’s rendering of ‘Your Song’ (and its refrain, sung to Satine,

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 83 of ‘how wonderful life is now you’re in the world’), and Satine’s reply that ‘one day I’ll fly away’ with its claim that when she does fly away she will begin to live again. Here, the songs (and the colour and the miseen-scène) perform the task of absorption: first of all, of absorbing the characters in their quests for transformation, and secondly of absorbing us, as viewers, as partners in those quests. The songs might also be said to take over the characters and their roles: Christian, for example, is entirely inactive and tongue-tied until the song releases his actions; the song completes his actions for him. This mode continues throughout the film, perhaps demonstrating itself most forcefully in the film’s conclusion, the performance of the stage show, ‘Spectacular Spectacular’. In the manner of Minnelli’s Band Wagon, the show allows the film to discover its resolution. What is discovered more than anything is a world of love: that Christian and Satine do indeed love one another – ‘to love and be loved in return’, as the film’s pop-philosophy proclaims. In this way, ‘Spectacular Spectacular’ is the discovery of another world and it is by way of the show that these characters pass from one world to another, even if the price for passing into this world is the death of one of them. More complicated is the film’s utilisation of the past. There is a framing narrative of Christian in the present writing his account of the year that has just passed, but this is merely a traditional flashback form of narration. We might invoke Luhrmann’s penchant for creating false or ambiguous pasts, part invention, part folklore, part historical truth – especially given the anachronistic soundtrack, which Cook herself has emphasised (Cook 2010: 46–8). Yet again, these are merely formal devices that do little to foreground a ‘direct image of time’. What is most significant is that Moulin Rouge! comes much closer to what Deleuze calls, with respect to Max Ophüls, a ‘perfect crystal’ (see Deleuze 1989: 83–4). The reminiscences by means of which Christian becomes a writer; the production of ‘Spectacular, Spectacular’; and the ‘real world’ of the film itself – a pastiche Montmartre as though plucked from a luminescent cartoon of fin de siècle Paris – all overlap and intertwine. Past and present, virtual and actual, theatrical show and ‘real life’, all coalesce and become indistinguishable.

Australia Australia is far less convincing as an example of the time-image, but, as noted above, Minnelli’s films feature in both Cinema books, and, in light of the comparison being made between Minnelli and Luhrmann and the

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84 Deleuze and Film ‘defence’ of the movement-image that I made at the start of this chapter, this does nothing to belittle Luhrmann’s cinema. There can be little doubt that Australia contains elements of the kinds of epic histories associated with the large form of the action-image. At the same time, we don’t necessarily have a strong and dominant central character whose actions lead to narrative resolution; that is, we do not have the kinds of character achievements to be expected from a movement-image film. During the Second World War, Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to the remote Northern Territory of Australia in order to join her husband, the owner of a large cattle station. She arrives, however, to discover that he has been murdered. She befriends a character known as ‘the drover’ (Hugh Jackman) and subsequently falls in love with him. The first half of the plot hinges on droving a large herd of cattle to the port town of Darwin in order to secure the financial viability of the station. The second half of the film, meanwhile, focuses on the attempts of Lady Ashley and the drover to rid the Northern Territory from the monopolistic grip of the Carney family, while at the same time trying to secure a future for the young, ‘mixed race’ aboriginal boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters), whom Lady Ashley adopts. Resolution is achieved, but it is achieved less by the aims and desires of specific characters than by chance, circumstance, or sacrifice; Lord Ashley, Lady Ashley’s accountant Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), Nullah’s mother (Ursula Yovich) and the drover’s colleague Magarri (David Ngoombujarra) all die in key heroic moments of the film. It is as though the world, chance, Nature, dreaming or spirit complete the plot, such that the overall lesson of the film seems to be to let go, to refrain from subjective design, and instead to allow the world to take its course. Australia’s exceptional ending sees Lady Ashley relinquish her hold on Nullah so that he is free to go ‘walkabout’. Thus he is free to discover his own transformation, to find another world over the rainbow and in the realm of dreaming. This is his way of passing from one world to another. The overriding absorptive motif of the film emerges via its constant references to The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939). It is here that the dream of passing into another world – ‘over the rainbow’ – is given voice. When Nullah attends a screening of The Wizard of Oz at the cinema in Darwin, we might perceive a definitive statement by Luhrmann on the absorbing, captivating power of cinema: that it is films themselves which have the ability to allow us to dream other worlds, to enter into the dreams of others, and to open ourselves up to other

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 85 worlds, into which we might even be able to pass. And yet, Luhrmann again emphasises by way of Nullah that the capacity to tell stories (and to tell one’s own story) is integral to that quest for other worlds. ‘One thing I know’, declares Nullah near the end of the film, ‘[is that] why we tell story is the most important of all . . . That’s how you keep them people belonging . . . always.’ Australia’s version of a re-birth of the world, that is, its discovery of a new world even within an overall structure that suggests a movementimage, makes of it the film in which Luhrmann tackles questions of the past with the most urgency. If his earlier films rely on pastiche pasts, then so too does Australia, especially via its evocation of Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939), Red River (Howard Hawks, USA, 1948) and Oz. But alongside this pastiche past is a more unsettling past, which might be no less one of ‘making up legends’ (as Deleuze says of Québecois filmmaker Pierre Perrault) or ‘realising fabrications’ (as Deleuze says of Eric Rohmer; see Deleuze 1989: 243), but the outcomes of which have been, on the one hand, more sinister, yet which also have the potential to be cautiously rewarding. I refer, of course, to the notion of the ‘stolen generations’ of indigenous Australian children, an aspect of the film that sparked significant debate at the time of its release (see Langton 2008; Greer 2008). The central Deleuzian motif to be wrenched from such debates is that of the ‘invention of a people’, perhaps even of ‘a people to come’. The haunting lesson of the film therefore might be precisely that the people are missing (Deleuze 1989: 216). From the Deleuzian perspective, this is where the film’s emphasis on storytelling comes to the fore: by making and crafting a story/by telling one’s own story, a new people might be formed (Deleuze 1989: 222–3). Are we so far away from Perrault here? It is easy to be critical and to accuse Luhrmann of insensitivity or inadvertent racism, but he does try in Australia to give a voice to a people who do not currently exist, and to deliver to them the possibility of finding a story by means of which they might come to exist. This is not just about ‘giving’ a voice to indigenous Australians, an accusation that might be levelled against the ‘victim’ depictions of aborigines found in films like Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, Australia, 2009) or Rabbit Proof Fence (Philip Noyce, Australia, 2002). Nor is it necessarily about indigenous Australians telling or discovering ‘their own story’, as arguably happens in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr, Australia, 2006). Rather, the film seeks to give voice to a ‘democratic’ and Australian people that includes both indigenous and other Australian people. Only by

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86 Deleuze and Film collectively going walkabout, over the rainbow and ‘into the dreaming’, will there be a people who reinvent themselves and reinvent the world alongside them. This sense of a collective becoming can be seen in the fact that it is not only Nullah who goes walkabout; both Lady Ashley and the drover have undertaken their own forms of walkabout during the film, particularly when they drove the cattle across the Never Never. If Luhrmann’s film is to be criticised for inventing a ‘false’ history – in the manner of other Australian films to which Australia is indebted, especially Jedda (Charles Chauvel, Australia, 1955) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffat, Australia, 1989), and even Mad Max 2/ The Road Warrior (George Miller, Australia, 1981) – then this is merely the product of an attempt to invent a people and a world in which those people can believe. Luhrmann desires, more than anything else, to deliver the vision or promise of another world.

Conclusion I hope to have shown in this study of Baz Luhrmann’s films that Deleuze’s categories and classifications are still very much relevant for the analysis of contemporary cinema. The relationship between the two major semiotic systems developed in Deleuze’s volumes, namely the movement-image and the time-image, emerges as something of a difficulty for the analysis of contemporary cinema in that, while the movement-image seems as dominant as ever, there are overlaps between the two, as Deleuze’s treatment of Minnelli and my treatment of Luhrmann hopefully make clear. In other words, the movement-image/time-image distinction is less forceful than Deleuze perhaps hoped it would be. However, what is at stake in a Deleuzian analysis is not to judge films as either progressive and revolutionary or regressive and culturally short-sighted, as if one could easily separate the image regimes in such a manner. Rather, the aim of a Deleuzian analysis should be carefully to chart the traits, aspects and components of images and how they ‘work’. In the context of Baz Luhrmann’s cinema, Deleuze’s tools for cinematic analysis are exemplary.

References Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York and London: Routledge. Cook, P. (2010), Baz Luhrmann, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone.

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Cinema According to Baz Luhrmann 87 Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (2006) ‘Portrait of the Philosopher as a Moviegoer’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotexte. Evans, B. (1979), Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice, New York: Oxford University Press. Fried, M. (1980), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press. Greer, G. (2008), ‘Baz Luhrmann’s New Film, Australia, Takes Too Many Liberties with History’, The Guardian, 16 December. Langton, M. (2008), ‘Faraway Downs Fantasy Resonates Close to Home’, The Age, 23 November. Lehmann, C. (2001), ‘Strictly Shakespeare? Dead Letters, Ghostly Fathers, and the Cultural Pathology of Authorship in Baz Luhrmann’s “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2): 189–221. McElhaney, J. (2009), Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2008), ‘Schizoanalysis, Spectacle and the Spaghetti Western’, in I. Buchanan and P. MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 75–88. Mullarkey, J. (2009), Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Olkowski, D. (1999), Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pisters, P. (2003), The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rushton, R. (2009), ‘Deleuzian Spectatorship’, Screen 50 (1): 45–53. Rushton, R. (2011), The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Chapter 5

‘There are as many paths to the timeimage as there are films in the world’: Deleuze and The Lizard

William Brown

In making a Deleuzian reading of Kamal Tabrizi’s popular Iranian comedy Marmoulak/The Lizard (Iran, 2004) it is important to consider the film’s context so as not to become what Hamid Dabashi would call a Western scholar playing ‘Ping-Pong’ with Deleuze, using Iranian cinema as the table (Dabashi 2007: 343). While the film can be understood in terms of Deleuzian becoming, and in particular a mutual becoming of its protagonist and the community with which he engages, I shall suggest ways in which this sense of becoming can equally be said to reflect the influence of Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush. That is, I shall not simply transpose Deleuze on to The Lizard, but I shall try to explain Deleuze’s relevance to our understanding of the film by forging links between Deleuze and Soroush. Furthermore, while The Lizard’s formal features are ostensibly exemplary of movement-image cinema, in this process of mutual becoming – which is itself a characteristic of modern political, or minor cinema (Deleuze 2005: 207–15) – I shall also argue in this chapter that The Lizard’s moral can help us to re-think time-image cinema. The phrase ‘there are as many paths to God as there are people in the world’, repeated throughout the film, can be taken up as a refrain to suggest that for audiences there are ‘as many paths to the time-image as there are films in the world’. I shall use The Lizard to influence our understanding of Deleuze, then, as much as the other way round, in a process of mutual becoming that will hopefully prevent this chapter from using The Lizard as a philosophical ‘Ping-Pong table’.

The Lizard Having won the Audience Award at the 22nd Fajr International Film Festival, The Lizard was released in Iran on 20 April 2004 and played

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Deleuze and The Lizard 89 to full houses, setting Iranian box office records until it was banned 27 days later (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009: 90). The reason for the film’s ban is that it tells the story of a professional thief who not only disguises himself as a mullah, but also ends up being a popular, if unorthodox, one at that. A more detailed description of The Lizard’s narrative is required for the argument that follows. The film tells the story of Reza Mesghali (Parviz Parastui), whose ability to climb walls has earned him the nickname marmoulak, or the lizard. Reza has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Tehran owing to his involvement in an armed robbery. His irreverence means he often falls foul of Mojaver (Bahram Ebrahimi), the prison warden, whose oppressive policy is to force his prisoners ‘into heaven’ by whatever means necessary, the subtext being that he will get his prisoners to behave in a socially acceptable manner even if he has to torture them. After a failed suicide attempt, Reza wakes up in hospital to find himself next to a mullah, also called Reza (Shahrokh Faroutanian). The two get on well, with Mullah Reza telling Reza Marmoulak that there are as many ways to God as there are people in the world. When Mullah Reza leaves Reza Marmoulak alone with his clothes – a gesture that seems deliberate – Reza dons the Mullah’s clerical garb, flees the hospital, and heads for the border, where he hopes to acquire a passport to escape to Turkey. When Reza arrives, however, the locals mistake him for their new cleric, and so he poses as a mullah by day, spending his nights pursuing the elusive passport. Improvising his sermons, Reza Marmoulak repeats to his sparse congregation Mullah Reza’s belief that there are as many ways to God as there are people in the world. This Reza directly opposes to Mojaver’s policy of forcing people into heaven; the latter is inappropriate, he argues, since those being forced can end up in hell. While this sermon helps Reza to achieve some popularity, what really heightens his standing in the local community are his nocturnal activities. Two young members of his congregation, Gholamali (Hossein Soleimani) and Mojtaba (Cyrus Hemati), follow Reza and interpret his handing money over to local passport counterfeiter Ozra (Maedeh Tahmasebi) as an act of alms giving. Gholamali and Mojtaba spread word that Reza is a latter-day saint, which in turn inspires in the local population a series of charitable acts involving the redistribution of wealth and the giving of aid to the dispossessed of society. Reza’s standing only improves when he beats up recently divorced local racketeer Delangiz for threatening to physically abuse his ex-wife Faezeh (Rana Azadvar). Although this act is inspired as much by Reza’s

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90 Deleuze and Film own attraction to Faezeh as it is by altruism, from this point forth Delangiz decides to become a better person and helps to reduce criminality in the area, an act that will, it is implied, ultimately lead him to a reconciliation with Faezeh. In addition, people claim that Reza cures a local mute boy (Sepehr Rezanoor), a miracle that is never substantiated, although Reza and the boy have some sort of ‘connection’, as signified by their regular exchange of ‘knowing’ glances. When informed of Reza Marmoulak’s whereabouts, Mojaver sets off to the border town, determined to recapture the only prisoner ever to have escaped him. Although their paths soon cross, Mojaver recognises Reza only after the latter has set off for the border. Upon discovering that the border is temporarily closed, Reza curiously decides not to wait but to return to town, where both Mojaver and an enormous congregation await him. The film ends with a freeze frame of an expectant and much expanded congregation turning towards the camera, which is placed at the exit of the mosque and through which, it is implied via the soundtrack, they can see a police car taking Reza away. Fortunately for Reza, his sentence is reduced thanks to an accomplice confessing that Reza was not in fact armed during the original robbery, and as the film’s credits roll, we hear Reza repeat some of his most memorable lines, including the moral/mantra that there are as many paths towards God as there are people in the world.

Deleuzian Becomings in The Lizard? Becoming is a concept that pervades Deleuze’s work, but we can confine our definition of it to Cinema 2. Here, becoming is generally a process defined by mutual influence, but it relates particularly to what Deleuze terms the powers of the false (Deleuze 2005: 122–50). For Deleuze, borrowing from Nietzsche, ‘there is no more truth in the one [good] life than in the other [bad life]; there is only becoming, and becoming is the power of the false of life, the will to power’ (Deleuze 2005: 137). This power of the false is the ability of the forger (who can be a man of state, a man of religion, a man of morality, a man of science, an artist, or perhaps even a madman like Don Quixote) not to take over or to dominate, but to become and to encourage metamorphosis, to ‘bestow virtue’ (Deleuze 2005: 296). The powers of the false, then, seem an apt framework through which to understand a character who is named after an animal and who can climb walls with ease: Reza seems happy to merge with his physical environment and the objects at hand in order always to become some-

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Deleuze and The Lizard 91 thing else, be it a lizard, or, in the case of his adoption of Mullah Reza’s clerical garments, a mullah. I shall discuss Reza’s relationship with his clothes in more detail below, but for the time being it is not so much that Reza progresses from a ‘becoming animal’ to a ‘becoming spiritual’, but that both are indicative of his nature consistently to become, which ultimately brings about his salvation in the form of a reduced prison sentence that will subsequently lead to his freedom. Furthermore, being a false mullah who himself undergoes a metamorphosis from criminal to spiritual being, Reza shows the powers of the false working within the film, as he bestows virtue on the community around him, enabling a mutual becoming of individual and community, as signalled by the community-minded acts that his own nocturnal and other activities inspire. As per Deleuze, ‘good’ people are no more ‘true’ than ‘bad’ people in The Lizard, in that even criminals can find God, or in Deleuze’s terms the will to power. Yet, while The Lizard does lend itself to a Deleuzian reading, which I shall investigate further momentarily, we should take care to relate this to the Iranian context from which the film springs (both philosophically and in terms of its status as a popular film), since this might further help our understanding of Deleuze and The Lizard, which themselves combine to ensure yet more becomings.

From Deleuze to Soroush An Iranian student interviewed about The Lizard believes that the film reflects the pluralist philosophy of Abdolkarim Soroush, an Iranian intellectual often associated with the reformist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which sought to bring about a pluralist state in Iran (ZeydabadiNejad 2009: 99). Although the reformist movement seems to have lost support over the past few years, the pluralist ethos, which seeks respect for social freedoms and rejects authoritarianism, remains. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Soroush wants to save religion in Iran from ideology (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2008: 195). That is to say, when religion is given an ideological framework, when an ideology is put forward as the word of God, then a repressive system of government is sure to follow. For this reason, Soroush does not regard shari’ah, or the sacred law of Islam, as being an a priori knowledge; rather the law of Islam should be dynamic and undergo constant changes, otherwise any contradictions to the law, or differences in interpretation, will similarly lead to confrontation (Ghamar-Tabrizi 2008: 199). To this end, Soroush sees nothing as existing in isolation; even if religion comes from

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92 Deleuze and Film God, its iteration on Earth is contingent on human history and subject to transformation through this interaction between the human and the divine. Similarly, the West and modernisation/technologisation are not strictly ‘bad’; being influenced by, say, Immanuel Kant, does not involve an ‘unmitigated acceptance of “the West” ’ (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2008: 213). Instead, Soroush suggests an active and productive engagement with these external influences, rather than an outright rejection thereof. Furthermore, Soroush argues that ‘Becoming is also a part of Being’, and that culture, religion and the self are all always moving, a moving that can lead to ‘blessings’ (Soroush 2000: 163–4). From this brief account of Soroush’s work we can perhaps see how The Lizard reflects aspects of both Deleuze and Soroush’s thinking. More particularly, however, when we consider the film within the context of contemporary Iran, where religion all too often seems to act as a repressive means of social control, we can further our Deleuzian reading of the film via Soroush: religion here, after Soroush, is criticised when it has an a priori telos or definition (as characterised by Mojaver, who will force his inmates into heaven), but this does not result in a rejection of religion outright. Rather, the interface of religion and the people is the opportunity for a wider becoming, the becoming of a people to come. For this reason, while The Lizard is not a work of modern political or minor cinema in the very specific manner in which Deleuze described it (Deleuze 2005: 207–15), and while the film is in fact much closer in aesthetic to a movement-image, nevertheless it does negotiate the emergence of a people yet to come somewhat in the manner we might expect of minor cinema. Reza’s becoming-mullah is matched by a mutual becoming-congregation of the people of the village. This is very much a mutual becoming. Even if, strictly speaking, the film’s final image, in which the congregation turns en masse towards the camera, is suggestive of an existing conception of a people (the people have, quite literally, come, since we see them together in the final frame), as opposed to a people yet to come (the very futurity of which cannot be depicted in quite this way), nevertheless this movement-image construction of the people has a minoritarian function. It is only possible to tease this out, however, once the context of the film’s release is more fully understood, giving an additional contextual dimension that foregrounds the limitations of Deleuze’s aesthetically focused conclusions. What seems to be true at the diegetic level, that Reza helps to construct a people, has ramifications for our understanding of the film and its audiences. That is, the film and its popularity suggest not an Iranian

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Deleuze and The Lizard 93 society cut off from Western influence and technology (which would be slightly paradoxical considering that cinema itself is perhaps precisely a ‘Western’ technology), but an Iranian society that embraces these things in a manner that, as per Reza in the film and Soroush outside of it, does not involve a rejection of what has come before but a creative and progressive synthesis between the past and the present. This in turn enables a choice for people to move forward into the future. In short, the film creates a memory of the future, and does so by reviving former attitudes towards the West typical of film farsi (discussed in more detail below), and replaying them in a minor key. In doing so, The Lizard as a cultural phenomenon gestures towards a people yet to come – precisely because of the popularity of the film’s depiction of a people that has come. The banning of the film in spite of its popularity plays a central role in this line of thinking: for some viewers, the film has anti-Islamic elements (hence the ban), but its popularity in conjunction with the ban means that The Lizard may be understood as having, or having the potential for, a minoritarian function. That is, it helps to bring audiences closer to a progressive understanding of Islam and Iranian society. If some ruling clerics in Iran feel that religion, technology and the West are ‘bad’ (referred to sometimes as gharbzadegi, or ‘Westoxication’), The Lizard refuses to accept this message, seeing all of these things as an opportunity for becoming-other, while retaining constructive and useful elements of what one already is.

The Lizard, Genre and the West While The Lizard did win an award at Fajr, it does not obviously conform to the art-house/‘festival’ film mode for which Iran is most famous internationally, and which also fits more readily within Deleuze’s definition of minor cinema. Films by Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, and the Makhmalbaf family, which often deal with the plight of ‘minorities’ such as Kurds, women and/or Afghans, have been described in Iran either as film-e sefareshi (films to order, i.e. for foreign audiences), or as film-e jashvarehi’i (festival films; see Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009: 152). These films, like several of those that Deleuze mentions in Cinema 2 when discussing works of modern political cinema, do thrive at international film festivals, but they do not do particularly well in Iran, even if this might in part be because of minimal promotion and exhibition support from the government (see Varzi 2006: 237; Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009: 125–36). In contrast to these films, The Lizard did well domestically (tellingly, it won the Audience Award at Fajr), with its popularity

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94 Deleuze and Film at home perhaps being a result of the film’s easy blend of three ‘genres’, including: film-e ejtema’i, or ‘social’ films dealing with issues such as social justice, the place of the clergy in Iranian society, and women’s issues (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009: 3); the popular film farsi tradition; and filmha-ye dini, or religious films. The popularity of The Lizard is important, not least in the context of its subsequent ban. Deleuze believes that the people who are missing are the ‘basis’ for political or minor cinema (Deleuze 2005: 209). However, in a manner that perhaps risks taking Deleuze ‘from behind’ – something that Deleuze felt he did to other philosophers (Deleuze 1977: 12) – we might argue that the people are also missing from the audience of many ‘minor’ films, which mostly circulate on film festivals or through independent cinema chains, and as such do not reach ‘the people’ in any wide sense of the term. The people were not missing from the audience of The Lizard, however, at least not until the film was banned. In order to give some context to the ban, and to explore how The Lizard might have a minoritarian function in spite of its popularity, I shall explore the film’s ‘genre’ in more detail. As befits the film-e ejtema’i, The Lizard deals with the clergy, the role of women and social justice. With regard to the former, it offers various controversial comments on the clergy in Iran, not least in suggesting that a criminal can make a good mullah. In the hospital Mullah Reza tells Reza Marmoulak that not all clergymen are good. Meanwhile, having escaped, Reza Marmoulak has difficulty getting a taxi in Tehran seemingly because of his religious attire. A similar lack of respect for the clergy is suggested by the meagre congregation that greets Reza when he first arrives at the border town: Delangiz, for example, simply insults Reza every time he sees him, while others mock him in the street. It would seem that the people no longer trust or respect those who are supposed to offer them spiritual guidance. In addition, the film takes time to point out many paradoxes involved in Islam, particularly through Mojtaba, who asks numerous questions about how to practise Islam in space and about how to fast under the permanent sunlight of the North Pole. Reza Marmoulak also encourages Gholamali to reject his previously relentless learning of the Koran in favour of ‘being himself’ and courting women. In other words, while the film endorses the idea that human beings ‘as they are’ (i.e. with all of their imperfections) are more important than (religious) ideals, it also seems implicitly to critique the clergy and their role in society – hence the film’s ban, with Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati declaring it a ‘hideous film’ and a ‘bad influence’ (Mitchell 2008: 93).

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Deleuze and The Lizard 95 As per the film-e ejtema’i, the film also explores issues of criminal and social justice: it suggests that prisons (like the church) are unjustly harsh in forcing people ‘into heaven’. Meanwhile, prior to his conversion, Delangiz is seen to dominate the local area surrounding Reza’s mosque, exploiting all and sundry for protection money. That is, there is little social justice in The Lizard without Reza’s interventions. Finally, and also in accordance with the film-e ejtema’i, Faezeh is arguably also representative of what Zeydabadi-Nejad terms ‘women’s issues’, in that she is a wife who has been beaten by Delangiz, and it is only the intervention of Reza that enables them to get back together. In other words, there is space to read the film along gendered lines. All ends well in the film, then, but without Reza’s interventions one can imagine an Iran that features an overbearing prison system, a corrupt social system, and a clergy that is by turns weak and repressive, and out of touch with people’s everyday struggles, especially those of women. Inasmuch as it conforms to the film-e ejtema’i, The Lizard performs a minoritarian function in that it speaks of and for an oppressed people who face many injustices. However, the film is also a broad comedy that, as Pedram Partovi has pointed out, belongs to a recent revival of the film farsi tradition that was popular before the Islamic Revolution (Partovi 2008: 515). This tradition was condemned by the Ayatollah Khomeini upon his rise to power in 1979, the cinema under the Shah being considered a symptom of Westoxication, which takes Iranians’ fascination with the West to be a disease. That is, the film involves mainstream elements that have historically been perceived within Iran as ‘Western’. In the Iranian context, the film farsi aspects of The Lizard might be construed as ‘minor’ – in that officially the nation is an Islamic Republic that has an at best ambivalent relationship with Western values – but this is compromised both by the film’s popularity and by the fact that these ‘minor’ attributes in Iran are anything but minor elsewhere, most obviously in the West itself. The influence of the West comes through in The Lizard when Reza and a Tehrani friend see a mullah on television praising Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (USA, 1994) because it finds salvation in darkness. This prompts the friend to comment that the mullah is exceptional, and Reza subsequently rehashes this sermon in his mosque, saying that Tarantino is a great Christian filmmaker. Furthermore, when Mojaver crosses paths with a disguised Reza, he asks him whether he used to be the mullah who presented a show called Knowledge in Television, to which Reza answers yes. In fact, the show never existed and Mojaver poses the question as a way to test Reza’s credentials as a cleric. If the

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96 Deleuze and Film mullah talking about Tarantino is defined as positively ‘exceptional’, and if Mojaver implicitly associates un-mullah-like behaviour with television and film (in that an association with television and cinema undermines Reza’s claims to be a mullah), then The Lizard suggests a film farsi-like sympathy with the influx of Western technologies and cultural influence, not least because Mojaver is the film’s ‘villain’. However, this sympathy is not merely a blind acceptance of all things Western, but a considered opinion on those elements of Western culture that can be instructive to Iranian citizens, particularly in light of the teachings of Islam. In other words, The Lizard is not ‘straight’ film farsi in promoting Western values, but it does ask how one might live with ‘Western’ technologies and cultural influence in an Islamic society. In this it helps construct a memory of the future, drawing on a previous film tradition to reinvigorate contemporary genre cinema, and in so doing utilising the power of the false to gesture towards a people yet to come. If The Lizard was banned for its critical treatment of the clergy, and if, as noted above, the film has only an ambivalent relationship with the West, then it can be considered to have a minoritarian function in its positing of a community of people who seek to find a future in an Iran that otherwise seems to lack a coherent identity. The reappearance of a film farsi-like sympathy for Western influences in this film suggests precisely the creation of a memory of the future. This future is not to be discovered by rejecting Western values, but by accommodating them into Iranian values. The Lizard thus posits a more general people to come, both diegetically and in terms of the film’s popularity among real audiences.

The Lizard and Religion In spite of the film’s criticisms of Islam, The Lizard still has respectful elements that arguably make it conform to a third ‘genre’, the filmha-ye dini or religious film. Most clearly, this is shown by the effect that the stolen clerical garments have on Reza. Reza’s relationship with these clothes not only signals an act of becoming, as mentioned, it also serves to illustrate the progressive synthesis of supposedly Islamic and antiIslamic elements. As he travels by train from Tehran to the border town, Reza encounters Faezeh for the first time and is obviously attracted to her. However, his gown gets caught in the train window as he tries to make an advance that would go against his apparent status as a cleric. Similarly, Reza trips on his gown both in the back of a van when eagerly encouraging Faezeh to confess her sins, and when he explains

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Deleuze and The Lizard 97 to Gholamali that it is okay for him to think about girls and to smoke instead of learning the Koran. At the film’s end Reza tells the mute boy that it is the clothes that have tamed him, and that it is good to become tamed. If, as Reza says while preaching in prison, beautiful attire does not reflect the worth of a man, and if the film does seem to suggest that all are equal in the eyes of God, then in the case of these particular clothes, they do seem to make a man more worthy; they are the exception, perhaps, that proves this rule. If the role that the cleric’s clothes play in The Lizard suggests a religious presence that is otherwise invisible in the film, then Reza resists his path towards spirituality until the film’s climax. This is particularly reflected in his figural behaviour at certain key moments. When he takes prayers during the aforementioned train journey, Reza seems to have a pain or at the very least an itch in his hand; he seems to have toothache when first he takes prayers in the border town; and he also rubs his nose and face during a third prayer meeting. These subtle figural gestures indicate the discomfort that Reza feels when wearing his disguise and carrying out the official tasks associated with it. At other moments, however, Reza uses his body expressively, especially when he climbs walls as per his nickname. This he does twice in the film: once in prison to set free a dove that has become trapped in barbed wire, and once when he climbs into Faezeh’s house to confront Delangiz. The first instance refers to Reza’s desire for freedom, while in the second instance Reza ‘frees’ Faezeh from Delangiz, who has beaten her for the last three years. Furthermore, Reza gets into several fights during the film: twice with prison inmates, once with Delangiz, and once with Ozra, against whom he raises his fist when she burns his fake passport upon being ‘converted’ by Reza’s congregation. This latter fight is perhaps the most interesting: although Reza’s own spiritual conversion is incomplete at this (late) stage of the film, it admits that Reza himself is far from perfect, even though Mojaver says that there is no need to handcuff Reza when eventually they re-arrest him. In other words, there is no easy dichotomy between freedom of movement and freedom of thought, in that the clerical disguise that Reza wears seems to restrict and even mildly to afflict his body, while he still aggressively uses his body when others do not give him what he wants (the passport). However, even if Reza is not perfect or a representative of the divine, in that he is far from blameless as a human being (as evidenced by his violent outbursts, including towards women), his contact with the divine transforms him as much, perhaps, as it enables him to expand the

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98 Deleuze and Film meaning of the divine (criminals are not God’s rejects, but they also have a role to play in God’s plans). In other words, neither religion nor self in The Lizard has a fixed essence, but both constantly undergo processes of becoming. Similarly, technology and cinema are not de facto ‘evil’ in the film (even though Mojaver seemingly suggests that the latter is), but, when realised in the Iranian context, can be seen as opportunities for mutual influence and change. The same goes for religion: Reza’s version of Islam is not an abstract ideal that no human could attain, but rather a human, even flawed, understanding, in which Islam adapts to humans as much as humans adapt to it (it is okay for Gholamali to chase girls, smoke and not to learn the Surat al-‘Ankabout).

The Lizard, the Spectator and the Time-Image As a result of the preceding considerations of Iranian film culture and Abdolkarim Soroush, hopefully the Deleuzian reading of The Lizard offered here amounts to a progressive becoming rather than a ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ imposition of meaning (The Lizard as table for a game of ‘Ping-Pong’ with Deleuze). However, while the film seems to endorse becoming and the possibility of a future, pluralistic Iran that does not yet exist (and perhaps cannot yet exist – Reza is taken away at the end of the film, after all), this certainly does not make The Lizard an easy-fit work of minor cinema, or even a time-image more generally. As noted, formally the film is predominantly characteristic of the movement-image as defined by Deleuze: that is to say, it is a film dominated by the sensory-motor regime, and in which the continuity editing system that is predominantly employed suggests the situation-actionrenewed situation (SAS⬘) system of the action-image as described in Cinema 1 (see Deamer, this volume). Even though the film involves extensive scenes in mosques, prayer does not here function, as it might, as a means for contemplation, in which characters are forced into thought by the purely optical and sonic situations in which they find themselves. It is instead a film dominated by human-led cause and effect, constructed out of the perception-, affection- and action-images of the movement-image, which are edited together at a pace that partly explains the film’s popularity with Iranian and other audiences. That is, at a pace that is redolent of the ‘spatialisation of time’ characteristic of movement-image cinema, wherein time is suppressed for the sake of movement. That said, the film seems to endorse a politics of becoming, and also to suggest a potential ‘people to come’ in Iran (and beyond). Indeed,

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Deleuze and The Lizard 99 an important moment in the film does also lead us towards the timeimage. During his first night in the border town, Reza goes in search of Ozra, who supposedly lives on Ostavari Street. Reza thinks he has arrived, only to be told that the street names have been changed and that Ostavari Street is now somewhere else. Reza is then told that the numbers on the houses have also been changed by the local government, and so in fact he takes a long time to find where he wants to get to. This moment might not just be an amusing critique of local bureaucracy. It might also function in such a way that the space and movement of the film are downplayed in favour of a deliberate system of delaying Reza from reaching (what he thinks is) his goal, namely an escape from Iran into Turkey. Deprived of their original street names and in a thoroughly confusing manner (which later will thwart the police in their attempts to catch Reza with Ozra), this seems to make of the town something of an any-space-whatever in the sense defined by Deleuze in Cinema 2 (Deleuze 2005: 247). That is to say, the space in which the film occurs is here deprived of any definite geographical location (sense of place), which means that time is not subordinate to space here but comes to the fore and can be seen for itself. As much would seem to be reinforced by the fact that Reza never occupies any spaces in the film that are his own: he is often in public spaces or on public transport, and on the rare occasion that he enters a private home, it is someone else’s. Being homeless, then, Reza also seems to become an any-personwhatever, as his ability constantly to become other perhaps suggests. We might even go so far as to argue that the eradication of any clear distinction between his private and his public/political life manifests something of a further minoritarian function in the film, correlating as this does to one of the three key characteristics Deleuze attributes to modern political cinema (Deleuze 2005: 210). Furthermore, when the police get lost in the town’s new street system in pursuit of Reza, they walk past a dove perched on a street sign – seemingly the same dove that Reza freed from the barbed wire in the prison. Are we to interpret this as Reza finding his freedom precisely in the any-space-whatever that is the village? Is it in this unnamed village, which is freed from a definite geographical/ geopolitical location, that the virtuous potential of the people can be actualised? This may be an interpretation of the film that borders on the ‘PingPong’-like, not least because there is little else in the film (aside from the final freeze frame described earlier) that lends itself to the time-image. I shall propose, however, that it is not only in spite but perhaps also because of the film’s formal characteristics, i.e. because it is ostensibly

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100 Deleuze and Film a movement-image film, that The Lizard can serve as an instructive film through which to renew our understanding of the time-image, particularly from the point of view of the spectator. Various scholars have noted the similarity between Deleuze’s definition of the time-image and the supposed position of the film spectator (for example, Friedberg 1993: 129). That is, like the supposed ‘seer’ that features diegetically within time-image cinema, the cinema spectator is placed into a purely sonic and optic situation, in which contemplation and thought take the place of action (Deleuze 2005: 2). However, while time-image cinema arguably encourages the viewer to reflect selfconsciously on the ‘seeing’ they are experiencing, this is considered to be not so typical of movement-image cinema, which, stylistically (for example, through a system of continuity editing in the action-image), encourages unthinking (and at times purely visceral) responses, in that we are engaged purely with the sensory-motor action of the film. While developments in our understanding of the human body and brain might lead to a blurring of these distinctions – in that visceral, emotional and intellectual activities are not separate but interlinked and interdependent (see Brown 2011) – I should like to blur these distinctions myself from within Deleuzian discourse. In his recent essay on Deleuzian spectatorship, Richard Rushton outlines the ways in which spectators are passive during film viewing, in so far as they ‘fuse’ with the film, becoming conscious with the movie they are watching, rather than conscious of it (Rushton 2009). That is, the film – any film – induces some form of becoming with the spectator, becoming both in the sense that we ‘merge’ with the film, but becoming also in that we think new thoughts, thoughts that would not happen without the film. This is a ‘passive’ process because it involves allowing our subjective selves to change. Elsewhere, Rushton says that the virtual – all that we may possibly become as we move from one moment to the next – is also passive, in that it is not produced by consciousness (we do not decide what we become), but rather produces consciousness (as time passes, we become). As a result, ‘subjectivity happens to the subject rather than . . . [being] caused by the subject’ (Rushton 2008: 137). If we combine these two ‘passivities’ then we might say that not only the time-image but all cinema is a ‘virtual machine’ that allows us viewers to become, and does so because it helps us to think the previously unthought, to experience the new. The typical argument against this hard interpretation of Deleuze would be that movement-image cinema does not allow us to become because it is a cinema that closes off the moment in which we expe-

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Deleuze and The Lizard 101 rience the existence of the virtual, a cinema that peddles in clichés; that is, when we watch a movement-image film, we do not think the unthought so much as think things that we have thought many times before, such that they have become automatic to us (Deleuze 2005: 19–21). Furthermore, we do not so much think for ourselves (because we are ‘fusing’ with the film), but rather think what the film ‘wants us to think’ (for the very same reason that we are fusing with the film). This is a viable argument, but it betrays a refusal to accept Deleuze (and Guattari’s) argument that becoming is what, as humans, we do anyway (Deleuze and Guattari 1984; 1987). That is to say, to repeat a thought is not necessarily to engage in a strict repetition, since in the intervening period between the first and second thoughts we have become different, such that the second thought is not simply a repetition, but a repetition in difference. As is Deleuze, we too should be wary that repetition does not make automata of us and that we do not ‘think unthinkingly’. Yet the ‘Hitlerism’ of the movies, as Deleuze describes it (2005: 255), is a worst-case scenario, one that does not de facto follow from watching mainstream movies. For this reason, Rushton says that ‘films can deliver to us the brains of idiots as much as it [sic] can deliver the brains of inspiration or genius’ (Rushton 2009: 53), a sentiment that echoes Anna Powell’s belief that ‘the spectator may have to work harder to extract new meaning from the more formulaic films. We input more of our own affective response if “trapped” in a set of conventions that we struggle to experience differently’ (Powell 2005: 203). That is to say, both Rushton and Powell point to the fact that movement-images can be the grounds for original thought as much as time-image films, even if the latter more easily seem to accomplish this (though that they do so ‘easily’ might lead one to argue that time-image films are ‘clichés’ of their own). Now, original thought and the time-image are not necessarily the same thing, but they are related through the concept of the virtual: the time-image in effect involves a blurring of boundaries between self and other, fantasy and reality, past and present (and future), such that we ‘see’ the virtual, or a non-chronological ‘time’ in which all possible pasts, presents and futures (including ones that are physically impossible in our universe) coexist simultaneously. Cinema allows us to see ‘other worlds’, which in turn enable us to reflect critically upon this world. This notion of the virtual has been related by Michael Goddard (2001) and Patricia Pisters (2006) to the spiritual, which indeed involves the movement of the mind/thought and the ability to choose. Here, our discussion of Deleuze brings us back to The Lizard, which

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102 Deleuze and Film both diegetically involves a character coming to realise that he has a choice thanks to a spiritual awakening (achieved, no less, through his repetition of the phrase that there are as many paths to God as there are people in the world) and extra-diegetically involves the possibility for a ‘people to come’ and for original thought in its Iranian (and other) audiences. If The Lizard posits a spiritual argument that there are as many paths to God as there are people in the world, then it perhaps also sheds light on the possibility for any film to lead us into the previously unthought, which is one of the key aspects of Deleuze’s time-image cinema. It is not so much, then, that the time-image is a thing, as it is that the time-image is a process, the potential for which lies in any cinematic work as it comes into contact with any spectator. Adopting a fundamentally pluralistic approach, we might argue that there are as many paths to the time-image as there are films (and film spectators, and film viewings) in the world. Even though the rest of the film is time-image ‘unfriendly’ in the reified sense of the term, the final freeze frame of The Lizard, with Reza being taken away off screen, suggests an open ending that does not give answers so much as inspire thinking about the future. A contextualised analysis of The Lizard helps to illustrate the ways in which the film diegetically reflects upon becoming and the possibility of change not as a thing but as a mode of thought, within Iran and elsewhere.

References Brown, W. (2011), Cognitive Deleuze: Report on the SCSMI Conference (Roanoke, 2–5 June 2010) and the Deleuze Studies Conference (Amsterdam, 12–14 July 2010), Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1 (1), available at www4.fcsh.unl.pt:8000/~pkpojs/index.php/cinema/article/download/11/13 (accessed 8 April 2011). Dabashi, H. (2007), Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Washington, DC: Mage. Deleuze, G. (1977), ‘I Have Nothing to Admit’, trans. J. Forman, Semiotext(e), 2 (3): 111–16. Deleuze, G. (2005), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Friedberg, A. (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. (2008), Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, Religious Politics and Democratic Reform, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

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Deleuze and The Lizard 103 Goddard, M. (2001), ‘The Scattering of Time Crystals: Deleuze, Mysticism and Cinema’, in M. Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge, pp. 53–65. Mitchell, J. (2008), ‘The Real Worlds of Iranian Cinema’, Journal of Media and Religion, 7: 92–5. Partovi, P. (2008), ‘Martyrdom and the “Good Life” in the Iranian Cinema of Sacred Defense’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28 (3): 513–32. Pisters, P. (2006), ‘The Spiritual Dimension of the Brain as Screen: Zigzagging from Cosmos to Earth (and Back)’, in R. Pepperell and M. Punt (eds), Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind, and World, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 123–38. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rushton, R. (2008), ‘Passions and Actions: Deleuze’s Cinematographic Cogito’, Deleuze Studies, 2 (2): 121–39. Rushton, R. (2009), ‘Deleuzian Spectatorship’, Screen, 50 (1): 45–53. Soroush, A. (2000), Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, trans. and ed. M. Sadri and A. Sadri, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varzi, R. (2006), Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Zeydabadi-Nejad, S. (2009), The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic, London and New York: Routledge.

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Chapter 6

In Search of Lost Reality: Waltzing with Bashir

Markos Hadjioannou

Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books present a complex and thoroughly informed theoretical feat, which aligns the creativity of filmmaking with that of a conceptual activity that goes far beyond the limits of the cinema screen. This is what D.N. Rodowick has in mind when he writes: ‘that Deleuze is a philosopher of time means that he is a philosopher of life: an inventor of concepts that affirm life and its untimely forces of creation’ (Rodowick 1997: xviii). To be sure, Deleuze’s movement- and time-images have become both methodological models and the theoretical motivation for thinking in cinema and thinking about cinema in a variety of ways. As Deleuze writes in the conclusion to Cinema 2: ‘it is at the level of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events’ (Deleuze 1989: 280). In line with the dynamic creativity exposed by both Rodowick and Deleuze, and with the aim of developing the impact of Deleuze’s filmphilosophy further, this chapter will address the position of reality in the cinematic image. The focus will be Ari Folman’s animated documentary Vals Im Bashir/Waltz with Bashir (Israel/France/Germany/USA/ Finland/Switzerland/Belgium/Australia, 2008), a mesmerising movie that triggers anew the debate regarding the documentarian’s treatment of the world. Through the creative practice of Folman’s vision, where the world documented is also animated, my aim will be to question a common assertion regarding the world of non-fiction cinema, placing this type of filmmaking within the uniqueness of Deleuze’s approach to reality in cinema. In essence, what becomes central to my discussion is the impossibility of a clear opposition between fiction and non-fiction, and, most importantly, the question of what this means for the figure of reality within the cinematic image.

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Time Loss Bill Nichols makes the distinction between a world that the documentary film always presents, and the world as the real historical world used as the basis for the documentarian’s treatment of her or his footage. He writes: We observe in documentary the everyday world of social action and photographic realism. This is clearly a view of the world, not the world as such, but it is not just any view of the world, as a fiction might be. It is the obvious and natural world of everyday life; it is a world represented with the indexical ‘wham’ that photographic images can provide; it is an argument set amidst those contending discourses of power, dominance, control, and the strategies of resistance, qualification, debate, contestation, and refusal that accompany them. (Nichols 1991: 157)

Nichols makes an important point here. The documentary image gains its power from the existential assurance granted to the image by way of its means of production: its mechanical and chemical basis make it an indexical sign. As such, the analogue image of film offers it the potential to become a testimony of the world, and thus to lay claim to a certain objectivity in its presentation of that very same world. However, Nichols points to the documentarian’s intrusion in this model: a documentary does not stand simply as an objective image, in that it is not a direct image of the historical world. Rather, it remains within the framework of argumentative speech, presenting a certain idea of the world. Even if we want to take Nichols’ proposition at face value, the matter with which film theory is inevitably confronted due to the move to non-analogical modes of image production is how we can think of the relationship between image and world in the new, digital culture. While the evidentiary function of analogue images offers them the potential of becoming existential testimonies to a world past, digital cinema’s relation to the world relies on the individual’s ability to infer a sense of reality to its forms and functions from the outside – that is, on the basis of an institutional contextualisation and a certain spectatorial practice. For instance, in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane speaks of the shock induced by the news reportage’s liveness as a spectatorial experience that diminishes the difference between an analogue and a digital recording of an historical event. She writes: Although the televisual and digital representations of explosions are not photographically based, their indexicality is a function of the strength of their exhortation to ‘Look here!’, ‘See this’, acting as the pointing finger of Peirce’s empty indexical sign. The ‘liveness’ of the televisual image ensures

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106 Deleuze and Film its adhesion to the referent just as the index adheres to its object, and the website makes that ‘liveness’ relivable at the touch of a finger. (Doane 2002: 208)

For Doane, what brings a sense of reality to the image is, in fact, not how it was recorded (in the sense of what medium was used), but the fact that it becomes part of an institution of information that theatricalises the documentary value of an event through a number of factors: the interruption of the scheduled programme in the name of breaking news; the establishment of a network of correspondents around the world who are constantly on standby; and, above all, the broadcasting of shocking events that forcefully ground the image in its historical context. Philip Rosen takes a similar approach, describing what he calls ‘digital mimicry’. Questioning the strict distinction made by theorists between old and new media, Rosen argues that the digital cannot be understood outside the context of a visual sociohistorical culture. As he explains: ‘In practice, then, digital imagery is often (but of course not exclusively) constituted by being propped on to certain culturally powerful image codes that preexisted it, and in this regard photography and film may be especially important examples’ (Rosen 2001: 314). As such, a digital image might not be indexical on the basis of its technical construction, but may still reproduce the qualitative functions of the analogue, thus overlapping with, rather than overturning, old media. To be sure, this is what Thomas Elsaesser has in mind when he also questions the newness of new media on the basis of the main product of Hollywood, the narrative feature film. In industrial terms, Elsaesser explains, we are in the midst of the reorganisation of modes of distribution and circulation opportunities, rather than in a significantly radical transition with regard to the spectatorial experiences of cinema (Elsaesser 1998: 203). What this debate goes to show is that indexicality as a strict framework for discussing the shift from analogue to digital images, and, by extension, for reflecting on the relationship between image and reality, becomes quite problematic once we take into consideration the position of an image within the broader culture that generates it and within which it is upheld. This is precisely what Stephen Prince has in mind when he proposes the term ‘perceptual realism’ for discussing digital movies. Prince explains that film theory has a tendency to evaluate the realism of an image merely on the basis of reference (that is, whether the association maintained between a recording and its source is indexical or not), neglecting to understand that the image’s credibility is a matter of perception (Prince 1996: 28). As he maintains, the realism of digital

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imaging need not be judged on the basis of indexical inferences at all, but through a correspondence-based model. Here, the privilege is given to the spectator who will consider whether or not the image maintains a reality effect based on the extent to which its features (lighting, colour, motion, and so on) correspond to her or his visual and social experience of the real world (Prince 1996: 31). While this approach does allow for the liberation of the image-reality relation from the grip of indexicality’s credibility, it does seem to neglect a fundamental part of the debate, indeed one that has been astutely pointed out by Rodowick in his own treatment of Prince’s argument: that the shift from analogue to digital images is not simply a matter of aesthetics, but one of time (Rodowick 2007: 110–24). The centrality of time in this debate is also apparent from Doane’s aforementioned assertion concerning the shock of televised liveness, where indexicality is prescribed within the perceptual experience of the instantaneous present. Nevertheless, what seems to be a recurrent theme in these arguments is that the digital continues to be judged on the basis of an analogue visual culture, by either being prescribed within it or, in Prince’s case, by making it completely irrelevant. It would be useful, though, to see how examples of digital products themselves try to renegotiate the tensions between image and reality, and between indexicality as existential assurance and digitisation as manipulable transcription. If we are to position the digital against analogue technology, then it will remain impossible for it to express reality at all. The digital is by definition non-analogical; as such, it is perceived continuously in the negative. This negativity is actually prescribed in Prince’s argument even as he tries to redeem the digital from theories of reference. The viewer will not necessarily look for correspondences between a digital image and reality to perceive it as realistic; rather, it is more likely that the reality effect of the digital image will be judged on the basis of whether or not it corresponds to our perceptual experiences of photographically created images. In other words, Prince’s correspondence-based model has as its point of reference photorealism, not reality. The world, within this framework, is always missing; and as such, a digital movie (fiction or non-fiction) is by definition always a view of the world so that what is always privileged is the subjective as an intentional act. What is not being addressed, though, is the fact that the digital image, precisely due to its non-analogical construction, has the ability to overcome the distinction between objective and subjective, the world and a world. Indeed, this is what we may learn from Deleuze’s film-philosophy. Without addressing the indexical nature of film, Deleuze still manages to

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108 Deleuze and Film connect the image with time; and even while this understanding of time is not conceived through the notion of indexicality, it still becomes a means through which the image gains the power to induce a belief in the world. In essence, by rethinking Nichols’ distinction in light of Deleuze’s approach to cinema, what we see in the documentary image is always an image of the world, but one in which this world is always changing. The world depicted remains the world, even when, as in the animated Waltz with Bashir, ostensibly it seems not to be. What becomes vital for such an understanding is the importance that Deleuze places on the friction between what is depicted in the image and what remains missing from sight. This dual role of bringing to sight while simultaneously hindering visibility becomes, within his theoretical schema, a means of falsifying the image. While we are given images of the world on screen, these images also express a certain loss of moments, of those fragments between each frame; that is, a loss of time. In other words, where indexicality is based strictly on the premises of an invitation to ‘look here’ and ‘see this’, Deleuze’s time-image is part of a regime to ‘look here, and see what is missing’.

The Unreal Real My interest in Deleuze’s philosophy of time has to do precisely with his attempt to unhinge the cinematic image from the reign of indexicality. As long as the index does not become a privileged form in the theorisation of the moving image, the non-indexicality of the digital should thus not prohibit the technology from expressing reality or from allowing for a spectatorial experience that may bring the individual in touch with the world. In search of the worldliness of Waltz with Bashir, in other words, it is useful to delve deeper into the concept of time as understood by Deleuze himself. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Deleuze’s theory of cinema is that he is talking about a certain expression of time, even when he interprets the movement-image. In the case of the organic/ kinetic regime of the movement-image, time is expressed through movement, where an image is given an assurance of life on the basis of its self-mobility. For her part, Doane turns to cinema to discuss the relationship between stasis and a certain expression of the passing of time as this appears in the visual stimulus caused by the world’s mobility. She reminds us that cinema’s moving images (what I would like to term ‘cinemes’ following the Greek root of the word cinématographe – that is, signifiers of motion) are created through, and thus literally dependent on, the division of real time into distinct static moments (‘photograms’

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– still photographic units), which file past the viewer’s eyes at a pace rapid enough to create what is actually a simulacrum of time passing. As Doane explains: During the projection of a film, the spectator is sitting in an unperceived darkness for almost 40 percent of the running time. Hence, much of the movement or the time allegedly recorded by the camera is simply not there, lost in the interstices between frames. These interstices, crucial to the representation of movement, must themselves remain unacknowledged. The cinema presents us with a simulacrum of time. (Doane 2002: 172)

Cinema presents us with a visual construction that connotes movement abstractly; that is, it recreates a figuration of movement by recording real motion in the form of a series of stilled and separate instances that are equivalent to, most typically, twenty-four photographs per second. Real motion is thus broken down to conform to a mathematically precise isomorphic depiction. The result is, conventionally, an image that seems to move without any interruption. Nevertheless, while the result is fluid enough to satisfy a belief in the uninterrupted and realistic progression of time in the image, it raises a certain philosophical concern: time seems to become spatialised. Deleuze’s return to Henri Bergson in his cinema books is quite extensive, as well as crucial in its renewal of how we can go about interpreting cinematic movement in search of expressions of time. For Bergson, what seem to be different states of being are simply our consciousness noticing specific formations as if they were representative of one state as opposed to another, similar to how one object positioned in space is separate from another (Bergson 2001: 87). To think this, he maintains, is to go against the flow of life. It is no surprise, therefore, that for Bergson cinema is incapable of depicting motion – a motion that arises as a changing force – because it is simulated out of separate instants based on an abstractly defined mathematical calculation of what seems good enough to perform a sense of continuous self-motion (Bergson 1998: 306). Snapshots taken of reality are used to characterise reality itself; but this reality is thus presented as a becoming that is quantified, made up of a uniformity that stems from a serialisation of static poses. What concerns Bergson here, and which becomes central to Deleuze’s own approach to cinema, is that the reanimation of reality’s passing in the image is based on an analytic rationalisation that limits the powers of durée (duration). The desire to see a reflection of past life on screen is satisfied by taking life outside of itself: one mathematical principle (twenty-four frames per second) makes up for the loss of time

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110 Deleuze and Film that is actually one of the primary signifying forces of cinema. Within this framework, film’s cinemes are signifiers of its photograms – those instantaneous images that allude to moments of the past, a collection of moments or states that are incapable of bringing reality back to life and engaging the viewer in durée. The movement of the projector seems to recreate movement, but does so as if movement were a generalised category that could be retraced on the basis of an abstracting hierarchy of moments, uniquely selected to represent life. Here, the relationship between the viewer and the image is placed within a Cartesian regime, where thought is presented as a means of dissecting the world with the purpose of excavating truth from life. In this sense, time becomes an activity that displaces the individual in order that she or he achieves exteriorly defined goals that transcend the aspirations and purposes of living in reality. That is, time becomes purposeful and is justified on the basis of its efficiency to achieve and to gain. In sum, the time of the organic/kinetic regime is deterministically technocratic. Where for Bergson this cinematic construction remains an insurmountable problem for depicting the changing force of reality, for Deleuze there is still hope. Speaking of the relationship between the two philosophers, Doane astutely notes that their main difference is in how they propose to interpret cinematic movement altogether. While Bergson insisted on focusing his attention on how the projector functions, Deleuze was more interested in considering movement from the point of view of the spectators who see it presented to them in the interval between shots – the space where motion is brought to a form of constant becoming. Doane explains: ‘The spectator does not see the succession of photograms but, instead, an intermediate image, which is a “mobile section” not an immobility. This mobile section is not the illusion of movement but its reality; it is imbued with qualitative change and duration’ (Doane 2002: 176). Within this understanding, the cinemes (signifiers of motion) become the primary effect of cinema, annihilating the photograms (still photographic units) in their emergence. Here we are led to another primary signifying force of cinema: not only does it express the loss of time – indeed, a time that we can never conquer directly – it also brings to the fore, both immediately and forcefully, the reinvention of time, or to be more precise, time as the act of reinventing. In other words, cinema has this unique ability to perform the simultaneous action of annihilating reality and depicting this loss, as well as reviving reality in its creative expressivity. The important factor, though, is that this revival is not a re-presentation in accordance with André Bazin’s hopeful cine-theology

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(Bazin 1967: 14); rather, it is a creative act configured as a point of concurrency between an actual time recorded and a virtual time of the constant regeneration of the trace of reality at some other point in time. While the cinematographic apparatus splits time into a series of moments, these moments are not privileged but are positioned as nonhierarchical, equidistant instants that just happen to have taken place. Here is the important claim that Deleuze makes: cinema can recreate the sense of durée with which Bergson is concerned, because it proposes a philosophy of the ‘any-instant-whatever’ (that arbitrarily recorded twenty-fourth photogram per second), which connects the production of the new with any, rather than some specially chosen, moment. ‘Meaning’, Doane writes, ‘is predetermined not in ideal forms, but in a process of emergence and surprise’ (Doane 2002: 180). That is, meaning is not drawn out of a purposeful progression through the world (movement that falls within the category of a transcendentalism) but from the unmotivated and thus irrational appearances of the world where movement is met by the collapse of reason and the encounter with a constant virtuality. This is what is expressed by the apparatus that privileges the interval between stases, as the space during which movement is performed by becoming a non-existent – and thus always virtual – bridge between inconsequential figurations of static pasts. This cinematographic break between photograms is, in other words, the performative act of cinema as a technology of cinemes, where the simulation of time passing becomes the creative power of the false: the unreal of cinema’s reality. Deleuze’s renegotiation of the relationship between time and movement in the cinematic image leads us to a crucial part of his discussion. In his consideration of the ‘powers of the false’ (Deleuze 1989: 126–55), Deleuze compares the organic/kinetic regime of the movement-image to the crystalline/chronic regime of the time-image, explaining that the two forms differ in their representational structures and effects. In the first case, he addresses the means by which the camera presents the world – literally presenting the world within the image. For the organic regime, this is a matter of the camera treating the world as an independently existent platform on to which the events of the narrative unfold. It does not matter if the world presented is made up of footage of exterior landscapes or of fabricated scenery. As Deleuze explains, ‘what counts is that, whether they are scenery or exteriors, the setting described is presented as independent of the description which the camera gives of it, and stands for a supposedly pre-existing reality’ (Deleuze 1989: 126). Quite differently, in the case of the crystalline regime, the world

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112 Deleuze and Film presented is not depicted as a background on to which action unfolds, but rather is activated by the camera’s construction of it as cinematic, or as a performance of cinemes. The description of space by the camera, in other words, literally replaces the actuality of the real by allowing it to appear as it erases it in its purposeful modification of what is depicted. The crucial point here is that the crystalline description of space privileges the act of seeing (indeed, the fact that the viewer is seeing) over a focus on events that need to be followed and resolved. As a consequence of these two differing relations between camera and filmic space, the representation of reality more generally presents us with a pivotal shift. Continuing his discussion, Deleuze points to the relationship between the real and the imaginary in each regime (Deleuze 1989: 126–7). Once again, the difference in how this relationship is treated by each regime is paramount for how we may go about thinking of a cinema whose concern is the real world even when this world is depicted as non-real. In the case of the organic regime, the real is constructed, and is perceived as, an uninterrupted continuous reality that persists from shot to shot and scene to scene. The world constructed, in other words, is based on an image of the whole, ‘a regime of localisable relations, actual linkages, legal, causal and logical connections’ (Deleuze 1989: 127). The organic regime is, in fact, able to contain virtual events, recollections, states of emotions and memories; but this is achieved from the point of view of the actual world that gives meaning to virtual states as a non-existent virtuality to which reality only refers. The virtual does not contain meaning in itself, but acquires meaning on the basis of the actual that upholds and justifies its appearance. As such, the real and the imaginary are contradicted, placed at the ends of two opposing forms of existence. In contrast, the crystalline regime renegotiates the distinction between real and imaginary leading to what is in fact an indecipherable indiscernibility between the two. The real and the imaginary within the crystalimage become facets of the same world. It is no longer the case that a dream is situated within reality, and analysed and justified on the basis of this reality. Rather, within the crystalline regime the dream becomes actual by transforming the real, while the real becomes simultaneously a manifestation of the dream. The one layer of existence follows on from the other in a way that the present passing of time is just that contracted point where all the past is virtually present, and where every action is a motion that moves into the past to reveal the desires and disorientations of the future. The imaginary, in other words, is a state of existing as much as the real is a state of virtuality. Deleuze proceeds from this point to focus on the types of narration

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privileged by the two regimes. Here, once again, he focuses on the difference between continuity and discontinuity, on the contradiction between an image of thought that relies on the ‘whole’ and that which presents a sense of constant differentiation that is upheld by the ‘interval’. The events that take place within the organic regime function in such a way as to support a claim to truth, even in the case of fiction. Everything is contained within this fictionalised world owing to a development that arises from tensions and oppositions that are eliminated or appeased through goals and their achievement, and through obstacles and their defeat. Anomalies, breaks and superimpositions may appear, but these are justified and rationalised by obeying certain laws that are based, as Deleuze explains, on certain ‘centres of forces in space’ (Deleuze 1989: 128). The time of the organic regime is thus chronological. Once again, the crystalline regime presents a form of narration that is quite different from the organic logic. Here ‘sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and sound situations to which characters, who have become seers, cannot or will not react, so great is their need to “see” properly what there is in the situation’ (Deleuze 1989: 128). In contrast, in the case of the crystalline, events are not there to present a reason for a character’s action, nor are they the immediate effects of these actions. Rather, the characters are now unable or unwilling to act. The world presented is overtaken by pure optical and sonic situations within which characters are found as individuals in need of seeing and hearing. Most importantly, this is a seeing and hearing that does not develop into action; it is not a presupposition of an action that leads to the coalition of the story’s progression with motion in space. This act of wandering and observing, where the character encounters the world as a space of perception and reflection that engulfs them, takes over the image to give us an image of thought where time is no longer rationalised but continuously changing. Movement becomes, as such, a situation that cannot be transformed into action; and space is no longer the summation of tensions and their resolutions organised on the basis of determining goals. Here is where the interval (that virtual space of constant differentiation) takes over the image, creating a world fuelled by the false and its powers.

The Digitographic Documentary Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is a fascinating example of contemporary cinematic production, one that expresses this tension between the organic and the crystalline by emphasising the impossibility of any claim

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114 Deleuze and Film to truth – or, more precisely, a claim to a certain type of truth – within the setting of documentary filmmaking. At the same time, the movie stands at the unique juncture of recent debates surrounding the shift from celluloid film, and its powers as an analogue recording device, to digital cinema, and the potential weakness of the computer, as a non-analogic recording and image-creating device, in depicting the real world. Of course, Waltz with Bashir is not an exclusive or rare specimen within the history of documentary filmmaking. The film follows in the tradition of the performative documentary that makes prominent the filmmaker’s concern with, and open critique of, the depiction of some true reality in the image, while at the same time making the filmmaker’s subjective framing of the work a main component. As Stella Bruzzi argues, ‘the performative documentary uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation’ (Bruzzi 2006: 185). The result of this focus on performativity within the context of non-fiction filmmaking is the creation of an alienating device for the spectator, which openly foregrounds the creative impulse, and thus artificiality, of the work. The reflexivity of this mode seeks to penetrate a certain canon within documentary film production that stems from film’s technical ability to make visible the objective traces of a world past, thus bringing to light certain truths of an historical reality. Performative documentaries target, as Bruzzi describes, ‘the erroneous assumption that documentaries aspire to be referential or “constative” to adopt [J.L.] Austin’s terminology (that is, to represent an uncomplicated, descriptive relationship between subject and text)’ (Bruzzi 2006: 187). Indeed, Waltz with Bashir embraces this very same logic, as it focuses on the filmmaker’s own personal quest to come to terms with his past through a therapeutic act of remembrance. As the viewer is told in the featurette that accompanies the DVD edition of the movie (Artifical Eye, 2009), Folman’s inspiration for Waltz with Bashir came from an experiment conducted by the Israeli army and in which he took part in order to gain an early release from service. During a number of sessions with the army’s therapist, Folman had to recount all his memories of the events he experienced during his service, amongst which was Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a war that becomes the historical background for the movie. What surprised Folman was the fact that he had avoided speaking about these events before taking part in the experiment, and so the very act of talking now about this past becomes a process of remembering. In other words, for Folman, and for the movie, this return to an

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historical trauma is not a matter of recalling incidents that had taken place as if they were simply there waiting to be brought back to light. Rather, this process of returning to one’s forgotten past is an occurrence that reinvigorates emotions linked to that past while simultaneously inducing a certain awareness of the individual’s place in present time. More than this, in recollecting his past Folman becomes aware of the fact that his memories are filled with gaps that he cannot fill or justify. The attempt to find out what happened in between the one and the other memory, and to target the anxieties induced by both the memories and their gaps, brings Folman to seek out some of his fellow soldiers. In the process, Waltz with Bashir becomes a documentary that looks back to one of the most horrific events of the 1982 Lebanon War: the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangist extremists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which at the time were surrounded by the Israeli Defence Force in which Folman was serving. Folman’s intention is not to describe or to disclose the truth behind these incidents (whether or how the Israelis let the vengeful Phalangists into the camps), but to position them at the centre of the meeting point between Folman, his past, the existential acts of remembrance, and the world that is revealed in the creative act of living. The movie is made up of a series of interviews conducted by Folman with other soldiers, a post-trauma therapist, and Ron Ben-Yishai, an Israeli war correspondent who famously documented the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The first encounter depicted takes place in a bar where Folman is told by a friend, Boaz, of a recurring nightmare he has, during which twenty-six savage dogs chase after him. Boaz explains that these twenty-six dogs are the dogs he had killed as a soldier during the night raids conducted by the Israeli army when the country had first attacked Lebanon in 1982. Here we see Folman perplexed not so much by his friend’s nightmare as by the fact that he himself does not have any recollection of his own time back in the army during the attack. At this point, though, a sudden memory, presented to us in flashback, takes him back to Beirut and his presence in the city during the war. The flashback causes a strong sense of restlessness for Folman, a matter that becomes the creative and philosophical force of the movie in that the memory that has generated it remains divorced from any further context, and contains details that Folman cannot justify or explain. The flashback is also central to the structure of the narrative, becoming the movie’s point of departure as well as the point towards which it is directed. While it is possible to think of it in terms of the organic regime (where the virtual is justified from the point of view of the actual

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116 Deleuze and Film that upholds it and grounds it in the real world), the circular narrative structure that the flashback produces places it more clearly within the context of the crystalline. Indeed, the point at the end of the movie when the emotional weight of the flashback is revealed – a point which coincides with the shift from animated footage to live footage – does not lend itself to a sense of resolution but to a fractured image of thought: the reality of the live footage reverberates with the emotional traumas of the past, the quest for self-therapy, and the realisation that it is impossible to think of the historical events with an analytic objectivity. To clarify, the first time Folman’s character confronts this memory he sees himself as a young soldier bathing naked in the sea on the shores of Beirut. In the company of two other soldiers (one he identifies as a friend, Carmi, and another he does not recognise), Folman rises from the water, dresses, and walks among the empty streets of the city. The three men walk past posters of Bashir Gemayel, the recently elected Lebanese president whose assassination was considered the cause of the violent retaliation on the part of the Phalangists against the Palestinian refugees. Bashir’s image is also a reference to the movie’s title, the full explanation of which is revealed once the historical context of the eponymous ‘waltz’ has also been presented. For the time being, however, Bashir remains an image glued to the dilapidated buildings that frame the streets through which the men advance, and who are then met by the frightening faces of women running in the opposite direction, seen (but not heard at this point) screaming in horror. Indeed, the flashback does not function uniquely as a return to the past to explain the present so as to satisfy the teleological progression of the narrative. While it does trigger the development of the story, it becomes part of this evolution in such a way that past and present are, in fact, in constant interaction. In this sense, it contradicts the powers of the organic regime, which form an image of the world as clearly defined, independent, continuous, transcendental, and as the platform upon which the individual progresses by reacting to various effects. Instead, the flashback is neither decipherable (Folman will not discover, for example, the identity of the third soldier), nor completely truthful (contrary to what we see, Carmi explains that he never was with Folman during that time in Beirut). Echoing the animators’ erasure of cinema’s technological objectivity by rendering its image a graphically digitised non-analogical depiction (that is, a ‘digitographic image’), the flashback plunges the historical reality of the screened world into a palimpsest of doubt and bewilderment. Nevertheless, this bracketing of truth is the actual power of the digitographic act. In other words, placed within the

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domain of the crystalline, the image is always something more than an image of a pre-existing reality. It is a reflection of reality, but not simply in the sense of a subjective portrayal of the world. Once again, the important focus here is time. In the case of the organic, time is placed within the limits of determinism: time as progression rather than change. In the case of the crystalline, however, time is the Bergsonian durée, or that which endures across time and with multiple temporal directions. It is in the sense of duration, then, that existence, reality and subjectivity all become a reflection of life’s constant change; that is, life as a creative force. The flashback that lies at the centre of Waltz with Bashir is precisely an expression of durée. In its appearance, it activates a search for Folman’s own present existence, which is part of a reality that is portrayed as an active power of creativity. This active creativity is manifested as the power of the false: it is not objective truth that Folman is after, but himself within this world. This is not a matter of erasing or annihilating reality, but of finding where the individual is to be found as an expressive force of the world’s events, a force that brings emotion, memory and thought in touch with being in the world, inseparable from reality as the expressive force of time. It is this framework that the movie seeks to unveil, and which it emphasises with its unique animating technique. Recording his encounters with the various people who helped him on his quest, Folman, and his animating director Yoni Goodman, used the video footage in a pioneering method that brings together techniques including CGI, Flash animation and cut-out animation. As such, images taken directly from the real world are enmeshed in a digitising process that leaves one wondering if reality can be found in the image at all. Nevertheless, it is precisely the creativity of digital manipulation that the movie emphasises: Folman’s existence is affected by his past, but this past is not simply an objective truth he must discover. Rather, in line with the force of change that durée expresses, Folman’s past – and by extension historicity in general – is merged with the present and the continuous interaction between worlds, past, present and future.

Waltz-ing with Bashir For Deleuze, the power of cinema is the potential for film’s self-moving image to induce thought that establishes a reconnection with this world here. What is interesting in his discussion is that it does not matter if the cinematic image is analogical or not. In fact, it is the canon of objective truth tied with film’s technological objectivity that resonates

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118 Deleuze and Film with Deleuze’s philosophical concerns with the organic regime. What remains a problem within this image of thought is the lack of existential involvement on the part of the individual. Here the subject takes on the role of the truth-seeker and truth-bearer to the point where the world is decisively His – the Western man replacing the omnipotence and omnipresence of God on the basis of the revelation of proven facts to explain life and to overcome the challenges of living in the world. Indeed, as He seeks to understand the world through scientific knowledge and rationalised systematisation, the post-enlightenment subject assumes a position that allows a certain independence to develop, one that is configured in the form of a determining objectivity (a discussion explored in depth by Rodowick 1997: 121–38). The more independent the subject is, and the more independent the world is, the more objective – or supposedly truthful – the definition of life will be. What we have here is a description of a world that stems from a tendency to map out reality on the basis of specified guidelines, literally configuring it to fit within predetermined abstractions, and in which symbols that create relations are calculated and re-calculable. The subject is oriented in space through geometric grids and interconnected databases, whose utmost purpose is to nullify the fears and anxieties of estrangement and uncertainty. More so than this, she or he is located in time, literally positioned in a quasi-temporal locus through a description of time as mathematically codified, chronologically sequential, and historically traceable. Time lost is, therefore, time regained; but it is regained with one caveat: we are outside time, examining life as a series of events (historical data), and with fixed limits (the past was then, the future is not yet, and the passing of each day resides exclusively in the nowness of the present). At the same time, though, this leads to the elimination of a sense of bewilderment and surprise, and of the sensations linked to discovering the world. What Deleuze, and by extension Folman, remind us of is that this discovery is not something linked exclusively to the new, but to our return to the constancy of the new – an expression of living as one force caught up in the ‘eternal return’ of life. This is, indeed, the Nietzschean crux of Deleuze’s philosophy, where the world is revealed as a continuously unfolding event, an active force, rather than a plane defined by our operations within it. And it is here where we encounter a cinema that falls within the schema expressed by the crystalline or chronic regime. To recall Deleuze’s analysis of the crystalline regime, it is the description itself that constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object. What remains decomposed and multiplied is thought and memory, thinking

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as a process of becoming part of the world, and belonging to reality’s continuous development and forceful change. This is precisely the world – not simply a world – that Waltz with Bashir imagines through its reinterpretation of the documented testimony and its reliance on reconstructed animated images: reality, that is, as the indistinguishable interaction between temporalities, as the decomposition of thought, as the force of change. Indeed, it is this creative force that is echoed in the scene from which the movie takes its title. As the Israeli army is immobilised by the heavy fire of opposing forces, Folman’s commander, Shmuel Frenkel, grabs a machine gun, runs to the street, and amidst the surrounding posters of the assassinated president (Bashir) he fires away in every direction in a sort of trance that becomes in Folman’s memory a waltz. The waltz of the title, in other words, becomes this indicator of Folman’s memory, and his subjective interaction with an historical past. To this Folman adds the revelation of his indirect and unknowing participation in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, as a result of the Israeli army covering Phalangists as they took it upon themselves to conduct the slaughter of the refugees. As such, when the movie finally turns to present real footage on which the flashback was based, even if this footage does not indexically contain Folman, it makes him an inseparable component – emotionally, but perhaps also ethically – of his position within the very world that is depicted. This is the power of the false as that inevitable virtual which takes over the image to lead the individual to confront the impossibility of encountering the world from afar, and to accept her or his participation in the constant forces of change within living.1

References Bazin, A. (1967), ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in H. Gray (ed. and trans.), What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 9–16. Bergson, H. (1998), Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Bergson, H. (2001), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Bruzzi, S. (2006), New Documentary, second edition, London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Doane, M.A. (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elsaesser, T. (1998), ‘Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time’, in T. Elsaesser and K. Hoffmann (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 201–22.

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120 Deleuze and Film Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Prince, S. (1996), ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film Quarterly, 49 (3): 27–37. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosen, P. (2001), Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Note 1. I would like to dedicate this essay to David N. Rodowick as a small token of my deep gratitude to him for introducing me to the details of Deleuze’s thought as a young postgraduate student in 2004, and for supporting me so generously throughout the years that have followed.

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Chapter 7

The Schizoanalysis of European Surveillance Films

Serazer Pekerman

In this chapter I shall use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘nomad’ to offer a schizoanalytic reading of three recent ‘surveillance films’: Red Road (Andrea Arnold, UK/Denmark, 2006), Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2006) and Salmer fra Kjøkkenet/Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, Norway/ Sweden, 2003). The nomad is a key concept in schizoanalysis, and, as we shall see, it allows us to read these films as political statements, particularly as a result of the connection between character and space.

Schizoanalysis and the Nomad Schizoanalysis, like most Deleuze and Guattarian concepts, notoriously resists succinct definition. It is the name they give to what they do and to how they think, as well as to the process of working with the concepts that they create. That is, schizoanalysis is strongly related to why Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts have functions rather than straightforward definitions. For this reason, Ian Buchanan explains why we should neither need nor want a clear definition of the term (Buchanan 2008: 1–15). Broadly speaking, however, schizoanalysis means making use of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concepts in order to consider art works as a form of resistance to the norms defined by the majority (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 301–418). Drawing on Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze identifies two different kinds of power, namely potentia and potestas (Deleuze 1988: 97). Elena del Río states that ‘potentia/puissance’ is influenced by Spinoza’s affirmative idea of power as a potential or ‘capacity for existence’, and that the other sort of power, ‘potestas/pouvoir’, is the negative model of power as domination or circumscription (del Río 2008: 9). Within the context of schizoanalysis, resistance to the majority means embracing

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122 Deleuze and Film not ‘potestas’ but one’s ‘potentia’, or potential, and it is in the figure of the nomad that Deleuze and Guattari see this potential most forcefully realised. The notion of the nomad has various functions in the scholarly works that make use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, although many share the idea that the nomad is one of the key concepts in understanding their philosophy. Brian Massumi and Rosi Braidotti attribute a wide meaning to the term; in their work, the notion of the nomad stands for the way in which Deleuze and Guattari think (Massumi 1992: 2; Braidotti 1994: 4). In addition to this generalisation, in Massumi’s writings the term is interchangeable with the adjective ‘schizophrenic’ (Massumi 1992: 4). Eugene W. Holland, meanwhile, describes the nomad as one of the many characteristics of ‘desire’ and ‘subjectivity’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (Holland 1999: 36 and 101). However, although it should be admitted that all concepts are related to one another in both the solo works of Deleuze and those co-authored with Guattari, I have here restricted my understanding of the nomad to the relevant chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, namely ‘1227: A Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 387–467). Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad is inspired by the nomadic tribes in history. The year in the title of the chapter, 1227, is the date of the death of Genghis Khan, who is known to have united the nomads of the Asian steppes (Massumi 2004: xv). Deleuze and Guattari are particularly astounded by the nomads’ potential to exist and their ability to adapt despite the harsh conditions of nature, the need for constant mobility, and the rigours of living in seemingly uninhabitable places – such as Eskimos on ice, Bedouins in the desert, or nomadic Asian tribes on the steppes (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 422). The nomad, slightly poeticised in the chapter, refuses to settle or to change nature to suit their needs, preferring instead to change what they do and how they work. As such, the nomad is for Deleuze and Guattari an example of a successful warrior against all kinds of oppression applied by any majority and any authoritarian discourse, not least because nomads are ‘minoritarian’, in a constant state of ‘becoming’, and ‘deterritorialised par excellence’. Furthermore, the nomad is ‘exterior to the State apparatus’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 387). It does not share the State’s values, and does not function as a mere replacement for the State. Instead, the nomad is a means for bringing about the destruction of the conditions that necessitate the State. In other words, the nomad deterritorialises existing systems of oppression in order to prove that there might be alternatives to them. It is for these reasons that Deleuze and Guattari

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 123 refer to this process as ‘minoritarian resistance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 117–18). Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘[t]he nomad exists only in becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 475). David Martin-Jones and Damian Sutton explain ‘becoming’ as follows: ‘Becoming’ is drawn from Deleuze’s opposition to existentialism and ‘being,’ [and] his opposition to psychoanalysis . . . Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal for ethical social resistance, for example, was that we must understand otherness through becoming ‘Other’ (‘becoming-woman,’ ‘becomingmolecular’). (Martin-Jones and Sutton 2008: xv)

In other words, Deleuze and Guattari put forward the concept of becoming in order to overcome the self-other binary opposition that prevents individuals from understanding each other. Becoming necessitates embracing constant change and being ready to leave the comfort of well-defined subject positions. The surveillance films that I am considering feature a shift that challenges the subject position of the main protagonists, and which helps them to understand how things are seen from the point of view of the others they are observing. As we shall see, not only does this turn them into a Deleuze and Guattarian nomad, it also means that they ‘become’ the other, occupying a similar position to that previously occupied by the people upon whom they spy. As mentioned, the nomad is also ‘the deterritorialised par excellence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 421). Holland explains that deterritorialisation is a schizoanalytic term generated from Lacanian territorialisation, which is ‘the parental care-giving process that maps the infant’s erogenous zones, charging specific organs and corresponding objects with erotic energy and value’ (Holland 1999: 19). Holland states that ‘deterritorialisation designates the process of freeing the desire from established organs and objects . . . [and] of labour-power from specific means of production’ (Holland 1999: 19). Deterritorialisation, therefore, changes expectations in a given system, thereby erasing what the system had tried to impose as normal without replacing this with another norm. In some instances deterritorialisation is followed by reterritorialisation, for example when labour power is attached to a new means of production (Holland 1999: 20). The nomad might also be reterritorialised but only temporarily, e.g. between deterritorialising travels. Deleuze and Guattari, meanwhile, state that when deterritorialisation is ‘precocious and sudden’, the individuals may be trapped in a black hole: ‘it is supposed to be a slow process’ (Deleuze and Guattari

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124 Deleuze and Film 2004: 368). Consequently, under certain circumstances, when deterritorialisation becomes constant, it might be a permanent way out of any closure, an alternative resistance to an authority, providing potential unless it ends up in a black hole (or a dystopia). Red Road, The Lives of Others and Kitchen Stories all involve a ‘becoming nomad’ and a ‘becoming minoritarian’ that sees the main protagonist, who is a surveillance expert, shift from a state of complicity with the ‘potestas’ of the State to a state not simply of sympathy for those ‘potential’ enemies of the State upon whom they spy, but to a condition of ‘potentia’ in and for themselves. That is, the protagonist leaves his or her post and takes action in the space they have been spying on. They cross a border, therefore, and challenge the authoritarian power for which they work. This border crossing, or transgression, reveals their potential to defy authority, and also allows them to understand both themselves and the others upon whom they spy. Before we look at each of the films in greater detail, however, I should first like to discuss the concept of surveillance, and how psychoanalytic arguments are not sufficient to understand these films, which instead seem better suited to a schizoanalytic reading.

The Power Politics of Seeing and Being Seen The logic of surveillance is best embodied in the panopticon, which literally means ‘all-seeing’, and which was conceived by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The panopticon is a surveillance machine where no prisoner can see the observer, nor do they know whether or not they are being spied on at any given moment. Drawing upon Bentham, Michel Foucault states that the panopticon is an ‘architectural apparatus for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it’ (Foucault 1995: 200), and that in the panopticon power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. (Foucault 1995: 201)

Today these principles have become a part of our everyday lives with the help of surveillance cameras. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson claim that surveillance today is a far greater issue than any science-fiction writer in the past could have foreseen. They state that when George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949, surveillance was widely

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 125 limited to the domain of the sci-fi genre; in contrast, ‘some groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored’ by ‘both state and non-state institutions’, and ‘the abilities of surveillance technologies have [today] surpassed (Orwell’s) dystopic vision’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 606–7). Haggerty and Ericson claim that being anonymous is no longer possible in contemporary society. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, they call the current situation a ‘surveillant assemblage’, and suggest that if anybody wants to remain anonymous today, they should never ‘study, work, vote, use credit or use the internet’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 620). In this ‘surveillant assemblage’, surveillance becomes an inevitable part of everyday life. With regard to cinema, therefore, surveillance, previously a story element limited to sci-fi, has become a part of many contemporary films regardless of genre or context. CCTV footage, with its very low quality monochrome and/or black and white images, has become a familiar feature in various films. These images are typically filmed from peculiar angles – extremely low or high – and mostly in unconventional, somewhat disturbing, frames. In many cases these visuals are chosen intentionally in order to underline the disturbance caused by both spying on someone and being spied upon. In addition to the commonplace nature of CCTV footage in contemporary films, there has also been a noticeable increase in the number of films that deal directly with issues of surveillance – and across a wide range of genres and styles. Prominent examples might include Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2002), Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/ Germany/Italy/USA, 2005), and A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, USA, 2006). One might be inclined to consider surveillance films according to Laura Mulvey’s (1975) psychoanalytic understanding of the gaze and voyeurism. Due to psychoanalysis’ understanding of the self as a constant, this approach inevitably assumes rigid boundaries between the owner of the gaze as the powerful subject who looks and acts, and the passive object who is looked at and controlled by the look. For example, Red Road, which deals with gender and surveillance, does lend itself to a Mulvey-inspired reading, not least because the film is made by a female director and tells the story of a female surveillance officer (Kate Dickie) trying to overcome her grief at, and exact revenge for, the loss of her husband and son. The promising closure of the film, in which the surveillance officer finds some sort of ‘peace’, constructs parallels with psychoanalysis’ main target, which, following Fadi Abou-Rihan, is to uncover the unconscious with therapeutic intentions (Abou-Rihan

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126 Deleuze and Film 2008: ix). This promising closure arrives through an unexpected unleashing of female sexuality, ironically triggered by a locksmith, Clyde (Tony Curran). However, while a psychoanalytic reading of the film would undoubtedly be useful, I shall explain how Red Road along with the two other surveillance films mentioned above might be better understood from the schizoanalytic approach inspired by Deleuze and Guattari.

Schizoanalysis and Surveillance Films In Red Road, The Lives of Others and Kitchen Stories, the protagonists are embodied as a site of trauma as they shift positions from a peeping subject outside of the frame to a subject moving in the frame, and from a recording machine to being part of the recorded action. This unexpected change accelerates the individual’s detachment from where he or she belongs in the first place and might trigger a total loss of the sense of territory and the feeling of being at home due to losing control over their space and the previous values attached to it. This shift not only brings both sides of the seer-seen dyad together on the same stage in stories of ordinary daily life, but it also changes the viewpoint of the subject, giving them a chance to see events from an/the Other’s point of view. In other words, each involves a ‘minoritarian’ protagonist who becomes deterritorialised and, subsequently, nomadic, thereby releasing a potential for change in the authoritarian systems to which they had previously belonged. As we shall see, the films signal this shift from territorialised to deterritorialised particularly through the use of space. The plots of all three films start before the main protagonists have become nomads, i.e. while they work as surveillance officers. They all work in symbolic spaces reminiscent of the tower where the officer watches without being seen, as in Bentham’s panopticon. In The Lives of Others, surveillance officer Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) works in the loft of the apartment building in which the couple he spies upon reside. He draws a sketch on the floor of the loft in order better to imagine where the events in the flat below are taking place. Especially in the scenes where he walks and looks down at the floor, towards where the couple lives, he is visually placed on top of a tower where he is not seen. In Red Road, although we never know the exact location where surveillance officer Jackie works, she also works in a kind of tower. Her office is full of CCTV screens showing images of various scenes from high vantage points. She is visually placed as though at a high place looking down on people. In the third case study, Kitchen Stories, the idea of the panop-

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 127 ticon model turns into a memorable prop and a comedy element. The Swedish surveillance officer Folke (Tomas Norström) places his miniature watchtower, a simple ladder with a desk on top of it, in the kitchen of Norwegian house owner Isak (Joachim Calmeyer). In each of these surveillance films, the main protagonists deterritorialise the enemy’s territory by leaving their watchtower and constructing a connection with those they spy upon. This is signalled literally by the way in which they enter into and inhabit the homes of their targets after finding out that these people are not so different from themselves. At the start of each of these films surveillance is represented as part of a daily routine: watching is a job like any other. As the films progress, the border between those under surveillance and the surveillance officer gradually becomes blurred. Both identities change constantly as an inevitable result of the process of observation, which has an effect on the past and future of both parties. All the officers, Wiesler, Jackie and Folke, are spied upon and interrogated by the authorities they work for and/or find themselves the objects of counter-surveillance from the people they are spying upon. A nicely decorated house in East Berlin, a poor and dirty flat in Glasgow, and an almost empty kitchen in Norway become sites of negotiation in which the officers become nomads. Identities become fluid in these spaces that become ersatz homes or homelands, and which resist both definition and borders. Ella Shohat also refers to the notion of the nomad as a resistance to authoritarian discourses that depend on discriminatory binary oppositions. She states that ‘[i]n nationalist discourses . . . home and homeland were often represented as the site of fixity as opposed to the suspect instability and mobility of the nomadic... [T]he metaphors of fluidity . . . express the critique of a fixed notion of identity’ (Shohat 1999: 225). In all three films, one particular place is introduced as homely and beyond the reach of the authorities. This place turns into an inhabitable and familiar place for the main protagonists, who keep coming back to it in order to help both themselves and those they spy upon. The nomad turns the space into a home and shows how this eliminates the need for a safe and protected home/panopticon provided by an authority. Consequently the negotiation with the other(s) reveals an affirmative potential and becomes a political statement as the officers rebel against the authoritarian discourse.

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128 Deleuze and Film

The Feeling of Home Reproduced by the Sketch of a Home: The Lives of Others The Lives of Others is an internationally acclaimed surveillance film set in East Germany in the period before the fall of the Berlin wall. It follows a Stasi officer, Captain Gerd Wiesler, who volunteers to spy on a celebrated writer and actress couple, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), and who becomes a part of the events he is supposed to be observing. His curiosity about his targets’ lives turns into interest and sympathy, while his belief in the dominant political party (the SED), for which he had worked devotedly, is deeply shaken by an executive officer’s abuse of power. Wiesler finds himself becoming increasingly involved in the life of the couple as he neglects to report information about them and breaks into their flat to hide important evidence against them. Wiesler is introduced as a devoted and proud member of the Stasi. However, his life lacks a home where he feels comfortable and safe. He neither feels at home in his own apartment, nor does he have someone to be intimate with, as we see when Wiesler is with a call girl (Gabi Fleming). In this scene, Wiesler’s apartment is hardly furnished except for basic items such as a chair, a small table and a couch, and Wiesler seemingly has no personal belongings. As a result, the only room we see looks rather like a hotel room. The scene comes after Wiesler witnesses the intimacy of the couple he spies upon, and demonstrates how unfulfilled his life is in comparison to theirs. Wiesler sits on a couch with the call girl sat on his lap, facing towards him. The camera mostly stays behind the call girl in medium shots. He asks her to stay a little longer, suggesting that he is in need of a moment of intimacy. She kindly reminds him that he has to book in advance if he needs to spend more time with her and prepares to leave. Only after she gets up do we see that Wiesler has been sitting totally dressed with his necktie on. We see him trying clumsily to hug the call girl as she leaves, suggesting that this is their first encounter; she looks slightly surprised but does not respond to this intimate act. She simply states that she has another appointment. In The Lives of Others, then, the only film space in which Wiesler feels at home, despite being unsafe for most of the time, is not his own home, but the apartment under surveillance. Unlike Wiesler’s, this apartment is filled with interesting art objects, comfortable, cosy furniture, and is portrayed as homely with warm colours. However, the feeling of being at home is mainly produced by the couple, who are represented as modest, sympathetic and loveable people. This feeling of home is first

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 129 reproduced by Wiesler, though not with the same intensity, when he produces sketches of the flat in his surveillance loft upstairs. As Wiesler looks down at his sketch, he starts to develop a sympathy for Georg and Christa-Maria’s life, and begins to keep their secrets. In other words, he territorialises the loft as a private space that he shares with the couple. Wiesler gradually becomes a nomad first by territorialising the loft, but then also by deterritorialising the Stasi, again using the sketch of the apartment as a tool. This deterritorialisation happens when he quickly draws a sketch of the downstairs apartment for the second time on a piece of paper in an interrogation room, where Christa-Maria is questioned about a typewriter that was used by Georg to write a provocative piece about the Stasi. At this point in the story the only missing information needed by the Stasi in order to convict Georg is the location of the typewriter. Wiesler asks Christa-Maria to mark the location of the typewriter on the sketch of the apartment instead of having her say where it is. By doing so, he controls the information produced in the room that was under surveillance; while giving nothing away, Wiesler manages to learn the exact location of the typewriter and to alert Christa-Maria to the fact that he knows the layout of her apartment. As soon as ChristaMaria marks the sketch, Wiesler heads straight for the apartment where his knowledge of the location of the typewriter enables him to remove it and to leave before the arrival of the Stasi. Consequently, with the help of the sketch of the flat, he turns the interrogation room into his control area, searching for ‘another justice’ that the nomad aims at, in this case beyond the ‘justice’ of the Stasi. Although Wiesler knows that it will put him in conflict with the Stasi, he helps the couple at the risk of ruining his career and, indeed, his life. Instead of using the information to get a promotion or to seduce Christa-Maria, he decides to help the couple. Caring about this home, which he can draw from memory, far more than he cares about the panopticon, turns Weisler into a nomad.

The Feeling of Home Through Intimacy: Red Road The British-Danish co-production Red Road tells the story of CCTV operator Jackie, who works for Glasgow City Council, and who oversees the security of the Red Road housing blocks in Barmulloch, one of the city’s suburbs. One day she sees a man on one of the screens in her office and starts to follow him, leaving all else in her life behind. The audience, for a long time unaware of Jackie’s motives for spying on the man, follows her struggle to frame him for a crime so that he will go to prison. Only after she manages to create a fake rape case against him

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130 Deleuze and Film are Jackie’s motives revealed: this man, Clyde, was responsible for the death of Jackie’s husband and child in a car accident, and Jackie seeks to send him back to prison because she feels that he did not serve a long enough sentence. At the end of the film, however, Jackie takes back her accusation, confronts Clyde, and tries to find a different way of communicating her grief. Throughout Red Road, Jackie seems as homeless as Wiesler from The Lives of Others. We never see her feeling comfortable or safe in a private place. The only time we see Jackie in her flat, we witness her disturbing ritual of stuffing her late daughter’s clothes so as to give them a ‘body’, and then hugging them and crying. Like Wiesler, it seems that Jackie wants to hold and to be held when in her flat, and when Jackie does have sex, she, like Wiesler, also keeps most of her clothes on. The first sex scene in Red Road takes place in a minivan. The camera stays behind the grid of the rear windscreen, visually imprisoning Jackie behind its bars. The only time we see Jackie’s face in close-up, she is behind the misted window of the minivan, her face distorted because of the way she is pushed against the glass. Both this sex scene and the scene of Jackie at home show us that, at this point in the film, there is nowhere else for her other than the panopticon where she works. However, the second sex scene, which takes place at Clyde’s flat, is portrayed completely differently, as we shall see below. Jackie becomes a nomad during her sexual liaison with Clyde, as she begins to feel at home with him in his flat. Although mostly offscreen, their encounter is, to Jackie’s surprise, sexually satisfying. The colour and atmosphere of the scene is quite different from the rest of the movie, and the rhythm of the film changes, with both Jackie and the camera moving at a slower pace. For example, the camera slowly travels around her body in close-up, framing her belly, breasts, shoulders and face under a soft red light. This warm light, which comes from Clyde’s lava lamp, gives the scene a unique character, since this is the only scene in the film that takes place in such a warmly lit room. In addition to homely warmth, the scene shows both Jackie and Clyde as peaceful during foreplay. At first it is hard to tell if she is acting or not, but later on the shot/reverse shot pattern shows that she enjoys herself since she is seen as relaxed and happy even when Clyde cannot see her face. In the middle of the scene Jackie suddenly tries to trick him into hurting her, and he tries to incorporate what he believes is a sexual fantasy in a rather clumsy and inexperienced way, trying not to really hurt her. When she leaves, he starts apologising and asking if she is all right. As a result, Clyde is portrayed as a person of good character who would not

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 131 want to hurt anybody on purpose – as opposed to the villainous murderer of Jackie’s husband and child. The scene presents Clyde’s bedroom as a home for Jackie, although she eventually runs away from it. After the sex scene, and in spite of the way in which Jackie seems at home with Clyde, she beats herself with a stone and prepares her body to seem as though she has been raped. The plan works and Jackie manages to get Clyde sent back to prison. However, she sees that this neither comforts her nor brings back what she has lost, namely her family. Unlike Wiesler, who never aims to attain power as such, Jackie here initially does so, but, instead of limiting her deterritorialising potential by enacting a simple revenge plan somewhere outside the panopticon, she becomes a nomad by refusing to use that power and dropping the charges against Clyde. In other words, she turns the negative power she attains into a positive potential to talk with Clyde and to try to see that he is not that different to her, in that he is someone trying to get by in spite of a traumatic past experience. Jackie does not use her power to destroy, but instead to understand. The political content in Red Road is not as explicit as in the other two surveillance films. The film does not narrate any negotiation of a past trauma between two countries, as The Lives of Others does between East and West Germany, and as Kitchen Stories does between Sweden and Norway (as we shall see). However, the film is a co-production between Denmark and Scotland, both of whose film industries might be defined as ‘small’ (Hjort and Petrie 2007). Furthermore, the film shows two marginal characters, both isolated and poor, who manage to bury their differences when they come to recognise their common situation. While not necessarily a story concerning a ‘national’ trauma, the disappearance in Red Road of the border between the seer and the seen nonetheless allows the negotiation of a common trauma to take place through the becoming-nomad of the main protagonist.

A Miniature Panopticon: Kitchen Stories A less traumatic nomadic encounter comes from the bittersweet Swedish-Norwegian co-production Kitchen Stories. Loosely based on real research carried out in Sweden in the 1950s, the film tells the story of Home Research Institute representative, Folke, who during the postwar period is sent from Sweden to Norway to observe how a single male participant, Isak, uses his kitchen, in order to discover the most efficient housework techniques. Abusing the rules of the research, Folke leaves his watchtower and becomes friends with Isak. As a result of the film’s

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132 Deleuze and Film surreal set-up, whereby Folke installs a literal observation tower in Isak’s kitchen, the film puts all the elements of the surveillance films and their nomadic protagonists into an abstract and minimal mise-en-scène. The film begins with Folke and his colleagues crossing the border from Sweden to Norway. The scene features dozens of cars of the same colour and model, slowly moving in harmony as if they were one big vehicle. The line of cars creates a strong linear effect that exceeds the limits of the frame, suggesting that their number is infinite. After this ceremonial border crossing, Folke’s supervisor, Malmberg (Reine Brynolfsson), explains how he feels sick every time he crosses into Norway and changes the side of the road on which he drives (at that time Swedes drove on the left side of the road, Norwegians on the right). This scene adds an explicitly transnational dimension to the binary power politics in the theme of surveillance, introducing a literal and ceremonial border crossing between two countries. This transnational dimension is re-emphasised when, after they decide finally to speak to each other, Folke and Isak speak two different languages, Swedish and Norwegian respectively. The nomad of Kitchen Stories, Folke (whose name ironically means ‘people’), deterritorialises several borders and, in addition to feeling at home in Norway and feeling close to the person he spies on, completes becoming a nomad by actually settling in Isak’s house. The whole film focuses on the relationship between the two old men, Swedish observer Folke and grumpy Norwegian Isak. Isak regrets hosting this research after finding out that the horse promised to him as an enticement is in fact a wooden toy. For a long time Isak resists letting Folke and his miniature watchtower, reminiscent of a tennis umpire’s chair, into his kitchen, but one day Isak leaves his door open without saying a word, and Folke settles in, waiting ready with notepad and pencils for Isak to use the kitchen. The watchtower functions as a parody of the idea of the panopticon, physically placing the surveillance officer in a private space to spy on how an old man uses his kitchen. According to the rules of the research institute they are forbidden to communicate and the participant, Isak, must act freely in the kitchen and pretend Folke is not watching him. When they are apart we see both Isak and Folke from eye level in more or less conventional frames. However when they are together in the kitchen, the camera frames them from each other’s viewpoint: Folke from a lower angle and Isak from a higher angle. Consequently, the images register the difference between their respective situations but do not allow us to take sides; in this kitchen the spectator remains equally

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 133 distant from both men. Furthermore, this high/low shot/reverse shot pattern allows us to see the story from both perspectives in turn, turning the kitchen into a combination of two kinds of spaces of surveillance, the panopticon and the prison cell. The surveillance officer and the one upon whom he spies share a private place, since Isak’s kitchen happens to be Folke’s workplace. This makes Kitchen Stories different from the other two films considered above. Isak, determined to make his observer’s life miserable, never uses his kitchen in a conventional manner (e.g. for cooking), but instead carries out unusual activities there, such as preparing mouse traps, cutting his good friend Grant’s (Bjørn Flobert) hair and hanging wet clothes out to dry. He starts to cook in his bedroom above the kitchen and to watch Folke from a hole he makes in the kitchen ceiling. After this reversal of observer/observed, the camera continues with a similarly ‘neutral’ high/ low shot/reverse shot pattern, still not taking sides. Day after day Folke keeps coming to observe an empty kitchen, unaware that he is under surveillance, before beginning to make himself feel at home in Isak’s kitchen. The first verbal exchange between the two men is caused by Folke’s taking the salt and not putting it back in its place. Following this, the two men gradually get used to each other and eventually they share tobacco, coffee and some friendly chat, much to the annoyance of Isak’s best friend, Grant, and Folke’s superior, Malmberg. A relationship develops and gradually Folke leaves his watchtower, instead sitting with Isak and using the house, thereby territorialising the place like his own and rebelling against the research institute. This change of roles in the kitchen is marked by a shift in the cinematography of the film. After they become friends, the camera frames both Folke and Isak together in the frame instead of in a shot/reverse shot pattern. In the new relationship both Folke and Isak sit side by side, and the kitchen is framed from their shared eye level. Folke goes into the other rooms of the house as well, where he is similarly framed with Isak in typically symmetrical compositions, which show them now as equals. Instead of watching each other, then, the two men start communicating. At the end of Kitchen Stories, a literal shift occurs between the characters: Isak dies and Folke settles in Isak’s house in Norway. The film ends with an image of two cups, as Folke waits for Grant to have coffee with him. Since we have no information on Folke’s private life and home in Sweden, we might consider him as ‘homeless’ as Wiesler and Jackie. As in the other two films, Folke makes a connection with the person he spies upon, and starts to feel at home where they live. However, the nomad in this film, Folke, experiences a more interesting and intense

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134 Deleuze and Film becoming than either Wiesler or Jackie, because he actually moves into and settles down in Isak’s house. In Kitchen Stories the changing camera angles signal a change in the perception of the filmic space. A simple kitchen, at first configured as a panopticon, turns into a peaceful home where Folke and Isak talk about a variety of things including distant relatives, the future of energy resources, and the Second World War. These conversations suggest various interconnected moments from a shared past and future between the two. The kitchen turns into a site of negotiation for discussing and overcoming the post-war rivalry between Sweden and Norway. For this reason, Cecilia Hector sees the film as ‘an allegory of Norwegians’ healthy scepticism – for historic reasons – about Swedish attempts to study them’, which ‘resembles an invasion from the east’ although currently there is no enmity between the two countries (Hector 2003: 14). The disappearance of the border between seer and seen becomes a metaphor for the erasure of the border between the two previously rival countries that are now preoccupied by common problems.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have pursued the schizoanalysis of a particular event, namely the surveillance officer’s becoming nomad, in three surveillance films. The schizoanalytic approach has allowed me to comment on the characters’ minoritarian attitude in choosing nomadic potential over dominating power. Seeing more potential in a fragmented self’s becoming minoritarian, I made use of schizoanalysis instead of psychoanalysis, which would be more interested in the gaining of power by, and curing the fragmented psyche of, the surveillance officer. In these films the observer becomes the doer of the action together with the one who is observed, thereby erasing the border between the two. In fact, in The Lives of Others, Red Road, and Kitchen Stories alike, this erasure of borders is presented as the only solution to the main protagonist’s problems. In each film, the spy and the spied upon gradually become one in the sense that old friends, comrades and lovers can be united. The observers in these films come to understand an/ the other, such that they experience what we might term a ‘becoming other’, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is the only way to understand an other at all. I argue that these films are political statements that portray surveillance not simply as an oppressive, limiting and imprisoning experience, but, paradoxically, as an opportunity for nomadic resistance. Despite the sadness of the stories, surveillance leads

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Schizoanalysis and European Surveillance Films 135 to the happiest possible closure, which implies that all of the protagonists start a new life outside of the panopticon (and the love of power) that dominates and imprisons them. Following a shift between the seer and the seen, the films end with the beginning of new lives: Wiesler reads his own story, which has been written as a novel by a grateful Georg, with whom he shares a mutual admiration; Jackie visits her family and shares her sorrow with them; and Folke waits for Grant to have a chat over a cup of coffee in his kitchen. These closures are reached after the protagonists have managed to look closely enough to see that the seer and the seen are not enemies or opposites, but are in many respects the same (although with some differences, of course), and that as such they can understand – and perhaps even love – each other.

References Abou-Rihan, F. (2008), Deleuze and Guattari: A Psychoanalytic Itinerary, London: Continuum. Braidotti, R. (1994), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Buchanan, I. (2008), ‘Introduction: Five Theses of Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema’, in I. Buchanan and P. MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 1–15. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights. Deleuze, G. And F. Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2004), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London and New York: Vintage. Haggerty, K.D. and R.V. Ericson (2000), ‘The Surveillant Assemblage’, British Journal of Sociology, 51 (4) (December): 605–22 Hector, C. (2003), ‘Underfundig Komedi’, Psykolog Tidningen Utgiven av Sveriges Psykologförbund, 22 (3) (December): 14, available at www.psykologforbundet. se/Psykologtidningen/PDF%20Tidning/PT0322.pdf (accessed 7 April 2011). Hjort, M. and D. Petrie (2007), The Cinema of Small Nations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holland, E.W. (1999), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, London: Routledge. Martin-Jones, D. and D. Sutton (2008), Deleuze Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Massumi, B. (1992), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2004), ‘Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum, pp. ix–xvi.

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136 Deleuze and Film Shohat, E. (1999), ‘By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyber Frontiers and Diasporic Vistas’, in H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 213–33.

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Chapter 8

Fictions of the Imagination: Habit, Genre and the Powers of the False

Amy Herzog

The past two decades have witnessed a surge of interest in Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema in English-language film scholarship. Nevertheless, Deleuzian approaches to cinema have not always rested comfortably alongside more established practices within the field. The question of genre presents a particular point of tension in this regard. Recent work in genre studies has incorporated dynamic models for understanding the operations of film’s generic conventions. Exploring adaptations across media and disciplinary boundaries, scholars have situated genre films within complex industrial discourses, examining a rich body of archival material beyond the texts of the films themselves (e.g. Grant 1995; Dixon 2000). However, some notable exceptions aside (for example, Conley 2000), these studies seem incompatible with the concerns of Deleuze’s film-philosophy project. Despite the complexity of Deleuze’s own taxonomy of signs in the Cinema volumes, his systems of image classification remain rooted in the immediacy of the individual articulation. Indeed, Deleuze’s classifications locate the affective power of film images outside of pre-coded expectations such as genre. If for Deleuze the crystalline image of time works to tease out new configurations of sensation and thought, the overly determined conventions of the genre film seem hopelessly colonised by the forces of causality and commercialism. At best, one might imagine using Deleuze to examine moments of excess that press against the outer limits of genre, in effect reading the expressive qualities of a film against their generic or industrial coding. While genre might thus appear to be one of the areas of film studies least conducive to a Deleuzian approach, I would argue that several aspects of Deleuze’s work could expand our understanding of the functionality of generic categories. Key here are three overlapping concepts, as elucidated across Deleuze’s writing: habit, the simulacrum,

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138 Deleuze and Film and the powers of the false. Certainly this take on genre is fairly idiosyncratic, remaining closer to Deleuze’s broader work on philosophy and art than it does to industrial, historical or reception-based genre theories. Yet a deeper exploration of the affective impact of cinematic repetition might enrich our understanding of the complex ways in which individual films situate themselves within, and against, conventional expectations. Deleuze’s resistance to representational modalities would seem fundamentally opposed to the notion of a genre as an abstract category, a set of conventions or structures to which individual texts vary or adhere. Yet Deleuze himself makes extensive use of classifications in his philosophy, and makes clear that he finds a certain utility in what might appear to be traditional groupings, so long as those categories remain rooted in the materiality of that which they describe. Deleuze links his own passion for classification to the Jorge Luis Borges passage that provided the foundation for Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, a quotation from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ containing a list of seemingly arbitrary categories: ‘(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens’, and so on (Foucault 1994: xv). ‘All classifications belong to this style’, states Deleuze in an interview: They are mobile, modifiable, retroactive, boundless, and their criteria vary from instance to instance . . . A classification always involves bringing together things with very different appearances and separating those that are very similar. That is the beginning of the formation of concepts. We sometimes say that ‘classical,’ ‘romantic,’ or ‘nouveau roman’ – even ‘neorealism’ – are insufficient abstractions. I believe that they are in fact valid categories, provided we trace them to singular symptoms or signs rather than general forms. A classification is always a symptomology. What we classify are signs in order to formulate a concept that presents itself as an event rather than an abstract essence. In this respect, the different disciplines are really signaletic materials. (Deleuze 2000: 368)

Deleuze then offers up his own classification of cinematic space that ranges from the encompassing (American westerns, the films of Akira Kurosawa) to the flat (Joseph Losey) to the empty (Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni) to the stratographic (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet). While the associations he draws between works and artists leaps across more traditional generic and national groupings, Deleuze draws our attention here to specific affinities, or certain stylistic consistencies, that might otherwise escape notice. He suggests, at the same time, that the classifications of space and light that he identi-

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fies could extend into other disciplines and media, such as science and painting (Deleuze 2000: 368–9). How, then, might we approach the subject of cinematic genres symptomatologically? And how might the classifications that arise from such a process interface with more traditional generic conventions? The challenge here would be to develop a means for classifying patterns and modalities in films not based on fixed, preexisting forms, but arising from the expressive materiality of the filmic event. The notion of film as an event is critical in this regard, as it shifts our attention to the interactive space between spectator and text, as well as the spaces between texts, and between sites of articulation. In this somewhat limited way, I would identify two points of resonance between Deleuze’s film-philosophy and the notion of genre as a discourse; both approaches work to discern certain expressive refrains circulating between films, and both are attuned to acts of perception and ‘reading’ as core to cinematic meaning. In the sections that follow, I will propose three means of rethinking film genre in relation to Deleuze, with a focus on the category of the domestic melodrama. The first, following Elena del Río’s work on affective-performance, posits genre as a limit against which a filmic text produces meaning. The second utilises the links between habits, stereotypes, and simulacra in Deleuze’s work (and those he draws from) to think about genre as a kind of productive fiction. Finally, focusing on the works of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I outline some of the ways in which an organic symptomatology might be imagined alongside, and counter to, existing generic categories.

Genre as Limit In Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Elena del Río explores the tension between the ‘representational imperatives of narrative’ and the ‘non-representational imperatives of the affectiveperformative’ moment as manifested cinematically (del Río 2008: 15). Though many of the films she studies (including works by Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch and Claire Denis) could be categorised by their melodramatic tendencies, del Río prefers to frame her project according to the more variable fluctuations of certain stabilising and destabilising qualities she identifies in each work. Thus del Río posits the performative as an affective force that destabilises narrative structures, linking this tension to a series of similar forces that circulate within Deleuze’s philosophy (the molar and the molecular, for example,

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140 Deleuze and Film or the movement-image and the time-image). Such a reading challenges the hegemony of fixed generic identity in favour of ‘unpredictable, disorganised rhythmic alternation’ and ‘a logic of temporal becoming’: If one considers performance an affective and sensational force that disrupts, redirects, and indeed affects narrative form, it is difficult to consign the affective-performative to stable and well-defined generic paradigms. Because narrative conventions and generic labels are often closely interrelated, the disruption that performance brings into the narrative coherence of a film may simultaneously impact the stability or coherence of this film’s generic identity. (del Río 2008: 15–16)

The genre as a formal category tends to function as a relatively static ideal in relation to which various iterations either conform or diverge. The affective-performative scene, in its corporeal immediacy, almost always serves to exceed and disrupt the conventional flow of the narrative, upending, in the process, fixed generic meaning. What del Río performs in her study is already in fact a symptomatology of affect, reading the traces of performative gestures across a range of diverse filmic texts. As she argues, ‘affect in the film is not a property of certain fixated systems of meaning we call genres, but rather the very quality that challenges the image to move away from any immediately recognisable, systematisable meaning’ (del Río 2008: 200). The heterogeneity of affect, in other words, overwhelms the homogenising impact of the generic category. At the same time, vestiges of genre do persist in these works, providing the limit against which the performance arises. Indeed, as del Río notes, affect becomes most intense in the films of David Lynch when, for example, it reaches the boundaries of generic meaning (del Río 2008: 202). We might thus view genre as maintaining a certain productive function in films, creating patterns and expectations that provide the foundation for counter-rhythms and deviations. The moment of affective impact gains saliency precisely because of its relationship to our entrenched, habitual notions of cinematic meaning. In other words, genres, clichés and formulas do not exist merely as obstacles to be struck down by the more transgressive elements in a film. In many of the examples del Río isolates, for example, the performer inhabits the cliché, creating affective excesses that destabilise its coded meaning. In the process, we experience not only the resonances of the corporeal performance, but the pleasures and discomforts of witnessing a larger system of representation coming unhinged. Noting that Douglas Sirk’s family melodramas contain a preponderance of female characters who are performers and exhibitionists, del Río argues that these

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stereotypical formulations of femininity as spectacle provide a ‘point of departure’ for more transgressive trajectories. ‘Ironically’, she writes, ‘the same features that tend to be used in the service of ideological coercion may also serve as the vehicle for a deterritorialisation of cultural norms and frames of reference’ (del Río 2008: 31). What we witness in these acts of performative deterritorialisation, I would argue, is an expressive sleight of hand. When, for example, Dorothy Malone dances with wild abandon in Sirk’s Written on the Wind (USA, 1956), she embodies any number of pre-formulated representational categories: the objectified female performer, the ‘loose’ woman, the bad seed. But the particularities of her performance, and the visualisation of this event, flesh out the clichés in palpable and unnerving ways: the lurid pinks, reds and blacks in her boudoir, the blaring jazz music on her record player, the counterpoint of Malone’s father’s fatal fall intercut with her movements. The code or stereotype becomes a guise for another set of affects and meanings; and the resonance of such a moment, I would argue, is heightened by the dissonance and uncertainty created in the act of deterritorialising (versus merely rejecting) the code. Deleuze describes a similar relationship between narrative formulas and the powers of the false that arise from the time-image. ‘This new regime’ of the time-image, he writes, ‘no less than the old one – throws up its ready-made formulas, its set procedures, its laboured and empty applications, its failures, its conventional and “second-hand” examples offered to us as masterpieces’ (Deleuze 1989: 132). What changes in the regime of the crystallised image of time is that narration works to falsify, destabilising the representational elements that ‘truthful narration’ works to establish. A key figure in this regime, for Deleuze, is the forger, who emerges as ‘the character of the cinema’ of the time-image. In the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, for example, forgers assume a new centrality. The forger is ‘simultaneously the man of pure descriptions and the marker of the crystal-image, the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary; he passes into the crystal, and makes the direct time-image visible; he provokes undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the true and the false’ (Deleuze 1989: 132). The cinematic forger embodies a more deepseated fascination with the murky, shifting boundaries between truth and fiction, reality and the imaginary. Forgers work inside the codes, occupying and mutating them. Deleuze points to an increased fascination with forgery as a narrative theme, but the implications of his observations here are far reaching.

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142 Deleuze and Film I would argue that forgery provides a productive model for thinking about films, and filmmakers, who mutate and exploit preexisting codes and expectations. We might locate acts of forgery on the registers of sound, décor, colour, framing and dialogue. Genre, in this sense, provides the foundation that is deterritorialised and transformed. What we witness is not a clean departure, but a sleight of hand that builds on a code, then renders it hollow, estranged.

Habitual Constructions We must take care, however, not to dismiss genre as merely the static ‘bad object’ that difference transforms. The formation of the genre itself is a highly complex process, a continually evolving exercise in the fabrication of representational codes. I would like to suggest that genre, even in its most reductive manifestations, is a fictional construction. In many instances, these fictions serve to reinforce restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour. Yet their status as fictional categories renders them open to more subversive acts of co-optation. Deleuze’s work on habit and repetition provides a means of exposing the seeds of difference at the core of repetitive formulations such as genre. And the concept of the simulacra, discussed in the following section, sheds light on the ways in which these seeds might be productively actualised. The relationship between representational conventions and the variations they generate can be seen as an extension of Deleuze’s broader philosophy of repetition and difference. Rather than framing repetition as a negative pole against which difference reacts, we might explore the entwined circulations between every iteration and deviation. Though genres are often defined according to certain fixed characteristics, it may be more useful to think about their functionality – to ask what it is that a melodrama or a musical or a horror film does. Framing genres according to the work they perform allows us to sidestep the trap of creating systems of dead categories, abstracted general forms. We can thus accommodate fluctuations in genres as they evolve, and forge new series of classifications that transect the rigid typologies imposed by industry or academic discipline. In this way, too, we might locate traces of more transgressive forces already circulating within the convention itself. This focus on functionality versus typology has an additional benefit; it centres our attention not on the characteristics of the texts, but on the impact of the act of articulation on the mind that contemplates it. Deleuze’s reflections on David Hume and habit in Difference and Repetition (1994) are particularly illuminating in this regard. Hume

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describes the way in which habits accumulate for subjects: as a subject amasses various perceptions and experiences, the full range of those experiences are contracted, condensed into a set of patterns used to anticipate future events. While the formation of habits involves a certain distillation of difference necessary to form an interpretive pattern or code, the process of discovering a series, for Deleuze, introduces a new order of difference within the mind that perceives it: Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. Hume’s famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem: since it implies, in principle, a perfect independence on the part of each presentation, how can repetition change something in the case of the repeated element? . . . Hume takes as an example the repetition of cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A... Each case or objective sequence AB is independent of the others. The repetition (although we cannot yet properly speak of repetition) changes nothing in the object of the state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates a difference, something new in the mind. Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B . . . Does not the paradox of repetition lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind which contemplates it? By virtue of a difference that the mind draws from repetition? (Deleuze 1994: 70)

Repetition is a process that unfolds temporally, through individual acts of iteration and contemplation. Repetition is not something that resides in a text, but something that occurs in the engaged mind of the perceiver, in the space between subject and object: ‘when we say that habit is a contraction we are speaking not of an instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but rather of the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind’ (Deleuze 1994: 74). Thus difference and variation are not strictly opposed to repetition. Rather, they are inherent to it, even within this most passive synthesis of time. The contracted vibrations of past perceptions coalesce as habits within bodies and brains. As the contractions become increasingly complex and autonomous, moving into higher realms of human activity, the synthesis of time becomes more active. Memory creates virtual layers of the past that disrupt linear notions of time, and in the process, the formation of habits involves increasing degrees of intervention on the part of the perceiver. With each act of habitual contraction, differences inherent to experience are minimised in order to form an illusory, coherent model by which expectations of the future might be formed, which Hume calls ‘fictions of the imagination’. Such fictions are in fact necessary for survival; they

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144 Deleuze and Film allow us to extract, from the overwhelming flow of empirical sensations, an image of a cohesive world that we can navigate. Yet as the syntheses become more active, the impressions and fictions move into the realm of ‘artificial signs’, for Deleuze, ‘that is to say, the passage from spontaneous imagination to the active faculties of reflective representation, memory and intelligence’ (Deleuze 1994: 77). Representational practices thus arise from the accumulated habits of material experience, and the interventions of memory and the virtual past. And acts of falsification, creative fictions, are core to the process. These fictions can easily devolve into habitual stereotypes, or even unlink themselves from material experiences altogether, generating false experiences and beliefs that fall into representational and interpretive codes. Yet Deleuze locates a generative force within creative fictions that can lead to disruptive acts of deterritorialisation. Within the realm of the arts, fictions and fabulations, the powers of the false, have a tremendous political potential. We might thus conceive of genre as a habitual means of categorising film. Based on our previous media experiences, and on the familiar conventions of storytelling, we have created collective sets of expectations that govern both the creation and the reading of cinematic texts. Difference is thus contracted in order to distil similarities between disparate works. And these conventions are further solidified as they are written into new films, films crafted with the express purpose of filling slots within genre-driven markets. Yet the representational codes themselves are idealised projections, virtual projected models. As fictional creations, genres are prone to hijacking – acts of simulation, forgery and parody. It is in this manner that genre, when exposed as an unstable fiction, becomes a platform for the powers of the false.

Disguises, Simulacra and Deterritorialisations In his reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski points to a peculiar tension between what he calls simulacra and stereotypes, or ‘the code of everyday signs’. Simulacra, for Klossowski, are representations of the unrepresentable – expressive manifestations of the phantasms, the dominant or obsessive impulses, of the soul. Much like the projected fictions of habit, which create simulated images based on past experiences, Klossowski describes simulacra navigating between the unrepresentable flux of existence and the schematic codes required by subjects for survival. Distilling the unrepresentable into a legible form, simulacra build upon, and exaggerate, the stereotypes we habitually rely upon to

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understand the world. What Klossowski draws out from his reading of Nietzsche here is the simulacrum as a willed intervention, a ‘project of philosophical imposture’ (Klossowski 1997: 134). Forgeries, parodies, simulacra: these terms circulate throughout Deleuze’s writings, drawn and extended, in many ways, from his own readings of Nietzsche and Klossowski, manifesting themselves in his cinema volumes in the discussion of the powers of the false. Resonances of this concept emerge in a short essay on the Série Noire crime novels, focusing in particular on questions of stereotype and generic code. Deleuze notes that habits and clichés plague many commercial novels, most noticeably in their attempts to achieve ‘realism’: ‘For bad literature, the real as such is the object of more stereotypes, puerilisations, and cut-price dreams than even an imbecilic imagination would know what to do with’ (Deleuze 2001: 10). Yet he praises the works within the Série Noire that embrace and elevate generic clichés through pastiche. Rather than attempting to represent reality, crime novels that mimic the style of William Faulkner or John Steinbeck, for example, create parodies that obscure the line between the real and the imaginary. Like the simulacrum, the parody arises precisely from within the restrictions of habitual representations. And like the simulacrum, the parody is an artistic invention, or intervention. In each instance, reality is neither represented, nor rejected. Instead the very act of simulation or imposture opens into a new and more profound engagement with the real: ‘parody in turn shows us directions within the real that we would never have found by ourselves’ (Deleuze 2001: 10). The parody, in other words, is less a send-up than an act of rendering obscure questions of intention, authenticity, truth and fiction. By engaging in pastiches of existing styles, these detective novels destabilise our expectations of what it is that a detective novel should do (for example, seek the truth with regard to a criminal act), shift the relations and qualities attached to stock characters (criminals and detectives), and reframe the contexts in which the crimes and cases unfold (such as institutions, networks of power and urban landscapes). The language used to represent these overdetermined tales of sexual intrigue and violence thickens, becoming more opaque as the true object of its narrative slips from view. In terms of genre, we might say that a parodic style deterritorialises the established generic function of a work (revealing the ‘truth’ about an unsolved crime), shifting the work onto new functional terrain (revelling in the surface level of signs, and, in doing so, destabilising notions of any underlying truth). The process Deleuze points to clearly extends beyond the realm of the detective novel. What we find here is an act of

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146 Deleuze and Film double displacement. The creative fictions of genre, brought about by necessity, create a virtual code, a classification that establishes patterns of expectation and minimises difference. But the classification itself is a kind of fabulation, one that can be reproduced in a false copy, a simulacrum that reveals the hollowness of the original. If the creation of habit evolves from a passive synthesis of difference, the second move is far more active. What we find in the active intervention are the powers of the false. Deleuze expands his discussion of the powers of the false extensively in his second volume on cinema, Cinema 2. The filmic time-image similarly throws truth and falsity into question in a variety of ways, each labouring to destabilise narrative verisimilitude. Like reflections in a crystal, certain film images present the virtual and actual as simultaneous and indiscernible. The figure of the forger looms large here, as investment in any faith in the ‘real’ becomes impossible; there is no originary image beneath the series of masks (Deleuze cites the expanding circuits of spectacle in Federico Fellini; 1989: 88–9). Time in other film images comes unhinged; rather than a linear unfolding, we encounter multiple sheets of time, each with its own set of ‘incompossible presents’ and ‘not-necessarily-true pasts’ (Deleuze 1989: 131). Truth, in such instances, is undecidable (see, for example, the overlapping images of the past in the films of Orson Welles or Resnais). The thrust of becoming as an ongoing process can result in another temporal reconfiguration. Here time is experienced not as a string of moments that move from before to after, but as an evolving ‘burst of series’. Rather than a sequence of distinguishable states or instants, before and after are inextricable, two coexisting sides of ‘becoming as potentialisation, as series of powers’ (Deleuze 1989: 275). Change becomes manifest here in a series of images that destabilise notions of a true, fixed identity (the complex narrative strategies of postcolonial cinema, for example, filled with historical fabulations and invented selves). Indiscernible, undecidable, inextricable, incompossible: the point of commonality amongst all these strategies is the unstoppable force of change. Truth is no longer a fixed universal, it is something created anew at each moment. Indeed, Deleuze’s interest in the powers of the false in the arts is not to identify a work that falsifies some notion of truth. What is key, instead, is the notion of invention as a practice that unfolds in time, continually occurring, recurring, evolving. And the task of the artist goes beyond that of the forger in rising above the level of form to create something new: ‘Only the creative artist takes the power of the false to a degree which is realised, not in form, but in transformation . . .

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What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created’ (Deleuze 1989: 146–7). To return to the question of genre, then, we might think about genres as fictions of the imagination, habitual codes created to make sense of diverse textual expressions. These codes, of course, are continually reinforced and cemented, working as they so often do in support of existing industry practices, existing ideological models, existing modes of reception. But, being at their core abstract projections, they are never fully actualised in a precise or systematic manner; it is hard to identify even a single genre film that faithfully adheres to all the criteria associated with those broad categories. Deviations multiply, and the imagined boundaries of the category evolve. Moreover, each iteration of even the most uninspired generic work elicits some kind of difference in the audience that contemplates it. While Deleuze does not address this concern directly, we might draw more attention to the variations elicited by the context of each filmic event in understanding how cycles of repetition extend beyond the film text itself. Do these codes and stereotypes operate differently on the third or thirteenth viewing? In a university lecture hall or on a handheld device? Does the sedimentation of certain generic distinctions within the realm of film studies shift the legibility of a film’s expressive elements? Can generic habits be destabilised in ways that render the codes themselves indiscernible? The key to working productively with generic stereotypes and habitual codes is to deterritorialise them, denaturalise them, opening them up to new paths of movement and thought. To do so requires a willed intervention. In a lecture on music, Deleuze elaborates on this dynamic through a discussion of pulsed versus non-pulsed time (i.e. expressions that are heavily coded and habitual versus those that break free from, and deterritorialise, the measure): In a certain manner, pulsed time will always be given to you, or it will be imposed on you, you will be forced to comply with it and from another side, it will order you; the other must be wrested . . . My problem of nonpulsed time becomes: wresting something from the territorialities of time, you wrest something from the temporal development of forms and you wrest something from the formation of subjects. (Deleuze 1977)

This distinction between something given and something created resonates broadly throughout Deleuze’s writings. The implications of the willed intervention are manifold, impacting not only the form and temporality of the work itself, but larger political questions regarding power

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148 Deleuze and Film and subject formation, the ideological scaffolding, in other words, for the fictions of the code. I would like to propose two ways of thinking through these notions of willed interventions and creative wresting in relation to the cinematic genre. The first involves an artistic intervention, taking a filmic text or a code and wringing new meanings, new, productive falsities from it. Joseph Cornell’s found footage collages are particularly affecting examples in this regard. Films such as Rose Hobart (USA, 1936) and Thimble Theater (USA, 1938) juxtapose snippets of devalued, discarded or incongruous films (B-studio films, children’s cartoons, educational or scientific shorts), often projected at a slower frame rate. These moments, wrested from their narrative context and native temporality take on a haunting quality: Hobart, the star of East of Borneo (George Melford, USA, 1931), is caught in a ceaseless state of reactive inaction; flowers metamorphose into carousels of living animals. What might have appeared, in its given state, to be a mundane artifact is revealed as an animated, enigmatic cabinet of curiosities. A 2007 installation by Spencer Finch suggests another mode of artistic intervention. West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 pm) uses the reflected light from a bank of video monitors, facing a wall, to recreate the precise colour patterns Finch observed in his motel room during sunset on that date. The nine monitors (which viewers can only see by peering around the side of the bank) show thirty stills from John Ford’s The Searchers (USA, 1956), each changing only once per minute, to calibrate the colour and tonality of the light that fills the gallery. Finch’s own memory of the light in Monument Valley (mediated by the motel room) is indiscernible from Ford’s epic fabulation of that same landscape as Hollywood backdrop in a film that is already both icon for and deterritorialisation of the western as a whole. Not only is The Searchers cast anew in this context, but our very notions of light, place and memory also come undone, wrested from the comfort of the individual recollection. Another approach to creative intervention rests in the realm of a philosophical or critical engagement. We might aspire, here, to be the reader that wrests something latent or unforeseen from an existing body of work. As with the artistic intervention, the aim is to engage with the materiality of that which one observes like a clinician. ‘If they are great’, writes Deleuze, authors are more like doctors than patients. We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists. There is always a great deal of art involved in the groupings of symptoms, in the organisation of a

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table where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the figure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general; rather, they are clinicians of civilisation. (Deleuze 1990: 237)

A critical engagement with genre would mean a renewal of the tables by which films are habitually organised, seeking out new connections and points of distinction. It means a further recognition of the work that filmmaker/clinicians perform in crafting their art, teasing out the relationship between material expressions and a civilisation/world that might lie dormant in the work. The film-philosopher must not merely describe, or impose preexisting models. Instead, she or he should ‘form concepts that aren’t of course “given” in films but nonetheless relate specifically to cinema . . . Concepts specific to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically’ (Deleuze 1995: 57–8).

A Symptomatology: People, Light, Flowers, Mirrors, Blood In a nearly ecstatic essay written in 1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder laid out his candid responses to a Douglas Sirk retrospective: Sirk has said you can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things that make life worth living. Sirk has also said: a director’s philosophy is lighting and camera angles. And Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do. (Fassbinder 1975: 88)

A filmmaker’s philosophy arises out of his or her manipulations of light, of surfaces, of images, of sounds. Such a description hews closely to Deleuze’s own insistence upon the affective power of pure optical and sonic situations. If philosophy ‘tells stories . . . with concepts’, the cinema ‘tells stories with blocks of movements/durations’ (Deleuze 1998: 15). The introduction of Sirk and Fassbinder allows me to circle back to del Río’s work on these filmmakers in order to reconsider the relationship between the performative qualities she identifies and the peculiar habits and formulations of the domestic melodrama. How does the category of the domestic melodrama work to create certain types of stylistic tics? Indeed, the melodrama is one of the most historically enduring, mutable and enigmatic dramatic forms, vastly exceeding what one might easily

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150 Deleuze and Film deem a genre-proper. From the perspective of a heretical symptomatology, this looseness lends itself to a creative renewal of the generic code. I am further drawn to the affinities between these two filmmakers, who seem to be articulating variations on a shared refrain, voiced in one instance within, in the other outside, the porous boundaries of a generic paradigm. Sirk and Fassbinder each seem hyperconscious of the functionality of generic conventions. And, it could be argued, each performs acts of forgery and parody in manipulating those codes. What we might find in a critical reading of these works, then, is an interplay between both artistic and philosophical modes of intervention. In his seminal essay on Sirk and the family melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser turns to the more elemental definition of the genre: ‘a dramatic narrative in which musical accompaniment marks the emotional effects . . . This is still perhaps the most useful definition’, he writes, because it allows melodramatic elements to be seen as constituents of a system of punctuation, giving expressive colour and chromatic contrast to the story-line, by orchestrating the emotional ups and downs of the intrigue. The advantage of this approach is that it formulates the problems of melodrama as problems of style and articulation. (Elsaesser 1987: 50)

Such a broad definition, of course, proves entirely unhelpful should one wish to create a system for categorising melodramatic films according to narrative structure; almost every film deploys music as an emotional marker, and we are given little guidance as to the distinctions that could be drawn between different stylistic approaches to emotional expression. Yet this starting point seems closer to Deleuze’s assertion that artists work with shapes (and not forms), reliefs and projections. A focus on style and articulation is in effect a symptomatology; rather than imposing classifying structures from above, the reader must wrest meaning from the signaletic material itself. Meaning is not given here; it is made. A focus on signs and style draws our attention to the particularities of each cinematic event. This move, for example, allows Elsaesser to make important distinctions between the domestic melodramas typified by Sirk, Nicholas Ray and Vincente Minnelli and other melodramatic traditions. The most readily apparent of these distinctions is the visual and sonic excesses of these works, particularly in their brightly hued, widescreen incarnations. Readings of the domestic melodrama, Elsaesser insists, are justified in ‘giving critical importance to the mise-en-scène over intellectual content or story value’. Emotional and dramatic conflict is ‘sublimated’ in these films into ‘décor, colour, gesture, and com-

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position of the frame’ (Elsaesser 1987: 52). Although Elsaesser frames his final observations on the family melodrama within the context of Freudian dream analysis, I suspect that his conclusion lends itself to more open readings: Melodramas often use middle-class American society, its iconography and the family experience . . . as their manifest ‘material,’ but ‘displace’ it into quite different patterns, juxtaposing stereotyped situations in strange configurations, provoking clashes and ruptures which not only open up new associations but also redistribute the emotional energies which suspense and tensions have accumulated in disturbingly different directions. (Elsaesser 1987: 60)

We might begin our symptomatology of the Sirk-Fassbinder melodrama with an examination of this kind of productive displacement. Del Río reads the gestures of the performative body as displacing or reorganising the narrative codes that would contain it. I might extend her observations to consider the performative gestures of costume and décor in this type of domestic melodrama. Emotion is not just externalised here, it threatens to devour the frame. If a symptomatological genre could be formed on the basis of ‘aggressive wallpaper and draperies’, we might draw a clear line between Sirk, Fassbinder and Pedro Almodóvar (with echoes of Jacques Demy and David Lynch). The rooms in these films are resplendent with the plumage of suffering and unfulfilled desire. Patterns and textures proliferate, collapsing space, bifurcating the frame, and swallowing up the human figures that dwell within them. The nearly nauseating purples and pinks of the hotel room Kyle (Robert Stack) attempts to seduce Lucy (Lauren Bacall) with in Written on the Wind are illustrative of this kind of performative gesture. Costumes, too, vocalise what the characters themselves cannot articulate. In Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974), the plump, middle aged Emmi (Brigitte Mira) wears a most spectacular and incongruous pair of bright yellow patent leather platform sandals. The shoes signal much about her character that we might not read in her physical gestures, but even beyond this, they create a gesture all of their own, becoming part of a larger tonal palette that exceeds individual characterisation, triggering even more amorphous affective responses. This observation, that domestic melodramas externalise suppressed emotion, is certainly not new. However, what I am suggesting we take from this observation is a renewed understanding of what it is that the domestic melodrama does. What will result is not a new generic formulation, but rather a sense of an expressive tendency that might surface

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152 Deleuze and Film in a variety of works, towards a diversity of ends. I would read this tendency as a movement that interfaces with the more formalised generic category of ‘the melodrama’, at times as unreflexive mimicry, and at others as an act of artistic intervention. In each case, the provocation must be taken up by the viewer: how will the gesture register? What potentialities might be wrested from this expressive material? ‘Melodrama’, Elsaesser writes is often used to describe tragedy that doesn’t quite come off: either because the characters think of themselves too self-consciously as tragic or because the predicament is too evidently fabricated on the level of plot and dramaturgy to carry the kind of conviction normally termed ‘inner necessity’. (Elsaesser 1987: 65)

What makes the domestic melodrama such a rich playground for exploring this dynamic is its excessiveness, together with the unadulterated pleasure that it takes in acts of fabrication. This does not signal a lack of sincerity; rather, I would argue that genuine affect is in abundance in these films – what Nietzsche might call ‘falseness with a good conscience’ (Nietzsche 2001: 225). Nevertheless, the specificity of their empirical expressions often butts against the ostensible goals of the generic form. While melodramas have traditionally been framed as vehicles for imposing moral judgements, filmmakers like Sirk and Fassbinder render judgement meaningless. Each player is a simulacrum, neither determinately ‘true’ nor ‘false’. Surface-level expressions here overpower, forge, and circumvent easy distinctions between interior and exterior; character is flooded. Comic elements proliferate in these films, to be sure, but they are more inscrutable than mocking. The trajectory of the displacement is more often deterritorialised than it is transparent. What one views is not just a symbolic gesture, but an openended reflection on the inextricable relations between individual and world.

Uncategorical Conclusions ‘It is pointless to claim that a list of categories can be open in principle’, writes Deleuze; ‘it can be in fact, but not in principle.’ Categories ‘belong to the world of representation’, whereas descriptive, empirical, pluralist approaches tip into the realm of the simulacrum, the ‘phantastical’ (Deleuze 1994: 284–5). Descriptive symptomatologies, in other words, might be open in fact, if they are based on careful empirical observation, rather than the abstractions of representational catego-

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ries. Symptomatologies must sink their teeth into material conditions and experiences. While general categories rely on sedentary universals, symptomatologies are ‘complexes of space and time’, irreducible ‘nomadic distributions’. ‘Nomadic or phantastical notions’, for Deleuze, are ‘the objects of an essential encounter rather than of recognition’ (Deleuze 1994: 285). Film genres, as we commonly use and understand them, almost certainly fall within the realm of a representational ontology. One might justifiably view the concept of genre with cynicism: genres exist to mould films into preexisting markets, they code our expectations and colonise our interpretations. Generic classifications artificially impose unity upon diverse texts after the fact, obscuring our access to their full optical and sonic richness. Deleuze is even more blunt in his dismissal: ‘the main genres, the western, crime, period films, comedy, and so on, tell us nothing about different types of images or their intrinsic characteristics’ (Deleuze 1995: 46). But it is important to recognise that the signaletic materials of the cinematic expression almost always evolve in relation to the codes of the genre, whether they un-reflexively adhere to them, explicitly refuse them, or engage them in acts of forgery and deterritorialisation. Might we not read the symptomatic expression, then, in dialogue with the generalised codes that circulate through it? And, with careful dissection, might not the codes themselves reveal a whole series of phantasms and simulacra? The interplay between cinematic viewer and text relies upon a series of repetitions, shared fabulations, and thwarted expectations. While most films will inevitably remain vehicles for the replication of codes and stereotypes, the lingering possibility of creative transgression requires a careful consideration of the complex artistic and political work such codes do, or could, perform.

References Conley, T. (2000), ‘Noir in the Red and the Nineties in the Black’, in W.W. Dixon (ed.), Film Genre 2000, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 193–210. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1977), ‘Sur la musique’, transcription of a seminar on Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux at the University of Vincennes, 3 May 1977, trans. T.S. Murphy, available at www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (accessed 4 February 2011). Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C.V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press.

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154 Deleuze and Film Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1998), ‘Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet)’, trans. E. Kaufman, in E. Kaufman and K.J. Heller (eds), Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 14–19. Deleuze, G. (2000), ‘The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze’, trans. M.T. Guirgis, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 365–73. Deleuze, G. (2001), ‘Philosophy of the Série Noire’, trans. T.S. Murphy, Genre, 34: 1–10. Dixon, W.W. (ed.) (2000), Film Genre 2000, Albany: SUNY Press. Elsaesser, T. (1987), ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London: BFI, pp. 43–69. Fassbinder, R.W. (1975), ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, trans. T. Elsaesser, New Left Review, 1 (91): 88–96. Foucault, M. (1994), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. Grant, B.K. (ed.) (1995), Film Genre Reader II, Austin: University of Texas Press. Klossowski, P. (1997), Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D.W. Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001), The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Chapter 9

Feminine Energies, or the Outside of Noir

Elena del Río

Taking a Deleuzian standpoint, this essay will investigate the possibility of assessing the noir genre as the specifically American counterpart to Italian neorealism’s transitional role in marking a psycho-moral crisis in the post-war period – a crisis that in cinematic terms translated into the weakening and collapse of the sensory-motor schema (Deleuze 1989: 5–6). Given the strong ties that neorealism and noir both developed with the social, cultural and economic upheavals in their respective contexts during and in the wake of the war, and given also the high investment in narrative and formal innovation that they both share, we may tentatively assign the noir series of the 1940s and 1950s a parallel, albeit non-symmetrical, function to that accomplished by neorealism. For Deleuze, this involved a shift away from the chain-like causation of actions built upon realistic spatial and temporal moorings towards a cinema of indiscernibility, unfolding through purely optical and sonic situations. As I re-evaluate some key aspects of the noir genre, I seek neither to question the validity of previous scholarly contributions nor to manufacture confirmation of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema in the films of the noir period. Instead, I am inspired by a general Deleuzian stance, also invoked by Ronald Bogue (2010: 125 and 127), which consists of cultivating a measure of scepticism towards past knowledge, and especially towards the ideas one holds most certain. In attempting a partial reconsideration of the noir genre, I will aim at suspending a number of conceptual givens that have framed past critical debates concerning this genre. In particular, I would like to disrupt the critical balance grounded in the Oedipal framings of noir narratives by emphasising instead the genre’s ambivalence towards Oedipal structures of law and morality. The ambiguity that affects the noir film, one which precisely affirms its transitional status, arises from the tension between its indebtedness to the old moral programme – a programme that

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156 Deleuze and Film post-war European cinemas had a much easier time dispatching – and its openness to a historically inflected sensitivity that begins to register the anachronistic irrelevance of the moral doctrine of judgement, debt/guilt, and punishment. In its unique response to the experiential crisis of the mid-twentieth century, the noir genre, as exemplified by films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, USA, 1944), Laura (Otto Preminger, USA, 1944), The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, USA, 1944), Dead Reckoning (John Cromwell, USA, 1947), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1947), does not typically follow the wandering adventures of perception that engage neorealism. Instead, the American noir film channels the generalised cultural and social malaise into angry impulse and criminal/illegal action, both of which hinge upon its core desire to test the limits of the (Oedipal) law, while still remaining deeply steeped in it. Although the characters of noir do not reach the visionary status of characters in neorealism, their actions lose a great deal of the pragmatism of the American classical cinema, in fact proving wholly ineffectual as a means of resolving the crisis at hand. While Deleuze or Deleuzian scholars may not have considered the film noir’s indeterminability sufficiently indeterminate (sufficiently capable of interrupting the powerful hold of the sensory-motor schemata) to merit much attention, this essay will focus on the genre’s contradictory organisation of desire as the basis for its incipient attempts to depart from classical Oedipal configurations and their implied adherence to morality. It is the noir organisation of libidinal forces, coalescing around the femme fatale and her castration-haunted male counterpart, that I wish to address as the sign of this genre’s high potential for shattering older moulds, and thus for creating what at the time must have struck viewers as a qualitatively new kind of cinema. My analysis of this facet of noir will be confined to several representative films, including those mentioned above and a few others, where the sexual and criminal relations between male and female are of paramount importance. In sum, I will examine the ways in which noir can be said to ‘experiment with the real’ by engaging with male and female energies beyond an obvious, fossilised Oedipal critical framework. The film noir presents a series of challenges to the oftentimes cut and dried opposition between the cinemas of the movement-image and the time-image as theorised by Deleuze, for it reveals a number of ambiguities in its formal and narrative categories that are not easily subsumed under the oppositional notions of movement versus duration – external regulated action versus internal unregulated states. This undecidability

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is part of noir’s immense popular and critical appeal, and should not be dampened by attempts to fixate the genre at one or other end of the spectrum. In fact, the noir genre can serve to emphasise the arbitrariness of an absolute segregation between the classical and modern cinemas, a point that Deleuze addresses in Cinema 2: We can choose between emphasising the continuity of cinema as a whole, or emphasising the difference between the classical and the modern. It took modern cinema to re-read the whole of cinema as already made up of aberrant movements and false continuity shots. The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom. (Deleuze 1989: 41)

Thus, instead of considering the difference of noir in terms of opposition between the movement-image and the time-image, I suggest that we discover the aberrant movements and forces that in noir impede the actionimage from reaching totalising, conclusive effects at both the aesthetic and epistemological levels. The noir image, I would argue, is extremely nuanced in its ability to actualise myriad variations and gradations of approximation and divergence between the two kinds of image. The flashback structures and inwardly drawn narrations abundantly displayed in noir give evidence of frequent intrusions of flows of memory, affect and duration that come close to a direct apprehension of time in what otherwise might appear as straightforward action-oriented films. These affective intrusions function as a short-circuiting mechanism vis-à-vis the action-image and its traditional male centre. In noir, the deformation of the action-image and the resurfacing of male castration anxieties occur as parallel, mutually reinforcing phenomena. And it is the superior energies of the female that are particularly responsible not only for exacerbating male anxieties, but also for eventually disabling the male capacity for action, and ultimately discrediting the moral programme that underpins/propels it.

Mobile and Contingent Oedipus Although my analysis will occasionally point to noir’s fluctuating commitments to the movement-image and the time-image, I would like to draw special attention to another opposition that a Deleuzian reconsideration of noir readily invokes: that between Oedipal and non-Oedipal forms of sexuality and desire. This dichotomy, drawn predominantly from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, furnishes a framework of analysis that can directly engage established psychoanalytic discourse

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158 Deleuze and Film on noir. But, here again, we need not approach the noir genre through the oppositional framework of Oedipal versus non-Oedipal desire, and instead we can be receptive to a similar dynamics of gradation and interaction between these two poles. Thus, rather than disputing the force of Oedipus in noir, I would distinguish between two approaches to Oedipal desire: the psychoanalytic approach prevalent in noir criticism, one that takes Oedipus as universal truth; and one that, following Deleuze and Guattari, might take Oedipus as a historically contingent and mobile formation. If we heed the contingency and mobility of Oedipus, we are no longer compelled to oppose the Oedipal to the non-Oedipal model, for, at the heart of desiring-production there lie different nuances and becomings, hence also the possibility of transitioning from an Oedipal into a non-Oedipal libidinal configuration. Following this latter approach, my reconsideration of noir will situate the Oedipal model within the immanent operations of desire rather than imposing this model as a transcendental and abstract ruling principle determining all relations between desiring bodies. To understand Oedipus as a contingent formation, and one that is highly relevant to desire in noir, we must first take a brief detour and explain how Oedipus arises alongside the molecular, non-Oedipal operations of the unconscious as immanent libidinal force and process. For Deleuze and Guattari, the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics rather than the realm of representation, material forces rather than idealities or abstractions. The molecular, schizoanalytic unconscious they postulate as primary does not recognise persons or objects in the Oedipal, familial sense that permeates the psychoanalytic unconscious. Thus, non-Oedipal sexuality and desire function as molecular multiplicities/becomings, desiring-machines that represent nothing and bear no relation to either subjects or objects: ‘Desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures – an always nomadic and migrant desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 292). In this kind of libidinal configuration, the persons that we take as specific love-objects intervene ‘as points of connection, disjunction, conjunction of flows whose libidinal tenor of an unconscious investment they translate’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 293). In a similar vein, castration is a formation alien to molecular, nonOedipal desire, whose ‘free multiplicities . . . [and] multiple breaks never cease producing flows’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 295). It is not that Deleuze and Guattari deny the existence of Oedipal formations, or their

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importance in determining the specific forms desire takes in subjects. But they are careful to stress that Oedipal coagulations of desire are so many restrictions or blockages, resistances and territorialisations of a circulation of desire that is virtually, and even actually, unrestricted and unstoppable. If we consider Oedipality as a secondary, culturally specific way of living desire, and not a universal truth for all subjects at all times, the notions of castration and lack lose their transcendent weight. Instead, castration/lack arises from a twofold cultural/historical process that simultaneously involves an interpretive operation, in the case of psychoanalysis, and an economic operation, in the case of capitalism: ‘Psychoanalysis is the technique of application, for which political economy is the axiomatic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 304). Castration and lack are thus not inherent to desire, but are the effect of an attempt to freeze, unify, or totalise the unwieldy processes of desiring production by evaluating the workings of partial flows and objects in relation to an imagined, despotic whole that remains forever out of one’s reach. But this operation of branding subjects inadequate or lacking is not merely carried out by the institution of psychoanalysis in a kind of isolated and haphazard fashion. As a historically grounded reactional formation, the notion of castration/lack coming from the psychoanalytic theatre of representation is strategically strengthened by the axiomatic of capitalism: the ceaseless production and consumption of surplus that introduces lack to ensure self-perpetuation. When Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘the molar aggregate [of the family] . . . is furrowed by the line of castration’, and that the notion of family hinders relations from being molecular/productive, not least because the familial relation becomes ‘metaphorical for all the others’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 307), they might just as easily have been describing the intractable organisation of desire that critics have conventionally assigned to the noir genre. That is to say, the noir films considered here favour a capitalist privatised organisation of desire where characters become separated from larger social investments and cathect on other individuals following a familial model. Although the family as a cohesive institution and a literal narrative unit of action is practically absent from the noir genre, familial, Oedipal relations arguably hold a central place in these films, and they rule all the more tyrannically precisely for taking on a metaphorical, abstract quality. Thus, whether as literally as in films like Double Indemnity, where the male character actually measures himself up against an older masculine figure, or in films where multiple relations among men fulfil a similar

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160 Deleuze and Film Oedipal role – as happens in Laura, The Woman in the Window, Dead Reckoning, and Out of the Past – noir seems to fit into the pattern where ‘[e]very person in authority is “father”; every object of desire is “mother”, and the subject is constituted in its relation to these’ (Adkins 2007: 166). But regardless of the evidence of an Oedipal organisation in the films themselves, the psychoanalytic reading of noir stays too close to a faithful application of the familial metaphorics for it to entertain other possibilities of libidinal connections in these films (see Johnston 1998). We might then ask whether the castrating paternal and maternal figures of noir reveal a kind of self-evident truth, or whether they might owe part of their credibility to a critical apparatus that takes Oedipus for granted and seeks to mobilise it through the hermeneutic operations of ‘extrapolation, application, and biunivocalisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 306) in order to contain a rather uncontainable web of desire. While it is true that the noir subject, male and female, belongs within the historical premises of a capitalist society that territorialises desire by attempting to impose a structural unity upon its decoded flows, and by extension a sense of lack, it is also true that the Oedipal wheel around which these subjects circle is not without its ruptures and schizzes. My examination of noir thus bears on the ways in which male and female subjects are differently positioned in relation to the representational construction of castration/lack. Instead of assuming the male and female positionings to be symmetrical and reflective of a single Oedipal system that encompasses both their desiring productions, I will align Oedipal desire in noir with the will to moral truth predominantly displayed by the male subject, and non-Oedipal desire with the ethical possibilities of the powers of the false adumbrated, if not always fully expressed, through the figure of the femme fatale. My discussion of noir will endeavour to loosen up the contours of Oedipal structures of castration and lack, and their gendered alignments, with the aim of utilising concepts as changing processes, rather than ready-made slots capable of containing the force of living images.

Uneven Reservoirs of Vitality From the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, the noir genre was as variegated in its choice of iconic themes and narratives as it was fluid in the evolution of these themes. At the risk of sounding overly schematic, the majority of films dealt with here recount the weakened state of the male, his temporary resurging through contact with a formidable woman,

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his collapse under the castrating weight of the law, and the upsurge of strength and eventual punishment of the woman. But I shall argue that the woman’s strength is not simply a male Oedipal paranoiac fantasy responding in a vacuum to fears of woman’s phallic usurpation of power. There are ample historical and social reasons why men in the late 1940s find themselves depleted (war, capitalist regulation and exploitation of labour, erosion of patriarchal gender roles), while women find in these same reasons so many opportunities for displaying abundant energy and resourcefulness. Too little attention has been brought to the noir woman’s thriving energies other than to dispose of them as a mere corollary to male projections and fantasies. While in many noir narratives, such as Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, USA, 1945), Gun Crazy/Deadly is the Female (Joseph H. Lewis, USA, 1950) and several other films already mentioned, the male voiceover provides the originating point of narration, it is unmistakably the female energy in these films that shakes the man out of a dead-end situation where a dull life of conformity and dissatisfaction seems like the only remaining alternative. If, considered from the psychoanalytic side of male fantasy, the woman simply serves as the stage for the man to act out his castration anxieties, the alternative reading I would like to propose considers the femme fatale as an energetic and energising figure of fabulation. Such feminine energy supplies the active force badly needed by the male in a post-war environment where his affective life has been reduced to feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, disillusionment and exhaustion. One may thus consider male and female relations in noir as uneven exchanges of materially distributed forces/energies, where, in general terms, the woman lends and the man borrows. At peak moments – first encounters, partnered criminal action – male and female energies converge in order to augment each other, while at other moments – separations, departures, killings – their relations decompose as their interests diverge and their energies dissipate. Even a cursory examination of the predicament of the protagonists in the films mentioned above will show that the male’s affective fatigue is temporarily repaired through his encounter with an actively desiring female. By teaming up with women that either become partners in crime (The Woman in the Window, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy), or murderers in their own right (Out of the Past, Dead Reckoning), the men’s brain powers are quickened to a degree that would have been unimaginable within the legal bounds of their former lives. Whether engaged in investigative pursuits (Dead Reckoning, Laura), meticulous murder planning (The Woman in the Window, Double Indemnity), or

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162 Deleuze and Film even more direct forms of artistic imagination (painting in Scarlet Street, aesthetic contemplation in The Woman in the Window, Laura), these men, along with their female counterparts, in a sense become the writers of their own stories, as they are compelled to mobilise the forces of fabulation to their advantage. In the material economy of energies or forces composing the noir relation between the femme fatale and her male counterpart, it is invariably the man who borrows from the woman’s reservoir of vitality his final injection of life. In such films as The Woman in the Window, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Dead Reckoning and Gun Crazy, the first encounter between the man and the woman potently dramatises their uneven energies through the unbridgeable distance that separates them and through the woman’s ability to master this distance to her advantage. In Out of the Past, for example, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) has been hired by mobster Whit (Kirk Douglas) to track down Kathie Moffatt (Jane Greer), a woman with whom Whit is infatuated, and who ran out on him with US$40,000. Waiting for Kathie to show up, Jeff hangs out at La Mar Azul café in Acapulco. His descriptive voiceover recaptures the force of their encounter (‘And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit wouldn’t care about that 40 grand’), while the moment unfolds in images that are simultaneously languid and potent, melancholy, yet full of libidinal energy: Kathie walks towards Jeff and the camera, brightly lit at first, but then shrouded in shadows as she crosses the threshold between the sunny street and the interior of the café. Her body, like that of many a noir woman on their first appearance, is emphatically framed, this time by the arched door placed right at the threshold between light and darkness, the outside and the inside – her hat equally framing her head and enhancing the play of light and shadow. Jeff’s voice is composed, yet it leaves no doubt as to the fascination and otherworldly awe the woman has provoked in him, as if she was arriving from a literal outside that is otherwise unavailable to him. From the beginning, Kathie’s tone is cool and detached, and she lays down the terms of their relationship: who will be waiting and wondering, and who will come and go unchecked. This pattern of woman exercising active power at a distance and refusing to enter into a relation of mutuality with the man is quite common in the noir films mentioned above. A similar dynamics where the feminine ‘does not allow itself to be possessed’ (Derrida 1985: 179) marks all of these films with a quality other than the fetishistic passivity that has oftentimes been paired off with such female images. Thus, for instance, in The Woman in the Window, Professor Wanley (Edward

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G. Robinson) admires a portrait of Alice (Joan Bennett) before meeting her, an image distanced by a layering of multiple framings – dream, window glass, portrait frame; in Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stands at ground level looking up at Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck), while she looks down at him from her elevated position atop the staircase, half hidden behind an ornate railing; in Dead Reckoning, Rip Murdock’s (Humphrey Bogart) first sight of Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) is enacted as a fragmented, affectively intense panning movement of the camera up her leg, hands and face in profile; and in Gun Crazy, Bart (John Dall) admires Laurie’s (Peggy Cummins) dexterity with guns from the position of a child-like spectator looking up at a competent onstage performer. There is no mistaking that the woman’s outsider status in these scenes, rather than connoting her fetishistic passivity and contained idealisation by a male voyeur, is tied to her ability to set the powers of fictionalisation/fabulation in motion through what Jacques Derrida, following Friedrich Nietzsche, has called woman’s ‘action at a distance’ (Derrida 1985: 177). In this scenario, the notion of distance is all important both to woman’s power and to man’s precarious situation vis-à-vis this power: ‘Woman’s seductiveness operates at a distance, and distance is the element of her power . . . But one must stay aloof from this chant . . . One must keep one’s distance from distance itself – not only to guard against this fascination, but equally . . . to experience it’ (Derrida 1985: 178). What are the conditions for maintaining this distance through which man and woman stay connected in an uneven exchange of forces? It is precisely the unevenness and the distance that enables the forces to move and to pass between them, but such unevenness in male and female positions becomes glaringly impossible to maintain for long. When the man, firm believer in castration, becomes conscious of the woman’s masterful distance and attempts to end it, the creative energies become stagnated and they can only proceed in a purely destructive direction. Such, for example, is the trajectory followed by Neff and Phyllis in Double Indemnity. In other cases, as in Jeff’s relationship to Kathie in Out of the Past, the man’s conscious surrender of his powers and affects to the woman is so prolonged that it causes the man’s disinvestment in castration, a move that becomes intolerable to the Oedipal patriarchal law. As I have argued elsewhere (del Río 2008: 32–3), the power of the spectacular (female) body to arrest the narrative momentum need not be concurrent with the fetishisation and passivity of the (female) body. On the contrary, the interruption of action is often attended by an

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164 Deleuze and Film excess of force in the image that can point to an incipient and tentative emergence of the time-image. In relation to noir films, Kathie’s body on her ‘entrance scene’ in Out of the Past (like Phyllis’ body in Double Indemnity or Laurie’s in Gun Crazy) radiates a powerful energy that transforms the image’s movement of extension into a movement or becoming of intensity. In other words, at the meeting point between female and male, the woman’s energetic action-at-a-distance coincides with the energy of the film image itself, whose potential it is fully equipped to uncover and embody. As the woman’s forces of seduction, appropriation and fabulation move through, around and away from her body, they saturate the image through multiple affects and sensations that arise in conjunction with changing patterns of light and shadow, music, voice, texture and gesture. Lighting in noir can particularly be deployed effectively to signal the ontological proximity between woman’s power-at-a-distance and the dissimulating power of style in general. We find an example of this, for instance, in Out of the Past, where Jeff obsessively experiences Kathie’s powers of appearance as involving striking low-key lighting patterns, where each time sunlight, moonlight and/or a car’s headlights figure as the scene’s only lighting sources. While these expressionistic lighting patterns have been largely credited with producing the fascinating overall visual effect of noir, they have often been attended by a judgemental/ moral evaluation of the woman’s alignment with enhanced shadows as a sign of her essentially dark, evil nature (see Place and Peterson 1976). From the perspective I am taking here, however, it is less a matter of a moral application of lighting patterns than of a mutually empowering alliance between the woman’s dissimulating power-at-a-distance (power of appearances) and the film noir’s equal familiarity with these powers. In acting at a distance, the woman’s powers of epistemological elusiveness and dissimulation find the most congenial ally in the baroqueness and indirection of the noir style itself. Thus, the figure of the duplicitous, dissimulating woman of noir shares an important quality with the noir as genre: they both deploy elaborate style with the aim of constructing and mobilising a desiring-machine. Although the noir attachment to style has been identified as a staple of the genre since the early days of noir scholarship (for example, Schrader 1995), I want to suggest here that this attachment is more consistently channelled in noir through the woman than it is through the man. As I will discuss shortly, this consistency is made palpable in that, unlike the man, the woman repeatedly chooses the movement of style and fabulation over the stagnation of castration anxieties. Thus, not surprisingly, an examination of noir that

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does not consider Oedipal desire as encompassing the whole of desire finds itself at odds with the widespread critical appraisal of noir as a genre predominantly centred upon male subjectivity (see, for example, Cowie 1993; Hanson 2007; Martin 1998).

Uneven Castration Anxieties While castration constitutes an integral, structuring part of desire in the psychoanalytic model, in a Deleuzian sense castration constitutes a blockage or an impediment to the full release of molecular desiring flows. Thus, contrary to the tenets of psychoanalytic noir criticism, I would like to suggest that castration in the noir film functions precisely as the repressive mechanism that stagnates desire by draining it irreparably of any signs of life. Rather than instigating libidinal actions of all kinds, whether sexual or criminal, castration is the rotten seed that holds the promise of death right at the core of the noir narrative, and even before killing machines of any sort have made their appearance on the scene (for example, Neff’s comment on his own status as a dead man walking and his inability to hear the sound of his own footsteps in Double Indemnity). In noir, male and female relations to castration are not equal, and yet this inequality may obtain from reasons other than those postulated by psychoanalysis. Although Freudian psychoanalysis is already cognizant of an important asymmetry between male and female positions with respect to castration, the woman for Freud is only the more affected and burdened by castration due to her literal lack of a penis. While, allegedly, the boy/man is perpetually haunted by the unthinkable possibility of losing his penis, the girl/woman is always already lacking not only a penis, but also the anxiety of losing one. What remains for her to live, under this paradigm, is simply the inherently castrated status man fabricates for her out of his own castration anxieties and fears of difference. Rather than further universalising the Oedipal organisation of desire by forcing woman to abide by rules originating in man’s paranoiac fantasies of castration, as psychoanalysis does, the noir film repeatedly emphasises the fundamental asymmetry in male and female relations to castration, thereby disproving the universal hold of Oedipus. Counter to the psychoanalytic model of an irretrievably castrated woman, the noir film repeatedly conjures the image of a woman whose actions reveal a total lack of investment in the notion of castration. Crucially underscoring this idea, all of these films signal to important divergences between male and female responses at the first signs of an imminent

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166 Deleuze and Film confrontation with the law. Whether the criminal activity involves the woman alone or the couple, the ruthless movement forward of the most outstanding women of noir (Phyllis in Double Indemnity, Kathie in Out of the Past, Laurie in Gun Crazy) heavily contrasts with the caution, fear, misgivings, guilt or remorse articulated by their male counterparts. It is here that we notice a profound alignment between the man’s belief in castration and his indebtedness to morality and truth, in stark opposition to the woman’s lack of ties with either castration or a legalistic notion of morality. This can be seen in Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, where the male protagonist places or finds himself in a situation of symbolic, unpayable debt vis-à-vis an older male figure – more benevolent in the case of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) in Double Indemnity, utterly sadistic in the case of Whit in Out of the Past. Such a relation of debt between a younger and an older man fits in quite smoothly with the doctrine of judgement, which Deleuze describes as a deferred, infinite, unpayable debt that one owes to somebody representing the moral system of higher values, whether a partner or a god (Deleuze 1997: 126–7). The relationship between Walter Neff and his older colleague, insurance adjuster Keyes, is structured precisely around this creditor-debtor dynamics. Not only is Keyes positioned in the insurance company as the ultimate judge of the legitimacy of customers’ claims, but he also describes himself as a ‘priest and a father confessor’, in the spirit of the logic of judgement that imbues his character. Moreover, Neff’s long dictaphone confession to Keyes, which provides the entire flashback structure of the film, unfolds like a protracted and failed attempt at paying an unpayable debt of guilt and castration to the man who represents the law, and who, alone, can free him from that debt (as shown in the closing scene by Neff’s futile plea to Keyes that he let him flee the law by crossing over the border). In fact, the creditor-debtor relation in Double Indemnity is, appropriately, doubled, for Neff is not only indebted to Keyes, but, as we saw earlier, and for radically different reasons, he is indebted to Phyllis as well. While he owes his temporary reprieve from a zombie-like existence to the woman, he owes his acknowledgment of the impossibility of overcoming such an existence (the impossibility of crooking up the house and thus evading the law) to the father figure. This bifurcated relation of debt is literally fleshed out in the film when the action brings both Keyes and Phyllis, almost simultaneously, to Neff’s apartment, and Neff finds himself visually torn between his two rival creditors. The end of the scene, taking place right outside Neff’s apartment door, dramatises this split: Neff stands between Phyllis, who hides from Keyes’ sight

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behind the open door to Neff’s apartment, and Keyes, who stands by the elevator door, still complaining of a stomach upset brought on by his suspicions of murder being involved in Phyllis’ double indemnity insurance claim. Even the remarkably different ways in which Neff comes eventually to be dispatched by his two creditors attest to the idea of two kinds of law or justice at work in the film. While the doctrine of judgement represented by Keyes simply hands Neff over to the law in order to prolong an already exhausted existence, the system of cruelty enacted by Phyllis on her last encounter with Neff brings on a form of justice close to what Deleuze calls ‘a writing of blood and life’ (Deleuze 1997: 128). In contrast to the symbolic, ever-deferred law written on the book of the doctrine of judgement, Phyllis engages with Neff in a close-range combat where his debt is physically marked and paid with a gunshot wound, and, as Neff shoots back at Phyllis, he is even allowed to stake a claim of final reciprocity with her. Derrida’s statement that ‘truth-castration . . . is the affair of man . . . [who] is never sceptical or dissimulated enough’ (Derrida 1985: 180) is accurately illustrated by many a noir protagonist, who, as Neff shows in Double Indemnity, is driven by the contradictory desire of escaping the law while displaying an obsessive dependence upon it. On several occasions after the murder of Phyllis’ husband has taken place, Neff demonstrates his entrapment by the lure of truth-castration that he himself has willed. While Neff walks to the train station with Phyllis, right after killing the latter’s husband inside the car, he gives away his anxiety and his unmitigated indebtedness to the law by engaging in a series of cautionary remarks and admonitions that are strictly meant to reassure himself of his ability to control every single detail of the following steps in their murder plan. Phyllis’ lack of interest in this unnecessary rehearsal process is obvious. Not only does she not partake in the performative anxieties of her male partner at this point, but, even later, when Keyes has begun to reject the initial theory of accidental death on the train, and Neff cautions Phyllis not to go ahead with her plans to claim the insurance money, she sees no legal hurdle or prohibition that might persuade her to abandon her plans. In noir, morality and its system of judgement begin to crack, not by virtue of the hero’s criminal transgressions, which are always already enmeshed in the moral system itself as its necessary underside, but by virtue of the very ineffectuality of action, whether in its criminal or its redemptive manifestations. This ineffectuality is exposed most flagrantly in the case of male action, still grounded in judgement, whereas in the case of the woman, a more originary or primitive impulse of action

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168 Deleuze and Film as raw, unregulated force seems to prevail, and its designs are only thwarted by the overall organisation of morality that still rules the film’s allotment of punishment and resolution along gender lines. But regardless of the reduced scope given to the woman’s action, she still plays a pivotal role in bringing to light and magnifying the ineffectuality of action in the male. Clearly, unlike the man, the woman in noir does not calibrate her actions with reference to their distance from, or proximity to, a set of moral standards, boundaries or prohibitions. As we see in both Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, her lack of investment in truth-castration makes the continuation of her alliance with the man impossible, and marks the definitive forking of their ways. In Double Indemnity, Neff and Phyllis begin to separate from each other as soon as they accomplish the murder of Phyllis’ husband (Tom Powers). It would seem as though Neff can no longer bear the sight of Phyllis’ total indifference not only with regard to her alleged castration, but also with regard to his own predicament of castration. Moreover, Phyllis’ interposition between Neff and Keyes is too much of a distraction and a tensionbuilder for Neff, whose energies must/should now be singly focused on his utterly legalistic struggle with the law. It is precisely Phyllis’ distance from truth-castration that leads Neff to characterise Phyllis in their final showdown as ‘a little more rotten’ than himself, thus proving his essential ressentiment, in that he ‘needs others to be evil in order to be able to consider himself good’ (Deleuze 1983: 119), or at least better by comparison. Out of the Past follows a similar pattern as it shows the man’s adherence to the law finally prevailing even through the string of unlawful activities or dubious alliances in which he has engaged. Before getting on his final car ride with Kathie, Jeff calls the police and makes sure they will be waiting for them on the road. While this action allows him to pay his debt to the law (a debt that in a way he also owes to Whit for failing to live up to the principles of their Oedipal contract), the woman’s own justice system of life and blood stakes its claim on him and makes him pay his debt to her with his life.

Mistresses of Appearance and Dissimulation: On Our Way to the Powers of the False In The Time-Image, Deleuze comments on the ways in which the cinema during the first half of the twentieth century registered the collapse of the system of judgement, referring to Fritz Lang and Orson Welles, not coincidentally seasoned practitioners of the noir sensibility, as having

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first shown in their films an awareness of such a collapse. Drawing on Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of slave morality, Deleuze delineates a kind of evolution or transformation of the notion of truth through three differentiated stages. First, there is the truthful man, who judges life in the name of higher values: ‘he is craving to judge, he sees in life an evil, a fault which is to be atoned for’ (Deleuze 1989: 137). In the second stage, truth has turned into appearances, which ‘transform rather than suppress the system of judgement’ (Deleuze 1989: 138), since ‘appearances betray themselves, not because they would give way to a more profound truth, but simply because they reveal themselves as non-true’ (Deleuze 1989: 138). When appearances triumph, and this is particularly relevant to the noir woman, they ‘have a chance of being turned around to the benefit of an individual’ (Deleuze 1989: 138). Welles, Deleuze argues, takes us to the third stage, one in which the system of judgement becomes definitively impossible, as ‘the ideal of truth crumbles . . . [and] the relations of appearance [are] no longer . . . sufficient to maintain the possibility of judgement’ (Deleuze 1989: 139). In this final stage, the moral system of truth gives way to an ethical network of bodily forces, whose evaluation no longer rests on higher or external principles, but is immanent to the affects, powers or qualities these bodies possess: ‘Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgement as transcendent value’ (Deleuze 1989: 141). It is here, too, that the powers of the false, as unrelated to either truth or appearances, are set free to pursue unlimited creative and revolutionary affirmation. A different kind of truth arises through this unleashing of the powers of the false, a truth that is no longer reproduction, but emergence of the new. In fact, if the noir woman’s relation to the system of truth and judgement reflects her ambivalent position between the nihilistic mirages of the ‘truthful man’ and the wholly affirmative powers of the false, her relation to castration also corresponds to a middle ground position. Looking at several of Nietzsche’s references to a specific feminine way of being in The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols, Derrida underscores three fundamental propositions, or value positions, that can be gleaned from the heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s thought. The first position is that of the castrated woman, whose power of lying is condemned or scorned by the credulous, truth-upholding man (Derrida 1985: 185). Such is no doubt the noir man’s contemptuous view of woman upon finding out that he has been duped by her. Woman’s second position expands the possibilities of action and affection available to her. Here, woman may identify with truth at a distance, ‘play[ing] with it as a fetish – to her advantage, and without in the least

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170 Deleuze and Film believing in it’ (Derrida 1985: 185). This is the position I find most congruent with the noir mechanisms of desire. In this guise, woman has castrating effects for man. Yet ‘she remains within the system and economy of truth’ (Derrida 1985: 185), in so far as her orchestration of appearances is still the negation/underside of truth, as seen from the reactive and negative point of view of man, who still believes in castration. In a third position, ‘woman is recognised, affirmed, as an affirmative, dissimulating, artistic, and Dionysian power. She is not affirmed by man; rather, she affirms herself both in herself and in man’ (Derrida 1985: 185–6). In noir, woman’s characteristic dissimulation, adornment and lying very rarely function to allow for her successful transition from the second to the third positions, and thus to transform her into a pure power of affirmation. We may find one such rare instance in the figure of Debbie (Gloria Grahame) in Lang’s The Big Heat (USA, 1953). With her burned face, yet courageous enough to strike a deadly blow to her sadistic mobster ex-lover, Debbie is one of the few women in noir who can distance themselves from the nihilistic games of specularity and who can achieve a self-determined end independent of moral truth or castration. But, in doing so, Debbie at the same time ceases to incarnate the nihilistic force of the femme fatale. If, in general, these women remain stuck in a performative ruse of specular manipulation of castration for the benefit of their credulous, castration-tormented partners, it is no doubt because the largely Oedipal organisation of desire in noir holds them to that limited achievement. Yet, even within those constraints, the woman provides the incentive for falsifying narration and identity, thus beginning a process that would eventually enable the noir genre to shed and surpass its own identity. Appropriately, the gradual disintegration of the genre, as seen in 1950s films such as The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, USA, 1955), The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1956), and Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, USA, 1958), coincides with the dissolution of the femme fatale as a viable or credible figure, for, in the increasing absence of a solid investment in the law, the femme fatale is no longer called upon to embody the point of tension in the man’s struggle with the law and its moral imperatives. It is also then that we begin to see the overcoming of the system of judgement and truth in favour of a direct staging of falsifying powers that goes beyond any psychological traits of particular characters, and contaminates the whole of the narration as a desiring-production. In contrast with the male formula – ‘I judge’ – the women in noir are moved by the originary impulse expressed in the formula ‘I love or I

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hate’ (Deleuze 1989: 141). Although the latter alternative of these two tends to prevail, and it is one that testifies to these women’s sick rather than generous nature, they are at least still alive through their will to impose their power, their power to impose their will. The noir woman’s ambivalent positionality in relation to the system of judgement, her limited belief in it as mere performativity, is instructive in terms of its instinctive capture of the generalised crisis of morality and judgement that swept the Western world during and in the aftermath of the Second World War. This is a crisis that the noir film timidly begins to intimate from its inception, but, in contrast to neorealism’s readiness to express such crisis in the most unequivocal terms, the noir film only seems to come to terms with it as its generic existence starts to dwindle. In other words, it seems as though the noir series shows the specifically American necessity of taking an extra detour in order to run a final test on the viability of the old moral programme before disposing of it for good. And it is in this sense that the noir woman becomes all-important in shaping the unique way in which the American cinema transitions from a classical to a modern sensibility; for if on the one hand she acts as a foil for the judgemental obsessions of the male, she also furnishes the imagination with the model of a non-judgemental existence, however limited by phallocentric imperatives or decadent in its aims. From this standpoint, the saving and transformation of the system of judgement in noir is but a temporary patchwork in a trajectory that would eventually bring to light the utter untenability of this system. In this trajectory, the woman of noir enjoys a privileged place in the cinema for having anticipated, with her excessive performative self, the incipient yet hopeful possibility of a form of desire that is no longer beholden to either truth or castration.

References Adkins, B. (2007), Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bogue, R. (2010), ‘To Choose to Choose – To Believe in This World’, in D.N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 115–32. Cowie, E. (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir, London: Verso, pp. 121–65. Deleuze, G. (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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172 Deleuze and Film Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1977), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, New York: Viking. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, J. (1985), ‘The Question of Style’, in D.B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, New York: MIT Press, pp. 176–89. Hanson, H. (2007), Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Johnston, C. (1998), ‘Double Indemnity’, in E.A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 89–98. Martin, A. (1998), ‘ “Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs’, in E.A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 202–28. Place, J.A. and L.S. Peterson (1976), ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 325–38. Schrader, P. (1995), ‘Notes on Film Noir’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 169–82.

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Chapter 10

The Daemons of Unplumbed Space: Mixing the Planes in Hellboy

Anna Powell

Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2004) is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a mixer of planes, in that it mixes film and literature, science and philosophy, and humour and horror. The film’s generic planes are also a mix of science fiction, gothic horror and comedy. Its science fiction elements include high-tech weaponry and gadgets, and an earth under threat from alien invasion. Gothic motifs are rife: demons and abject monsters, occult rituals, saints’ statues and reliquaries, crucifixes, the living dead, and the apocalyptic threat of an ancient curse. Furthermore, the film is strongly marked by both the fantastic fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and contemporary ‘Steampunk’ film and fiction, which are themselves hybrid mixes of gothic and sci-fi. In this essay, then, I shall explore these and other ‘mixed planes’ in Hellboy, not least by linking Lovecraft’s weird tales with Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophy as a means to explore how the whole mixture operates. Before considering Hellboy from a Deleuzian perspective, however, I should like to discuss why Deleuze’s thought and a popular film like Hellboy are mutually relevant.

Deleuze and the Popular Although Cinema 1 focuses on numerous Hollywood films, Deleuze’s personal canon is focused on auteurs, and as a result Deleuze’s Cinema books, and Cinema 2 in particular, are mainly comprised of art-house classics from Europe and Japan, as well as politically inflected documentaries and formally innovative films that assert minoritarian communities and voices from Africa, Brazil and French Canada (see Deleuze 1995: 217; Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 218). Elsewhere, Deleuze rejects popular ‘trash’ culture, castigates the ‘bad cinema of sex and violence that travels through the lower brain circuits’, and ridicules the ‘pitiful grimaces’ of music videos (Deleuze 2000: 367). In other words,

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174 Deleuze and Film it would seem that Deleuze has little time for the popular, especially popular film. However, it is important to remember that in his work Deleuze is not enforcing a dogma to be obeyed, but is instead opening up innovative forms of creative theory and practice. With regard to cinema, this is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Deleuze’s argument that ‘the brain is the screen’: cinema both expresses and induces thought, as images at once move us and move in us (Deleuze 2000). The brain/screen assemblage is, for Deleuze, an event of images in motion, which is to say both that we think in moving images and that moving images on the cinema screen share the mobile processes of thought. If this is the case, then the brain/screen assemblage does not take place only when we watch arthouse films, as a superficial reading of Deleuze might seem to suggest, but when we watch any film. Any film involves a capacity to express and to induce thought when it comes into contact with a spectator. As a result, we need to maximise the impact of Deleuze’s understanding that ‘the brain is the screen’ by setting this and other of his concepts to work in conjunction with mainstream films and genres. Conversely, by using his otherwise complex and radical concepts in tandem with popular films, as opposed to independent films or art-house cinema, we can also try to spark a wider interest in Deleuze and his ideas. My work with Deleuze and horror film confirms the widely held view that mainstream movies are less conceptually dense than more formally adventurous films (Powell 2005). This does not mean, however, that formulaic horror film is not concerned with time, space and movement, which are the major concerns of Deleuze’s Cinema books. Rather, the horror film engages with them differently. Many mainstream horror films are strong on affective impact and offer an intensive experience of fear and desire. This affective force can serve to isolate a particular idea and to render it in potent sensorial ways, stimulating the brain’s field of operations and thus stretching its ability to think. The term ‘affect’ is not used here in the psychoanalytic sense of the release of psychic energies, but is rather a materialist aesthetic of emotion and sensation that preexists the formation of the subject. As I argue in Deleuze and Horror Film, then, some of the richest films lie between popular formulae and more adventurous forms of style and narrative, or they include potently affective images that depart from the formula-bound mainstream of their milieu. Before moving on to a specifically Deleuzian analysis of Hellboy, I should like to expand briefly upon the above and to situate this chapter within wider discourses of the popular. Cultural tastes are a complex

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 175 assemblage. We might enjoy both mainstream and experimental films, but as film scholars we draw on a privileged bank of cultural capital to inform our self-reflexive viewing choices. I am, of course, exploring my own contradictory love of both Deleuze and popular culture in what follows. Outside the academy, though, cineliteracy is increasingly widespread across a broad spectrum due to an unprecedented growth in the digital circulation of moving images. The spectrum may be widened further as another culture’s populist cinematic output is invested with the allure of exotic otherness, such as the current vogue for Japanese anime (see Jenkins 2006; Lamarre 2009) and Korean gangster films (Shin and Stringer 2005). Despite plenty to celebrate in this flood of accessibility, questions remain about the reification of pleasure in late capitalism, as what Michel Foucault calls the ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ circulate between the poles of top-down and bottom-up (Foucault 1978: 45). As D.N. Rodowick reminds us, the duty of ‘the simulacral arts and a philosophy of resistance’ is to mix interpretation with evaluation in order to ‘invent alternative ways of thinking and modes of existence immanent in, yet alternative to’ capitalist hegemony (Rodowick 1997: 205). Despite the current boom in marketing the ‘ecstasy of communication’ (Baudrillard 1983), critical film studies is ever mindful of the narrowing of creative possibilities and the blatant manipulation of audiences via product franchises that churn out sequels and/or prequels, and marketing campaigns that use video games, toys and other paraphernalia.

Hellboy: From Comic Book to Film As a mainstream film, Hellboy is positioned firmly within this commercial milieu. The film opens in 1944, when the failing Axis Powers are seeking to reverse the outcome of the war by occult means ‘combining Science and Black Magic’. Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), the undead magus who is now a key Nazi, performs a ritual at night in an obligatory gothic storm. Using beams from a Tesla-style generator and a Steampunk-style artificial hand of heavy metal and glass tubes, he aims to open a portal for the Ogdru Jahad, the Seven Gods of Chaos whose avatar he is. These noxious space demons are foiled in their attempt to enter our dimensions by a traditional combination of rosaries, crucifixes and bullets, and so the portal shuts, leaving one red-skinned fledgling demon behind. Sixty years later, adopted and semi-humanised by Professor Broom (John Hurt), the mature demon ‘Big Red’ works as an agent for the

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176 Deleuze and Film FBI’s Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence. Along with his fellow ‘freaks of nature’, he is confined to the basement to maintain the Bureau’s secrecy and in the interests of public safety. His activities range from zapping demons with high-tech, yet magical, weaponry such as his Samaritan revolver (with bullets of clove leaf, silver shavings and white oak), to filing down his unwieldy horns to pass as more ‘normal’ in the eyes of his human girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair). In the opening section of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate various interconnected concepts including the book, the rhizome and the multiple. They figure three types of book in botanical terms as root, radicle and rhizome. The traditional classic realist root-book ‘imitates the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5), whereas the experimental modernist work (they cite the fiction of William S. Burroughs) has ‘an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots [that] grafts on to it’, yet, despite its ‘abortion’ of the principal root or the destruction of the growing tip by formal experiment, a transcendent order remains so that the unity of the root still ‘subsists, as past, as yet to come, as possible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 6). The presence of such higher unity, despite its having been displaced or concealed (for example, Burroughs’ transcendent occult schema), keeps the radiclebook grounded in imitation, being only ‘the image of the world: radiclechaosmos rather than root-chaosmos’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 7). The third type is the rhizome-book, which is a much more conjunctive, inclusive and productive assemblage in which ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 7). Hellboy retains mixed elements of all three types of book: root, radicle and rhizome. An apocalyptic fantasy, the film is a generic blend of gothic and punk sci-fi tropes. As a self-reflexive text it refers back to its literary and cinematic roots and makes them overt, like Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the ‘cultural book’, which makes ‘a tracing of itself, a tracing of a previous book by the same author, a tracing of other books however different, a tracing of the world present, past and future’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 26). The wider cultural circulation of the character Hellboy, for example, is quoted self-reflexively within the film. We see a copy of Mike Mignola’s comic book (the inspiration for the film) with a cartoon version of Hellboy on the cover, and a young comic fan instantly recognises the living character when he meets him climbing up on a rooftop. Furthermore, there is a distinctive Steampunk flavour to the film, which also brings to Hellboy its own ‘tracings’ via fiction, films and

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 177 comics. A hybrid assemblage, Steampunk’s characteristics include the self-reflexive reworking of a selective history of Victorian/Edwardian England. This operates via a fascination with steam power, early electricity generators like Tesla coils and elaborate clockwork machinery. The subgenre blends late Victorian gothic occultism (especially the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley) with the early science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, in versions not directly derived from literature but from secondary reworkings in comics and films. The hybrid figure of the mad scientist – such as Hellboy’s Professor Broom – is another crucial icon, again mixing gothic with sci-fi. Films with Steampunk appeal include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (UK, 1985), La Cité des Enfants Perdus/The City of Lost Children (JeanPierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, France/Germany/Spain, 1995), Wild, Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld, USA, 1999), The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK 2006), and Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, USA/Germany, 2009). Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen popularised the genre via his graphic novel (1999) and its film adaptation (Stephen Norrington, USA/Germany/Czech Republic/UK, 2003), both reworking gothic literature by adopting its characters and plots in a creative bricolage. Though Steampunk aficionados overtly ‘trace’, they also invent, producing new assemblages, such as the Arts and Crafts-influenced ‘maker’ aesthetic of recycling, constructing new objects from scrap copper and brass, and clock parts. Although Deleuze and Guattari’s book has a tripartite typology of root, radicle and rhizome, this is not meant as a prescriptive classification, but as a stimulus to further thought. Indeed, the three named types immediately function to question their own apparent identities. Rather than being unified, they are, rather, assemblages of forces that pull in variable, even contrary directions. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari explain, there are ‘very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialisation. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 16). The coordinates of rhizomes are constantly shifting, being ‘determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 16). Accordingly, a further cinematic tracing can be seen in director Guillermo del Toro’s casting of Ron Perlman, with his portfolio of ‘freakish’ characters, in the lead role of Hellboy. Perlman also plays One, the circus strongman in the prototype Steampunk film, The City of Lost Children. It is presumably from this film, along with del Toro’s own Cronos (Mexico, 1993), that

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178 Deleuze and Film much of the current Steampunk iconography, such as clockwork, brass goggles and antiquated scientific machinery, evolved. Along with the Tesla-style generator from the opening scene described above, Hellboy’s Steampunk credentials include retro nostalgia and elaborate clockwork such as the concealed traps of Rasputin’s mausoleum, and Baron von Kroenen’s (Ladislav Beran) metal prosthetics. Even Abe Sapien’s (Doug Jones) goggles are a Steampunk fashion item.

Machines, Machinic Assemblages and Schizoanalysis We should note here that the tripartite concept of the book is intended by Deleuze and Guattari as a multi-purpose and general model of the machinic assemblage. The concept is not limited to literature, and can be applied to film, which, like all machines/machinic assemblages, is crossed by ‘lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 4). Film, in other words, is stretched in many directions by dynamic forces of organisation and chaos. Deleuze and Guattari explain that one side of a machinic assemblage ‘faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject’, but that, Januslike, it also has a contrary side ‘facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 4). A body without organs (BwO) is predominantly an inorganic entity not limited by physical properties. It is, rather, a cluster of affective forces in process, an ‘intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds and gradients’ (Deleuze 1998: 131). It is this body that Deleuze intends when he asserts that ‘it is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms an alliance with spirit, with thought’ (Deleuze 1995: 189). Given the way in which Hellboy blends a diverse group of sources and influences, as outlined in the previous section, the film may be pulled in divergent and contradictory directions by the forces of stratification and destratification, reaction and radicalism – rather than simply being reified by generic templates or ideological formulae (such as the ‘Reds under the bed’ tradition of invasion by un-American aliens). Working with the assemblage of brain and screen, the rhizomatic methods of schizoanalysis can usefully be applied to reading cinema differently (Buchanan and MacCormack 2007). For Deleuze and Guattari, schizoanalysis offers a method of reading via the conjunctive synthesis,

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 179 which, like Hellboy itself, also yokes heterogeneous elements together to produce a new working assemblage. This assemblage refuses to be fixed in signifying codes and representational equations, but rather proceeds via the open-ended conjunction ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’, which, they assert, ‘carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 27). Such living chains of conjunction include apparently incompatible elements welded together temporarily to make something new – as per Hellboy’s unique blend of the rhizomatic, the root and the radicle outlined above, as well as its blend of gothic and Steampunk elements. Such distinctive innovations are what Deleuze and Guattari call singularities. They can include previously unconnected components of a different, even an incompatible, nature, taken from wherever relevant, including ‘semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 8).

Mixed Planes in Deleuze and Guattari and Hellboy In Deleuze and Guattari’s last joint work, What is Philosophy?, they present the concept of mixed planes. They identify science, art and philosophy as three planes thrown across chaos by the questing human mind, and which cross-fertilise to produce new forms of thought. For the philosopher, these operate as ‘variations’, for the scientist as ‘variables’, and for the artist as ‘varieties’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 47). The three distinct planes comprise the plane of ‘immanence’ for philosophy, the plane of ‘composition’ for art, and the plane of ‘reference or coordination’ for science (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 48). Philosophy produces ‘concepts and conceptual personae’ as tools with which to think, art works with ‘sensations and aesthetic figures’, and science operates via ‘figures and partial observers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 48). Art transforms ‘chaotic variability into chaoid variety’ and composes chaos into sensation images (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 49). Science is ambivalent towards the condition of chaos necessary to its own work. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘if equilibrium attractors (fixed points, limit cycles, cores) express science’s struggle with chaos, strange attractors reveal its profound attraction to chaos’ as well as constituting the ‘chaosmos internal to modern science’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 51). A strange attractor is fractal by definition. If a system with a limit-cycle attractor is moved to a system with a strange attractor, the original limit cycle unfolds or explodes. In Deleuze and Guattari’s three-plane model, the brain, a centre of

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180 Deleuze and Film indetermination in the flux of forces, acts as a vital junction-box of circuitry exchange but does not therefore impose unity upon the chaoid planes (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 52). In order to mount an effective challenge to the ‘derisory model’ of reality via which recognition seeks to police the creative forces of desire, the three planes need to cross-fertilise in the brain in order to produce new thought (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 53). Thus the ‘vital ideas’ offered by each chaoid operate in duration ‘in the deepest of its synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals and meantimes of a non-objectifiable brain’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 54). Despite the irreducible aspects of the planes, Deleuze and Guattari welcome, and consistently practise, productive ‘interference’ between them. Three types of interference fuel conceptual progress. In the first ‘extrinsic’ kind, the interfering discipline keeps its own methods intact, only acknowledging the external value of the others (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 55). The ‘mixed plane’ type proceeds by a more subtle and mutual ‘sliding’ between two or more planes (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 56). ‘Becoming indiscernible’, the most extreme form of interference, engages in more interactive mingling, being shared by functions (science), sensations (art) and concepts (philosophy) (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 57). This last kind of interference is determined by the negative position. As well as confronting the broader challenge of chaos, each plane needs to open up to the distinctive challenges posed by other disciplines in order to grow in unprecedented directions, hence philosophy needs ‘a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs non-art and science needs non-science’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 58). Science, art and thought are already ‘becoming indiscernible’ as interdisciplinarity stretches from the academy to popular culture. If, as Deleuze contends, the twentiethcentury creative brain was the cinema screen, then the brain screen of the future is digital in tendency as computer-generated imagery demands new ways of thinking – despite Deleuze’s warning in Cinema 2 against the dangers of digital imagery being infiltrated by fascistic tendencies (Deleuze 1995: 255). Sounding an optimistic note, then, Deleuze and Guattari contend that, in its triple-headed plunge into chaos, the creative brain can reach out towards the ‘people to come’. They advocate the nurturing of further interaction between the three exploratory planes as ‘forms of thought or creation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 208). Despite the mixture of creative interference, each plane will, per se, retain irreducible singularities, which work intensively rather than extensively to create new concepts and forms. Using terms which strikingly evoke the plot of Hellboy’s

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 181 ambivalent congress with the monsters of chaos, they argue that each plane wants to ‘tear open the firmament and plunge into chaos’, to bring back a ‘chaosmos’, a new ‘composed chaos neither foreseen nor preconceived’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 204). With regard to Hellboy, Deleuze and Guattari’s mixed planes are particularly useful in light of H.P. Lovecraft’s influence on the film, particularly the fact that Hellboy features Lovecraftian gothic sci-fi monsters, of the kind that also features in Steampunk, for example in Paul Di Filippo’s short story ‘Hottentots’ (1995), in which space monsters and Hottentots invade Massachusetts. Lovecraft himself grafted the relativistic science of his day on to the American gothic tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘witch-haunted’ New England (Lovecraft 2008: 789) to produce the distinct fictional universe evoked by his hypnotic prose. Lovecraft realigned the gothic tradition with non-Euclidean geometry and relocated some of his demons, the Great Old Ones, to an ‘outer space’ of incongruous dimensions and non-linear time. From this dubious locale they send their servitors to reclaim the earth from human usurpation. Lovecraft’s blend of alien monsters from ‘beyond’ with musty grimoires and occult rites is a seminal influence on Mike Mignola’s original Dark Horse Hellboy series (1994), and Lovecraft’s mixed-plane vision is crucial to the first Hellboy film.

Hellboy, the Anomalous and Multiplicities By bringing another figure from Deleuze’s solo work into the mix at this point, I would argue that Hellboy makes its popular cultural blend of creative interference cross all three planes via the concept of the Anomalous. To think what happens when singularities, which were described above as incompatible elements that are welded together, intersect, Deleuze posits anomalies as unnatural and irregular elements that operate at the border of a system in order to catalyse creative change. He writes that ‘the Anomalous is always at the frontier, on the border of a band or a multiplicity; it is part of the latter, but it is already making it pass into another multiplicity, it makes it become, it traces a line-between’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 42). His own description of anomalies overtly references the creatures of dark fantasy and horror and Lovecraft’s entities, including ‘the “outsider”, Moby Dick, or the Thing or Entity of Lovecraft, terror’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 42). The conjunctive jump here, which links abstract concepts to familiar, culturally embedded images, is typical of the mixed plane of Deleuze and Guattari’s methodology.

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182 Deleuze and Film As I argue in Deleuze and Horror Film, monstrous entities are not fixed in their identity, but move and become by engaging in processual assemblages (Powell 2005: 62–108). Thus, they can open on to other affective elements in the sublimely mixed experience offered by the gothic mode, such as beauty and joy. Referencing Lovecraft’s fiction more specifically via the character of Randolph Carter, who is Lovecraft’s authorial persona in several stories, Deleuze states that ‘ENTITY = EVENT, it is terror, but also great joy. Becoming an entity, an infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke of it, the horrific and luminous story of Carter: animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptiblebecoming’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 66). The entity’s force lies in the perpetual motion of becomings that both maintain transformative potential and disseminate its impact more widely through its ambient milieu. Humans who become with other life forms are among the anomalous array of hybrid figures in fantasy cinema. The gothic genre’s bodies without souls may also possess a non-human life of their own. This can be seen in Hellboy through the character of Baron von Kroenen, whose mutilated body is kept alive by machine elements and who at one point shuts himself down so as to infiltrate the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, before being resurrected by Rasputin. On the one hand, monstrous anomalies are for Deleuze and Guattari the objects of our fascinated aesthetic contemplation, but on the other hand, it is in their changing movements that they fascinate, incorporating us into their virtual assemblage. In other words, by affective engagement, we also become with the monsters. Anomalies therefore subvert fixed notions of subjective wholeness and act to undermine cultural attempts to maintain self-consistent typological and species norms. Despite the formulaic restoration of order at the end of many horror films, we mutant spectators continue to become long after the film has ended. In Hellboy, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence keeps its own anomalies hidden from view – Baron von Kroenen notwithstanding. Dwelling in its heavily guarded cellar are ‘freaks’ of nature, hybrid elemental beings who blend human and earth, fire and water, in keeping with other hybrid superheroes in the realm of comic books. Hellboy himself, a demon with human habits, has a large stone hand with magical properties. Liz, a human pyrokinetic, produces fire from her body when angry and aroused. Like The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, USA, 1954) before him, Abe Sapien is an intellectual and hypersensitive humanoid merman. Opposed to these ‘good’ monsters are arch-villains, Lovecraft’s ‘daemons of unplumbed space’,

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 183 here as the Seven Gods of Chaos, or Ogdru Jahad, who are writhing tentacled blobs whose mixed planes have become indiscernible. Discussing the transformative potential of the human psyche, Deleuze and Guattari contend that ‘of course there are werewolves and vampires’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 107). Popular fantasy formations develop by grafting and hybridising with other elements in our shifting culture. New forms of anomaly emerge from its mixed plane media and challenge us to produce distinct kinds of thought. Like the earlier mixes of gothic/sci-fi, anomalies such as Hellboy refuse to remain distanced objects of structuralist abstraction or aesthetic contemplation and seek to incorporate us into their own dynamic mix. Closely linked with the concept of the anomaly is the multiplicity, both being applicable to the mixed entities of Hellboy. The film operates a sliding scale of anomalies ranged in degrees from human to monster. This spectrum classifies good and bad monsters via their resemblance and relation to humans. At the human end is a woman with supernatural powers (Liz), shading into a humanised demon (Hellboy). At the monstrous pole, the reanimated Steampunk-cyborg (Baron von Kroenen) shades into the Seven Gods of Chaos (in human form via Rasputin) then becomes the more abject entity of Sammael the Hellhound (Brian Steele), known as ‘Stinky’ for his noxious trail of slime. As a shapeshifting demonic entity, Sammael figures as the most rhizomatic of terrestrial anomalies (though with roughly humanoid shape). Like the monster from Alien (Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 1979), Sammael has canine characteristics and the ability to reproduce monstrous progeny (for more on the monstrous alien in Alien, see Creed 1993). The gods remain extraterrestrial, sending servitors such as Behemoth, which manifests its many-tentacled and completely inhuman splendour in the climactic battle, to do their bidding. During this battle, Rasputin, also undead/a reanimated corpse, is revealed as Behemoth in disguise, the monster bursting out of his human shell to be born via the death of his temporary host. Hellboy is the only one who can act as bridge between and fitting adversary against these anomalous entities, though he can only do this fully when he eschews his human upbringing to become the demonic Anung un Rama. Deleuze and Guattari argue, though, that any such scale of types can be tested and found wanting when thrown into relief by ‘true’ multiplicities which ‘expose arborescent pseudo multiplicities for what they are’, because in the case of multiplicities, ‘there is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 8). To Deleuze and Guattari’s examples of swarming rats, couchgrass

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184 Deleuze and Film and weeds, we could easily add the self-replicating ‘group ego’ and body without organs of Sammael. Multiplicities can spread themselves abroad, like this amorphous Hellhound who appears in the museum as a shape-shifting demon moving at anomalous speeds, to elude capture and to avoid re-imprisonment by the saints and angels (the arborescent forces of his Christian adversaries). Via his ability to self-replicate as quickly and effectively as a fatal virus, Sammael matches a further principle of the rhizome cited by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘asignifying rupture’. For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizome is like a swarm, for it can be ‘broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome’ that can, as in the case of Sammael after Hellboy’s first attack, ‘rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 10). Like the multiplicity, Sammael is numerically endless: he appears in the sewage tank as infinite numbers of potential replicants of himself in embryonic spawn, but he ‘never has a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions’, and, finally, in their function as servitors of the Old Ones beyond the edges of the known universe, ‘multiplicities are defined by the outside’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 9).

The Affective Gothic Plane As I begin in this chapter to mix film analysis with Deleuzian analysis, I want at this point to edit in a long shot by providing a contextual overview of Deleuzian gothic, which is an anomalous hybrid in itself. Gothic, with its religiosity and morbid perversity, might appear to gravitate against the radical optimism of Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics and politics. Yet, simply to elide expressive affect with representational content would be to keep potential lines of flight grounded. In Hellboy, for instance, we might block off the alluring fluidity of CGI monsters and the impact of special effects because of the film’s crudely simplistic and problematic political polarities: Allies vs. Axis Powers, Demons vs. Humans, the FBI vs. Evil Aliens, humans vs. monsters (and the normative schmaltz of Hellboy’s ‘what makes a man a man’ speech at the end, which aligns him firmly with the idealised American male because of his freedom of choice). The film clearly belongs in the protectionist paranoid tradition of Hollywood sci-fi, as the culturalist reader trained in cinematic representation might well argue.

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 185 Yet, as Trevor Holmes notes in a different gothic context, despite the majoritarian conservatism of much vampire fiction, gothic also has rhizomatic tendencies: ‘the transformations of, and flights from, the body [nevertheless] illustrate almost too neatly the minoritarian impulse that drives Deleuze and Guattari’s work’ (Holmes 2006: 1). For, Deleuze and Guattari are provocative and uncompromising when they assert that the literary assemblage (here typical of all art forms, including film) has nothing to do with ideology, which is the framework through which the culturalist reader might understand Hellboy. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘there is no ideology and never has been’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5). In their view, ideologies are inevitably bound by the existing regimes of signification and representation in their milieu, and they replicate its structures. Art, meanwhile, has nothing to do with signifying; it has to do with surveying, mapping even, realms that are yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5). By emphasising the distinction between tracing and mapping here, Deleuze and Guattari endorse the need to develop the latter in art, which, as a living rhizome of affects, reaches away from imitation into innovation. In other words, Hellboy is not a film that lends itself to an ideological reading, even if the film features the binaries mentioned above. From the Deleuze and Guattarian perspective, far more important is the way in which the film affects its viewers. Earlier I mentioned that the schizoanalytic rhizome can and will select elements from preexisting regimes of signs, mixing them to create something new. However, the schizoanalytic rhizome can also incorporate what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘non-sign states’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5). In the case of film, such ‘states’ might include the use of light and colour, sound effects, framing, composition or other formal properties such as the speed and slowness of movement. Not reducible to signifying content, these formal properties can often affect the perceiving mind more powerfully than the plot or theme. Later, in the Cinema books, Deleuze designates some of these ‘non-sign states’ as types of sensory images in themselves: opsigns (vision), tactisigns (touch) and sonsigns (sound). As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, magical transformations occur when ‘an intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synaesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenges the hegemony of the signifier’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 16). I would also argue that such effects can sometimes happen even in the most formulaic Hollywood franchise product and the mind engaged in assemblage with it. If a Deleuze and Guattarian approach to a film, novel or painting looks primarily at the affective force of images and stylistic expression,

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186 Deleuze and Film rhythms and movements, asking not what it means (inexorably to fix signification), but what it does, then the gothic in particular has long been regarded as a primarily sensational genre, for which Deleuze proposes a logic, and language, of sensation. Sci-fi is also known for its very different but equally sensational images and is celebrated as a genre for its intellectually speculative use of fantasy to interrogate issues of space, time and the nature of the cosmos and alien life. Blended together in a film such as Hellboy, such mixed planes offer us a distinct way of thinking not through concepts, as philosophy does, but through aesthetic affects. I want to ask what special kinds of sensations are induced by the gothic and its hybrids and how these might be thought. Despite the small number of direct references to the gothic in the work of Deleuze (and Guattari), such as their intriguing comments on the ‘spirituality of the body’ and the gothic line in architecture, their broader use of examples from gothic can offer new and productive ways of thinking (Deleuze 2003: 34). Though brief, Deleuze’s comments are suggestive, indicating his familiarity with and enjoyment of some gothic cinema. When referencing films such as Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula (UK, 1960), Deleuze’s main interest lies not in their gothicspecific properties, but in their use-value as aesthetic stimuli for philosophical thought (Deleuze 1986: 112). F.W. Murnau’s seminal vampire film Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu (Germany, 1922) is used to explore the metaphysical struggle of light and dark forces (Deleuze 1986: 101), and the surreal Italian gothic of Mario Bava exemplifies the impulse-image (Deleuze 1986: 50). For me, provocative and pertinent images from popular fantasy attest to the broader applicability of these rich theoretical concepts, and I set out to defamiliarise mainstream texts as part of a project to discover a fundamentally different kind of gothic. As a long-lived, popular cultural mode, the gothic embodies concepts like the anomalous, becoming and bodies without organs in an overt and accessible way. As well as the rhizome, the anomaly and the multiplicity, there are further keys with which to enter a Deleuzian gothic world. These include the treatment of time as the eternal return of sinister figures and agendas. Gothic events shift the planes of past and present to produce overlay, the over-riding of present time with the past, leading into a pre-ordained future.

The Gothic Time-Image? Henri Bergson, whose philosophy of duration helped shape Deleuze’s time-image, asserts that the entire past, both personal and general, is

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 187 preserved in virtual form as a non-chronological existence (Bergson 1991). In Hellboy, for example, the past shapes the present to an apparently inexorable end that is turned aside for another sequel. The linear power of clock-time is undermined by the infernal agenda and the Seven Gods’ eternal nature. Here, time is a loop or a series of interlinked planes rather than a linear progression. As monsters beyond space and time, the Seven Gods predate or extend the Christian characterisation of Hell, and Broom talks of ‘a dark place where ancient evil slumbers and waits to return’. The anomalies of the Seven Gods, therefore, are partly temporal. The 1944 backstory features other layers of (imaginary) past in the Romanesque ruins of Trondheim, which happens to be ‘built on an intersection of ley lines’. In the present day, the exhibition of ancient magick at the Machen Museum, which is self-reflexively named after real-life fantasy author Arthur Machen, showcases a sixteenth-century statue of St Dionysus the Areopagite. We witness von Kroenen being dispatched in 1944, but he is brought back to zombie life in the present. Hellboy, 60 years old, seems hardly to have left adolescence. Rasputin, ostensibly killed in 1900, appears to have been granted eternal life. This kind of cavalier temporal elision, familiar from comics, could be deployed, then, to posit a populist version of Deleuze’s time-image. In Cinema 2, of course, the ‘pressure of time’ in a film (Deleuze 1995: xii) is brought out through a self-reflexively philosophical art-house style rather than in the literal ways of plot and theme as here. As well as Lovecraft’s aforementioned relevance to the anomalous, Deleuze puts one of his stories, ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’, to intriguing use to evoke the process of becoming. In this tale, with its ‘aura of strange, awesome mutation’, the narrator Randolph Carter travels beyond ‘our narrow, rigid and objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic’ and experiences the temporal anomalies of Einsteinian relativity so pertinent to the debates of Lovecraft’s own scientific context (Lovecraft 1985: 515). Carter encounters this ‘vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned’, which held ‘no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration’ so that, for him, ‘age and location ceased to have any significance whatever’ (Lovecraft 1985: 515–16). In a dynamic knot of interlocking lines, these temporal anomalies evoked by Lovecraft intrigued Deleuze, influenced as he was by Bergson’s philosophical response to Einstein’s physics, which in turn left its own mark on Lovecraft’s fiction. In Lovecraft’s anomalous space-time, Carter encounters ‘an order of beings far outside the merely physical in organisation and capacities’

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188 Deleuze and Film (Lovecraft 1985: 519), who bypass sensory perception to communicate directly to his consciousness via ‘indefinable’ radiations of colours and sounds. Moving beyond the ‘ultimate gateway’, Carter encounters the schizoid event of his own ‘infinite multiplicity’, realising with ‘consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons’ (Lovecraft 1985: 525). Like Bergson’s vision of the common evolutionary gene pool of humans and other life forms (Bergson 1983), these myriad ‘Carters’ are ‘both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless’ (Lovecraft 1985: 526). Deleuze uses this disturbing tale, with its overload of ineffable descriptors, to evoke the gothic mix of joy and terror in the process of becoming-imperceptible (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 66). Like the amoeba, which opens in any direction to incorporate and absorb environmental stimuli into itself, becoming opens up to other affective elements, both positive and negative and draws them into the affective gothic assemblage to add further singularities to its multiplicity.

Summary and Concluding Plane Deleuze’s thought is intended, then, as a starting point for new ideas. Lovecraft’s ‘weird tales’ are conjoined to these concepts by startling lines of flight, which jump between planes from abstract concepts to culturally embedded images and back again. This kind of move is typical of the mixed plane of Deleuze and Guattari’s methodology. When we use Deleuzian concepts as a way into the kind of mainstream cinema he actually rejects, then we engage in the sort of ‘buggery’ that he himself describes when he speaks of ‘taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (Deleuze 1990: 6). In schizoanalytic operations such as reading films from a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective, it may sometimes become necessary ‘to take dead ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigidified territorialities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 16), such as narrative conventions of mainstream film like the happy ending of Hellboy here. Hellboy’s distinctive mix of art with philosophy may fruitfully be used both to supplement and to challenge extant approaches as used, for example, in generic studies of gothic film (for example, Halberstam 1995; Hopkins 2005; Pirie 2009). Psychoanalytical, culturalist and sociohistorical studies can be augmented by what is at once a more philosophical, medium specific, and materially based way of reading, and

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 189 the process of cross-fertilisation can also operate in the other direction. Above all, the value of Deleuzian theory lies in its experiential focus. The gothic abounds in sensational affects, anomalous perceptions and astonishing concepts. Between existing planes and new ones, between genres and modes, lurk the anomalous spawn of a mutant gothic. By bringing such anomalous entities together, we can experiment with the mutant progeny of the conjunctive synthesis. A question, posed already at the start of this chapter, remains. Do more formulaic films actually offer greater space for creative thought than a formally complex art-house cinema that has been engineered by a philosophically or politically oriented auteur? In obvious ways, mainstream narratives might gravitate against and contain the energies released by their own more unsettling images and affects. Nevertheless, I contend that it is possible to retain the force of this special cinematic material and elude reification. When we view more mainstream, generic films, particularly those with affective overload, we need to work harder to think. Yet, their formulaic nature might actually act as an alienation device for producing conjunctions. The incongruous encounter of Deleuze and Hellboy opens up the portal for further transformational forces, and we can work to extend the gap to let more of them through. Though the rhizome is at the pole furthest from the root of arborescence, it also keeps on pulling in diverse directions in its own becoming. It already ‘contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialised, organised, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 10). If the most experimentally rhizomatic film contains arborescent elements, then the most mainstream root-film contains rhizomatic potential. As Deleuze and Guattari warn us, even in the apparent rhizome, ‘there is still a danger that you will reencounter organisations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to the signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject – anything you like, from oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallise’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 10). All films, whatever their type, can be understood as mixed plane entities, and thus subject to the same danger of reification. Not even the most destratified of rhizomes is exempt, and, as we have seen, Hellboy is far from destratification. One danger for our work with film arises when the formal and thematic differences of mainstream and art house harden into a judgemental, hierarchical and permanent binary. As both forms contain reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation, we need to maintain an active

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190 Deleuze and Film and endless reworking and rethinking about what each of them can do, for ‘good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 10). As Deleuze and Guattari contend, we need to work schizoanalytic machinations transversally ‘between things’, which ‘does not designate a localisable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle’ in our experiential assemblage with the films (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 28). From a Deleuzian perspective, our becomings, mobilised by the film-specific encounter, must continue to make conjunctions. What is initially a cinematic assemblage transmutes into another plane of experience. Mutant spectators on a mixed plane, making living maps grow out of what appear to be only dead tracings, we can also become-anomalous.

References Baudrillard, J. (1983), ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, pp. 126–34. Bergson, H. (1983), Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Buchanan, I. and P. MacCormack (eds) (2007), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Psychoanalysis and Film, London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1998), ‘To have Done with Judgment’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, G. (2000), ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in G.A. Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 365–73. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans D.W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1991), What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2002), Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone.

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Mixing the Planes in Hellboy 191 Di Filippo, P. (1995) ‘Hottentots’, in The Steampunk Trilogy, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Foucault M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, New York: Random House. Halberstam, J. (1995), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holmes T. (2006), ‘Becoming-Other: (Dis) Embodiments of Race in Anne Rice’s Tale of the Body Thief’, Romanticism on the Net, 44 (The Gothic: from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, November) available at www.erudit.org/revue/ ron/2006/v/n44/014004ar.html (accessed 9 April 2011). Hopkins, L. (2005), Screening the Gothic, Austin: University of Texas Press. Jenkins, H. (2006), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Lamarre, T. (2009), The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lovecraft, H.P., with E. Hoffmann-Price (1985), ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’, in H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness, London: Grafton Books, pp. 503–52. Lovecraft, H.P. (2008), ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in S. Jones (ed.), Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, London: Gollancz, pp. 750–829. Mignola, M. (1994–), Hellboy, Milwaukee, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics. Pirie, D. (2009), A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Powell, A. (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Shin, C.-Y. and J. Stringer (eds) (2005), New Korean Cinema, New York: New York University Press.

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Chapter 11

Digitalising Deleuze: The Curious Case of the Digital Human Assemblage, or What Can a Digital Body Do?

David H. Fleming

The phenomenology of films discussed in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema project arguably differs from that of modern forms of digital cinema, yet his cinematic and philosophical paradigms (co-created with Félix Guattari) remain invaluable for understanding issues raised by contemporary films that expressively employ digital modes. For example, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, USA, 2009) is, in Deleuzian terms, an action-image narrative wherein an artistically expressive bifurcation of time surfaces through the locus of the eponymous character’s body, raising ontological questions about the state of the actor/performer in the digital age. Drawing upon various Deleuzian concepts, I particularly focus on notions of cinematic affect and the geste in order to establish how the eponymous Benjamin presents us with a complex virtual-actual character whose affective performance cannot be singularly ascribed to the film’s star, Brad Pitt. Instead, the main character is built from multiple contributions from Pitt and countless other bodies, both actual and digital (including software, which, as we shall see, can be conceptualised as a ‘digital body’) – and this combination, or resultant ‘body’, moves Benjamin Button beyond the movement-image film towards the timeimage. In working to demonstrate why this is so, I further highlight the value of Deleuze and Guattarian models of the assemblage for theorising new forms of digital character, which emerge as multiplicit galaxies of different ‘things’, beings, forces and agents gathered into a new form of performing body and body without organs.

From Movement-Image to Cyberstar Loosely adapted from a novella by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button charts the story of Benjamin (Brad Pitt [et al.]), who

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is born as an octogenarian in 1918, and ages backwards throughout his life, before dying as an infant in the contemporary world. In the beginning, Benjamin is physically old and mentally young, but his chronological movement through space and time witnesses him grow physically young and mentally mature. In his review of the film, Graham Fuller argues that Brad Pitt’s lead performance as Benjamin ‘can seem as elusive as a dream in its evocation of “time out of joint” ’, with a disconnect emerging between the ‘Hollywood realism and the Borgesian ambience that flows from the surreal premise’ (Fuller 2009: 26). The apparent antinomy between Hollywood realism and surrealism, and whether or not it is correct to attribute the entire performance to Pitt, are pertinent issues for this chapter. They relate to Fincher’s exploration of new digital technologies, which illuminate a transmutating movement ‘forward’ by actualising a new form of digital-human character, whilst simultaneously signalling a spiralling return (through a century-long cinematic standard) towards pre-cinematic modes of animated artistic expression. Having worked on various versions of the script since the early 1990s, Fincher repeatedly dropped the project, believing it to require the casting of different actors to represent the various stages of Benjamin’s life, which would supposedly cause ‘an emotional and visual roadblock every time the actors changed in the movie’ (Duncan 2009: 74). For Fincher, the film’s power would come from ‘seeing one actor play the character throughout his whole life’ (Duncan 2009: 74). He believed, therefore, that Benjamin Button was a project waiting for digital technology to catch up to it. Before exploring in separate sections how digital technologies have been utilised to create animated digital characters, and how Benjamin Button employs a raft of innovative techniques that reportedly improve upon these, I shall first briefly illuminate some of the non-digital techniques used to depict different aspects of Benjamin, before providing a Deleuze-inflected theoretical consideration of the ‘cyberstar’. The first example of the more ‘traditional’ techniques used to depict Benjamin includes what the director describes on the film’s DVD commentary as a ‘monstrous’ wrinkled animatronic machine, operated by three technicians, and used to represent/perform the role of the ancientbaby Benjamin. Another sees Fincher employ framing, editing and a musically gifted hand double to capture Benjamin playing the piano as an adult. Finally, in the sequences depicting Benjamin’s regress from childhood into infanthood, five appropriately aged child actors were cast for the role. The use of ‘old’ techniques does not end here, however,

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194 Deleuze and Film for while the character of Benjamin is in these examples incarnated by something or someone entirely different to actor Brad Pitt, at other moments the film carries out a hybridisation of old and new within/upon the character’s body. That is, by being constituted by a combination of carbon-based and digitally animated elements that have been added at different times, Benjamin’s body surfaces as a form of meta-cinematic time-image, expressively plicating cinematic techniques from the past and present – as I shall explain below. In a Deleuzian reading of Fight Club (USA, 1999), Patricia Pisters identifies Fincher as a movement-image director who expressively toys with time-image regimes (Pisters 2003: 98). Elsewhere, I discuss Fight Club as a parallel mind- and body-film (simultaneously movement- and time-image cinema) that encases the body within a time-image crystal (Fleming 2009; Brown and Fleming 2011). Similar attributes also surface in Benjamin Button, although it is through the eponymous character’s body that the film’s time-image emerges, introducing a complex ‘before and after’ into the body and film. Indeed, Benjamin’s growing younger before his death seems to expose, through a form of cinematic mise-en-abyme, Fincher’s own musings on the fate of the living actor/ body in the digital age. In this reading, Benjamin artistically and expressionistically actualises/embodies the views of digital film theorists like Lev Manovich and Barbara Creed. Creed argues that the beginning of the twentieth century saw the birth of mechanical movie cameras, while the end witnessed their death, at the moment when ‘cyberstars’ came into being (Creed 2000: 79). For Manovich, the advent of digital cinema marked a shift from the predominantly indexical legacy of the kino-eye to a new age of the kinobrush, which is more akin to animation or ‘painting in time’: ‘Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation’ (Manovich 2001: 302). In the animated/‘cyber’ character of Benjamin, then, it is possible to read the imagery of an old body endowed with a new spirit and fated to grow younger (and eventually to lose his memory) as an expressive realisation of the cinematic actor/performer’s destiny as it becomes in the digital age. Such factors witness Benjamin’s body surface as a meta-cinematic time-image, simultaneously actualising a forward movement via its utilisation of new digital technologies, whilst concomitantly illuminating a spiralling return towards pre-cinematic modes of animated expression. Deleuze’s Nietzschean take on the ‘eternal return’ can help frame these forms of transformation, and shed light upon the changing ontology of

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the cinematic performer in the digital era. For Deleuze, the eternal return celebrates the transformation and evolution of forces and bodies as they expand into new territories and formulate new connections and assemblages in time. Furthermore, ‘only that which becomes in the fullest sense of the word can return, is fit to return’. These forms of ‘return’ should not be understood as a repetition of the same, then, but rather as a form of ‘transmutation’ (Deleuze 2006: x). In this manner, the cinematic performer can be viewed as a transmutating diachronic force that returns in the digital era after formulating a new technological range of machinic-assemblages. On account of this, Benjamin illuminates a complex interplay between real and false, actual and virtual, human and posthuman, subject and object, actor and animator, present and past, character/film and viewer. The fluid theories of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are invaluable for synthesising these concepts via the ontology and affect of Benjamin as a photorealistic animated digital-human and, by extension, Benjamin Button as a film. Before exploring these issues, however, I shall explain how digital technologies have typically been utilised to create ‘cyber’ characters, and how scholars have theorised these techniques.

CGI: Towards a Posthuman Realism For Stephen Keane, CGI can be divided into two broad categories: ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’ effects. The former constitute background details, whilst the latter are designed to be noticed. Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1993) is an example of both, since the digital work used to render the jungle mise-en-scène largely goes unnoticed, while the spectacular photoreal dinosaurs are designed to generate awe (Keane 2007: 63). In Benjamin Button, however, these categories become increasingly blurred and/or move into expressive relation, with the special effects at once seeming to draw attention to themselves, while simultaneously aiming to pass unnoticed/as natural. Indeed, casting an iconic star in the lead role indicates that the film freely invites viewers to ‘notice’ the visible modifications Pitt’s star body has undergone; yet at the same time the understated and unobtrusive nature of the effects (Benjamin is not a fantastical monster or machine) appear designed to contribute to a level of ‘realism’ that does not detract from narrative verisimilitude. For various film scholars (for example, McQuire 1997; Rodowick 2007), industrialised standards of photorealism remain the ‘holy grail’ for digital special effects in the digital age, even though objects and bodies are increasingly rendered within computers. Non-photoreal

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196 Deleuze and Film Hollywood characters – in whose existence we do not existentially ‘believe’ – can of course captivate audiences and make them feel without needing to satisfy any ‘realistic’ credentials, as Shrek and Wall-E testify. There is a different level of realism required, however, when animated characters are surrounded by and interact with ‘real’ human performers, and film scholars have extensively discussed negative feelings felt towards CG characters like Jar-Jar Binks from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, USA, 1999), which were felt temporarily or even entirely to disrupt narrative verisimilitude (see, inter alia, Manovich 2001; Keane 2007; Rodowick 2007; Brown 2009b). When digitally animated and real characters interact upon the same fictional plane, then, viewers and directors increasingly demand convincingly photorealistic CG characters that perform on an equal footing with their human co-stars. These characters must thus transcend their ontological object status and surface as believable subjects with real human depth and complexity (physical and psychological). Jody Duncan discusses how Fincher and the Digital Domain team believed prior to Benjamin Button that, despite huge financial outlays, digital cinema had failed to create a ‘completely convincing, organic and emoting human being’, nor had it managed successfully to cross the ‘uncanny valley’, ‘a term referring to the in-the-gut unease the average person feels when viewing artificial human beings, be they animatronic or computer generated’ (Duncan 2009: 72). For Fincher, the best CGI examples had merely produced stylised digital humans – like those in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Horonobu Sakaguchi/Moto Sakakibara, USA/Japan, 2001), and Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2007). Fincher therefore strove to create and harness new technologies that could recreate the appearance and power of real bodies, along with their movements, performances and powers of affection. These included compositing a variety of different bodies and forces into a multiplicit assemblage, and challenging CG imaging technologies to follow a creative line into the realm of becoming-molecular. D.N. Rodowick argues that the increasingly popular technological transformation of carbon-based film actors into digitally affected virtual bodies is symptomatic of an industrial ‘sea change’. Conceding that the actor’s body has ‘always been reworked technologically through the use of special makeup, lighting, filters, editing, and so on’, Rodowick says contemporary digital cinema takes body transformation to a new level: digital cinema’s ‘cyborg fusions’ of the body and technology are increasingly used to efface and even rewrite the actor’s body, such that filmic characters emerge as a part-human and part-synthetic ‘Frankenstein

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hybrid’. Rodowick observes that it is increasingly tempting to read this substitution of actual for virtual as a sinister ‘remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (Rodowick 2007: 8). Such views are undoubtedly premised on a preference for the human(ist) over the posthuman in art. Following this trend, Barbara Creed postulates detrimental psychological effects if viewers become aware of watching a digital creation born in a computer world. Creed imagines an emotional roadblock arising because the viewer knows the ‘cyberstar’ is not flesh and blood and ‘not subject to the same experiences as the living star, experiences such as mothering, Oedipal anxiety, hunger, loss, ecstasy, desire, death’ (Creed 2000: 84). Here, the character’s ‘false’ ontology results in uncanny feelings that prevent any ‘real’ human empathy or involvement in the cyberstar’s (spiritual-psychological) plight. I would argue, however, that Fincher anticipates this potential problem and works through it by endowing his digital actor with a human element that grants the character a ‘real’ psychological depth and complexity. In this manner the director works to button together the human and posthuman aspects of his digital creation, and to endow his virtual actor(s) with an actual human (‘spiritual’) dimension. Viewing such phenomena through a Deleuze and Guattarian lens allows us to transcend traditional oppositional/binary paradigms regarding the human and the posthuman, and to see them instead as modes formulating a creative block of becoming or moving into expressive relation within an artistic assemblage. Here, the human actor is caught in a process of becoming-digital, at the same time as digital imaging technologies shift towards a becoming-human. Such assemblages do not necessarily connote any ‘irredeemable loss of something uniquely human’, but rather open up opportunities ‘for endless self-recreation through the creation of ever-more complex and wonderful identities’ (Brown 2009c: 67). For Brown, Deleuze and Guattarian models demonstrate liberating potentials for hybridisation with machines and countless other forces, and provide a means to bypass old ‘fixed’ identities and creatively to embrace ‘becoming other’ (Brown 2009c: 67).

The Affective Digital Body: Or What Can a Digital Body Do? Benjamin Button’s visual effects supervisor Phil Tippet explains how, for a digital character like Benjamin to be convincing on a narrative level, he had ‘to work in every single shot. It’s not like a dinosaur that can be creaky in one shot, but it doesn’t matter because you still get the overall gestalt. A human character has to be a character, and if it

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198 Deleuze and Film breaks, it breaks’ (Duncan 2009: 71–2). Accordingly, in the film’s final cut, Fincher utilised 350 digital effects shots, which ultimately allowed him to ‘shoot’ the film as if Benjamin was actually there as a performer. Beyond being a convincing character at a narrative level, though, Benjamin is also expected to perform as an affective and intensive force. In an exploration into the limitations facing digitally animated characters, Creed invokes the views of Ross Gibson, who argues that a good carbon-based actor needs a very special type of intelligence that is simultaneously emotional, intellectual and corporeal in order to be convincing (Creed 2000: 83). For Fincher, it is clear that Pitt, with whom this film marks his third collaboration, embodies all of these actorly attributes. And yet, for the majority of the film, Pitt does not have his own body or perform as the entire character. For Manovich, analogue cinema – and by extension human cinematic performance – can be understood as the art of the index. Following theorists like André Bazin, he outlines cinema as an attempt to make art out of ‘a footprint’ (Manovich 2001: 294–5). Indicating that this indexical standard remains an important criterion for his partially digital character, Fincher explains how he specifically wanted to capture all the ‘weird little behavioural clues that an actor is constantly using in his performance’, which he refers to as a behavioural ‘fingerprint’ or ‘footprint’ (Duncan 2009: 75; James 2009: 28). Pitt’s ‘footprint’ (captured facial performance) was added to the digital elements of Benjamin’s character, so that it formulated an affective force within the body-assemblage. Here, we can recognise that even on a surface level, in the age of the digital character, the emotional, intellectual and physical attributes of a ‘human’ performance remain key to the digital character. In Cinema 1, Deleuze outlines the actor’s body and face as among the most powerful agents for mobilising and communicating cinematic affect, arguing that the ‘affection-image is the close-up, and the closeup is the face’ (Deleuze 2005: 89). For Deleuze, the close-up or face transmits feeling directly to the viewer prior to any search for narrative meaning. Pitt provides Benjamin’s face throughout the film, but the concept of the face for Deleuze and Guattari is not understood as an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks or feels; it is rather an intensive or affective surface used to communicate feeling or emotion directly (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 186). Furthermore, the face, like the close-up, can ostensibly be anything, including, say, a shot of a nervously tapping foot. The Deleuzian close-up thus communicates something of the character’s inner state and introduces an affective dimension into the image. These affection-images are realised by a combination

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of the close-up and the actor’s ability to put feeling and emotion into their face or body. Somewhat reflecting these ideas, Digital Domain’s Ed Ulbrich argues that Fincher had to create a digital character that ‘could sustain up to an hour of the movie, in extreme close-up, [and be] a character that could laugh and talk and make the audience laugh and cry’ (Ulbrich 2009). In a Deleuzian investigation into the affective forces of performance, Elena del Río distinguishes between two broad categories of performance outlined as representational and affective-performative registers, which she articulates through Deleuze’s ‘cinema of action’ and ‘cinema of the body’ paradigms (del Río 2008: 16). Concentrating on the latter, she describes how the performing body can present itself as a shockwave of affect, so that an expression-event ‘makes affect a visible and palpable materiality’ (del Río 2008: 10). Adopting the Deleuze and Guattarian model of the assemblage allows del Río to view the performative body entering into composition with a multiplicity of other forces and affects that restore a dimension of intensity typically lost when reading the body through a representational paradigm (del Río 2008: 3). This manifests itself as the potential to make other bodies, both inside and outside the frame, feel, think and act differently. Adopting del Río’s affective-performative register allows me to explore how the digital character or assemblage that is Benjamin enables other bodies on- and offscreen to pass from one experiential state to another. Applying these views to a digital human puts del Río and Deleuze’s models to work, and insists that a digital character’s performative acts, gestures and movements can also be affective and intense rather than merely functional and extensive. The performative actions of a digital character are here understood to deterritorialise the virtual body and turn it into an affective body without organs. Any ‘affective’ difference between a character like Benjamin and an earlier digital synthespian like Grendel’s mother in Beowulf must be attributed to the ever-changing creative block of becoming interlinking the human and (posthuman) digital technologies. For special effects supervisor Eric Barba to render a convincing Benjamin, the digital technologies had to surpass the old ‘facial marker’ systems that typically resulted in plastic and plasmatic (un-human) performances. Barba explains that ‘[e]verything we’d ever seen done with tracking markers looked stretchy and rubbery’, because the markers, which are placed on the performer’s face, merely provided ‘a sub-set of what the face is doing. The more markers you have, the more accurate the sub-set; but even with a very large number of markers, say 200, you still don’t have

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200 Deleuze and Film data relating to what is happening in between those markers, and that explains the rubbery nature of it’ (Duncan 2009: 83). For character supervisor Steve Preeg, existing techniques were therefore only capable of showing what an actor’s face was doing, and struggled to capture or convey what the character was feeling (Duncan 2009: 83). Rather than try to copy Pitt’s facial-performance with markers and animation, Fincher was driven to develop new technological processes that allowed him to ‘literally Xerox [Pitt’s] performance over’ a CG character. Fincher and a team at Digital Domain therefore developed a system tellingly called ‘e motion capture’. For this, four Viper cameras simultaneously viewed and recorded Pitt’s facial movements from various angles, building up a 3D model of his face within a computer. This involved a ‘volumetric capture of a library of Brad Pitt’s facial expressions’, which were then subdivided into ‘thousands of “micro expressions” using Mova’s Contour system’ (Duncan 2009: 83). These can be imagined from a Deleuzian perspective as an extensive library of digital affection-images. A good example of the character’s/the technologies’ newly acquired affective and intensive (‘human’) powers can be located in a subtle scene where the previously crippled 80-year-old Benjamin bathes alone. Benjamin is viewed in close-up vigorously washing his naked body’s outer surface, before discovering and animatedly scrutinising new sprouts of silver hair. The subsequent shot sees him energetically examining himself and posing before a mirror, tensing and stretching his strengthening muscles. Here, fractured into actual and virtual doubles, viewers perceive Benjamin’s face and body (arrested in affective closeup) come alive in a kinetic expression-event verging upon a dance or thought. As he breaks into an infectious smile, the character’s face and body synergise to communicate a renewed energy and spiritual awakening. It is interesting to note that the facial and body performances belong to different actors and bodies at these moments (filmed at different times), yet it is undoubtedly the composited and photorealistic character of Benjamin who makes the viewer feel. Recognition of this fact signals that I should now begin deconstructing the affective performingassemblage that is Benjamin in order to create a taxonomy of bodies and forces that contribute to the final digital character’s affective nature.

I Am Legion: The Digital-Character Assemblage Deleuze and Guattari remind us that a multiplicity should not be defined ‘by its elements, nor by a centre of unification or comprehension. It is

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defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 275). It is in this sense that the transmutating ontological nature of the digital actor becomes most philosophically pronounced, for by forming an assemblage with new digital technologies, we are encountering nothing short of a transformation in nature. Furthermore, the digital-human synthesis of the cinematic performer should not be understood as having a filial relationship to the ‘humanist’ cinematic actor that came before, for the digital-human assemblage is ostensibly ‘a multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 266). For Manovich, traditional analogue cinema pretends to be a recorder of an already existing reality. This pretence is founded upon a disavowal of the medium’s true nature as a special effects machine designed to manufacture a fictional ‘never-was’. Traditional techniques like rearprojection, blue-screen, matte paintings, mirrors and miniatures, always already allowed filmmakers to construct and alter recorded moving images. Cinema was always animation, then, which in the contemporary age now constitutes a ‘melange of digital and live action footage’ (Manovich 2001: 308). Manovich further outlines digital cinema as a kind of assemblage in and of itself, rendered as ‘live action material + painting + image processing + compositing + 2–D computer animation + 3–D computer animation’ (Manovich 2001: 301). This concept of the melange or assemblage becomes equally pertinent to the ontology of the digital actor in Benjamin Button, who/which is likewise a heterogeneous assemblage or multiplicity of macro and micro effects, actual and virtual forces that move into expressive composition to help generate affective performative powers. A filmic character, even an analogue one, is already an assemblage of sorts, partially created by the director, scriptwriter, the actor’s ‘type’, the skills they bring to the role, makeup artists, costume designers, etc. As indicated above, the most obvious and traditional force and agent distilled into the Benjamin-assemblage can be attributed to the carbonbased star Brad Pitt, who received top billing for the film. Fincher here employs Pitt simultaneously in an artistic and economic fashion, adding the star into the digital assemblage for a variety of calculated reasons. Pitt has carved out a role as a ‘spectacular’ male body in a range of films from Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, USA, 1991) to the overtly bodyfascist Fight Club (see Church Gibson 2004). The spectacular nature of both Benjamin and Pitt’s body is accordingly signalled throughout the film in a repeated mirror trope that serves to fracture the onscreen body

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202 Deleuze and Film into countless actual and virtual duplicates. The motif reaches its apogee in a mirrored dance studio, where Benjamin and Daisy (Cate Blanchett) pause to perceive themselves in infinite regress. In this crystalline hall of mirrors at the narrative’s centre, Pitt’s star body is isolated as a virtual reflection held in a dilated perception-image. The body is foregrounded as an object to-be-looked-at and is subjected to a complex web of looks and gazes within and beyond the frame. Tellingly Pitt plays his ‘real’ age at this moment, yet his star body is signalled as being a virtual image in a performing space. Thus, in the surreal heart of the narrative crystal, the actual and the virtual move into expressive relation and indiscernibly overlap as Pitt himself surfaces as a subject and object within the film. As arguably the most famous male body in contemporary Hollywood, the inclusion of Pitt as a governing component in the Benjaminassemblage functions on both an affective (body) and narrative (action) level of performance register. As an actor, Pitt not only brings an emotional and physical intelligence to the role, but his star baggage encodes significant narrative ‘meaning’ to help viewers ‘read’ the (representational) story. Cine-literate viewers will know, then, that the decrepit Benjamin’s destiny is to age backwards, become the Hollywood hunk, and therefore ‘satisfyingly’ claim his right to the narrative’s nearcompulsory romantic coupling. In this manner the film signals itself as a very conventional Hollywood/action-image narrative, which only distinguishes itself (narratively and affectively) through its inclusion of an unusual transforming body in its lead role. But what other factors or forces contribute to this affective body-assemblage besides Pitt? For John Andrew Berton Jr, digital synthetic cinema relies more than any other cinematic medium on the skills of plastic artists, such as painters, sculptors and architects, who are essential to ‘create images, to shape, colour and arrange every facet of every object within the screen’ (Berton 1990: 6). I shall return to the work of the digital painters and others in relation to the Benjamin-multiplicity below, but presently shall focus on the role of the sculptor – analogue and digital – and consider how their contributions factor into the final performing-assemblage. Ulbrich points out how sculptors and effects modellers were initially employed to create life-like Benjamin maquettes made from plaster lifecasts of Pitt fleshed out with silicon makeup, depicting how he would look in his sixties, seventies and eighties (Ulbrich 2009). These ‘actual’ 3D models were then scanned by digital cameras into a 3D digital form. A group of CG artists subsequently ‘built’ three virtual heads, which they further ‘modelled’ by adding aged details specific to each. These heads were later used to overlap Pitt’s recorded ‘footprint’, or rather his

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‘faceprint’, so that they became virtual masks moving into composition with his digitally recorded performance. As all these images were necessarily fed through a series of computer programs like Lola VFX and Mova’s Contour System, we must also consider the relationship these programs have with the Benjaminassemblage. For Sean Cubitt, software increasingly acquires an aura of co-creator in cinema, or else becomes recognised as an author and star in its own right (Cubitt 2000: 88). For similar reasons, Joohan Kim compares computer programs, or digital renderings of information, as a form of ‘digital-being’ (Kim 2001). By imagining these humanised and fetishised digital-beings as virtual bodies, then, we suddenly find a whole range of other heterogeneous forces and affects contributing to the Benjaminbody-assemblage. These co-creating digital-beings of course demonstrate two interfacing poles, which we can discuss through humanist (actual) and posthumanist (virtual) terms. Indeed, these digital-beings are operated and controlled by carbon-based digital-animators and painters, with the former allowing the latter to create new levels of 3D photorealism at a near molecular level, which further contributes to the digital character’s ‘actual’ credibility and powers of affection. For Berton, analogue cameras index an image of reality necessarily containing vast amounts of complexity: ‘The depth of information contained in the colour, textures and motion of nature is substantial. It is doubtful that any human construct can rival this complexity’ (Berton 1990: 9). Twenty years after Berton wrote this, however, the digitalbeings available to the artists of Benjamin Button clearly demonstrate that CG effects can now be rendered at a level of complexity comparable to indexical analogue techniques for human perception. The trick to creating a ‘real’ or believable human was simply to deconstruct it and tackle it as a series of ever-smaller parts, which initially formulate a creative process of becoming-molecular. Barba explains that ‘replicating a human was a matter of breaking it down into individual pieces. We needed eyelashes, we needed lips, we needed teeth, a tongue and eyes. Once we broke it down into individual components, we would attack each component and figure out how to do it’ (Duncan 2009: 83). The digital character’s head and face undoubtedly become the most ‘special’ effects within the film, paradoxically designed to be visible in their invisibility. Fincher strove to introduce miniscule elements into the image that ‘looked real to the eye’: ‘We had to see a little bit of moisture in Benjamin’s mouth and on his lips when he talked. We had to see light shining through the top part of his ear. All those little details and nuances had to be there’ (Duncan 2009: 90). For contemporary

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204 Deleuze and Film critics concerned with synthespian performance, the eyes are repeatedly singled out as the ‘human’ features judged most important in making or breaking the character/performance. Kurtz quotes Digital Domain president Scott Ross, for example, who states: ‘I’m concerned that when you create a close-up of a virtual actor and look into its eyes, that it will take real skill to be able to give that virtual actor soul’ (Kurtz 2005: 785). The eyes are thus judged as a ‘human’ criterion of value and as the ‘magical’ portals leading to the other side of the uncanny valley. Achieving human-looking eyes meant working at a microscopic level, adding the sort of detail and complexity traditionally the preserve of indexical cameras: ‘Every element – the amount of water in the eyes, the different layers of the skin, the red in the conjunctiva of the eye’, says Barba, ‘was rendered out separately for control, and then the compositors layered those things together, shot by shot’ (Duncan 2009: 88). Beyond the eyes, the assemblage of digital-beings also offered animators near-magical powers for rendering a believable fleshy character during different stages of life. The addition of wrinkles, the use of appendages (for example, walking sticks), and the portrayal of relationships that reflect a state of dependency are techniques employed to age Benjamin – but it is Lola VFX’s advances in wrinkle and skin imaging that grant Benjamin a living realism that transcends all previous forms of theatrical makeup and realise a creative process of becoming-molecular. Barba explains that the ‘problem with old-age makeup is that it’s additive, whereas the aging process is reductive. You have thinner skin, less musculature, everything is receding. There is no way to do that 100 percent convincingly by adding prosthetics’ (Duncan 2009: 72). Various digital compositors, painters and ‘skin shaders’ thus worked to realise Benjamin’s flesh at infinitesimal, near cellular, levels, beyond the ability and fine detail level of traditional makeup. One technique involved a high-resolution still shoot that picked up ‘pore detail’ specific to Pitt’s face, while the computer also grafted ‘high-rez close-ups of elderly people’s skin’, which likewise enter the organic body assemblage (Duncan 2009: 88). Their age spots and enlarged pores were transplanted on to Benjamin’s flesh, but, illustrating that a stylised ‘Hollywood realism’ was being sought rather than a true representation of how ‘real’ aging is, Barba stated that they did not use ‘too much of the texture from the older people, because we didn’t want to age and discolour Benjamin’s skin so much that he was unappealing’ (Duncan 2009: 88). Since Benjamin ages backwards, the same digital-beings were used to add force or remove the ravages of time from Benjamin/Pitt as he becomes more youthful. In certain scenes Pitt had to appear some twenty

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years younger than he was at the time of shooting, and, paradoxically, given the ‘realism’ of Benjamin’s appearance and comportment, these scenes seem among the most ‘visible’ in their presentation as special effects. Lola was used here digitally to enhance images and perform agereduction processes. The effects teams also consulted other ‘actual’ body specialists, including plastic surgeon Andrew Frankel, who likewise enters the creative body assemblage. Using Frankel’s advice, Benjamin/ Pitt underwent age-reduction procedures in two and a half dimensions. This involved the digital erasure of seam lines and ‘virtual skin grafts’ whereby areas of good-looking skin were layered over blemishes, wrinkles or shadows (Duncan 2009: 93). Under Frankel’s guidance, Digital Domain worked to completely rebuild the folds and structure of Pitt’s eyes and recreate a younger version. Moreover, other digital-beings like Mental Ray, ‘a ray-tracing system’, were used to ensure that the ‘physics’ of the character’s existence within, and his movement through, different light-infused spaces appeared ‘real’, an effect achieved by adding subsurface light, scattering effects, and illumination displacement both in and around the body (Ulbrich 2009). These procedures clearly demonstrate, then, that the digital body-assemblage is now conceived and rendered beneath and beyond surface and cellular levels and demonstrates an effects movement that passes through a becoming-molecular towards a ‘becoming-particles’. Over and above working on realism at the micro level, an assemblage of artists and digital-beings was also responsible for creating affective performances on a macro level. These agents ensured the characters’ powers of affection over and above their molecular ‘realism’. Perhaps the most obvious and apparent example can be recognised in the tracking of animated heads on to a series of different body performances. Beyond Pitt’s facial performance, a further four actors were employed to play Benjamin’s body and perform the character’s appropriately aged and affected movements – from his eighties down to his late fifties. The performers were not only employed for the ways their bodies looked, but for the way their gait, movement and kinetic energy represented the character. Their performances were captured in three dimensions by a network of high-resolution digital cameras, before being treated to head replacement shots in a computer. Head replacement techniques are not new, and have been produced since cinema’s infancy. They were originally observed in silent films like Georges Méliès’ Une bonne farce avec ma tête (France, 1904), and were more recently applied within Alex Proyas’ The Crow (USA, 1994) after actor Brandon Lee died before completing shooting (see Creed 2000:

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206 Deleuze and Film 80). In the case of Benjamin, the decision was an unforced, artistic one, and had to be far more convincing and open to greater degrees of scrutiny. Besides its animated realism, then, the means of suturing the head on to different performers’ bodies also relied on the refinement of motion capture techniques. ‘Mocap’ is a procedure designed to capture an actor’s physical movements as a ‘reference point’ for a digitally rendered character – as per the aforementioned Beowulf. Traditionally, this is achieved by the actor wearing a monochrome suit adorned with motion sensors, which a computer tracks before storing the input as digital information. These techniques are increasingly supplemented by facial capture to give the character expressive capabilities, with the combination of techniques being known as performance capture (see Keane 2007: 72–3). Markos Hadjioannou argues that motion captured digital performances can ‘still matter’ when considered through the Deleuzian concept of the geste (Hadjioannou 2008). In this sense the seamless flow of the actor’s body and performance is captured and translated into the digital character. From this perspective, the corporeality of a motion capture performance is reasserted in digital form so that the body becomes ‘a role’. If there remains room for the re-emphasis of the body as a performative or even affective-performative force in motion capture cinema, then, it is related to a continuity in performance (see Brown 2009b: 162–4). In the cases of Benjamin and Daisy, however, we uncover a heterogeneous assemblage of different actor bodies and variegated motioncaptured performances that become significantly more layered than normal mocap. Here, instead of wearing the ‘computer pyjamas’/ monochrome suits normally worn during mocap, the body actors wore the characters’ costumes, but with monochrome computer-balaclavas, replete with motion trackers, over their heads. Their bodies and performance remain in the final scenes, then, and the other actors and bodies respond and react to their movements and presence on set – but we do not see their heads. In this sense there is no continuous bodily geste running throughout the film, even though there remains continuity in the animated role/character. It is interesting to consider how the kinetic performance of the different bodies adds an affective and expressive dimension to the characters and augments the head and facial performances. Perhaps Daisy, who is similarly treated to mocap head replacements, provides a more extreme affective-performative case in point here. Daisy is a prima ballerina, and for her performance scenes Fincher tracked Blanchett’s head on to the body of professional dancer Jessica Cropper. Visually, Daisy’s spec-

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tacular (assembled) dance movements abound with destratifying kinetic energy and expressive affect, and illustrate how the act of expressiveperformance allows the body to transcend subject-object divisions and create a shockwave of affect. The ability to synthesise these different intensive capacities and to fuse them into a single role demonstrates how the posthuman characters can easily surpass the capabilities of any single human. Greater elements of control offered by digital animation technologies are often counterweighed against a perceived shortfall: the loss of unforeseen, unanticipated or accidental actions, events or performances that fortuitously add to the finished film and are beyond the director’s control. However, by assembling a digital-actor constructed from a heterogeneous range of real performers and actors, Fincher illuminates how a new type of unforeseen and uniquely digital ‘performance’, over and above the unique ‘footprints’ offered by individual performers, may reenter the film. A good example can be located in a scene that witnesses the tracking of Benjamin’s digital head and Pitt’s facial capture on to the performance of body actor Robert Towers, who plays Benjamin in his seventies. There, Fincher was amazed ‘to discover the repercussions the gross body movement had on the performance of the face’. Fincher continues: One of my favourite shots . . . is at the Thanksgiving Day dinner, and little Daisy says, ‘Isn’t it sad that turkeys are birds that can’t fly?’ Another character says, ‘I like birds that can’t fly – they’re so delicious!’ And everybody laughs. Robert Towers, who was doing the body performance for Benjamin in that scene, tensed his shoulders, as if he was intaking breath and then exhaling for the laugh. When that movement was in sync with what Brad was doing facially, it worked and looked like a singular performance. (Duncan 2009: 84)

At least two separate performances synthesise here to create a third, with its outcome hardly foreseeable before its final ‘actualisation’. These elements also highlight some of the problems in singularly ascribing Pitt’s performative geste as the sole driving force steering Benjamin’s ‘continuous’ role. It becomes even more problematic, however, if we move on finally to consider the nature of the other artists and effects used to manipulate Benjamin’s performance. Fincher has discussed how almost all of Pitt’s ‘recorded’ images required some form of ‘hand-manipulation’, since despite its advantages, the ‘e motion’ technology tended to ‘sandblast’ the edges off his performance: ‘so you still have to go in and re-jigger that stuff, and that requires

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208 Deleuze and Film people who are artists in their own right’ (Duncan 2009: 83). Over and above Pitt et al.’s performance, then, a team of keyframe animators were employed in postproduction to realise Benjamin himself. Perhaps in the end, it is the animators who become most responsible for the nuances of the continuous geste, with the carbon-based actors merely providing a screed of digital information for them to work upon. Indeed, Fincher states that the digital system relies heavily on ‘manual override’ to allow the digital artists to complete a fully realistic performance, to ‘correct’ the image analysis, and to animate ‘on top of it through the manipulation and control of key shapes’ (Duncan 2009: 83). The performance and ‘shooting’ thus only constitute the first stages of (post)production, providing raw information upon which animators then work. In the end, then, the Benjamin-assemblage represents a materially schizophrenic synthesis of actors and animators, humans and machines, actual and virtual, and realises a believable and affective form of performing subject-object. Perhaps Benjamin’s body is best explained by what Brown calls the digital merveilleux, a term applied to help describe digital cinema’s ability simultaneously to depict the fantastic alongside the real (Brown 2009a: 20). In Benjamin’s case we find the real and the fantastic, the actual and the virtual, refolded one upon the other so that the fantastic becomes the ‘real’. Thus, the Deleuzian assemblage that is Benjamin is uncloaked as a realistically rendered conjunctive body, conflating actual-virtual, realism-surrealism, actors-animation, mimesis-abstraction, human-machine, subject-object and viewer-character. Benjamin’s animated body is also found artistically refolding past and present (human and posthuman) and so surfaces as a meta-cinematic time-image illuminating a creative process of transmutation and becoming. If Pitt must still be considered the film’s star, then, he must be recognised as that special/new type of star, which, if observed under a greater magnification, actually reveals itself to be an entire galaxy, composed of myriad swirling bodies and countless smaller stars.

References Berton, J.A. Jr. (1990), ‘Film Theory for the Digital World: Connecting the Masters to the New Digital Cinema’, Leonardo: Digital Image – Digital Cinema Supplemental Issue, 3: 5–11. Brown, W. (2009a), ‘Contemporary Mainstream Cinema is Good For You: Connections Between Surrealism and Today’s Digital Blockbusters’, Studies in European Cinema, 6 (1): 17–30. Brown, W. (2009b), ‘Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie’, in animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4 (2): 153–68. Brown, W. (2009c), ‘Man Without a Movie Camera – Movies Without Men:

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Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?’, in W. Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, London: Routledge, pp. 66–85. Brown, W. and Fleming, D.H. (2011), ‘Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis in David Fincher’s Fight Club’, Deleuze Studies, 5 (2): 275–99. Church Gibson, P. (2004), ‘Queer Looks, Male Gazes, Taut Torsos and Designer Labels: Contemporary Cinema, Consumption and Masculinity’, in P. Powrie, A. Davies and B. Babington (eds), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 176–86. Creed, B. (2000), ‘The Cyberstar: Digital Pleasure and the End of the Unconscious’, Screen, 41 (1): 79–86. Cubitt, S. (2000), ‘The Distinctiveness of Digital Criticism’, Screen, 41 (1): 86–92. Deleuze, G. (2005), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2006), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2004), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Duncan, J. (2009), ‘The Unusual Birth of Benjamin Button’, Cinefex, 116: 70–99. Fleming, D.H. (2009), Drugs, Danger, Delusions (and Deleuzians?): Extreme FilmPhilosophy Journeys into and Beyond the Parallel Body and Mind, PhD thesis submitted to University of St Andrews. Fuller, G. (2009), ‘Up The Hill Backwards’, Sight & Sound, 19 (3): 26–9. Hadjioannou, M. (2008), ‘How Does the Digital Matter? Envisioning Corporeality Through Christian Volckman’s Renaissance’, Studies in French Cinema, 8 (2): 123–36. James, N. (2009), ‘Face to Face: David Fincher’, Sight & Sound, 19 (3): 28. Keane, S. (2007), Cine Tech: Film, Convergence and New Media, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, J. (2001), ‘Phenomenology of Digital-Being’, Human Studies, 24: 87–111. Kurtz, L.A. (2005), ‘Digital Actors and Copyright: From The Polar Express to Simone’, Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, 21: 783ff. McQuire, S. (1997), Crossing the Digital Threshold, Brisbane: Australia Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pisters, P. (2003), The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rodowick, D.N. (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ulbrich, E. (2009), ‘How Benjamin got his Face’, TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, available at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ed_ulbrich_shows_how_benjamin_button_got_his_face.html (accessed 21 April 2011).

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Chapter 12

The Surface of the Object: QuasiInterfaces and Immanent Virtuality

Seung-hoon Jeong

Mysterious Object, Quasi-Interface In Sang sattawat/Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria, 2006), a woman, Pa Jane (Jenjira Pongpas), tells Dr Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) a fable: a long time ago there were two poor farmers who, following a monk’s tip, gathered as much gold and silver as they could around a lake (we see an adjoining field that is said to have been the lake); suddenly a solar eclipse occurred, but the farmers didn’t stop and one of them came back for more gold (a total eclipse darkens the screen, which consequently loses depth of field); the story ends with thieves robbing the greedy farmer’s house and shooting him dead. The lesson is: ‘No matter what we do, something always watches us.’ The eclipsed sun contoured by its thin light in the deep blue sky not only evokes the title of Weerasethakul’s debut feature, Dokfa nai meuman/Mysterious Object at Noon (Thailand, 2000), but it also visualises the superego gaze, a god’s eye, a surveillance camera in the sky, or what I shall term a cinematic ‘quasi-interface’. Furthermore, the darkened sun radiates an ineffable aura for a time-freezing moment such that its epiphany does not seem fully represented in the human ethics that the moral story conveys. This surreal image suggests that the visual shift from three-dimensional illusionism to two-dimensional flatness can facilitate a more fundamental shift towards the ‘virtual’ dimension of the ‘actual’ world. In some sense ‘time is out of joint’. First, the image of the field described as the former lake, which is not represented, evokes the temporal strata deposited underneath it, so that time is rewound, now in the virtual mode. Second, the sun slowly emerges from behind the moon, leading to a shift in light from dark blue to normal daylight, before the film cuts back to the woman and Dr Toey. It is as

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 211 if the eclipse has occurred with them on the grass where they sit rather than being an image from a reenacted fable; given the situation, this nonsensical montage could only suggest that the legendary past is virtually immanent in the ordinary present. Such a ‘crystal-image’, which for Deleuze renders indiscernible the actual and the virtual, the real and the imaginary, the present and the past (Deleuze 1989: 68–9), reappears in a similar form of quasi-interface at the end of the film. In the basement of a modern hospital, a roaming camera slowly approaches an intake vent until it begins to resemble a huge round black hole sucking in smoke; ultimately it takes up the centre of our visual field. The three-dimensional screen space, then, transforms itself into an eclipse-evoking two-dimensional void that gazes at us and absorbs our intellect, vision and sense. To where would these natural and artificial eclipses take us, if not to an ontological ground of the world, the real as virtual – whether Lacanian or Deleuzian – in eternal return – whether Buddhist or Nietzschean? Furthermore, this unfathomable interface with emptiness abruptly cuts to the film’s last scene of a too-ordinary city landscape, whose inhabitants – dating, playing, exercising, etc. – seem completely unaware of what lurks underground. An ontological rupture occurs through this ‘irrational cut’, as if the black hole of the vent, having engulfed the entire world, now belches it out. Likewise, our everyday life might be the actualisation of the virtual at every moment of the present, or the realisation of the world’s own unconscious memory, which we cannot even claim. Weerasethakul remarkably captures the feeling of that memory by letting us sense inhuman eyes as quasi-interfaces viewing all human desires and activities from an ontological ground. In other words, we can move from the actual state of the world to its virtual verso through ‘interfacial’ objects. In this essay I shall argue that in this movement our phenomenological experience of images ultimately leads us to their ontological stage, which is immanent in the screen. I use the term ‘interface’ to mean the contact surface between image and spectator. It is a notion that can be applied to the camera, the filmstrip and the screen. Films can not only show these cinematic interfaces, but can also create indirect ‘interface effects’ out of various surfaces; that is, quasi-interfaces can emerge on to the surfaces that evoke but do not represent actual interfaces. These effects may open a cinematic realm other than the representation of the actual. What matters here is to look ‘at’ the surface of the object and to look ‘through’ it, as it becomes a quasiinterface that looks ‘like’ a camera, filmstrip or screen. Rather than simply being our subjective impression, this becoming seems to realise a

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212 Deleuze and Film new potential of cinematic illusion: not a mere perfect imitation of the actual world, but a deeper immersion into its immanence that is virtually on the verge of surfacing to light. To illuminate this effect, I shall re-engage with the notion of illusion and theorise its deterritorialisation into ‘immanent virtuality’ in light of Deleuze’s ontology. I shall then unfold the spectrum of quasi-interfaces, paying special attention to the ‘quasi-screen’ whose three modes can be thought in (re)view of Deleuze’s three modes of the ‘perception-image’ (Deleuze 1986: 71–86). In short, this is an attempt to formulate ‘interfaciality’ as immanent virtuality by drawing on Deleuze’s core philosophy of immanence, while also taking a ‘line of flight’ from his Cinema books towards a larger frame of illusion/perception and different states or stages of interfaciality between the actual and the virtual. The chapter does not simply apply Deleuze to film, but interfaces his thought with other theories, as well as various quasi-interfaces, as ways of exploring and expanding both Deleuze and, as it were, ‘interface theory’. What matters here, then, is how better to address a cinematic experience of the ontologically inhuman matrix of all beings.

Illusion of Interfaciality Let me begin with a theoretical redefinition of illusion. Weerasethakul’s films often culminate in the traditional celluloid-based illusion of sensorial space, taking one further step towards Bazin’s myth of ‘total cinema’. A soldier groping in the dark jungle in Sud pralad/Tropical Malady (Thailand/France/Germany/Italy, 2004) extends all his sensorial antennae towards the opulent sound, smell and touch of nature. Not limited to any sign system, the nature-sense circuit brings about a ‘pure optical and sound’ situation (Deleuze 1989: 17) which may be, I add, purely ‘tactile’ as well: a non-signifying, material surrounding that is too pure for a modern viewer to experience outside of a darkened theatre. Yet the ghost-beast that the soldier pursues in Tropical Malady lurks as something that all these saturated senses miss, as a quasi-being that his sensory-motor system fails to capture or barely traces. The multisensual immersion in the hyperreal space, then, turns into the supersensible encounter with virtual beings, including a tiger watching him in the middle of the darkness. The film leaps from the phenomenological impasse to an ontological wonderland. And while the steady panoramic camera unfolds ecological space, a crucial shift often occurs through the cut-in or zoom-in that guides the viewer unawares to the face of a nonhuman gaze. From the tiger lit in an iris frame, the camera cuts in to its

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 213 persistent but impenetrable gaze in close-up – the same two-dimensional captivation as in the zoom-in to the aforementioned vent. Here, the shift from 3D back to 2D reactivates neither the disturbing perspective of ‘haptic’ aesthetics nor (thereby) any ideological critique of a geometric vision that organises the totality of Cartesian space. The illusion of depth is disturbed, but it seems to give way to a new ‘cinematic’ illusion. Like the black sun and the vent, the tiger’s eye works like a camera lurking in nature, that is, as a quasi-interface. This ‘illusion of interfaciality’ changes the representation of things more or less immanently or virtually. It does not solely depend on one of the illusion mechanisms Richard Allen lists, for instance: it is neither trompe l’oeil entailing a loss of medium awareness, nor ‘reproductive illusion’ created with different sources, nor ‘sensory illusion’ like the duck-rabbit figure (Allen 1995: 81–106). However, in somewhat deconstructive ways it could be a trompe l’oeil with medium-interfaces appearing out of things, a reproductive illusion somehow intended by the director, or a sensory illusion oscillating between depth and surface. The same applies to Allen’s notion of ‘projective illusion’, which implies that an active spectator voluntarily invests belief in the reality effect despite medium awareness. In this regard I first assert that the illusion of interfaciality could also be a sort of negotiation between the image and the spectator rather than a given hallucination, but then, what matters is that even if so invested, it elicits from the image not transparent reality but immanent virtuality. It does so by changing the ‘cinematic iconicity’ of that reality, thereby thwarting its transparency without revealing the raw cinematic apparatus. One could compare this ‘interfacial vision’ with the Russian formalist notion of ‘enstrangement’ or ‘defamiliarisation’ that aims at recovering the sensation of life, making us feel objects through virginal perception. As Viktor Shklovsky says, ‘by “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest.’ It thus delays habitual recognition based on schemata while enabling us to see through what ‘makes a stone feel stony’ (Shklovsky 1990: 6). In fact, similar ideas permeate what Malcolm Turvey (2008) calls a ‘revelationist tradition’ of film theory, which has underlain the formative and realist approaches of European theorists from the early pioneers (Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin) to modern thinkers (Stanley Cavell, Deleuze). According to Turvey, all of these theorists commonly assume that cinematic vision escapes the limits of human

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214 Deleuze and Film sight and reveals the true nature of reality. This revelation occurs as the ‘photogenic’ epiphany of the ‘optical unconscious’; it is the interfacial becoming of the world’s being. Thus the effect of interfaciality can (only) be experienced on and through the screen. The pebble and the coffee captured in Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (France/Italy, 1967) suddenly manifest the shocking alien beauty of their surfaces with scrupulous indifference. The keyword for cinematic perception seems to change from (formative) creation or (realist) discovery to (interfacial) revelation. I nonetheless emphasise the decisive difference between this revelation effect and the illusion of interfaciality. The latter concerns not the stoniness of a stone, but the immanence of its becoming something other, whose iconicity can surface immediately rather than laboriously; the eclipsed sun resembles a camera. However, the analogy between a thing and a ‘quasi-’cinematic interface ‘immanent’ within it is neither pure similarity (metaphor) nor mere contiguity (metonymy), neither the classical imitation of an original nor the postmodern simulation without original. It is rather evocative of what Vivian Sobchack names simileation or simply similation, because a thing appears only as if it were an interface, not really but virtually. A pertinent rhetorical term may be catachresis: a false, improper metaphor that mediates and conflates the literal and metaphoric, ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’, ‘real’ and ‘as if real’, when no proper term is available (Sobchack 2004: 81–4). There are two points to note here. First, what matters is not ‘seeing’ an image of the sun ‘as’ the sun, but ‘seeing’ (an image of) the sun ‘as’ (an image of) a camera. The former concerns the primary psychological illusion that has been the basic issue of all the established theories of illusion, whereas the latter suggests a sort of semiotic, rhetorical illusion, or ‘figuration’ as often addressed among French critics, which involves our interpretation of the diegetic world. Second, this illusion is not the same catachresis as Sobchack’s example of the animal on screen that oscillates between its metaphoric meaning and its physical being as such – what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls ‘animetaphor’, and which does not serve as a figure but rather leads to the extra-textual animal beyond language (Lippit 2002: 9–22). While animetaphor takes an image of an animal to its actual body in full tactility (re-embodiment), the illusion of interfaciality leads an image of a thing to its bodiless immanence (dis-embodiment). The shift from 3D to 2D is crucial in the latter, as it signals losing actual corporeality and gaining virtual sense-effect. In Syndromes and a Century, the sun and the vent appearing like quasi-cameras clearly marks the transmutation between the 3D and 2D illusions, just as the tiger does in

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 215 the jungle of Tropical Malady. These figures imitate a camera in their whole body, but by becoming bodiless. In short, the illusion of interfaciality is an optical allusion to a virtual interface immanent in the surface of the object.

Spectrum of Quasi-Interfaces: Singular (Camera), Plural (Filmstrip), Molecular (Screen) I shall now use other examples to flesh out the theoretical basis for the quasi-interface, and its three manifestations as quasi-camera, quasifilmstrip and quasi-screen. As seen above, many circular objects can take on the appearance of the eye and thus of the (quasi-)camera whose ‘gaze’ we can suddenly feel looking back or leading us beyond. The title object of Le ballon rouge/ The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, France, 1956) is not simply the child hero’s toy, but a quasi-camera that watches and follows him like a smart bomb. Moving autonomously, the balloon performs the cinematic agency of continually opening our perceptual field where all things are rendered visible around it. Furthermore, in Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, USA, 2001), the zoom-in to the dark hole of a fallen jet engine sucks in our vision, marking the diegetic shift to a ‘tangent universe’. Upon its apocalypse, we see the very traumatic Thing falling through a supernatural wormhole, looking like a detached mechanical eye. It is soon matched with the skull image residing within an eye, Escher’s vanitas print hung in Donnie’s room, returning the diegesis to the actual universe. There are also cases where we can take the point of view of a quasicamera from the position of the Lacanian Real. In Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941), for example, Kane’s glass ball first appears in his hand in normal 3D perspective, but upon his death, it falls onto the floor and lets us look back at the space now distorted on its convex surface, a sort of post-mortem perception of reality. Similarly, La double vie de Véronique/The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kies´lowski, France/ Poland/Norway, 1991) has a scene where Weronika (Irène Jacob) looks through a magic glass ball in the train. Reality around this artificial interface dissolves into a formless smear while its fantastic refraction is revealed clearly – but upside down. Slavoj Žižek sees these glass balls as what Lacan calls objets a, objects which vouch for the phantasmatic link of the subject’s reality to the unnoticed Real (Žižek 2001: 50–1). In Deleuze’s terms, what is crystallised are the actual, which loses its 3D visual dimension, and the virtual, which gains convex 2D visuality.

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216 Deleuze and Film As for the quasi-filmstrip, one conspicuous example will suffice. In Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (USA, 1947), the multiple oblique shadows of bars in the entryway to the Magic Mirror Maze look like haphazardly hung filmstrips, recalling the spidery curves decorating the wall of Dr Caligari’s cabinet – both disorganise represented depth by pictorial lines stretching in similar expressionist style. Within the Maze, then, every shot resembles a series of sliced mirrors, that is, a 2D quasifilmstrip of photograms in plural. A barely possible distinction between the heroine and her images soon gives way to the total indiscerniblity between the actual villain and his virtual doubles. Moreover, the condensation of a shot and its reverse shot between these two characters proliferates both within a shot and through shots, continuously deranging the classical suture system. There are three references to make here. First, the seriality of Welles’ images reflected from slightly different angles undoubtedly reminds us of motion photograms captured by a pre-cinematic zoetrope or zoopraxiscope, as well as in ‘post-cinematic’ bullet-time shots. Second, quite apposite is Jean Epstein’s poetic experience of a pit walled with mirrors in Mount Etna: ‘There are as many different and autonomous positions between a profile and a three-quarter back as there are tears in an eye . . . Each one of these mirrors presented me with a perversion of myself’ (Epstein 1926: 135–6). Third, such an image of ‘tears in an eye’ that cause ‘perversion’ would be a perfect ‘crystal-image’, the smallest internal circuit in which the actual and its virtual image are in continual exchange. Within this circuit, as Deleuze explains in reference to Welles’ maze scene, the two characters ‘will only be able to win it back by smashing all [mirrors], finding themselves side by side and each killing the other’ (Deleuze 1989: 70). In short, the entire scene creates and reinforces an amazing maze of quasi-filmstrips until the crystallisation of the actual and the virtual unbearably confuses the subject, both character and spectator. As for the quasi-screen, I shall briefly return to the quasi-camera. Deeply rooted in film history, the quasi-camera effect often exposes the movie camera/kino-eye’s obsession with the human eye and its ontological ground. Early experimental films such as Anémic Cinéma/Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, France, 1926), Filmstudie (Hans Richter, Germany, 1926) and Emak-Bakia (Man Ray, France, 1927) exhibit a variety of floating eyeballs, lighting spots, camera-looking objects that lose their ‘thing-ness’ while appearing like or connecting to abstract forms ‘as part of the world we live in, as its nearest expression underlying the unending manifoldness of appearances’ (Mekas 1957: 5). The robot Maria’s dance scene in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927)

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 217 magnifies her fetish body whose singularity, however, shatters over the surface of a flock of male eyes exploding with testosterone, a multitude of impersonal bodiless organs. Varieté/Variety (Ewald André Dupont, Germany, 1925) pulverises this effect: a trapezist’s POV shot from above accelerates dizziness until the audience space looks like nothing but a sea of 1,000 eyes molecularly waving in cubist style. Here there is an asymmetrical dynamics between the (camera) eye as a single organ and the multitude of inorganic eyes immanent in the world. The latter may be the potential, primordial state of the former; conversely, the former is a sutured, organised form of the latter. When looking like the former, a thing appears as a quasi-camera; the entire surface of multiple quasi-cameras could then lead to the illusion of a quasi-screen. By the screen, basically, I mean the Real whose gaze the quasi-camera often delivers, or rather, the fundamental space of Bergsonian matter in which everything exists as image and ‘photographs’ everything else, receiving and reflecting each other’s image at every molecular moment (Bergson 1990: 31–2). Matter-as-movement in Deleuze could thus be said to consist of numerous inorganic eyes whose ‘pure perception’ renews their content while repeating their form, just like the screen. Though the phenomenological screen with actual images is not equal to this ontological screen, the open whole of all screened images in ceaseless change would form this ‘plane of immanence’ (Deleuze 1986: 56–61). The quasiscreen effect could be viewed as barely ‘visualising’ immanence that is in essence invisible and at best indirectly sensible through the change of all images and interstices on the screen. Now, if we think of plural eyes in a quasi-filmstrip as situated between the single eye of a quasi-camera and molecular eyes-in-matter on a quasiscreen, this gradation of singularity-plurality-molecularity may indicate the degree to which objects are less and less translated into our human recognition, and thereby more and more deterritorialised into inhuman immanence. And if this quasi-screen signals the plane of immanence as a body without organs (BwO), all visual ‘molecules’ like 1,000 eyes – in the sense of being innumerable rather than plural – would look like infinitesimal organs floating on the screen as a not-yet-organised body. The BwO does not necessarily mean the absence of organs but concerns potentials of organs, say, quasi-organs that traverse an undifferentiated body in the form of a multiplicity of pure affects, machinic desires and impersonal intensities (Deleuze and Guattari 1977). The BwO therefore embodies the virtual of becoming that generates the actual of being. In contrast to the quasi-screen, the quasi-camera could then fit within Žižek’s notion of ‘organs without bodies’ (OwB). Criticising Deleuze’s

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218 Deleuze and Film becoming/being for repeating the old dichotomy of production and product, Žižek draws attention to another pair, being and event, found in early Deleuze. The virtual is then redefined as the site of the senseevent, which does not generate actual reality, but which is generated from reality. And the OwB appears through ‘the virtuality of the pure affect extracted from its embeddedness in a body, like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat’s body is no longer present’ (Žižek 2004: 30). Here, rather than fully following Žižek, I suggest that OwB are equivalent to (disorganised) organs on a BwO, only with the difference that we cannot identify this source body. That is, when apparently detached from a BwO, an organ may look as though it has lost its body, becoming an OwB. And since it is an objet a, it interfaces with the unseen Real, its virtual body. So the eclipsed sun in Syndromes and a Century takes on the familiar image of the camera, while its appearance is unfamiliar because we see no body, no cameraman, and no contextual matrix of its emergence. We just experience an uncanny sense of what is behind and beyond this quasi-interface. In short, the spectrum of interface from quasi-camera (to quasi-filmstrip) to quasi-screen implies a pathway from OwB to BwO, the former interfacing with the latter. In order for the sun to appear like an OwB, it must be eclipsed or cinematically processed so that light no longer prevents us from facing it head-on and we can look into it. That is, the sun can evoke the OwB on the condition that it looks like an ‘eye without a face’, or a camera without a cameraman. In the case of the ‘grin without a cat’, we (are supposed to) directly recognise it as a virtual grin and nothing else, but in our example, we first recognise the actual sun and then take it as a virtual eye or camera. Both the grin and the sun are analogous to the OwB, but the sun needs figuratively to appear as a quasi-interface in the first place. We could then take one more step from Žižek. His focus on Deleuze shifts from the virtual as BwO (the cause of the actual) to the virtual as OwB (the effect of the actual), emphasising the rupture between these two virtual dimensions. And the latter virtual presumably occurs within, from, and against the actual (diegetic) world. Yet significant is the cinematic power figuratively to visualise the virtual as senseeffect in the form of quasi-interface from the surface of actual things, thereby evoking the virtual as matrix-cause. Virtuality therefore comes full circle forming a Möbius strip without any spatio-temporal passage: the immanent virtual generates the actual diegetic world, whose surface turns into the ground of the sensual virtual, which interfaces back with the immanent virtual.

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 219 The kernel of this circuit lies in the figurative transformation of things becoming quasi-interfaces. This becoming as figuration is thus a sort of cinematic illusion that enables immanent interfaciality to surface on to visuality. And the gap between interface and immanence decreases along the spectrum from quasi-camera to quasi-screen, so that a quasi-screen, often taking up most or all of the physical screen, appears not detached from the BwO but attached to it as though two virtualities had merged or the immanent BwO were nothing but its own sense-effect. This virtuality as ‘the reality of the virtual itself’, therefore, has nothing to do with ‘virtual reality’ (VR) that imitates reality in an artificial medium and thus forms non-immanent actuality in diegesis (Žižek 2004: 3). This truth is obvious but still worth mentioning, because it gives more pertinence to the notion of interfaciality as ‘immanent virtuality’.

Quasi-Screen: Solid, Liquid and Gaseous Interfaces To explore immanent virtuality further, I propose three qualitative phases of the quasi-screen resonating around Deleuze’s three types of perception-image – ‘solid’, ‘liquid’ and ‘gaseous’. Along this line, the illusion of interfaciality seems to maximise the cinematic potential to draw a ‘line of flight’ from the surface of the world into its immanence. Let me begin with just one suggestive scene regarding the solid quasiscreen. Among many riveting scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo/ Mirror (USSR, 1975) is a long take that epitomises the screen metaphor. It first shows a kitchen-like room with furniture and an open window as the camera pulls back slowly – slower than the two children who run out of frame. The screen is a mobile ‘window’, i.e. an undetermined mask that hides the out-of-field, revealing only part of the world, yet never stopping the renewal of this limited revelation. It delivers the aura of the space in duration until, with a revelatory clock sound, a bottle magically falls off the table and on to the ground. Then the camera pans to the left and pauses on the children in front of an open door, which soon turns out to be a mirror reflection (evoking the idea of screen as ‘mirror’). Finally, the camera finds its fixed position from which to transform the screen into a symmetrically contoured ‘frame’. We see a man and a woman, with a small building burning in the upper middle third of the frame as if it was an altar and they were conducting or attending a ritual. We recognise rainwater dripping here, though not heavily, from the eaves; it brings a subtle effect of a liquid screen that consists of molecular drops without a solid surface, distinguishing and protecting us from this fire. But at the same time, we are allowed to see and feel the

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220 Deleuze and Film alchemic superimpositions of the solid and the liquid, of the hot and the cold, and of the burning Real out there and our safe reality in here. One of the children reflects our spectatorial desire to get close to the Real. Passing over the boundary between offscreen and onscreen spaces, he enters the amalgam of Window-Mirror-Frame. Some East Asian films saliently display this ‘screen chemistry’ in completely different manners and contexts. A mall scene in Cheung fo/The Mission (Johnnie To, Hong Kong, 1999) almost consists of a series of tableaux vivants – another kind of quasi-screen as a painterly frame. The extreme tension and suspense nearly stops every motion of characters so that the movement-image of the film is punctuated by photographic ‘privileged instances’. At such moments, pictorial expressionism reigns, as killers look like 2D shadows in dark profile, making black holes in the empty, slick, hygienic 3D space. In the middle of this silent stillness, shooting is initiated and mediated through the interface effect when the surface of a steel cart reflects a gunman. This type of mirroring penetrates the core characteristic of a new millennium Hong Kong noir, Mou gaan dou/Infernal Affairs (Wai-keung Lau and Alan Mak, Hong Kong, 2002). A cop working as a mole in the mafia and a mafia member infiltrating the police become doppelgängers, each of whose image is also split whenever reflected on any reflective surface. Notably, the final showdown occurs on a quasi-screen, as a slight distortion of the image is reflected on the glass wall of a building; it not only splits a figure but also warps the surroundings like choppy waters of an ocean. It is as though solidity is about to take on liquidity, and as though the heroes could resist the world only through this virtual impact on the world, however minute, contingent and unconscious it may be. The same liquidity is found at the end of Qing meu zhu ma/Taipei Story (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1985). The main character faces her mirror image in front of a window, when the solid quasi-screen exposes an anamorphic effect due to the mirroring wall on the opposite side. The last shot fully shows that wall looking like a partly liquid screen on which cars run as if to ride the surf. Though not furthering fluidity, Yang’s Yi yi/A One and a Two (Yi yi) (Taiwan/Japan, 2000) updates his observation of doubling in every aspect of Taiwan’s postmodern life and on every level of the film’s structure, including the title. For example, a night-time office shot through its window overlaps the inside and outside, the right and left units, and 3D and 2D, all appearing only as ‘shadows’ on ‘windows’ whose actual locations are hardly discernible. When the characters step in the dark, their silhouette takes on more than the pictorial flatness of The Mission; they look even ghostly, as

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 221 part of multilayered simulacra – everything virtually onscreen is actually offscreen. Finally, Wong Kar-wai embodies this aesthetic in his films. The depth of field and the surface of reflection typically overlap, intimating the prevalent motive of the double in Chung Hing sam lam/Chungking Express (Hong Kong, 1994) – another film of fissure and fusion, but this time, between two parts, two loves, two cities (Hong Kong and Los Angeles), and allusively, two eras (before and after Hong Kong’s retrocession to China). In fact, the split national identity underlies all these pan-Chinese obsessions with the mirror image. Wong’s signature of step printing, then, adds another effect to the solid screen; it starts to become gaseous at its dizzy speed. The subject is not statically poised in the interfacial environment, but dynamically fused into it. At this point, it would be better to check more explicit liquid screens prior to hardcore gaseous screens. The mirror is crucial in this regard, as the surface of water that reflects Narcissus is also a mirror, that is, not far from a liquid quasi-screen. A memorable shift of the mirror from a solid to a liquid screen can be found again in Welles. In The Lady from Shanghai, we should not forget a magic mirror standing in the hallway to the real maze. It is just a single mirror without subdivided slices, but it reflects Welles in fluidity; his solid body stretches and shrinks as comically as it does haphazardly. This type of liquid screen effect dates back at least to Abel Gance’s La Folie du docteur Tube (France, 1915), for instance. Gance is certainly a magician, the successor of Georges Méliès. If Méliès mechanically devised unreal situations in front of the camera, though, Gance operates surreal effects by chemically manipulating the camera lens; in other words, the former was mostly pro-filmic, the latter highly filmic. The 3D stage as an object of the camera then becomes a 2D screen, an extremely malleable membrane-like mirror that bends, folds, twists and distorts the world as if it were just a design on a spandex swimsuit one can wear, soak or throw into a washing machine. Moreover, this liquidity results from Dr Tube’s experiment rather than just being inserted by Gance. The diegesis affects the apparatus (screen), which in turn affects the characters to the extent that what counts are no longer simply diegetic events, but their immanent plane as nothing other than the surface of the apparatus. And taking the form of slapstick, this self-circuit magic nurtures some early Pathé comedies and prefigures Gance’s own Au secours/The Haunted House/Help! (France, 1924). When it comes to the gaseousness of a quasi-screen, it does not always result from special cinematographic techniques, nor does it always pass through liquidity. Hindle Wakes (Maurice Elvey, UK, 1927) has

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222 Deleuze and Film an impressive amusement park scene in which the entire world picture turns into both solid and gaseous interfaces. At night, the entertainment complex appears only as a clearly lit contour as if on a completely even, solid blackboard. In the inside of a dance hall, meanwhile, the flatness of the whole space continuously shimmers with the molecular movement of human particles, just like tiny leaves minutely swaying in the wind. Here, all subjectivity is shattered on the huge plane of interfaciality, whose infinitesimal restructuration at every molecular moment is its consistency. Deleuze takes Vertov’s ‘montage’ as ‘gaseous’ because of the extremely disorganic relations between shots (Deleuze 1986: 80–6); I add that Vertov’s shot, and even just one photogram within it can be perceived as gaseous because of the extremely disorganic relations between human molecules on the evaporating surface of the world. ‘All that is solid melts into the air’ – Marx’s Communist Manifesto might also sound like an Interface Manifesto in Vertov. Not coincidentally, early avant-garde cinema in general innovatively experimented on/with this unspoken manifesto. Among others is László Moholy-Nagy’s Ein Lichtspiel schwarz-weiss-grau/Light Spill: BlackWhite-Gray (Germany/USSR, 1930), a product of a 3D device that is less complex than its 2D visual effect. A small set of rotating iron poles, balls, holes and mirrors casts much greater reflections that almost erase their metal body in multilayered shadows. Even in close-up, the device dissolves into an illusion of flattened fluidity. Furthermore, the liquid surface becomes gaseous as ‘black, white, and gray’ facets of light circulate on the whole screen as if in the air. Visual illusion then melts the reality effect of the solid substance into the screen effect of substanceless surfaces that are already immanent in it, yet more immense than it. Some contemporary experimentalists continue to explore the potential of the ‘object-becoming-screen’. Franco Piavoli’s Il pianetto azzurro/ The Blue Planet (Italy, 1981), a stunning love-poem to mother nature, captures the surface of the world that looks as though it changed into all the three types of quasi-screen. A solid screen: the dark yellow sky appears just like a canvas, a frame of the unlimited space with a sharp trace of its immanent verso. A liquid screen: not rushing of water, but its reflection of light, casts a hypnotic spell of fluidity on to its waving surface. And a gaseous screen: the wind in the trees is emblematic of the slow, lingering, but continuous and relentless movement of matter at every moment. A similar symphony of nature, or of the nature of things, is played in a more ‘enstranging’ way by Nathaniel Dorsky. Sarabande (USA, 2008) updates Dorsky’s typical captivating guide to the immanent virtuality of our ordinary reality. When a show window space of a fur-

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 223 niture store is displayed from an oblique angle, simple decorative balls suddenly look like planets afloat in space without any ground of gravity. With all its 3D spatiality, the image disorients our habitual sense of topology as if we were looking at the cosmos. The tactile sense of solid substance in this shot, then, rather disappears when the camera looks into the slightly liquid surface of red leaves and expressionist black lines that look like worms wriggling out of leaves or abstract waves flooding out of immanence. This still, inorganic life force between pattern and environment evokes the notion of the ‘dynamic sublime’ of German Expressionism (Deleuze 1986: 51), only now on the microscopic scale. But Dorsky’s imagery is quite static rather than literally dynamic. A shot from Threnody (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2006) elicits from a spidery entanglement of twigs and branches an illusion of an ‘action painting’ à la Jackson Pollock. In complete stillness, the 2D surface of our vision somewhat takes on gaseousness here, because of those haphazard inorganic lines – still dynamic in essence rather than in actuality – and interstices that take over every molecular space of the screen. The world calmly evaporates there.

Virtual Reality, Virtual Screen, the Virtual on Screen The illusion of a quasi-screen causes an imagination of the world’s transformation. It amplifies the flatness, fluidity and fluorescent effects of the surface of objects – reflected or refracted, natural or artificial – which thereby enables the screen to sway, flow and evaporate with inorganic particles. The world then reveals itself as an interface that is a cinematic plane of immanence. If this is one way of liberating what Martin Heidegger calls the ‘world picture’, or the world conceived and grasped as habitual image (Heidegger 1977: 115–54), then this leads me briefly to discuss the possibilities of and for interfaciality in the digital era. There are two major tendencies regarding virtuality in the digital era. Firstly, VR is still a dominant concept in digitisation. The efficiency of the world picture is rather reinforced through the digital approach to reality, still based on Alberti’s perspective for the world of the picture itself to be a virtual space. It is a vividly immersive space that facilitates the illusion of tactility in the continuum of actual and virtual realities. However, the existence of the frame distinguishes two realities anyhow, and the spectator’s enhanced identification with virtual characters is somewhat owed to his sense of safety and distance from VR (Morse 1998: 19). Moreover, Human-Computer Interfaces (HCIs), as the apparatus of VR, display their own spatiality that combines haptic and optic spaces, not within

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224 Deleuze and Film VR but on the monitor in reality. That is, we have the sense of the ‘spacemedium’ of the interface that we use, and which is different from the 3D totality we want to enter. Simply put, computer windows overlap each other, constantly awakening their utilitarian nature. In addition, far from being ‘post-symbolic’, VR must also find its symbolic means, conventions and signifiers, whether they be adopted from other media practices or newly developed over time (Lister 2005: 38–47). Second, perhaps as an attempt to overcome these conditions of VR, there is a tendency to liberate the notion of screen from its usual location. The point is not to make a virtual space, but to take any actual space as a virtual screen for projection. Many installations’ media art works now develop this screen-creating capacity by projecting images on to the wall of public buildings and so on. As one might trace the primal screen back to the mother’s breast, it would be possible to think of the evolution of the screen in its largest sense regarding such expanded cinema (Connor 2004: 59 and 285). More profoundly, this might suggest that the projected image implies, elicits or creates its own immanent screen above and beyond the screen that first exists and shows the image. Therefore, we meet again with the idea of immanent interfaciality here. Still, we could discuss the virtual on screen in its own dimension rather than confusing it with VR or the virtual screen. The digital update of the illusion of interfaciality thus deserves attention. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (USA, 2005), for example, opens with a great water drop on a leaf whose convex surface reflects other leaves in high resolution. As the camera zooms in on this quasi-camera, however, it turns into the blue earth while the surrounding green nature gradually becomes a dark space/surface. The earth here looks less like a camera than like an object seen from outside, namely an objet a for aliens that will soon desire/attack it. Our planet then changes into a red traffic light, an eye in the air, as if the outer gaze were sutured into it. This iconic montage epitomises the suture/de-suture dynamics between nature, the universe and civilisation, with the quasi-interface looking not only ‘back’ but also ‘beyond’, and/or enabling us to do so. The ending of the film is more radical: while the narrator explains how bacteria defeated the aliens, the camera focuses on another big water drop, before zooming into it to show similar-looking bacteria cells within. 3D tactility thus gives way to 2D interfaciality, while the quasi-camera is magnified until it operates as a quasi-microscope that lets us look ‘into’ it. This immersion into biological immanence continues, disorganising eye-looking bacteria into a sheer empty plane with floating strings of microbial molecules alone. The microscopic plane then transforms into the macroscopic one, with

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Quasi-Interfaces and Immanent Virtuality 225 strings becoming stars – visually, a universe of eyes. Our subjective vision is then liberated to a quasi-screen of visuality based on emptiness, blankness, openness. Genesis (Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, France/Italy, 2004) will serve well as our final example. Resonating with Piavoli’s and Dorsky’s films, this cinematic bravura goes back to immemorial time and translates it into spatial immanence. The title tells everything: in the beginning was no Word, but a wordless Big Bang. The first shot is nothing other than a cosmic gaseous screen with nameless particles floating through light, their innumerable crashes and atomic dances, faceless surfaces of undetermined brown waves. Then we see the birth of the earth, the seas and the heavens, which is followed by the indefinable force of a water drop that horizontally traverses a transparent surface of the world, i.e. a liquid quasi-screen. Germs of life appear in the form of eye-looking cells, or quasi-cameras that look back, and through which we look beyond on a rather solid dark screen. This chiasmus of microcosm and macrocosm, all that dynamism of chaosmos, godless struggles and inhuman drives in the origin-less and goal-less world, is now replayed after digitisation and on sleek digital interfaces. The digital infiltrates into the immanence of our vision and illusion in this way. There now unfolds, so to speak, digital immanence. In sum, we have reformulated the concept of illusion by investigating the ways in which the surface of the object takes the visual form of a quasi-interface. The illusory 3D reality effect leads to the total cinema of virtual reality that invites us to the saturation of the senses and thus to a spectatorial mode of ‘phenomenological’ embodiment. The illusion of 2D interfaciality, however, hints at the ‘ontological’ shift of the sensory-motor system to ‘immanent virtuality’ as the cinematic plane of Deleuze’s immanence. These two illusions are not only being updated on the digital surface of the cinematic image, but they are also visually invigorating both the actual – even within VR – and the virtual as such – even within this actual. While the former will never stop fascinating our eyes, the latter will remain a Deleuzian playground for our continuous rethinking of cinema.

References Allen, R. (1995), Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergson, H. (1990), Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books. Connor, S. (2004), The Book of Skin, London: Cornell University Press.

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226 Deleuze and Film Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1977), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, New York: Viking. Epstein, J. (1926), Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna, Paris: Les Ecrivains Réunis. Heidegger, M. (1977), ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 115–54. Lippit, A.M. (2002), ‘The Death of an Animal’, Film Quarterly, 56 (1): 9–22. Lister, M. (2005), ‘Dangerous Metaphors and Meaning in Immersive Media’, in J. Furby and K. Randell (eds), Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies, London: Wallflower, pp. 38–47. Mekas, J. (1957), ‘Hans Richter on the Nature of Film Poetry’, Film Culture 3 (11): 5–8. Morse, M. (1998), Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shklovsky, V.B. (1990), Theory of Prose (1929), trans. B. Sher, Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press. Sobchack, V. (2004), ‘What my Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment And Moving Image Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 53–84. Turvey, M. (2008), Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, S. (2001), The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies´lowski Between Theory and Post-Theory, London: British Film Institute. Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge.

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Notes on Contributors

William Brown is a Lecturer in Film at Roehampton University. He is the author of Supercinema: Film Theory in the Digital Age (Berghahn, forthcoming), which is a theoretical consideration of digital cinema, particularly digital special effects. He is also the joint author (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin) of Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). He has published essays in various journals and edited collections, including Deleuze Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in European Cinema, and Studies in French Cinema. David Deamer lectures in film at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published in J. Bell and C. Colebrook’s Deleuze and History (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Deleuze Studies and A/V, the online Deleuze journal. David blogs on Deleuze and cinema at cineosis.blog spot.com and is preparing a book on Deleuze, Japanese cinema and the atom bomb. Elena del Río is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her essays on the intersections between cinema and philosophies of the body in the areas of technology, performance and affect have been featured in journals such as Camera Obscura, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, Studies in French Cinema, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film-Philosophy, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, SubStance, and Deleuze Studies. She has also contributed essays to volumes on the films of Atom Egoyan, Rainer W. Fassbinder, and on the philosophy of film, and Deleuze and cinema. She is the author of Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh University

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228 Deleuze and Film Press, 2008). Her current book project re-examines the phenomenon of violence in the cinema from the perspective of a Deleuzian ethics informed by Spinoza’s philosophy of the affects and Nietzsche’s philosophy of bodily forces. David H. Fleming is a Lecturer in Film, Media and Communications at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. After completing his PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2009 he has published film reviews, review articles and academic papers engaging with Deleuzian and schizoanalytic approaches to identity and affect in different forms of cinema. He co-edited Cinema, Identities and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009) with Ruby Cheung, and is currently working on completing his first monograph that explores a Deleuze and Guattarian approach to ‘extreme’ and ‘event’ cinemas (Blowing Minds and Breaking Bodies: The Philosophy of ‘Extreme’ and ‘Event’ Cinemas [Intellect: Forthcoming]). Markos Hadjioannou received his PhD from the Film Studies Department at King’s College London (2009), where he also lectured until 2011. Recently, he was appointed to the position of Assistant Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University, where he will be teaching film theory and film history. His research interests include the ontology of cinema, film and new media, film theory and philosophy, and spectatorship and ethics. He has published a number of articles on these topics, and his monograph From Light to Byte: The Question Concerning Digital Cinema is forthcoming (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Amy Herzog is coordinator of the Film Studies program and Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She is also on the doctoral faculty of theatre and film studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. He has published extensively on a variety of topics including indexicality, cinematic ontology, Korean horror, and animals in film, as well as on filmmakers and theorists including André Bazin, Werner Herzog, Michael Haneke and Peter Greenaway. David Martin-Jones is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of Deleuze, Cinema

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Notes on Contributors 229 and National Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), Deleuze Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (I.B. Tauris, 2008) (with Damian Sutton), Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and Deleuze and World Cinemas (Continuum, 2011). He is also the co-editor of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010). He is a member of the editorial boards of Deleuze Studies, FilmPhilosophy and A/V, and co-edits the Continuum monograph series Thinking Cinema. Serazer Pekerman has recently acquired her PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews. She holds a BArch in Architecture from Middle East Technical University and an MA in Visual Arts and Communication from the University of Bahçes¸ehir. In her PhD thesis she worked on the representation and perception of the female body and female intimacy in contemporary transnational cinema. She is interested in film space, hybrid non-human imagery, transnational cinemas and schizoanalytic approaches in film studies. She writes film scripts, novellas, short stories, film reviews and scholarly articles on film in Turkish and in English. Anna Powell is Reader in Film and English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Sovereignty in Popular Vampire Fiction (Mellen Press, 2002), Deleuze and the Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). She is also the co-editor (with Andrew Smith) of Teaching the Gothic (Palgrave, 2006). Anna directs A/V and is a member of the Deleuze Studies editorial board. Richard Rushton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is author of The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester University Press, 2010), Cinema After Deleuze (Continuum, 2011) and (with Gary Bettinson) What is Film Theory? (Open University Press, 2010). Damian Sutton is Reader in Photography at Middlesex University. He is the author of Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and, with David MartinJones, of Deleuze Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (I.B. Tauris, 2008).

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Index

Action-image, 2, 8–9, 13, 18–19, 23–34, 37, 39, 43, 48–51, 56, 84, 98, 100, 157, 192, 202 ASA⬘, 50 SAS⬘, 26, 49–53, 98 Actor’s Studio, 46 Affection-image, 23, 25, 198, 200 Ahn, Dong-kyu, 68 Ahn, SooJeong, 68 Aldrich, Robert, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 170 Allsop, Samara Lea, 22, 34 Almodóvar, Pedro, 151 Andrew, Dudley, 2, 3 Anomalous, 14, 181–4, 186, 187, 189, 190 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 138 Any-space-whatever, 99 Arnold, Andrea, 12, 121 Red Road (2006), 12, 121, 124–6, 129–31, 134 Arnold, Jack, 182 The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), 182 Asian economic crisis (1997), 9, 62 Assemblages, 1, 4, 8, 55, 177–8, 182, 195, 197 Attraction-image, 24 Badiou, Alain, 22 Balázs, Béla, 213 Baudrillard, Jean, 175 Bava, Mario, 186 Bazin, André, 110, 198, 212 Becoming, 6, 7, 12, 14, 34, 46–8, 56, 86, 88, 90–3, 96, 98, 100–2, 105, 109, 122–4, 131–2, 134, 140,

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146, 158, 164, 180, 182, 186–90, 196–7, 199, 203–5, 208, 211, 214–15, 217–19, 225 Ben-Yishai, Ron, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 213 Bentham, Jeremy, 124, 126 Bergson, Henri, 18, 23–4, 56, 64, 109–10, 111, 117, 186, 187, 188, 217 Matter and Memory (1896), 23–4 Beugnet, Martine, 2 Body without organs, 8–9, 15, 37, 45–51, 53, 178, 184, 192, 199, 217 Bogue, Ronald, 2, 155 Bollywood, 55 Borges, Jorge Luis, 138, 193 Braidotti, Rosi, 122 Buchanan, Ian, 2, 121, 178 Burroughs, William S., 176 Buscombe, Edward, 38, 40, 42 Butler, Alison, 2 Cavell, Stanley, 213 Chakravarty, Sumita, 44–5 Chang, Kyung-sup, 62 Chaplin, Charles, 37 Chauvel, Charles, 86 Jedda (1955), 86 Chow, Rey, 4–5 Chronosign, 24 Cinemes, 108, 110–12 Cineosis, 23–4, 34 Cliché, 13, 82, 101, 140–1, 145 Cold War, 20, 65 Colman, Felicity, 2

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232 Deleuze and Film Cornell, Joseph, 148 Rose Hobart (1936), 148 Thimble Theater (1938), 148 Creed, Barbara, 183, 194, 197–8 Cromwell, John, 156 Dead Reckoning (1947), 156 Crowley, Aleister, 177 Crystal, 64, 79, 83, 141, 146, 194, 202, 211, 216 crystalline regime, 56, 60, 111–13, 116–18, 137, 202 Cyberstar, 192–4, 197 de Heer, Rolf, 85 Ten Canoes (with Peter Djigirr, 2006), 85 de Palma, Brian, 39 Scarface (1983), 38 del Río, Elena, 8, 13, 121, 139–41, 149, 151, 199 del Toro, Guillermo, 13, 173, 177 Cronos (1993), 178 Hellboy (2004), 13–14, 173–90 Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 1 (1983), 3, 37, 98, 173, 198 Cinema 2 (1985), 3, 37, 55, 72, 74, 90, 93, 99, 104, 146, 157, 173, 180, 187 Difference and Repetition (1968), 142 Logic of Sense, The (1969), 47 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 1, 6–9, 14, 18–19, 37, 46–8, 51, 53, 101, 121–3, 125, 126, 134, 157–60, 173, 176–86, 188–90, 192, 195, 197–201, 217 Anti-Oedipus (1972), 19, 47, 157 A Thousand Plateaus (1980), 14–15, 47, 122, 176 What is Philosophy? (1991), 7, 14, 179 Demy, Jacques, 151 Denis, Claire, 139 Derrida, Jacques, 162–3, 167, 169–70 Deterritorialisation, 8, 12, 24–5, 123–4, 129, 141, 144, 148, 153, 177–8, 189, 212 Di Filippo, Paul, 181 digital imagery, 14,15, 106, 180 Discourse-image, 24 Doane, Mary Ann, 105–11 Dorsky, Nathaniel, 222–3 Sarabande (2008), 222 Threnody (2006), 223

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Duchamp, Marcel, 216 Anemic Cinema (1926), 216 Dupont, Ewald André, 217 Variety (1925), 217 Eastwood, Clint, 38, 40 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), 40 Eisenstein, Sergei M., 18, 72, 73 Elsaesser, Thomas, 106, 150–2 Elvey, Maurice, 221 Hindle Wakes (1927), 221 Epstein, Jean, 213, 216 Escher, M.C., 215 Eurocentrism, 4, 6 Fajr International Film Festival, 88, 93 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 12–13, 139, 149–52 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 151 Faulkner, William, 145 Fellini, Federico, 146 film farsi (Iran), 93–6 film noir, 1, 13, 156, 164 film-e ejtema’i (social justice films in Iran), 94–5 filmha-ye dini (religious film, Iran), 94, 96 Finch, Spencer, 148 West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 pm) (2007), 148 Fincher, David, 148, 192–208 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), 14, 192–208 Fight Club (1999), 194, 201 Fisher, Terence, 186 The Brides of Dracula (1960), 186 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 192 Flaxman, Gregory, 2 Fleming, Victor, 84–5 Gone with the Wind (1939), 85 The Wizard of Oz (1939), 84 Folman, Ari, 11, 104–19 Waltz with Bashir (2008), 11, 12, 104–19 Ford, John, 37, 53, 74, 148 The Searchers (1956), 148 Foucault, Michel, 124, 138, 175 Fried, Michael, 75 Fukasaku, Kinji, 9 Battles Without Honour and Humanity (1973), 9

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Index 233 Gance, Abel, 72–3, 221 La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), 221 The Haunted House/Help! (1924), 221 Gemayel, Bashir, 116 Gilliam, Terry, 177 Brazil (1985), 177 Globalisation, 68 Godard, Jean-Luc, 141, 214 Week End (1967), 214 Griffith, D.W., 73 Broken Blossoms (1919), 73 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles Hamer, Bent, 12, 121 Kitchen Stories (2003), 12, 121, 124, 126, 131–4 Haneke, Michael, 125, 228 Caché (2005), 125 Harrison, Rachel, 38, 40–2 Hawks, Howard, 37, 38, 43, 74, 85 Red River (1948), 85 Scarface (1932), 38 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 181 Heidegger, Martin, 223 Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian, 12, 121 The Lives of Others (2006), 12, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130–1, 134 Herzog, Amy, 2, 12–13 Herzog, Werner, 37 Hiroshima, 9, 18, 20 History (antiquarian, critical, monumental, universal), 30–4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 72–4 Hobart, Rose, 148 Holland, Eugene W., 122–3 Honda, Ishirô, 8, 18, 20–1 Godzilla (1954), 8–9, 18–34 Hume, David, 142–3 Hyalosign, 24 Im, Kwon-taek, 63 Sopyonje (1993), 63 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 62 inversion-image, 24 Israel-Lebanon War (1982), 114–15, 119 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 177 City of Lost Children (with Marc Caro, 1995), 177

MARTIN-JONES 9780748641215 PRINT.indd 233

Kaige, Chen, 44 kaiju¯ eiga (mysterious creature film), 18 kalatesa (timeliness), 42, 44–5, 52 Kar-Wai, Wong, 221 Chungking Express (1994), 221 Kazan, Elia, 46 Keaton, Buster, 37, 50 The General (with Clyde Bruckman, 1926), 50 Kelly, Gene, 76 Kelly, Richard, 215 Donnie Darko (2001), 215 Kennedy, Barbara M., 2 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 95 Kies´lowski, Krzysztof, 215 The Double Life of Veronique (1991), 215 Kim, Dae-seung, 9, 54, 57 Blood Rain (2005), 57 Bungee Jumping of their Own (2001), 57 Traces of Love (2006), 9, 54–69 Kim, Jee-woon, 57 A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), 57 Kim, Tae-yong, 57 Memento Mori (with Kyu-Dong Min, 1999), 57 Klossowski, Pierre, 144–5 Kong, Su-chang, 57 R-Point (2004), 57 Kracauer, Siegfried, 213 Kubrick, Stanley, 170 The Killing (1956), 170 Kurosawa, Akira, 8–9, 37, 138 Rashomon (1950), 9 Lamorisse, Albert, 215 The Red Balloon (1956), 215 Lang, Fritz, 156, 161, 168, 170, 216 The Big Heat (1953), 170 Metropolis (1927), 216 Scarlet Street (1945), 161 The Woman in the Window (1944), 156 Lau, Wai Keung, and Alan Mak, 220 Infernal Affairs (2002), 220 Lectosign, 24 Lee, Ang, 42 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), 42 Lee, Brandon, 205 The Crow (1994), 205

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234 Deleuze and Film Lee, Jang-ho, 63 The Man with Three Coffins (1987), 63 Leone, Sergio, 38, 40, 43 The Dollars trilogy (1963–1966), 40 Lewis, Joseph H., 161 Gun Crazy/Deadly is the Female (1950), 161 Limit situation, 6 Linklater, Richard, 125 A Scanner Darkly (2006), 125 Losey, Joseph, 138 Lourié, Eugène, 20 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), 20 Lovecraft, H.P., 173, 181–2, 187–8 Lucas, George, 196 Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), 196 Luhrmann, Baz, 1, 10–11, 71–86 Australia (2008), 74, 77, 80, 83–6 Moulin Rouge! (2001), 74, 77–83 Strictly Ballroom (1992), 74, 77–8 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), 74, 78–82 Lynch, David, 139–40, 151 MacArthur, General Douglas, 20, 32 MacCormack, Patricia, 2, 178 Machen, Arthur, 187 Machine, 14, 18–19, 22, 30, 34, 100, 124, 126, 158, 164–5, 177, 178, 182, 193, 195, 197, 201, 207–8 Mak, Alan see Lau, Wai Keung Manovich, Lev, 194, 196, 198, 201 Marks, Laura U., 2 Marrati, Paola, 2 Martin-Jones, David, 2, 4, 10, 43, 72, 123 and Damian Sutton, 2, 123 Marx, Karl, 222 Massumi, Brian, 122 Melford, George, 148 East of Borneo (1931), 148 Méliès, Georges, 205, 221 Une bonne farce avec ma tête (1904), 205 Melodrama, 1, 12–14, 57, 62, 74, 139–40, 142, 149–52 Mignola, Mike, 176, 181 Hellboy (comic book, 1994–), 176, 181

MARTIN-JONES 9780748641215 PRINT.indd 234

Miller, George, 86 Mad Max 2 (1981), 86 Minnelli, Vincente, 10, 18, 74–8, 80, 81, 83, 86, 150 An American in Paris (1951), 74 The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), 74 The Band Wagon (1953), 74–6, 83 Brigadoon (1954), 74, 76 Gigi (1958), 74 Madame Bovary (1949), 75 Meet Me in St Louis (1944), 76 The Pirate (1948), 76 Some Came Running (1958), 75 Minoritarian, 11, 92–6, 99, 122–4, 126, 134, 173, 185 Moffat, Tracey, 86 Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), 86 Moholy-Nagy, László, 222 Light Spill: Black–White–Grey (1930), 222 Moore, Alan, 177 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comic book, 1999), 177 motion capture (mocap), 200, 206 movement-image, 3–4, 10–11, 13, 15, 23–5, 37, 43, 48–9, 51, 53, 55, 71, 72–3, 76, 81, 84, 86, 88, 92, 98, 100–1, 108, 111, 140, 156–7, 192, 194, 220 Mullarkey, John, 2, 73 Multi-plane existence, 8 Multiplicity, 7, 176, 181, 183–4, 186, 188, 199–202, 217 Muni, Paul, 38 Murnau, F.W., 186 Nosferatu (1922), 186 Murray, Timothy, 2 Nanking, rape of (1937), 34 Neorealism, 13, 55, 138, 155–6, 171 Nichols, Bill, 105, 108 Nietszche, Friedrich, 7, 11, 18–19, 30, 34, 36n, 90 118, 114–15, 152, 163, 169, 194, 211 Beyond Good and Evil (1886), 169 The Gay Science (1882), 169 Twilight of the Idols (1888), 169 Untimely Meditations (1876), 19 Nietszche/Dionysus, 7 Nimibutr, Nonzee, 41

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Index 235 Nolan, Christopher, 177 The Prestige (2006), 177 Nomadism, 8 Non-Oedipal desire, 8, 158, 160 Noosign, 24 Noriega, Chon A., 20, 21–2, 34 Norrington, Stephen, 177 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), 177 Noyce, Philip, 85 Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), 85 Nuridsany, Claude, 225 Genesis (with Marie Pérennou, 2004), 225 Olkowski, Dorothea, 72 Ophüls, Max, 83 Opsign, 24, 185 Orwell, George, 124–5 Ozu, Yasujiro, 55, 138 Pacino, Al, 38–9 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 18 Pastiche, 38, 43, 53, 83, 85, 145 Pearl Harbor (1941), 32 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 18, 23, 105 People to come, 85, 92, 96, 98, 102, 180 Perception-image, 23, 25, 202, 212, 219 Perrault, Pierre, 85 Perry, Commodore Matthew, 32 Pestonji, Rattana, 41 Piavoli, Franco, 222, 225 The Blue Planet (1981), 222 Pisters, Patricia, 2, 3, 72, 101, 194 Pitt, Brad, 14, 192, 198, 201–2, 204–5, 208 Plane of immanence, 15, 217, 223 Pollock, Jackson, 223 Powell, Anna, 2, 8, 13–14, 15, 57, 63, 101, 174, 182 Powers of the false, 11, 12–13, 90–1, 111, 137–8, 141, 144–6, 160, 168–9 Preminger, Otto, 156 Laura (1944), 156 Proust, Marcel, 64 Proyas, Alex, 205 The Crow (1994), 205 Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), 68

MARTIN-JONES 9780748641215 PRINT.indd 235

Ray, Man, 216 Emak-Bakia (1927), 216 Ray, Nicholas, 150 Ray, Satyajit, 144 Recollection-image, 23, 25 Redner, Gregg, 2 Relation-image, 23 Renoir, Jean, 79 Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), 79 Toni (1935), 79 Repetition, 12–13, 32, 101–2, 138, 142–3, 147, 153, 195 Resnais, Alain, 141, 146 Rhizome, 8, 14, 176–7, 184–6, 189 Richie, Donald, 18, 19, 20, 36n Richter, Hans, 216 Filmstudie (1926), 216 Ritchie, Guy, 177 Sherlock Holmes (2009), 177 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 141 Rodowick, D.N., 2, 4, 72, 104, 107, 118, 175, 195, 196–7 Rohmer, Eric, 85 Rushton, Richard, 2, 10–11, 12, 13, 73, 75, 100–1 Russell of Liverpool, Lord, 34 Sabra and Shatila massacres (Lebanon, 1982), 115, 119 Sakaguchi, Horonobu, 196 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (with Moto Sakakibara, 2001), 196 Sampoong department store, collapse of (1995), 58, 61–2, 63, 68 Sasanatieng, Wisit, 9, 37 Tears of the Black Tiger (2000), 9, 37–53 Schizoanalysis, 8, 121–35, 178 Scott, Ridley, 183, 201 Alien (1979), 183 Thelma & Louise (1991), 201 Shapiro, Jerome F., 22, 34 shari’ah law, 91 Shaviro, Steven, 2 Shohat, Ella, 6, 127 and Robert Stam, 6 Sirk, Douglas, 12–13, 139, 140–1, 149–52 Written on the Wind (1956), 141, 151 Songkhram, Phibun, 43

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236 Deleuze and Film Sonnenfeld, Barry, 177 Wild, Wild West (1999), 177 Sonsign, 24, 185 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 88, 91–3, 98 South Korea, 1, 2, 9, 54–9, 62–9 Spielberg, Steven, 125, 195, 224 Jurassic Park (1993), 195 Minority Report (2002), 125 War of the Worlds (2006), 224 Spinoza, Baruch, 121 Starbucks, 67–8 Steampunk, 14, 173, 175–9, 181, 183 Steinbeck, John, 145 Stewart, Garrett, 2 stolen generations (Australia), 85 Straub, Jean-Marie, 138 and Danièle Huillet, 138 surveillance, 2, 12, 121–35, 210 Sutton, Damian, 2, 8–9, 15, 123 Tabrizi, Kamal, 11, 88 The Lizard (2004), 11, 88–102 Tanaka, Tomoyuki, 20 Tarantino, Quentin, 95–6 Pulp Fiction (1994), 95 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 219 Mirror (1975), 219 Teo, Stephen, 5 Thailand, 8, 9, 34, 36n, 37–44, 210, 212 Thornton, Warwick, 85 Samson and Delilah (2009), 85 Time-image, 3–4, 8–11, 13–16, 24–5, 37, 48, 54–69, 71–4, 81, 83, 86, 88–102, 104, 108, 111, 140–1, 146, 156–7, 164, 168, 186–7, 194, 208 To, Johnnie, 5, 220 The Mission (1999), 220 Tourneur, Jacques, 156 Out of the Past (1947), 156

MARTIN-JONES 9780748641215 PRINT.indd 236

Verne, Jules, 177 Vertov, Dziga, 213, 222 Vidor, King, 38 The Crowd (1928), 38 virtual, 14–15, 22, 24, 46, 56, 60, 64–5, 83, 100–1, 111–13, 115, 119, 143–4, 146, 159, 182, 187, 192, 195–7, 199–205, 208, 210–25 virtual reality, 219, 223, 225 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 210–12 Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), 210 Syndromes and a Century (2006), 210, 214, 218 Tropical Malady (2004), 212, 215 Welles, Orson, 146, 168–9, 170, 215, 216, 221 Citizen Kane (1941), 215 The Lady from Shanghai (1947), 216, 221 Touch of Evil (1958), 170 Wells, H.G., 177 Wilder, Billy, 156 Double Indemnity (1944), 156 World War Two (1939–1945), 8, 10, 13, 55, 69, 84, 134, 171 Yang, Edward, 220 A One and a Two (Yi yi) (2000), 220 Taipei Story (1985), 220 Yau, Esther C.M., 5 Yeo, Kyun-dong, 63 Out of the World (1994), 63 Zemeckis, Robert, 196 Beowulf (2007), 196, 199, 206 Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 46, 51, 52, 215, 217–19

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