‘Wheeler Winston Dixon is a masterful film editor. His sensitivity to the movement within the frame and of the camera itself allows for fluidity in his editing that is exuberant and refreshing. He is skillful not only in manipulating the flow of images but the flow of ideas as well. He has assembled his images and juxtaposed them in such a way that their very ordinary nature suddenly becomes extraordinary. It is as though his films tap into our collective unconscious by exploring the surface realities that permeate our lives. Magical realms, pubescent fantasies, dreams of wish fulfillment, all assume strangely mythic proportions through Wheeler’s editing, so even the mundane world we accept so readily begins to look somehow dreamlike and unreal.’ — Bruce Rubin, Associate Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art

“Though he’s best known today as a scholar (his book The Exploding Eye provides a who’s who of 1960s experimentalists), Dixon’s short films…are themselves visual catalogs of underground techniques: snarky Bruce Conner-ish montage, psychoactive Conrad/Sharits flicker effects, and Mekasian home-movie diaries. The distinctive Dixon kick comes from witty edits to far-out music. His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC 5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out. The rich filmic collapse of personal memory into cultural history is summed up at the end of Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), a Fluxus performance set to a Gerard Malanga poetry reading. ‘It will take you a long time,’ intones Malanga, ‘to understand why I wrote poems for you.” — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

‘Wheeler Winston Dixon, the prolific author of books on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema, and film theory, has also been making experimental films of his own for the past three decades. Dixon’s career stretches from the late 1960s to the current day, including early works like The DC Five Memorial Film (1969), which interweaves home movies of Dixon’s 1950s Connecticut childhood with footage shot in 1969 in New York City and at a farm upstate; Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), featuring a Fluxus group-performance piece and a poetry reading by Gerard Malanga; and Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy’s Sinful Life in London (1976), in which a fictional Caroline recovers from a hangover. Other notable early films include Serial Metaphysics (1972), an examination of the American lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements, and What Can I Do? (1993), a rigorous, tender portrait of an elderly woman who holds dinner-party guests in thrall to her difficult family life.’ — Joshua Siegel, The Museum of Modern Art

 

____
Stills

 

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Further

Wheeler Winston Dixon Official Website
WWD @ IMDb
WWD @ Vimeo
Wheeler Winston Dixon’s books
WWD @ Senses of Cinema
WWD @ Experimental Cinema
Wheeler Winston Dixon Tolls the Death of the Moguls
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON ON THE LOST ART OF BLACK & WHITE
Crowhurst and Bonemagic – Dedicated To Wheeler Winston Dixon
Audio: WHEELER WINSTON DIXON: THE FILMS OF TERENCE FISHER
SOME NOTES ON STREAMING, BY WHEELER WINSTON DIXON
Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema
Audio: The Spy Whom We Loved: The Enduring Appeal of James Bond

 

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Extras

Frame By Frame: Movie Trailers

Frame By Frame: Film Criticism

Frame By Frame: Camera Moves

Frame by Frame: Minorities in American Cinema

 

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Critic

There can be no doubt that the digitisation of the moving image has radically and irrevocably altered the phenomenon which we call the cinema, and that the characteristics of this transformation leave open an entirely new field of visual figuration. For those who live and work in the post-filmic era – i.e., those who have come to consciousness in the past twenty years – the digital world is not only an accomplished fact, but also the dominant medium of visual discourse. Many of my students remark that the liberation of the moving image from the tyranny of the “imperfect” medium of film is a technical shift that is not only inevitable, but also desirable.

For younger viewers, the scratch-free, grain-free, glossily perfect contours of the digital image hold a pristine allure that the relative roughness of the filmic image lacks. Indeed, by doing away with film, many of my students persuasively argue that we are witnessing the next step in what will be a continual evolution of moving image recording, which, in turn, will be followed by newer mediums of image capture now unknown to us. For others, those of my age, the filmic medium is a separate and sacrosanct domain, and the “coldness” of the digital image, stripped of any of the inherent qualities of light, plastics and coloured dyes, betrays a lack of emotion, a disconnect from the real in the classical Bazinian sense. DVDs are easy to use and cheap to produce, but can’t afford the visual depth and resonance of a projected 35mm filmic image. And, it seems to me, both arguments have valid points and are equally worthy of serious consideration. (cont.)

 

Four Nights of a Dreamer is, for me, one of the most sublime films by Robert Bresson, along with his much-maligned French Resistance drama Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, with a script by Bresson from Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and incomparably witty dialogue by Jean Cocteau. But while Les Dames is readily available on DVD, Four Nights is not. I saw it when it first opened in New York at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on a gorgeous 35mm print, and was stunned by the film’s sensuous beauty, and its rendition of Paris at night as a city of romance and artistic endeavor, in which the young – giving their lives to love and art – were the film’s undoubted protagonists. (cont.)

 

For most of his long career, Éric Rohmer created a series of ‘moral investigations’ that were resolutely spare and enigmatic in their construction, dealing with matters of the heart, personal intrigues and disappointments, and the vicissitudes of human existence. He began his career shooting on 16mm film, and then as his commercial clout increased, switched to 35mm (with exceptions such as his gorgeous and mostly improvised 1986 feature The Green Ray, shot on 16mm film to keep costs down), but no matter what format Rohmer used, his films remain rooted in the real world, devoid of both spectacle and special effects.

The Lady and The Duke, however, represents a dual departure in both style and structure from Rohmer’s previous work. For the first time, “aside from La Cambrure, a 17-minute film presented at Cannes in 1999”, Rohmer used digital cameras rather traditional 35mm film to capture his chosen images. In addition, Rohmer made extensive use of ‘blue screen’ technology to create non-existent sets through the use of digital backdrops that are, by design, completely stylised and artificial. As Frédéric Bonnaud noted shortly after the film’s release in 2001, “the results are spectacular, recalling early cinema projection techniques and 19th-century magic lantern presentations, as well as the panoramic views of Venetian painting, the canvases of painters like Hubert Robert, and children’s slide shows and shadow play, with vague silhouettes seemingly floating against exterior backdrops.” (cont.)

 

Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d all post the list on our respective bulletin boards. In that resolutely pre-digital era, every new release was screened in its original 35mm format at one of the many excellent facilities that existed in Manhattan at the time, and being absolutely omnivorous about film, I would make it a point to attend every single screening, every single day, of absolutely every film that was being released.

And thus it was one day that I found myself in a screening room at Preview Theater, located at 1600 Broadway, sitting in a screening room watching Alain Robbe-Grillet’s debut feature, L’Immortelle. The film absolutely stunned me with its originality and brilliance in every aspect, from its enigmatic screenplay, to the dreamy mise-en-scène. But unlike the much better known Last Year at Marienbad, which Robbe-Grillet scripted but did not direct — Alain Resnais did the honors on that one — for some reason, L’Immortelle never caught on in the states, even on the art house circuit. (cont.)

 

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Bach, the film tracks the composer through his everyday life as a church organist and composer for hire, and is composed of only about 80 shots for the entire film. Filmed on many of the actual locations of Bach’s life, using period musical instruments, real musicians rather than actors pretending to be musicians, and photographed in 35mm using direct sync-sound recording, the film is truly a one of a kind project. Though Straub is often credited as the sole director of the film, it’s clear to me that it was co-directed by both Straub and Huillet, as a documentary on the making of the film demonstrates. (cont.)

 

When the cinema was first invented, women were responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the medium, and often advanced to the director’s chair. Such early figures as Alice Guy, Ida May Park, Cleo Madison, and Lois Weber all made films during the silent era, and the impact of their work was considerable. Alice Guy directed what is often considered the first film with a plot, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy) in 1896, and then went on to direct nearly 1,000 films, of which some 350 survive, as well as developing an early sync-sound process, an equally pioneering color process, and directing some of the first multi-reel films. Lois Weber was one of the most successful and highly paid directors working at Universal during the teens and early 1920s, with such controversial films as Hypocrites (1915), Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Blot (1920).

It was during this period that Dorothy Arzner broke into the film industry, starting out as a stenographer in 1919 at Paramount Studios, rapidly moving up as a screenwriter, and later as a film editor on Fred Niblo’s 1922 version of Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino. As an editor, screenwriter and script doctor, Arzner was much in demand, but Paramount refused to give her the chance to direct a feature film. Incensed, Arzner finally threatened to move to Columbia Pictures, where Columbia’s studio head, Harry Cohn, was actively courting her as a director and scenarist. Dismayed at the prospect of losing her services altogether, Paramount relented. Arzner soon became one of the studio’s most prolific directors, directing such box office hits as Fashions for Women (1927), Ten Modern Commandments (1927), Get Your Man (1927) and The Wild Party (1929), her first sound film, starring the “It” girl, Clara Bow. (cont.)

Many more of Wheeler Winston Dion’s essays and reviews here

 

____
Interview
from Senses of Cinema

Gwendolyn Foster: Let’s start with your obsession with movies. When did you first realize that you were interested in movies and the moving picture art form?

Wheeler Winston Dixon: I was born March 12, 1950 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I first realized that I wanted to make movies when I was about four years old. I recall sitting in a crib and looking out the window at a church in the distance. There was a cross on top of the cathedral, and I wanted to capture that image and keep it with me always. That was the first image that I remember, and I guess that was when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

GF: Did your mom let you play with a still camera? Did you start playing with an 8mm movie camera?

WWD: She gave me a small still camera and I took pictures of my classmates in kindergarten in black and white; this was about 1956. About that same time, when I was about six years old, I got a standard 8mm camera, and started making home movies in earnest, particularly of our cross country trip in 1960, when I shot about three hours of 8mm film, all lost now, and some animated cartoons.

GF: I remember seeing some of your early animation that you made when you were a little kid. Want to talk about them a little bit?

WWD: I first started making animated cartoons in 1956 or ’57, but then I found I couldn’t draw. So that was pretty much the end of the animated cartoons. But I made a bunch of them. One was called Skate Crazy, which was made in 1958. I drew them a frame at a time with crayons and photographed them with this camera that was set up with a homemade animation stand that was built out of a Dewar’s whiskey box. Really a pretty primitive affair. I’d get a friend over to help me color the drawings, because there really were thousands of them to do for a very simple four minute cartoon. People thought that they were more or less like the Tex Avery cartoons from MGM in the 1940s, which I was heavily influenced by. Television started in New York in the early fifties, and I began watching television voraciously; the first thing they ran were old cartoons, and old British movies, because the Hollywood studios were scared of TV at that point, and didn’t want to sell them any movies. So I grew up on Ealing comedies and British “quota quickies,” plus Monogram, PRC, and Republic films, which were sold to TV early on. When I was about 10, somebody gave me a 16mm print of Strange Illusion (1945) a really interesting Edgar G. Ulmer film, and I learned how to thread it in a 16mm projector that someone loaned me for a weekend. I watched the film that one weekend something like 20 times. I just memorized it. Later, I was involved in film societies, and began traveling into New York City to see films, and meet some experimental filmmakers.

GF: Tell me a bit more about these film societies; who was there, what you saw, and the like. With videocassettes, they’re pretty much defunct. But this was all 16mm film projection.

WWD: In New Brunswick, at the Public Library, they screened classic films in 16mm format every Saturday or Friday night, for free. That was when I first saw Len Lye’s films, the Marx Brothers, Maya Deren, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair. I saw right away that there were two models. There was the Hollywood model, and there was the independent model. The independent model attracted me more, because you didn’t have to deal with all of the sets and the casts and the crew and the money and the overhead. And independent cinema at that time was very cheap to make, so it was a possible alternative. That’s when I got involved in the Co-op, when it was still a pretty fluid scene. When I was about 14, I bought my first Bolex 16mm camera, and from that point on, I began to make 16mm films with optical sound tracks and never looked back.

GF: Did you have any friends that you would show these films and maybe make films too?

WWD: My friends at this point, even when I was 14, were mostly graduate students at Rutgers University. Robert Atwan, Donald McQuade, Mark Gibbons, Dick Arthur, Robert Pingree; these were all people who were passionate about film, and supported my work. These were people who were basically involved in creating stuff, creating art, creating literature. So by the time I was 14, I was already involved with the graduate program at Rutgers University, hanging around a group of graduate students, going to their parties, and dividing my time between that and New York City. When I found the people at Rutgers University, I just walked in on the film screening one day. It was open to the public. I started talking to the projectionist. I said to myself, “This is it. These are the people. I’m talking to them. We’re on the same level here.” And the next thing you know, they drew me into their circle really fast.

GF: Let’s talk about some of the stuff you were interested in at the time.

WWD: Well, I was obsessed with comic books, pop culture, television shows like The Untouchables. American International films like I was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr, 1957) and Invasion of the Saucer Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957). I also really liked a show called Open End, hosted by David Susskind. And at that point, it really was open-ended! It would start at about 10 o’clock at night and run until everyone was exhausted, depending on the topic.

New York television in the ’50s and ’60s was sort of an extension of your living room. It was another living room somewhere, with a camera televising the discussion. Soupy Sales did a live hour-long show every day, which I adored. There were no glitzy sets, no replay graphics, just some people in a room. It was very amateurish, very “from our home to your home.” It was mostly live. Now, in 2003, we’re going back to live TV, but it’s live TV intercut with video clips and other image sources, and it loses its liveness and its immediacy. The interesting thing about ’50s live television was that it was raw. When videotape first came in, you couldn’t edit it, it had to be a straight run; we’re talking the very early ’50s here. So, it was all live and uninterrupted.

So I saw a lot of films, and knew it was my life. From the time I was four or five, I was covering my walls with stills from movies. I knew a lot about movies. I could rattle off statistics. There was no “standard” film history out there. There were no film historians, there were no cult movies. It was really something I was doing on my own.

GF: A lot of these films are really short. How would you describe them? Were they assemblage type of films? Did you use appropriated images or shoot them yourself? Were they structuralist? What kind of films were they?

WWD: Well, Gee Whiz (1966) was shot in color in 8mm, intercut with shots of planes blowing up and Michael Landon turning into a werewolf in I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Then I blew it up to 16mm and released it, without a track. The second silent film, 60 Seconds of the City (1966), was basically just a sort of Bridges-Go-Round (based on Shirley Clarke’s 1958 film of that title) approach to New York City; footage of New York at the time.

Jon (1966) was a 45-minute film starring a guy named Chris Saia, and that was made in 1966. I shot that in Regular 8mm sound, with a Fairchild 8mm sound camera. This was sync sound, the standard 8mm Fairchild camera, and was then considered the technological marvel of the age. It had a magnetic stripe on the side of the film, and took 100′ loads of 8mm film. The sound quality was terrible, but the camera was lightweight, and completely portable. The film was about a 16-year-old kid and his problems in high school; highly autobiographical.

GF: It strikes me that it wasn’t hard to get in on a scene. Was that partially because you were handy with technical equipment, or was it just a really open scene?

WWD: It was an open scene. You could walk in the door, and if you were perceived as being useful, you were allowed to stay. That’s basically it.

GF: Who were some of the other filmmakers hanging around at this time?

WWD: Shirley Clarke; I remember her being very kind to me. Gerard Malanga and I fell in very rapidly. Bob Cowan. Warren Sonbert. Jerry Hiler. Nick Dorsky. Jud Yalkut. John Dowd, a very fine collage artist in the school of Ray Johnson, was working at the Cooperative. Gordon Ball, also a filmmaker, was working at the Co-op, as well. Marie Menken worked at the Time/Life Building. When I was working at the Time/Life Building, Marie Menken would come up and we would sit and talk. Ernie Gehr was working at the Cooperative. He began making films in Super-8. I later met Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland.

I remember running some early reels for my film The Visionaries (1969) at Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York. Filmmakers would get together and have chamber screenings and run each other’s movies. I mean, basically you had a projector, and you had a wall. We’d all sit around and run each other’s films.

GF: Experimental film now seems so incredibly competitive and so hierarchical. I can never put my finger on what kind of a scene it really was then. Did you all seem like kids running your films, having a good time? Or was it already becoming hierarchical?

WWD: The film scene, when I became aware of it in New York, was very non-hierarchical. Jonas Mekas was publishing his column in The Village Voice called “Movie Journal” saying, in essence, that film should be open to all. There was a long period of the 60s, from ’60 through ’68, where valuations were not made; everyone was considered to be a creative artist with something to say. All styles and methodologies were encouraged; nothing was censored, and there were no ‘schools’ of thought or practice.

One of the things that I’ve done in my book The Exploding Eye is to talk about the people who have been dropped by the wayside, people who were superb filmmakers but have somehow dropped off the radar. Rudy Albers, Rudy Burckhardt, Norman Berg, a lot of great people, some of whom have resurfaced. Yayoi Kusama, who came back after years and years of wandering in the wilderness. Valie Export. Carolee Schneeman. She was pretty notorious during that time. Charlotte Moorman, Steve Anson, Takahiko Iimura, people like that.

But then in 1967, Michael Snow made Wavelength. People were deeply impressed by the film, and saw it as the first film which really played with the structural qualities of the motion picture image. It’s a very sophisticated and accomplished work. There’s no getting around it. But Wavelength suddenly became a model for all other filmmaking. Structuralism took over as a school and dominated independent production for all of the 1970s. Unfortunately, that’s what really killed the ’60s film scene more than anything else.

The critical establishment embraced formalism with a frenzy, and all other styles of filmmaking were thrown out. This marginalized a number of enormously valuable filmmakers, many of whom simply left the scene. Jerome Hiler, for example, never even exhibited his films; he had his first exhibition in 1995. He was making films from 1964 on, but he never screened them, or made prints of them. So, until 1968 it was an open scene. Suddenly it became a very closed scene. The minute the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City closed down, that was the end of it. It turned into Anthology Film Archives, at the Public Shakespeare Theatre, running a closed set of films called “The Essential Cinema,” and suddenly, except for a few places like UP Screen, Millennium, and The Collective for Living Cinema, there was no place to show your films. So that put a real stop to the whole ’60s film scene in Manhattan.

In the sixties we made films about people, about their lives, their concerns, their loves and passions. The seventies were very sleek and empty, more concerned with structure, form, and a certain kind of ascetic rigorousness. I didn’t really care for it; I’m a romantic. It was also the height of disco, which was omnipresent in New York City in the early ’70s, and which, of course, was absolutely brain dead. WKTU, “Disco 92,” played disco around the clock; it was awful. Most people just followed the crowd to Studio 54, but that struck me as really dull and elitist. Everything I was against. But then CBGB’s started putting on The Ramones, Blondie, Television, a lot of interesting New Wave bands, and that was something of a haven. But there was definitely a sense of paradise lost; it was just too good to last.

 

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17 of Wheeler Winston Dixon’s 53 films

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Bits & Pieces (1969)
‘Late one night in the Time/Life Building in 1969, the television speaks.’ — WWD

 

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Children of Light (1969)
‘On The 4th of July in upstate New York, 1969, at a small farm I owned at the time, local children and their parents play with sparklers in the evening – a very simple film.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

______________
Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)
‘The rich filmic collapse of personal memory into cultural history is summed up at the end of Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), a Fluxus performance set to a Gerard Malanga poetry reading. ‘It will take you a long time,’ intones Malanga, ‘to understand why I wrote poems for you.’’ — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

 

______________
London Clouds (1970)
‘No matter where you arrive in legend, you find yourself at the point of initial departure.” — Wheeler Winston Dixon. ‘His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC 5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out.’ — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

 

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Stargrove (1974)
‘A brief film from 1974 – really an experiment – which uses eight layers of superimposition to create a work of such density that no one image dominates for more than a few seconds.’ — WWD

 

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Gaze (1974)
‘In 1971, I drew a large mural on the wall of my studio – involving painting, tracing, and photo-silkscreens – which was located on the top floor of an abandoned building in New Brunswick, NJ. In 1974, the building was demolished. One morning, just before the demolition crew moved in, I set up my Bolex and shot 100′ of the mural before it was completely destroyed, and here it is. The film is silent; the light is all natural; the film is Ektachrome Reversal 7241, a really beautiful daylight film stock – 2.5 minutes of contemplation.’ — WWD

 

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Numen Lumen (1974)
‘Meditations on light and a window fan for Jerry Hiler and Nick Dorsky.’ — WWD

 

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Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy’s Sinful Life in London (1976)
‘This is a short film based on an incident I read in the National Enquirer, a really innocuous item about Caroline partying late at night with Erskine Guinness, the heir to the Guinness Brewery fortune. I imagined Caroline waking up the next morning, recovering from the excesses of the night before, and trying to mix some orange juice in a blender, but being so out of it that she used three cans of gin instead of water to make the concentrate into OJ. It’s an odd film.’ — WWD

 

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Distance (1987)
‘With Richard Lea, Jane Back-Patton. Memories of a long-ago summer, London 1968; morning tea and departures. Produced with the assistance of the New Arts Lab, London.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

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Slap (2015)
‘Made entirely from found materials, this film documents the moment before impact, the slap itself, and then recapitulates the moment leading up to the slap – three times. This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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A Typical Day (2016)
‘Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you’re doing it.’ — Srikumar Rao

 

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The Ninth Circle (2017)
‘At the bottom of the well Dante finds himself on a huge frozen lake. This is Cocytus, the Ninth Circle, the fourth and the last great water of Hell. Here, frozen in the ice, are punished sinners guilty of treachery against those to whom they were bound by special ties. The ice is divided into four concentric rings marked only by different positions of the damned within the ice. This is Dante’s symbolic equivalent of the final guilt. The treacheries of these souls were denials of love and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead center of the ice will serve to express their natures . . . As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice.’ — John Ciardi

 

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Sleep (2017)
‘This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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Catastrophe Series (2018)
‘Here’s a series of videos dealing with catastrophic events, stylized and accelerated to about 1 minute or so each. “The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.’ — Simon Winchester

 

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Access Granted / Access Denied (2018)
‘New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind. The extent to which that transformation is positive will depend on how we navigate the risks and opportunities that arise along the way.’ — Klaus Schwab

 

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Prison State (2018)
‘In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.’ -– Wikipedia

 

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The Language of Dreams (2019)
‘Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of images. And in real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.’ -– Federico Fellini

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, Hi. Yes, actually, I think Deleuze becomes more relevant every day. I’m happy the blog is bolstering you, and I’m sorry to hear about the thin, sad times. Things are rough and weird at the moment on my end. Long story. I’m fine, but some work I’m doing is in limbo and endangered, and someone both close to me and in involved in the work appears to be dying. What a world. Take care, pal. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, I think you’re probably pretty safe. Look forward to the review. Everyone, Steve Erickson has reviewed Torche’s forthcoming album ‘Admission’ here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I don’t know that I agree with everything Deleuze writes in this book, but I find all of it inspiring and exciting, and I haven’t thought he was wrong so far. I’ve read a little Oudart, but I need to read more. ** KK, Hi. I’m in-between writing right now, in-between writing for the film and TV projects, but it’s too short a break to get back into my novel, which, yes, I started but haven’t worked on in a focused way for a few years. I do want to finish it, hopefully starting ASAP. I do seem to be very driven, writing- and work-wise. But I think it’s just a happy accident of my biology or something. That’s very nice of Joseph Grantham. I like his work. Wow, cool story of how you got ‘Period’. That’s very cool to hear. Happy that you’re writing, and good luck with the waiting on the venue responses. I hope they’re diligent. You enjoy your enjoy early weekend big time too! ** DJWaKeasaton, Ha. Uh, no, I hated seafood with all my heart and soul even when I last ate meat/fish as young teen. I’m totally cool when eating with people who are downing meat and fish and stuff across a table, but when they’re eating oysters or clams or lobster or that kind of thing, I feel ill. You sound like a totally revved song constructor, yes! I suppose you’ve read about the horror movie Danzig directed that’s supposed to be the most embarrassingly terrible movie ever made or something. ‘The Room’ of its generation, etc. If it ends up on youtube, I’m there with finger on the FF. There are awesome new films, but you have to really hunt them down, and I’m just guessing that the hunt is especially hard in Florida, but maybe that’s just northern naivete. Oh, twink assassin, back cracking … I’m so there. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Cool, yeah, ‘The Conformist’ is amazing, right? I’m happy the blog helped lead you to it. Yes, what do I know, but pushing for a change in your treatment seems like a no brainer? There’s always the possibility that consultants get complacent and unambitious and too accustomed to the easy answer of staying the course. Yeah, Ben, I encourage you to press for what the possibilities are and to urge them to up their game. ** Misanthrope, That’s some rain, it would seem, if your poetry is at all accurate. Our fireworks are on the 14th. They’re already turning Concorde into a giant VIP area for the parade and all of that. I’m getting sympathy sweat and lethargy just reading about your temperature. Hang tight. Or loose. ** liquoredgoat, Hey, D! Thanks about ‘Long Gone’. I’ve never read Ottessa Moshfegh as far as I know. Huh. I’ll try to hunt down that short fiction collection. Thanks, buddy. I hope things are thoroughly good and sharp with you. ** Okay. I only knew Wheeler Winston Dixon’s very fine film writing until Mr. E mentioned that there was a screening of his films in LA, whereupon I went on a discovery mission re: his films, and I liked them very much, so I made a post, and that’s the story. Check out what he does if you don’t know it, or, obviously, even if you already do. Excellent stuff. See you tomorrow.

 

‘While we normally talk about cinema in terms of their “narrative structure”, the level of conceptual specificity that Deleuze invokes in these books requires that we make crucial distinctions between the notion of connection of images and “narrative”. As a story-telling species, language naturally forms the basis of how we present or represent experience. But it overshadows what lies beneath, which are “images”. All of life responds first and foremost to signs, from the most basic to the most advanced. And more importantly as relates to Deleuze’s concern for understanding the potentiation of thought, images have a primary relationship with thought, not language. Language works on top of, side-by-side with and through them, for humans. From the pespective of the experience of the brain, the association or connection images and “narratives” are not at all synymous. The brain experiences all sorts of way more complex and multicomponential forms of expression/content, and so do our representations of them. But I only mention this so that the way you understand everything else isn’t reduced to that idea of “narrativization”.

‘Before one can understand what a “crystal” is, lets first situate what is actually being discussed in these books. He’s talking about the advent of moving images and advanced cinematography almost anthropologically. Dissecting objects and signs of experience in general insofar as we represent them to ourselves in forms of human expression (as a form of art that mimicks natural perception). All of this sounds odd and very strange philosophically until we retrace the source of inspiration of the discussion, which comes from Bergson and his connection of ‘mobile section’ and ‘abstract time’ as one sees in this art form, to Zeno, who played a big role in both of Bergson’s theses insofar as he tackled the notions of spatiality/temporality.

‘So the object is not cinema, but human experience (under the very broad distinctions of sensory-motor schema–movement– and time). But why cinema and not simply talk about movement and time in general? For two reasons, 1) because human experience is not general, it’s real, it’s concrete, and it’s how your brain receives and participates in the unfolding of time, so there’s a richness in the exposition of cases that is simply not generalizable in terms of effects and affects vis a vis subjects; and 2) this gap between generalized transcendent conceptualizations and actual experience is precisely what explains the infinite diversity of what brains/bodies experience, the role of thought (and what contributes to the lack of thought) in human expreience, the proliferation of fictions, the manipulation of subjects of experience, the production and manipulation of affects, the production of subjectivity as a whole etc. All of this is involved both implicitly and explicitly in the discussions of movement-images and time-images in a high degree of nuanced categorizations and elaborations that take as their origin philosophical theses on movement and time.

‘While not going into the types of movement-images here, these images in general can be defined as ways of slicing up experience in contractions of mental experience. By movement one should understand a conception of matter that is flowing. Nothing is static in experience. Matters always flows. So a particular flow in experience can be of whatever undefined duration, but something cuts it, makes it distinct, the particular cut that define distinct duration instances are what can be described as the “images” in Cinema I. The three central types of movement image he defines are the perception-image, action-image, affection-image, all crucial because they neatly group any sub-categorizations of the subjects experience in time.

‘There are three basic time images as well, but they are distinguished from movement-images because they are images which are different from themselves, which are virtual to themselves, or which are infused with past/future. One could also say that they are distinguished from the more actual images of Cinema I in that we are always not fully what they are. That is to say that they are virtual, and function as signs (referring to other signs).

‘Lived time, or time that endures, flows (thus implicating the movement-imaging). As distinct from abstract time however (chronos), it is that in which the past and future penetrate into the present in the form of memory and desire. Time stretches when it seems to move more slowly (ie: when bored), and contracts during moments of crisis, or when we inter into moments of dreaming, fantasy, reverie, and more shallowly during moments of action. All three central sub-types of time-images are virtual in origin, ranging from the surface recognition in the virtual of the actual’s passing, to inhabiting images of past as memory, tied to the actual but infusing it with blocks of pure past, and the most extreme which looses formal direct connection with the actual despite depending on it in general as material (the closes example one might “actually” experience being that of dream-states). Any image which functions to helps us recognize, recollect, or dream, is a type of time-image or time-cut/slice infusing into the present something not of itself actual. The key point to them however is that they infuse difference into the present. Whereas with movement images you have beginning, middle, end narratives. Time-images, whereever they appear change the significance of what was beginning, middle and end. It’s not a simple issue of succession anymore, but all sorts of circuits that complicate a development.’ –– ClearMountainWay

 

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Further

Deleuze Cinema
Gilles Deleuze and Film Theory
Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project: Part 1
Thinking with Cinema: Deleuze and Film Theory
Gilles Deleuze’s place in film studies remains deeply uncertain.
Book: Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy
Gilles Deleuze – The Art(s) of Slow Cinema
DELEUZE AND FILM’S PHILOSOPHICAL VALUE
Book: Deleuze and Film Music
At the movies with Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze and early cinema: The modernity of the emancipated time
Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity.
Book: Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
Deleuze and World Cinemas
The Practicality of Deleuze’s Philosophy of Film
Book: The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema
Book: The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory
Book: Gilles Deleuze′s Time Machine
Buy ‘Cinema 2: The Time Image’

 

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Extras

Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act 1987 (English Subs)

Deleuze no cinema (1973)

Gilles Deleuze – L’espace et la main chez Bresson

 

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Interview by Serge Daney
from Cahiers du cinéma 380, February 1986

 

How did the cinema enter your life, both as a spectator and, of course, as a philosopher? When did you begin to love cinema and when did you begin to consider it a domain worthy of philosophy?

I had a privileged experience because I enjoyed two separate phases of filmgoing. Before the war, as a child, I went to the cinema rather often: I think that there was a familial structure to the cinema because of subscription theaters like the Salle Pleyel. You could send children there by themselves. I didn’t have the choice of program, sometimes it was Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, sometimes Les Croix de bois (The Wooden Crosses)—which upset me; they even showed Fantomas, again, which made me very scared. It would be interesting to find out which theaters disappeared after the war in a given neighborhood. New theaters sprang up, but many disappeared. And then, after the war, I returned to the cinema, but in another manner. I was a student of philosophy, and although I wasn’t stupid enough to want to create a philosophy of cinema, one conjunction made an impression on me. I liked those authors who demanded that we introduce movement to thought, “real” movement (they denounced the Hegelian dialectic as abstract movement). How could I not discover the cinema, which introduces “real” movement into the image? I wasn’t trying to apply philosophy to cinema, but I went straight from philosophy to cinema. The reverse was also true, one went right from cinema to philosophy. Something bizarre about the cinema struck me: its unexpected ability to show not only behavior, but spiritual life [la vie spirituelle] as well (at the same time as aberrant behavior). Spiritual life isn’t dream or fantasy—which were always the cinema’s dead ends—but rather the domain of cold decision, of absolute obstinacy, of the choice of existence. How is it that the cinema is so expert at excavating this spiritual life? This can lead to the worst, a cinematic Catholicism or religious kitsch [sulpicisme] specific to the cinema, but also to the greatest: Dreyer, Sternberg, Bresson, Rosselini, and even Rohmer today. It’s interesting how Rohmer assigns to cinema the study of the spheres of existence: aesthetic existence in La Collectionneuse, ethical existence in Le Beau mariage, religious existence in Ma nuit chez Maud. One thinks of Kierkegaard, who, well before cinema, already felt the need to write in odd synopses. Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind. Spiritual life is the movement of the mind. One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy.

The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I don’t believe that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain—molecular biology—does. Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are. As Michaux said, “Man is a slow being, who is only made possible thanks to fantastic speeds.” The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t preexist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles [grains] that trace them. Cinema isn’t theater; rather, it makes bodies out of grains. The linkages are often paradoxical and on all sides overflow simple associations of images. Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion [automouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain. This characteristic can be manifested either positively or negatively. The screen, that is to say ourselves, can be the deficient brain of an idiot as easily as a creative brain. Look at music videos: their power was in their novel speed, their new linkages and relinkages. Even before developing their strength, however, music videos had already collapsed in pitiful twitches and grimaces, as well as haphazard cuts. Bad cinema always travels through circuits created by the lower brain: violence and sexuality in what is represented—a mix of gratuitous cruelty and organized ineptitude. Real cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localized. The characters in Losey, for example, are like capsules [des comprimes] composed of static violence, all the more violent because they don’t move. These stories of the speed of thought, precipitations or petrifications, are inseparable from the movement-image. Look at speed in Lubitsch, how he puts actual reasoning into the image, lights—the life of the spirit.

The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on the other, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other. One can imagine that similar problems confront the sciences, painting, music, philosophy, literature, and cinema at different moments, on different occasions, and under different circumstances. The same tremors occur on totally different terrains. The only true criticism is comparative (and bad film criticism closes in on the cinema like its own ghetto) because any work in a field is itself imbricated within other fields. Godard confronts painting in Passion and music in Prenom Carmen, making a “serial cinema,” but also a cinema of catastrophe, in the sense corresponding to the mathematical principle of René Thorn. There is no work that doesn’t have its beginning or end in other art forms. I was able to write about cinema, not because of some right of consideration, but because philosophical problems compelled me to look for answers in the cinema, even at the risk that those answers would suggest other problems. All work is inserted in a system of relays.

What strikes us in your two books on cinema is something that one already finds in your other books, but never to this extent, namely, taxonomy—the love of classification. Have you always had this tendency, or did it develop over time? Does classification have a particular connection to cinema?

Yes, there’s nothing more fun than classifications or tables. They’re like the outline of a book, or its vocabulary, its glossary. It’s not the essential thing, which comes next, but it’s an indispensable work of preparation. Nothing is more beautiful than the classifications of natural history. The work of Balzac is based on astonishing classifications. Borges suggested a Chinese classification of animals that thrilled Foucault: belonging to the emperor, embalmed, domesticated, edible [cochons de hit], mermaids, and so on. All classifications belong to this style; they are mobile, modifiable, retroactive, boundless, and their criteria vary from instance to instance. Some instances are full, others empty. 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 “classic,” “romantic,” or “nouveau roman”—even “neorealism”—are insufficient abstractions. I believe that they are in fact valid categories, provided that 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 [des matieres signaletiques]. Classifications will vary in relation to the materials considered, but they will also coincide according to the variable affinities among materials. Cinema is at the same time a very uncommon material, because it moves and temporalizes the image, and one that possesses a great affinity with other materials: pictorial, musical, literary…. We must understand cinema not as language, but as signaletic material.

For example, I’m attempting a classification of light in the cinema. There is light as an impassive physical milieu whose composition creates white, a kind of Newtonian light that you find in American cinema and maybe in another way in Antonioni. Then there is the light of Goethe [la lumiere goetheenne], which acts as an indivisible force that clashes with shadows and draws things out of it (one thinks of expressionism, but don’t Ford and Welles belong to this tradition as well?). Yet another light stands out for its encounter with white, rather than with shadows, this time a white of principal opacity (that’s another quality of Goethe that occurs in the films of von Sternberg). There is also a light that doesn’t stand out for its composition or its kind of encounter but because of its alternation, by its production of lunar figures (this is the light of the prewar French school, notably Epstein and Gremillon, perhaps Rivette today; it’s close to the concepts and practices of Delauney). The list shouldn’t stop here because it’s always possible to create new events of light; we see this, for example, in Godard’s Passion. In the same way, one can create an open classification of cinematic space. One can distinguish organic or encompassing spaces (in the western, but also in Kurosawa, who adds immense amplitude to the encompassing space); functional lines of the universe (the neowestern, but Mizoguchi above all); the flat spaces of Losey—banks, bluffs, plateaus that allowed him to discover Japanese space in his last two films; disconnected spaces with undetermined junctions, in the style of Bresson; empty spaces, as in Ozu or Antonioni; stratigraphic spaces that are defined by what they cover up, to the point that we “read” the space, as in the Straubs’ work; the topological spaces of Resnais … and so on. There are as many spaces as there are inventors. Light and spaces combine in very different ways. In all these instances, one sees that these classifications of light or space belong to the cinema yet nonetheless refer to other domains, such as science or art, Newton or Delauney—domains that will take them in another order, in other contexts and relations, and in other divisions.

There is a “crisis” regarding the concept of the cinematic auteur. Current discourse about the cinema might go as follows: “There are no more auteurs, everyone is an auteur, and all of them get on our nerves.”

Right now many forces are trying to deny any distinction between the commercial and the creative. The more that we deny this distinction, the more we consider ourselves clever, understanding, and “in the know.” In fact, we are only betraying one of the demands of capitalism: rapid turnover. When advertisers explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, they shamelessly forget that no real art tries to create or exhibit a product in order to correspond to the public’s expectations. Advertising can shock or try to shock because it responds to an alleged expectation. The opposite of this is art produced from the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art: that’s nonsense. There are popular arts, of course. There are also art forms that require some amount of financial investment; there is a commerce of art, but no commercial art. What complicates everything is that the same form serves the creative and the commercial. We already see this in book publishing: the same material format is used for both Harlequins and Tolstoy. If you compare a great novel and a best-seller, the bestseller will always win in a market of quick turnover, or worse, the best-seller will aspire to the qualities of the great novel, holding it hostage. This is what happens in television, where aesthetic judgment becomes “that’s tasty,” like a snack, or “that’s too bad,” like a penalty in soccer. It’s a promotion from the bottom, an alignment of all literature with mass consumption. “Auteur” is a function that refers to artwork (and under other circumstances, to crime). There are other just as respectable names for other types of producers, such as editor, programmer, director, producer … Those who say that “there are no more auteurs today” suggest that they would have been able to recognize those of yesterday, at a time when they were still unknown. That’s very arrogant. No art can thrive without the existence of a double sector, without the still relevant distinction between commercial and creative.

Cahiers did a great deal to establish this distinction in the cinema itself and to show what it means to be an auteur of films (even if the field also consists of producers, editors, publicity agents, etc.). Paini recently said some interesting things about all this. Today, people think they are clever by denying the distinction between the commercial and the creative: that’s because they have an interest in doing so. Every [truly creative piece of] work, even a short one, implies a significant undertaking or a long internal duration [une longue duree interne] (it’s no great undertaking, for instance, to recount recollections of one’s family). A work of art always entails the creation of new spaces and times (it’s not a question of recounting a story in a well-determined space and time; rather, it is the rhythms, the lighting, and the space-times themselves that must become the true characters).

A work should bring forth the problems and questions that concern us rather than provide answers. A work of art is a new syntax, one that is much more important than vocabulary and that excavates a foreign language in language. Syntax in cinema amounts to the linkages and relinkages of images, but also the relation between sound and the visual image. If one had to define culture, one could say that it doesn’t consist in conquering a difficult or abstract discipline, but in perceiving that works of art are much more concrete, moving, and funny than commercial products. In creative works there is a multiplication of emotion, a liberation of emotion, and even the invention of new emotions. This distinguishes creative works from the prefabricated emotions of commerce. You see this, oddly, in Bresson and Dreyer, who are masters of a new kind of comedy. Of course, the question of auteur cinema assures the distribution of existing films, films that can’t compete with the commercial cinema, because they require another kind of duration. But auteurism also makes the creation of new films possible. In this sense, maybe cinema isn’t capitalist enough. There are financial circuits of very different lengths; the long term, the medium term, and the short term have to be distinguishable in cinematographic investment. In science, capitalism has been able to acknowledge the importance of fundamental research now and then.

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Book

Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image
University of Minnesota Press

‘Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century philosophy, whose master-works, Difference and Repetition and – with Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus have become one of the most widely-influential bodies of work in contemporary thought.

‘Cinema 2 is Deleuze’s second work on cinema, completing the reassessment of the art form begun in Cinema I. Influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze here offers a compelling analysis of the cinematic treatment of time and memory, thought and speech. The work draws on examples from major film makers, including Jean Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, among many others.’ — University of Minnesota Press

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Excerpt

‘Give me a brain’ would be the other figure of modern cinema, [the first figure is the body – Ed] This is an intellectual cinema, as distinct from the physical cinema. Experimental cinema is shared between these two areas: the physics of the body, everyday or ceremonial; the formal or informal ‘eidetics’ of the spirit (to use Bertetto’s formulation). But experimental cinema develops the distinction according to two processes, one concretive, the other abstractive. The abstract and the concrete, however, are not the right criteria, in a cinema which creates rather than experiments. We saw that Eisenstein already laid claim to an intellectual or cerebral cinema, which he considered to be more concrete than the physics of bodies in Pudovkin, or physical formalism in Vertov. There is no less of the concrete and abstract on the one side than on the other: there is as much feeling or intensity, passion, in a cinema of the brain as in a cinema of the body. Godard initiates a cinema of the body, Resnais, a cinema of the brain, but one is not more abstract or more concrete than the other. Body or brain is what cinema demands be given to it, what it gives to itself, what it invents itself, to construct its work according to two directions, each one of which is simultaneously abstract and concrete. The distinction is thus not between the concrete and the abstract (except in experimental cases and, even there, it is fairly consistently confused). The intellectual cinema of the brain and the physical cinema of the body will find the source of their distinction elsewhere, a very variable source, whether with authors who are attracted by one of the two poles, or with those who compose with both of them.

Antonioni would be the perfect example of a double composition. The unity of his work has often been sought in the established themes of solitude and incommunicability, as characteristics of the poverty of the modern world. Nevertheless, according to him, we walk at two very different paces, one for the body, one for the brain. In a fine passage, he explains that our knowledge does not hesitate to renew itself, to confront great mutations, whilst our morality and feelings remain prisoners of unadapted values of myths that no one believes any more, and find only poor excuses – cynical, erotic, or neurotic – for freeing themselves. Antonioni does not criticize the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticizes the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body, which puts all the weight of the past into the body, all the tiredness of the world and modern neurosis; but also a cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world, its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains. If Antonioni is a great colourist, it is because he has always believed in the colours of the world, in the possibility of creating them, and of renewing all our cerebral knowledge. He is not an author who moans about the impossibility of communicating in the world. It is just that the world is painted in splendid colours, while the bodies which people it are still insipid and colourless. The world awaits its inhabitants, who are still lost in neurosis. But this is one more reason to pay attention to the body, to scrutinize its tiredness and neurosis, to take tints from it. The unity of Antonioni’s work is the confrontation of the body-character with his weariness and his past, and of the brain-colour with all its future potentialities, but the two making up one and the same world, ours, its hopes and its despair.

Antonioni’s formula is valid for him only, it is he who invents it. Bodies are not destined for wearing out, any more than the brain is destined for novelty. But what is important is the possibility of a cinema of the brain which brings together all the powers, as much as the cinema of the body equally brought them together as well: there are, then, two different styles, where the difference itself is constantly varying, cinema of the body in Godard and cinema of the brain in Resnais, cinema of the body in Cassavetes and cinema of the brain in Kubrick. There is as much thought in the body as there is shock and violence in the brain. There is an equal amount of feeling in both of them. The brain gives orders to the body which is just an outgrowth of it, but the body also gives orders to the brain which is just a part of it: in both cases, these will not he the same bodily attitudes nor the same cerebral gest. Hence the specificity of a cinema of the brain, in relation to that of the cinema of bodies. If we look at Kubrick’s work, we see the degree to which it is the brain which is mise-en-scene. Attitudes of body achieve a maximum level of violence, but they depend on the brain. For, in Kubrick, the world itself is a brain, there is identity of brain and world, as in the great circular and luminous table in Doctor Strangelove, the giant computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the Overlook hotel in The Shining. The black stone of 2001 presides over both cosmic states and cerebral stages: it is the soul of the three bodies, earth, sun and moon, but also the seed of the three brains, animal, human, machine. Kubrick is renewing the theme of the initiatory journey because every journey in the world is an exploration of the brain. The world-brain is A Clockwork Orange, or again, a spherical game of chess where the general can calculate his chances of promotion on the basis of the relation between soldiers killed and positions captured (Paths of Glory). But if the calculation fails, if the computer breaks down, it is because the brain is no more reasonable a system than the world is a rational one. The identity of world and brain, the automaton, does not form a whole, but rather a limit, a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact, makes them present to each other, confronts them or makes them clash. The inside is psychology, the past, involution, a whole psychology of depths which excavate the brain. The outside is the cosmology of galaxies, the future, evolution, a whole supernatural which makes the world explode. The two forces are forces of death which embrace, are ultimately exchanged and become ultimately indiscernible. The insane violence of Alex in Clockwork Orange is the force of the outside before passing into the service of an insane internal order. In Space Odyssey, the robot breaks down from the inside, before being lobotomized by the astronaut who penetrates it from the outside. And, in The Shining, how can we decide what comes from the inside and what comes from the outside, the extra-sensory perceptions or hallucinatory projections? The world-brain is strictly inseparable from the forces of death which pierce the membrane in both directions. Unless a reconciliation is carried out in another dimension, a regeneration of the membrane which would pacify the outside and the inside, and re-create a world-brain as a whole in the harmony of the spheres. At the end of Space Odyssey, it is in consequence of a fourth dimension that the sphere of the foetus and the sphere of the earth have a chance of entering into a new, incommensurable, unknown relation, which would convert death into a new life.

In France, at the same time as the new wave launched a cinema of bodies which mobilized the whole of thought, Resnais was creating a cinema of the brain which empowered bodies. We saw how states of the world and the brain found their common expression in the bio-psychic stages of My American Uncle (the three brains), or in the historical epochs in Life is a Bed of Roses (the three epochs). Landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralized (the torrent in L’amour a mort). The identity of brain and world is the noosphere of Je t’aime je t’aime, it can be the diabolic organization of the extermination camps, but also the cosmo-spiritual structure of the Bibliotheque Nationale. In Resnais this identity already appears less in a whole than at the level of a polarized membrane which is constantly making relative outsides and insides communicate or exchange, putting them in contact with each other, extending them, and referring them to each other. This is not a whole, but rather like two zones which communicate all the more, or are all the more in contact, because they cease to be symmetrical and synchronous, like the halves of the brain in Stavisky. In Providence, the bombshell is in the state of body of the old, alcoholic novelist, who rattles in every direction, but also in the state of the cosmos in thunder and lightning, and in the social state in machine-gun and rifle bursts. This membrane which makes the outside and the inside present to each other is called memory. If memory is the explicit theme of Resnais’ work, there is no reason to look for a latent content which would be more subtle; it is better to evaluate the transformation that the notion of memory is made to undergo in Resnais (a transformation as important as that carried out by Proust or Bergson). For memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.), makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always already there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter. These themes have been analysed earlier; and, if the cinema of bodies referred in particular to one aspect of the direct time-image – series of time according to the before and the after, the cinema of the brain develops the other aspect – the order of time according to the coexistence of its own relations.

But, if memory makes relative insides and outsides communicate like interiors and exteriors, an absolute outside and inside must confront each other and be co-present. René Prédal has shown the extent to which Auschwitz and Hiroshima remained the horizon of all Resnais’ work, how close the hero in Resnais is to the ‘Lazarean hero’ which Cayrol made the soul of the new novel, in a fundamental relation with the extermination camps. The character in Resnais’ cinema is Lazarean precisely because he returns from death, from the land of the dead; he has passed through death and is born from death, whose sensory-motor disturbances he retains. Even if he was not personally in Auschwitz, even if he was not personally in Hiroshima .. . He passed through a clinical death, he was born from an apparent death, he returns from the dead, Auschwitz or Hiroshima, Guernica or the Algerian war. The hero of Je t’aime je t’aime has not simply committed suicide; he speaks of Catrine, the woman he loves, as a marsh, a low tide, night, mud, which means that the dead are always victims of drowning. This is what a character in Stavisky says. It should be understood that, beyond all the sheets of memory, there is this lapping which stirs them, this death from the inside which forms an absolute, and from which he who has been able to escape it is reborn. And he who escapes, he who has been able to be reborn, moves inexorably towards a death from the outside, which comes to him as the other side of the absolute. Je t’aime je t’aime will make the two deaths coincide, the death from the inside from which he returns, the death from the outside which comes to him. L’amour à mort, which seems to us to be one of the most ambitious films in the history of cinema, moves from the clinical death from which the hero comes back to life, to the definitive death into which he goes down, ‘a shallow stream’ separating the two (it is clear that the Doctor had not been mistaken the first time, it was not an illusion, there had been apparent or clinical death, brain-death). Between one death and the other, the absolute inside and the absolute outside enter into contact, an inside deeper than all the sheets of past, an outside more distant than all the layers of external reality. Between the two, in the in-between, it is as if zombies peopled the brain-world for a moment: Resnais ‘insists on preserving the ghostly character of the beings he shows, and on maintaining them in a society of spectres destined to be included for a moment in our mental universe; these shivering heroes . . . like to wear warm, out-of- date clothes’. Resnais’ characters do not just return from Auschwitz or Hiroshima, they are philosophers, thinkers, beings of thought in another way too. For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. In a very happy story, Pauline Harvey says that she understands nothing about philosophy, but is very fond of philosophers because they give her a double impression: they themselves believe that they are dead, that they have passed through death; and they also believe that, although dead, they continue to live, but in a shivering way, with tiredness and prudence. According to Pauline Harvey, this would be a double mistake, which amuses her. According to us, it is a double truth, although this is cause for amusement as well: the philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness. The philosopher has returned from the dead and goes back there. This has been the living formulation of philosophy since Plato. When we say that Resnais’ characters are philosophers, we are certainly not saying that these characters talk about philosophy, or that Resnais ‘applies’ philosophical ideas to a cinema, but that he invents a cinema of philosophy, a cinema of thought, which is totally new in the history of cinema and totally alive in the history of philosophy, creating, with his unique collaborators, a rare marriage between philosophy and cinema. The great post-war philosophers and writers demonstrated that thought has something to do with Auschwitz, with Hiroshima, but this was also demonstrated by the great cinema authors from Welles to Resnais – this time in the most serious way.

This is the opposite of a cult of death. Between the two sides of the absolute, between the two deaths – death from the inside or past, death from the outside or future – the internal sheets of memory and the external layers of reality will be mixed up, extended, short-circuited and form a whole moving life, which is at once that of the cosmos and of the brain, which sends out flashes from one pole to the other. Hence zombies sing a song, but it is that of life. Resnais’ Van Gogh is a masterpiece because it shows that, between the apparent death from inside, the attack of madness, and the definitive death from outside as suicide, the sheets of internal life and the layers of external world plunge, extend and intersect with increasing speed up to the final black screen. But, between the two, what flashes of lightning there will have been; these were life itself. From one pole to the other a creation will be constructed, which is true creation only because it will be carried out between the two deaths, the apparent and the real, all the more intense because it illuminates this interstice. The sheets of past come down and the layers of reality go up, in mutual embraces which are flashes of life: what Resnais calls ‘feeling’ or ‘love’, as mental function.

Resnais has always said that what interested him was the cerebral mechanism, mental functioning, the process of thought, and that here was the true element of cinema. A cinema which is cerebral or intellectual, but not abstract, because it is clear to what extent feeling, affect, or passion are the principal characters of the brain-world. The question is rather that of knowing what difference there is between the ‘classical’ intellectual cinema, for example, Eisenstein’s, and the modern, for example, Resnais’. For Eisenstein already identified cinema with the process of thought as this necessarily develops in the brain, as it necessarily envelops feeling or passion. Intellectual cinema was already the cerebral whole which brought together pathos and the organic. Resnais’ pronouncements may be close to those of Eisenstein: the cerebral process as object and motor of cinema. Nevertheless, something has changed, which undoubtedly has something to do with scientific knowledge of the brain, but still more with our personal relationship with the brain. So that intellectual cinema has changed, not because it has become more concrete (it was so from the outset), but because there has been a simultaneous change in our conception of the brain and our relationship with the brain. The ‘classical’ conception developed along two axes; on the one hand integration and differentiation, on the other association, through contiguity or similarity. The first axis is the law of the concept: it constitutes movement as continually integrating itself into a whole whose change it expresses, and as continually differentiating itself in accordance with the objects between which it is established. This integration-differentiation thus defines movement as movement of the concept. The second axis is the law of the image: similarity and contiguity determine the way in which we pass from one image to another. The two axes cut across each other, according to a principle of attraction, in order to achieve the identity of image and concept: indeed, the concept as whole does not become differentiated without externalizing itself in a sequence of associated images, and the images do not associate without being internalized in a concept as the whole which integrates them. Hence the ideal of knowledge as harmonious totality, which sustains this classical representation. Even the fundamentally open character of the whole does not compromise this model, on the contrary, because the out-of-field shows an associability which extends and goes beyond the given images, but also expresses the changing whole which integrates the extend- able sequences of images (the two aspects of the out-of-field). We have seen how Eisenstein, like a cinematographic Hegel, presented the grand synthesis of this conception: the open spiral, with its commensurabilities and attractions. Eisenstein himself did not hide the cerebral model which drove the whole synthesis, and which made cinema the cerebral art par excellence, the internal monologue of the brain-world; ‘The form of montage is a restoration of the laws of the process of thought, which in turn restores moving reality in process of unrolling.’ For the brain was both the vertical organization of intergration-differentiation, and the horizontal organization of association. Our relationship with the brain has followed these axes for a long time. Of course, Bergson (who was, with Schopenhauer, one of the rare philosophers to propose a new conception of the brain) introduced a profound element of transformation: the brain was now only an interval [écart] a void, nothing but a void, between a stimulation and a response. But, whatever the importance of the discovery, this interval [écart] remained subject to an integrating whole which was embodied in it, and to associations which traversed it. In yet another area, it could be said that linguistics maintained the classic cerebral model, both from the point of view of metaphor and metonymy (similarity-contiguity) and from the point of view of the syntagm and paradigm (integration-differentiation).

Scientific knowledge of the brain has evolved, and carried out a general rearrangement. The situation is so complicated that we should not speak of a break, but rather of new orientations which only produce an effect of a break with the classical image at the limit. But perhaps our own relationship with the brain changed at the same time, and, on its own account, independently of science, and consummated the break with the old relationship. On the one hand, the organic process of integration and differentiation increasingly pointed to relative levels of interiority and exteriority and, through them, to an absolute outside and inside, in contact topologically: this was the discovery of a topological cerebral space, which passed through relative mediums [milieux] to achieve the co-presence of an inside deeper than any internal medium, and an outside more distant than any external medium. On the other hand, the process of association increasingly came up against cuts in the continuous network of the brain; everywhere there were micro-fissures which were not simply voids to be crossed, but random mechanisms introducing themselves at each moment between the sending and receiving of an association message: this was the discovery of a probabilistic or semi-fortuitous cerebral space, ‘an uncertain system’. It is perhaps through these two aspects that the brain can be defined as an acentred system. It is obviously not through the influence of science that our relationship with the brain changed: perhaps it was the opposite, our relationship with the brain having changed first, obscurely guiding science. Psychology has a good deal to say about a lived relationship with the brain, of a lived body, but it has less to say about a lived brain. Our lived relationship with the brain becomes increasingly fragile, less and less ‘Euclidean’ and goes through little cerebral deaths. The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision. We are not copying Artaud, but Artaud lived and said something about the brain that concerns all of us: that ‘its antennae turned towards the invisible’, that it has a capacity to ‘resume a resurrection from death’.

We no longer believe in a whole as interiority of thought – even an open one; we believe in a force from the outside which hollows itself out, grabs us and attracts the inside. We no longer believe in an association of images – even crossing voids; we believe in breaks which take on an absolute value and subordinate all association. This is not abstracting, these two aspects define the new ‘intellectual’ cinema and examples can be found in particular in Téchiné, and Benoit Jacquot. Both are able to take the sensory-motor collapse on which modern cinema is constituted as read. But they distinguish themselves from the cinema of bodies because for them (as for Resnais) it is the brain which initially orders attitudes. The brain cuts or puts to flight all internal associations, it summons an outside beyond any external world. In Téchiné, associated images slide and flee on windows, following currents up which the character must go back to move towards an outside which calls them, but which he will perhaps not be able to meet up with (the boat in Barocco, and then L’hôtel des Ameiriques). In Jacquot, by contrast, it is a function of literalness of the image (flattened, redundancies and tautologies) which will shatter associations, to replace them with an infinity of interpretation whose only limit is an absolute outside (L’assassin musicien, Les enfants du p1acard). In both cases, this is a cinema inspired by neo-psychoanalytical themes: give me a slip [lapsus] an act that is lacking and I will reconstruct the brain. The new cerebral images are defined by a topological structure of the outside and the inside, and a fortuitous character at each stage of the linkages or mediations.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, The post covers disappearances that happened in 1972 or earlier. Johnny Goesch disappeared in the 80s, so that’s one reason why. Everyone, There’s still time to score some goodies for a bargain from the collection of Mr. E. To wit, David speaks: ‘My Big Emergency Sale of DVDs, CDs, LPs and books Is still going on. If you live in L.A. write me at [email protected].’ ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yeah, I’m curious. I don’t think ‘Midsommar’ has opened here yet, but I’ll recheck. I don’t know the actual legal issues re: using found you’ve footage. I suppose it’s a different situation, but I’ve never had any issues with using the found gifs in my gif novels. Nor have I ever had any issues resulting from using all the found, borrowed videos and images and gifs and things I use in the blog posts. I guess it depends on the source and its owner? My guess would be that you could get away with it pretty easily, but I guess you should probably find out the exact rights thing in that regard. ** Bill, Hi. Oh, right, it’s July 4th, or, as we call it over here, the biggest Trump campaign rally yet. Hm, I’ll listen to that Fjernsind album. Thank you so much! I think I need that. ** YoucanbemyblackKeatMosstonight, Now that is an experimental name. My heart’s cockles are … I forgot what cockles do. Oh, they get warm I think. I wish you not just Rock glory but Avalanche glory! ** _Black_Acrylic, I’ve always meant to get that book. Everyone, Re: yesterday’s post, here’s _Black_Acrylic with a hot tip: ‘Re missing Keith Bennett, the recent updated edition of Ian Brady’s book The Gates of Janus has a thoughtful afterword by Peter Sotos that goes deep into the lifetime ramifications of the case. Highly recommended for those who can take it.’ Thanks, Ben. ** JM, Hi, pal. Thank you very much, sir. ‘Equus!’ Are you staging that or being part of its restaging? Wild. Bon day! ** Okay. I’m currently reading the book under the spotlight today, and I’m finding it hugely interesting and inspiring re: film-thinking and filmmaking, and I thought I would pass along evidence of its existence to you while the iron is hot. See you tomorrow.