O'Neill on Fahle/Engell Film-PhilosophyISSN 1466-4615 Edward R. O'Neill Apprehending Deleuze ApprehendingCinema _Der Film bei Deleuze/Le cinema selonDeleuze_Edited by Oliver Fahle and LorenzEngellWeimar/Paris: Verlag derBauhaus-Universitat/Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997ISBN 3-86068-060-9 (BUW)ISBN 2. 87854-143-X (PSN)565 pages. Outline I. Introductory II. Top Drawer: Reading DeleuzeA. Bellour on DeleuzeB. Cinema as a Pedagogy ofPerceptionC. A Deleuzian Reading of DeleuzeD. Sign, Shot and POVE. Taking Deleuze Literarily III. Deleuze in ContextA. Zeno, Bergson, DeleuzeB. Appropriating Terms:Any-Space-WhateverC. Deleuze and The Event IV. OverviewsA. Image vs. World.B. History Again.C. Miscellany V. How Not To Read a TextA. Peirce and BergsonB. Unjust Criticisms and UnfoundedComparisonsC. Leibniz, TV and _Providence_ VI. Conclusion 'We have always had a taste for universalhistory.'-- Gilles Deleuze, speaking of himself andFelix Guattari I. Introductory This volume gathers together revised versionsof essays which were presented at a colloquium at the University ofBauhaus at Weimar in October 1995. The topic was Deleuze's twovolumes on the cinema. Deleuze himself participated in thepreparations for the conference, although he was not present for theconference itself; the editors do not make clear whether this'participation' included the selection of participants or no. Theeditors believe the colloquium was the largest dedicated to Deleuze'scinema work to that date. The editors also point to the collegialatmosphere of the colloquium in an attempt, I feel, to apologize inadvance for the relative inadequacy of certain entries vis-a-vis theothers. While a generosity of spirit may be induced by the atmosphereof a social gathering, when holding a book in one's hand one tends tofeel the author should have had a clear and meaningful purpose whilewriting it, and that the editors' duty was to guarantee the reader ofthe relative merits of each essay. This I feel could have been donewith a stronger hand: it appears that all the papers from thecolloquium were included, whereas a smaller number would have made upa stronger and more useful volume. After all, only a very fewconferences publish the entire proceedings; more usually writers areleft to fend for themselves in securing publication, and this volumeinadvertently makes a case for the merits of the latter procedureover the former. In what follows I will try to evaluate eachessay as regards its strengths and weaknesses, but I will also try topoint out in what ways each essay might be useful and to whom, sincecertain topics have interest to researchers regardless of the meritsof what was written. I have sorted the essays according to theirapproach and consequently to my estimation of their relative value.The best essays seem to me to be those which mark precise points inDeleuze's writing and link them either with each other or with otherrelevant texts or events. In so doing, the writers are guided bytheir own interests, but they use their interests like a dowsing rodto detect the inner movements of Deleuze's writing, and so they helpus to understand Deleuze better. Throughout my essay it will become apparent tothe reader that various topics crop up repeatedly, topics which seemto me crucial for reading Deleuze's work in general and his writingon film in particular. These are, in no particular order: therelation of Deleuze's work on film to his philosophical and criticalprojects, both in terms of their concepts and their procedures;Deleuze's approach to cinema in particular and what it means to writea couple of books thinking *with* the cinema; the distance betweenDeleuze's approach to cinema and familiar procedures andpreconceptions; the significant but difficult-to-define role ofhistory in the cinema books; the relation between semiotic andphenomenological, or, not quite the same thing, Peircean andBergsonian dimensions in the cinema books in particular and Deleuze'swork more generally as well; and finally the role played by Deleuze'smultiform conceptions of difference and his famous stance againstPlatonism. This last topic is particularly important, since most of20th century continental philosophy can be defined by its insistenceupon rethinking the concept and role of difference -- I'm thinking ofHeidegger and Derrida in particular -- but Deleuze's own approach hasyet to be fully grasped both in its specificity and its relation tothese other projects. The best entries in this volume are of arichness and complexity which will challenge and stimulate thosealready familiar with Deleuze's work as a whole, but they may bedaunting for the uninitiated. Although this volume in no wayconstitutes an introduction to Deleuze's cinema books, certain essaystake pains to frame the significance of Deleuze's project in a waythat will be enlightening for those who need to situate these books,while other essays recapitulate some of Deleuze's larger categoriesin a way that might be helpful to those first approaching the cinemabooks. (I found many of these recapitulations refreshed my memorysignificantly about the overall plan of the cinema books.) The volumewill also be enlightening for those who have already read some ofDeleuze's philosophical works in enough detail to appreciate theircomplexity and are approaching the cinema books for the first time,since here the reader will have a foothold already. Two bibliographic notes are necessary. First, Iwill be referring to the French page numbers throughout, since it isin the French versions that I read the articles, regardless ofwhether the original language was French or German. When these Frenchtexts refer to Deleuze's texts they invariably refer to Frencheditions, and despite the fact that I often refer to Deleuze's titlesin English as a matter of convenience (as I do for the title of eachessay in the volume), I have preserved these references to theoriginal French editions without translating them into correspondingEnglish page numbers. I have abbreviated the titles of Deleuze'sworks as follows: C1 and C2 for the two cinema books (_TheMovement-Image_ and _The Time-Image_, respectively); DR for_Difference and Repetition_; LS for _The Logic of Sense_; WIP for_What Is Philosophy_. Second, European footnoting habits are not socompulsive as are those of most Americans, so information that somereaders expect may not be present. II. Top Drawer: Reading Deleuze A first tier is made up of authors who bring animmense erudition to bear upon reading Deleuze's cinema books. Here Imean 'reading' in the most intense and best sense. These writers helpus to situate Deleuze's cinema books either amongst his other worksor in specific historical or intellectual contexts. My discussions ofthese top drawer works will necessarily be longer because the worksthemselves are so richly rewarding. My aim is to honor the essays bypreserving enough detail to make reading this review of some value inand of itself and so that it can also serve as a guide for readersinterested in specific topics. The essays which make up first part of thisgroup are particularly rewarding: namely those essays which analyzeDeleuze's cinema books in terms of his other work. These authors are:Bellour, Bensmaia, Francois and Thomas, Ropars-Wuilleumier, Esquenaziand Leutrat. (Since Bensmaia both looks at one particular concept interms of where it comes from and how it functions as what Deleuzewould later come to call a conceptual persona, I'll discuss thatessay below with analyses which contextualize Deleuze's work in termsother than its own.) II. A. Bellour on Deleuze First in the volume and the introductory talkfrom the conference is Raymond Bellour's essay 'To Think, To Tell:The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze'. Bellour's stated goal is to recountthe effect of reading Deleuze's cinema books on Bellour himself, andin this context Bellour frames Deleuze as both being a part of andyet separate from cinema studies in France -- a distance which theappearance of this volume would itself diminish. Bellour points out that Deleuze hascherry-picked from the work of cinema studies in France in order tothen organize numerous observations that are not his own within aconceptual framework which is both original in its details andfamiliar in its contours or divisions. Bellour also underlines what a departure thecinema books were for Deleuze: while Deleuze's other books approach aparticular conceptual problem (as in _Difference and Repetition_ or_The Logic of Sense_) or constitute a monograph on a singlephilosopher or thinker (Leibniz, Bergson, Foucault), and manypassages in his work address individual writers (Beckett, Bacon,Lowry, Fitzgerald), at no point had Deleuze attempted the feat of'apprehending' an entire art form. Bellour thus calls the cinemabooks the 'bearer of a unique gesture', namely Deleuze's attempt tograsp the entire field of cinema in his own fashion (23-24). Bellourtraces the condition of possibility for such a gesture in an approachwhich takes cinema as *already* thinking, as already a modality forthe philosophical work which Deleuze was eventually to name as the'invention of concepts' (with the emphasis on *invention* rather thansimply apprehension of concepts already existing in language orexperience), and Bellour traces the origins of Deleuze's cinemaproject to remarks the philosopher made at the French national filmschool ('Femis') conference 'What is the act of creation?' publishedunder the title 'To Have an Idea of cinema', ideas Bellour finds tobe developed later in _What Is Philosophy?_. (Here we should add thatthis last work seems to suggest shades of Heidegger -- not just inthe title but in the relation/distinction set forth there betweenphilosophy and art on the one hand and science on theother.) Bellour points out that Deleuze himselfunderlines that the cinema books are not intended to be a history inthe traditional sense but rather at once a taxonomy and a 'naturalhistory'. It is this two-sided conceptual architecture which concernsBellour most. He points out that Deleuze uses the word 'history' in asense that is at once banal and complex. In one sense Bellour takesthe distinction between the movement-image and the time-image ascorresponding roughly to the distinction between classical andmodernist cinema, but here I think Bellour downplays the fact thatthis distinction itself is not simply historical but is also moreoverstylistic and presents the same definitional problems as that ofdefining classicism and romanticism in other arts. Such terms aretied to historical co-ordinates with which they are not thereforeentirely synonymous. Bellour links the distinction, however, withDeleuze's other periodizations, his bi- and tripartitions: those inhis book on Foucault; Deleuze's argument that Bacon recapitulates inhis own paintings of the history of painting; thesavage/barbarous/civilized trichotomy of _Anti-Oedipus_. QuotingDeleuze speaking of himself and Guattari: 'We have always had a tastefor a universal history.' (25, referring to _Pourparler_, LesEditions de Minuit, 1990, p. 206). Bellour also demonstrates that Deleuze'sconcepts correspond to existing taxonomies, indeed to historicalmovements, authors and national borders: Deleuze's four forms ofmontage (organic, dialectic, quantitative and intensive-extensive)correspond to American, Soviet, French Impressionist and GermanExpressionist schools. Here Deleuze recapitulates a set ofdistinctions with which cinephiles and scholars are already familiar.One helpful thing about Bellour's gesture of showing how Deleuze'spatently original concepts correspond neatly with existing ones isthat the gesture helps to enable us to question the *status* ofDeleuze's concepts rather than their import. Indeed, the veryneatness of Deleuze's concepts itself gives one pause. How can theycorrespond so precisely to existing distinctions which must be inpart contingent? Does not this suggest a latent Hegelianism inDeleuze's cinema books? Why would the history of cinema convenientlyrecapitulate an abstract theory of cinema or taxonomy of cinemasigns? Nevertheless, Bellour points out that although Deleuze'scategories may be in part borrowed, he then uses them to createhitherto unforeseen affinities, such as that which links Bunuel andStroheim as naturalists and the makers of images deeply invested withprimal drives. Somewhat later in his essay Bellour shedsfurther light on Deleuze's hybrid conceptual-historical project bybringing it into rapport with the work of Barthes: Bellour recallsBarthes' description of his own writing as 'the novelistic withoutthe novel', and he then links this description with Deleuze'smobilization of concepts, which Bellour dubs similarly novelistic.That is: Deleuze's 'taste for universal history' expresses itself notonly in the overarching conceptual frame he uses to divvy up thehistory of cinema, but in using the history of a cinema as aframework within which to give a novelistic account of the genesis ofa series of concepts as if this unfolding itself were historical.(Leutrat's essay, discussed below, expands significantly uponBellour's observation.) Here I think Bellour has underlined a keytendency in modern French thought: the reversal of values aroundphilosophy and literature and their increasing hybridization. Thiskeen insight on Bellour's part makes questionable Bellour's criticismthat Deleuze undervalues the concept of narration (31), since itstrikes me that narration has passed to another level in Deleuze'stext: it is no longer an object because Deleuze's text itself hasbecome a narration in the more fundamental sense which Bellourhimself makes so palpable. One aspect of Bellour's essay that will be ofsome interest to those who work on Godard is the centrality Bellourdemonstrates that the Swiss filmmaker has for Deleuze's cinema book:that in Deleuze's _Cahiers du cinema_ interview with with Godard in1976 the philosopher suggested that in order to understand therelation between image and sound in Godard's work, it would benecessary to recount a very abstract history of cinema. (Already inthat interview, Bellour points out, Deleuze was referring toBergson.) Thus the two cinema volumes, by being such an abstracthistory, can thus be understood as preparatory for, or directedtowards, an understanding of Godard. In passing Bellour claims that no director inDeleuze's cinema volumes is ever the object of a value judgment, onlyto classification and genealogy. I disagree. I would argue ratherthat the very inclusion in the typology grants the directorsdiscussed entrance into a creative fraternity which participationitself constitutes a mark of honor. Deleuze doesn't have to bad-mouthanyone; he just leaves them out. Doesn't the absence of Russ Meyer,Mark Rydell and Frank Perry judge them just as surely as theirpresence under the mark of a negative judgment? Finally, the fact that Bellour dedicates hisremarks to the memory of Felix Guattari helps to underline the factthat references to Guattari in the volume are few and far between,and when Guattari is mentioned by name, it is generally as part ofthe Deleuze-Guattari team -- arguably the dynamic duo of modernFrench political philosophy. Guattari's precise contribution toDeleuze's work or role therein has yet to be analyzed in any degreeof detail (so far as I know), and the works in this volume, whileadmirable in their own right, do nothing to remedy thisdeficiency. II. B. Cinema as a Pedagogy ofPerception In 'The Critical Dimension of Gilles Deleuze:For a Pedagogy of Perception' Alain Francois and Yvan Thomas give arichly suggestive account of the relationship between Deleuze'scomments, sometimes passing, on his conception of pedagogy and theproject of the cinema books. Thus the authors situate the cinemabooks in a complex relationship within Deleuze's entire project.While they admit that pedagogy was never an explicit topic ofextended treatment in Deleuze, they nevertheless point to the notionof apprenticeship in the 1964 _Proust and Signs_, and they also drawthe reader's attention to 1968's _Difference and Repetition_ -- inparticular to Deleuze's distinction between an empirical and atranscendental exercise of sensibility. Francois and Thomas frameDeleuze's philosophical project (aptly, I think) in terms ofDeleuze's rejection of Platonism, and they underline in particularDeleuze's emphasis on forms of difference which involve differencesin intensity and quality (rather than differences in number or kind).These qualitative 'contrarieties' constitute for Deleuze the 'beingof the sensible' and determine the limit of the sensible as such fromwhich Deleuze then attempts to define sensibility vis-a-vis itslimits in an almost Kantian fashion. As an example of the possibility ofapprehending intensity as separate from quality, Deleuze points towhat he coyly names as 'pharmacodynamic experiences', as well as toexperiences of vertigo: such experiences, by effecting a distortionof the senses provide for what Francois and Thomas construe in termsof pedagogy: 'To apprehend intensity independently ofextension or before the quality in which the intensity developsitself, such is the object of a distortion of the senses. A pedagogyof the senses is turned towards this end, and forms an integral partof 'transcendentalism'. Pharmacodynamic experiences or those physicalexperiences like those of vertigo approach it: they reveal to us thatdifference in itself, this depth in itself, this intensity in itselfat the original moment where it is no longer qualified or extended.'(DR 305). Francois and Thomas place cinema here under thetopic of the pedagogy of sensibility, apparently based on the waycinema for Deleuze gives new types of image and hence new intensitiesof the sensible. (The above account would seem to give Hitchcock's_Vertigo_ pride of place.) (See also DR 214-215.) One of the advantages of the account Francoisand Thomas give is that it allows the reader to begin to gauge thetension between empirical and transcendental tendencies in Deleuze.While Deleuze often styles himself an empiricist, it is the samething with other words taken from the philosophical tradition:Deleuze doesn't mean of himself what we mean of Locke when we use theword 'empiricist'. He does mean that he makes experience or thesenses a central category, but this category does not fashion itselfafter empirical objects. For another discussion of pedagogy, the authorspoint to Deleuze and Guattari's _What Is Philosophy_ whereinphilosophy becomes named as a pedagogy of the concept (WIP 16).Philosophy as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari is a 'pedagogy of theconcept' insofar as it involves posing or re-posing problems whichhad been malformed, and the posing and reposing of problems iscentral for the Deleuze because for him it is only in conjunctionwith problems that concepts are created. (The centrality of theproblem goes back to Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_ and _TheLogic of Sense_ and depends on my view upon the centrality ofCanguilhem and his philosophy of science for French thought of thelate 1960's.) This turn to philosophy as a pedagogical reworking of aproblem thus reframes Deleuze's cinema books as exactly reposing theproblem of how cinema should be thought: it was on the basis of amalformed analogy with language and signs that the French study ofcinema (a cine-semiology) had poorly posed the problem of how tothink the cinema, to think both of and with the cinema, and Deleuzereposes the problem of how to think cinema by turning back to thesenses and to the image from the emphasis upon the sign, meaning andintellection. Francois and Thomas also turn to Deleuze's'Letter to Serge Daney' which constitutes the preface to Daney's_Cine-Journal_ (Editions des _Cahiers du cinema_) and which isreprinted in Deleuze's _Pourparlers_ (Editions de Minuit). ThereDeleuze imagines three ages of cinema or functions of the image, oneof which is a pedagogy of perception which aims to teach the eye andthe senses. The authors find this concept particularly central to thesecond of Deleuze's cinema volumes in which Deleuze is at pains todescribe the way 'pure optical situations' and pure acousticsituations (in which the sensori-motor ties of the movement-imagehave been cut) present directly what Deleuze calls the time-image. Inthe cinema's pedagogy of perception, perception itself is a temporalprocess: the cinematic mechanism thus becomes a mechanical model forthe temporal process by which perception grasps an object which is nolonger conceived of as static and timeless (203-205; cf. C2 65). Thisunderstanding strikes close to what Deleuze means by 'image', and theauthors underline the way Deleuze links this idea with Bergson, forwhom the object of attention is the object of an attention that iscontinually renewed and which attention hence participates in evershifting circuits of attention and behavior. This point also allowsone to understand better the rapport between Deleuze and the twosides of Peirce -- hallucinatory and practical, phenomenologist andsemiotician, drug fiend and logician. Finally, the authors describe briefly howmodern cinema might be understood to perform this pedagogy ofperception through references to Eisenstein, Vertov, and Godard. In away this seems like an avant-garde truism: that certain forms of art'teach' us to perceive the world differently. At such a level theobservation is probably of little value; but by linking this conceptto precise places in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Francois andThomas perform a great service for those readers interested infollowing the way issues elsewhere in Deleuze's work (both alone andwith Guattari) cross over into his cinema books. (One small detail: Francois and Thomas draw thereader's attention to a text which they suggest is the inspirationfor Deleuze's discussion of Fellini: J. M. G. Le Clezio's essay'L'extra-terrestre' published in _Arc_ number 45 -- cited by Deleuzein C2 30. Such signposts allow the reader to investigate for herselfthe way in which Deleuze appropriates and reworks his sourcematerial.) II. C. A Deleuzian Reading ofDeleuze Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier is without adoubt one of the most profound thinkers and acute writers on theFrench cinema studies scene, one whose works seems to have barelypenetrated into Anglophone cinema publications. Anyone who's everseen her speak is not likely to have forgotten the experience, whichis both challenging and exhilarating. The essay in this volume, 'TheWhole Against the Part: A Crack To Be Repaired?', creates much thesame feeling. Ropars-Wuilleumier begins much the way Bellourdoes, by recalling how differently Deleuze had seemed to operate uponliterary texts in contrast to his work on the cinema. ButRopars-Wuilleumier cunningly discovers a secret affinity: althoughDeleuze writes on singular writers and painters, like many modernistshe is concerned with the way the individual artist makes evident apotentiality of the medium. She takes Kafka as a sort of arch-examplein Deleuze's work: he is concerned not just with the way Kafka useslanguage but with the way he 'minoritizes' it, turns it away from itstypical uses and puts it towards quite different ends.Ropars-Wuilleumier underlines the way Deleuze's concept of a'becoming-minor' of literature (a touchstone in _A ThousandPlateaus_) can be traced by examining those 'lines of flight,tensions, paradoxes, cries and modulated catastrophes' (243) by whicha work tends towards its own crisis, catastrophe and undoing. HereRopars-Wuilleumier sees both a similarity and an inverse relationwith cinema: with cinema Deleuze is examining not a major language inthe process of becoming-minor but rather of a minor artbecoming-major, and Deleuze's object is not a single work 'haunted byits own destruction' but rather the totality of cinema (243). Thehypothesis which she sketches -- and 'sketch' is the word she uses --is that: 'the cinema according to Deleuze, because ittotalizes contraries, is able to play a double aesthetic game:accomplishing the virtualities of art, scriptural or pictorial,realizing the 'image of thought' dreamed of by the philosopher in theform of literature, cinema revokes, even in evoking anew, the fissureof the work in the act of writing, this fleeting heterogenization ofpersonal postures and linguistic procedures' (244). Ropars-Wuilleumier sets as her goal not toexplore Deleuze's strategies but rather to measure the way a certainambivalence of the cinema *itself* is better evoked by Deleuze thanby any other analyst. If Deleuze reads literary works in terms oftheir own internal contradictions and paradoxes, Ropars-Wuilleumierreturns the favor by taking Deleuze's two volumes on cinema asconcepts which are two sides of a single fissure or difference, withthe second volume repeating the first (including re-citing some ofthe same directors) but 'affected by a different coefficient' (245).The writer grounds this reading in Deleuze's own anti-Platonic use ofconcepts in which ideas do not unify but rather affirm a divergenceand establish resonances between series which diverge (DR 357; butalso LS). As demonstration that the two volumes are two sides of thesame difference, Ropars-Wuilleumier draws attention to the centralrole of Ozu in both volumes: Ozu seen from the perspective ofmovement and Ozu seen from the perspective of time. Then, to furtherclarify the way she reads the relationship between the two volumes,she reinterprets the time-image as making visible the pure becomingof the movement-image. And as confirmation of her reading of therelation between the two volumes on cinema, Ropars-Wuilleumierdetects the same organization as Deleuze's earlier book _Proust etles signes_: the original 1964 edition offered a classification ofsigns, while an addition dated 1970 reframed the Proust's work inmore paradoxical terms. Ropars-Wuilleumier effects, in other words, astrikingly Deleuzian and deconstructionist reading of Deleuze's ownwork, which strikes me as a major achievement in terms of the clarityand force with which she's able to seize Deleuze's work as a wholejust as Deleuze seizes the history of cinema as a (mobile) whole. Toreaders familiar with Deleuze's other works, the writing ofRopars-Wuilleumier will be a treat because in grasping Deleuzehimself through his own means her work is felicitously Deleuzianwhile at the same time keeping enough distance to frame that workanew. Finally, in addressing the way Deleuze takes upfamiliar distinctions in the history of cinema -- silent vs. sound,black and white vs. color, the various national schools of montage,etc. -- Ropars-Wuilleumier suggests a tantalizing reversal in whichDeleuze is not trying to give a history of cinema but rather to usecinema's history as itself an image of a theoretical idea. Cinema andits history would thus become Deleuze's own time-image, an image ofthe movement of history. On this view Deleuze does not recapitulatethe history of cinema through his own conceptual categories in aHegelian unfolding: rather he lets the history of cinema be its ownimage (245). II. D. Sign, Shot and POV Jean-Pierre Esquenazi's essay 'Deleuze and theTheory of Point-of-View: The Question of the Sign' attempts todiscover what definition of the sign might be compatible withDeleuze's cinema project in order that he might construct ameaningful understanding of point-of-view in cinema. (What Esquenazitakes to be a canonical theory of point-of-view are those viewsespoused by Jacques Aumont, Bellour in _L'analyse du film_ andFrancois Jost in _L'oeil camera_.) While this would appear difficulton its face to those familiar with Deleuze's antipathy towards asemiotic conception of cinema, the rigor and precision with whichEsquenazi approaches the task he sets himself can hardly fail toelicit admiration from the reader. To begin to analyze the way Deleuze uses theterms 'shot', 'sign' and 'image', Esquenazi briefly and helpfullymarks the places where the terms are used: 'shot' in the secondchapter of first book; 'image' in the second commentary on Bergson,the fourth chapter of the first book; 'sign' in a brief discussion atthe end of the fourth chapter of the second book then again in thesecond chapter of the second volume. Esquenazi draws the suggestiveconclusion that the term 'shot' plays the role in the cinema booksthat the concept of 'event' does in _The Logic of Sense_, 'sign' doesin the Proust book, and 'fold' does in the book on Leibniz and thebaroque (379): the key term summarizes a sense or expressed that isimmanent to a given field. Esquenazi also decides that the notion of shotin Deleuze plays a role that is highly ambiguous (380) and that thedifficulty in understanding a unit of sense in Deleuze's work makesDeleuze's terminology difficult to utilize. Esquenazi makes aparticularly significant point when he links this difficulty to whathe calls a 'hesitation' between phenomenology and semiotics, thus tothe difficulty in bringing together Bergson and Peirce, since ifthese two approaches cannot be reconciled, then Deleuze's projectitself is on shaky ground. But it is important to remember that thenecessity of a significative unit comes from Esquenazi and not fromDeleuze, that Deleuze does not participate in any such formalism, andthat this may make Deleuze's work difficult to utilize *for thoseends which Esquenazi imagines*, but this only suggests that the endsthat Deleuze imagined for his work were quite different. In an extended discussion, Esquenazi analyzesthe significance of camera movement vis-a-vis the moving camera shotin _Vertigo_ which introduces Kim Novak for the first time. Thediscussion relates issues of movement and the image to those ofpoint-of-view generally, and though the terms of the discussion aremore Esquenazi's than Deleuze's, the discussion is acute and deserveswider attention. The writer's reconsiderations of the concept ofsuture in the context of Deleuze's film theory will be of greatinterest to some and a thorn in the side for others -- thoseantipathetic to the whole conception of suture and hence adverse toseeing it 're-thought', from whatever perspective. Esquenazi believesthat the theory of suture can be developed in semiotic terms that arecompatible with Deleuze's work on cinema. Given Deleuze's clearfeelings about semiological approaches to cinema, one might doubtthat Esquenazi's dream can be achieved, but one cannot by the end ofthe essay doubt the writer's ability to pursue that goal. Theauthor's _Film, Perception et Memoire_ (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan,1994) was not available to the reviewer at this time, but the acuityand precision of Esquenazi's writing suggest that his book mustsurely be a significant one, even if one has doubts about the goalsof the semiotic approach to cinema. II. E. Taking Deleuze Literarily Jean-Louis Leutrat's 'The Clock and the Mummy'situates Deleuze's cinema volumes not only in relation to Deleuze'sother writings but also in relation to the writings of authors whoare favorites of Deleuze. Like Bellour, Leutrat considers Deleuze'swork in its novelistic dimension, but even more so than Bellour,Leutrat considers Deleuze's project not so much as a conceptualedifice but rather as a literary text. While Leutrat claims that heis displacing the discussion not for tactical reasons but because ofhis own lack of philosophical credentials, the enormous eruditionthat he then goes on to display suggests that his disclaimer isitself a rather calculated tactic. Leutrat rightly says that he will neither'apply' nor reprise Deleuze's ideas but that he wishes rather todemonstrate a mode of relation to Deleuze's writing that he finds tobe the richest in consequences. Indeed, Leutrat's offering is one ofthe richest and most complex in the volume, but again it is probablynot for new readers of Deleuze, although it might provide a sort ofmap, an 'index of themes' for those who want to read Deleuze a bitdifferently than the emerging English-speaking Deleuze orthodoxymight like. Leutrat concentrates on the third and tenthplateaus of _Mille Plateaux_ and demonstrates the way the are alreadymarked by an encounter with the cinema -- indeed with the horrorgenre and its literary antecedents. In their philosophical maskedball, Deleuze and Guattari mobilize figures as diverse as mummies,Conan Doyle characters, the naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, andSpinoza. Leutrat interprets the mummy figure as a quasi-literarysymbol: pointing in one direction to the body-without-organs, inanother to Bazin's famous figure of the cinema as a mummy, and in yetanother towards the figure of Egypte which Deleuze uses to figureHegelianism. But it is by bringing out the Lovecraftianresonances and horrifying imagery in Deleuze's text that Leutrathelps to bring out the role of the horror film in Deleuze's cinemabooks -- something which I don't think would leap out to even areader quite familiar with these books. On the one hand the seventhplateau of 'faceity' points towards the role of the face in thecinema books, where the expressivity of the face becomes borrowed bycertain sorts of spatial images, while on the other hand this samefacial figure points back towards _Difference and Repetition_ (334),in which it is the modality of what the face expresses which concernsDeleuze. It is exactly the face's potentiality for expressing terrorwhich interests Deleuze, and for him the terrifying world is one*possible* world among others. Leutrat even finds references in thetenth plateau to (of all things) the horror film _Willard_ (1971) andto Hoffmannstahl's _Letter to Chandos_. And of Deleuze's conceptionof becoming-animal, Leutrat, in keeping with his discerning ear forechoes of the horror genre, finds references to werewolves, vampires,packs of rats and other monstrous images, images which he furtherlinks to the classificatory impulse Deleuze signals with hisreference to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and towards the status of thecinema books as a sort of 'natural history' of cinema. The immense richness of Leutrat's text is duein part to his close knowledge of Deleuze's corpus, as well as hisability to recognize affinities, however attenuated, and to spin themtogether into a suggestive web (or perhaps a rat's nest). The resultis dizzying, but rewarding for those who will be interested infollowing this elaborate tracery. III. Deleuze in Context Equally rich and rewarding are those essays byFihman, Bensmaia and Conley which relate Deleuze's works to relevantintellectual and historical contexts of which those on the Americanand English scenes may be dimly aware. III. A. Zeno, Bergson, Deleuze Guy Fihman's 'Deleuze, Bergson, Zeno of Eleasand the Cinema' presents a finely contextualized discussion of theBergsonian aspect of Deleuze's cinema books, and of the centrality ofZeno's paradoxes for Bergson's intellectual development. According toFihman, this began with Bergson's thesis of 1883-85 (entitled TheIdea of Place in Aristotle) which focused on Aristotle's rejoinder toZeno. The paradox of imagining movement as itself made up of immobilefixed points became for Bergson, according to Fihman, the source ofhis impulse to escape Plato's replacement of a paradoxical time andmovement with immobile and eternal Ideas. The significance of cinemafor Bergson was that 'just as the arguments of Zeno were at theorigin of the Platonic metaphysics of Ideas conceived as immobileforms, the appearance of cinematography should bring with it a newmetaphysics, one which will be Bergsonian, that of becoming, ofchange, of real duration'. Thus Fihman takes cinema as a'technological actualization of the logical apparatus of the eleaticparadoxes' (65). Fihman gives a wealth of historical backgroundthat helps us to understand Bergson better. He juxtaposes Bergson'swriting with the experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey, cites an obscure1914 interview which Bergson granted upon his election to the FrenchAcademy, finds Bergsonian echoes in the work of Marcel L'Herbier andJean Epstein, and explains the reference to the enigmatic 'ecrannoir' cited in _Matter and Memory_ to explain Bergson's theory ofperception: namely the image produced by the interferentialphotography of French physicist Gabriel Lippmann in 1891(70). Fihman also explains a bit of the institutionalbackground of how Deleuze came to understand the bearing Bergsonmight have on cinema: according to Fihman, he and Claudine Eizykmanwere working at Vincennes on Bergson and cinema when they weretransplanted to the Saint-Denis campus, where they encounteredJean-Francois Lyotard and Deleuze, Deleuze having been alreadyimmersed in Bergson and an ardent cinephile. Fihman also brings up a central butmuch-neglected facet of Deleuze's work, namely the conceptualcentrality of the operations within the calculus of differentiationand integration. The logical apparatus of calculus is something of atouchstone for Deleuze, as anyone who's spent a significant amount oftime with _Difference and Repetition_ or _The Logic of Sense_ couldattest. Indeed, it could be said of Deleuze's project as a whole thathe seeks to be the first thinker to make use of the conceptualapparatus developed by modern mathematics (since Leibniz andSpinoza), leaving other philosophers with a logical armature that hasnot advanced beyond that of geometry and algebra. This is anotherrapport with Peirce, one on which Deleuze himself makes no remark butwhich readers of Peirce will have been quick to recognize. III. B. Appropriating Terms:Any-Space-Whatever In 'The 'Any-Space-Whatever' as 'ConceptualPersona'' Reda Bensmaia is at pains to show how Deleuze uses conceptshe borrows from others in ways of his own. Anyone who knows something about Peirce and hastried to make out what Deleuze is doing with Peirce in the cinemabooks has probably recognized this, and Bensmaia's essay willdoubtless be helpful to those trying to draw such connections.Bensmaia examines both how Deleuze adopts and adapts the concept ofan 'any-space-whatever' ('espace quelconque') developed by theanthropologist Marc Auge, and also how this concept comes to functionfor Deleuze like, what he later comes to call, a conceptual persona.Bensmaia says less about the latter than the former, which may not bea bad thing, since explaining two unfamiliar concepts in terms ofeach other is not necessarily advantageous. Bensmaia demonstrates that Deleuze doesn't justwork with a concept, he works it over and transforms it, and whatBensmaia demonstrates nimbly is these differences which help tolocate Deleuze, to situate him in the context of French thought --not to make the differences disappear, but rather to make them standout all the more strongly. Since Auge threatens to become the NextBig Thing on the ever-francophilic American Theory Scene, Bensmaia'sdiscussion will doubtless be welcome. (Not too much Auge has beentranslated into English, although a few bits have recently appearedin some 1996 issues of _Architectural Digest_.) Since so little ofAuge's work widely known, I will take some time to detail whatBensmaia says about Auge, and the present text may thus tell readerswhether they wish to discover more. The texts of Auge which Bensmaia discusses arepart of his 'anthropology of everyday life': _La Traversee duLuxembourg_, _Un ethnologue dans le metro_, _Domaines et Chateaux_and _Non-Lieux: Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite_.Auge investigates what form of obligation we encounter in theanonymous non-places of modern urban space: hotel rooms,supermarkets, ATM machines, and various spaces of transition andpassage -- like those annoying conveyor belts that drag passengersslowly from one section of an airport to another. (Perhaps I'm theonly person who remembers Sartre's once-famous discussion of suchforms of public existence in terms of seriality. Has Sartre become socompletely unfashionable that people no longer even remember what hesaid -- even in France?) In any case Auge's argument, as summarizedtersely by Bensmaia, is that although we don't 'rest' or 'reside' inthese spaces but merely pass through these spaces as ifinterchangeable, we nevertheless therein enjoy a contractual relationwith the world and others symbolized by our train or plane ticket,bank card, or email address, and hence anonymity and identity areoddly drawn close. Auge infers from such spaces a paradox of whathe calls 'surmodernite': the French prefix 'sur-' translatesliterally as 'over-' and the French use this prefix to translateNietzsche's 'overman' as 'surhomme' where we in English have come totranslate the figure as a 'superman'. For Auge this supermodernity orhypermodernity functions as an aggregate effect of three(paradoxical) superabundances: (1) we experience a superabundance oftime and history: there are too many events going on and too muchnews and information about them, and yet (even therefore) we findourselves unable to make sense of the past and experience therelation of the past to the future in terms of an eternaldisappointment (with socialism, with communism, etc.); (2) weexperience an increasing sense of the vastness of the spaces weinhabit as these spaces expand and interpenetrate each other, and yetat the same time our urban spaces are increasingly homogenized andincreasingly filled-up; (3) we experience a simultaneous excess anddeficiency of personal identity such that we have more and more waysof differentiating ourselves from others and identifying ourselves(everyone has a driver's license, passport, bank cards, identitycards of all sorts) while at the same time personal identities becomeincreasingly rigidified and formally interchangeable (everyone hasthe same cards, the same differentiators). Bensmaia's summary of Auge makes him sound abit like Lyotard before he became the party animal of all Frenchphilosophers: those interested in such things will experiencedelirious excitement, while those antipathetic to that French mode oftheorizing which is at once melancholic and hyperbolic -- a kind ofsad sack old Heidegger tripping on the latest rave party drug -- willprobably think: 'This I can do without.' The nut of Bensmaia's discussion, however, isto show how the non-place of Auge is transformed by Deleuze (by wayof Michel de Certeau) in order to become something closer to the wayCarroll's 'Snark' functions in Deleuze's _The Logic of Sense_. Thisshows the kind of explication one gets at some of the best points inthis volume: one part of Deleuze's work is contextualized in terms ofothers -- but if you don't know anything about the others (yet), thecontextualization may not be helpful. Nevertheless Bensmaia writes acutely about thekinds of concepts which Deleuze employs, concepts she calls 'inexactand rigorous'. This seems central to those who would understand howDeleuze works and the status of his writings. Bensmaia shows how theconcept of 'any-space-whatever' is inexact because, rather thanhaving a single unique origin in Auge's text, Deleuze also definesthe concept in relation to Altman, Lumet, Godard, Snow, and (if thatweren't enough), in a more attenuated fashion, in relation toLawrence, Pasolini, Valery, Spinoza, and Heidegger. Bensmaia urgesthat certain inner necessities govern the conception and movement ofDeleuze's text and then goes on to demonstrate a kind ofcharacteristic reversal in the Deleuzian text (144). Namely, Deleuzedescribes affect as 'the expressed of a state of things' and asclosely tied with the expressive material ('expression' for Deleuzecannot be reduced to signification, in which the bearer is generallya matter of indifference), and he begins to discuss affection-imagesas certain kind of expressive uses of close-ups. But then he reversesdirection and finds that an affection-image can be any kind of imageregardless of the scale of framing. Thus Deleuze moves from anexpressive close-up (of a face expressing affect) toany-shot-whatever as expressive by means of the concept of theany-space-whatever. Deleuze's particular concern is at first withthe representation of anonymous public spaces (train stations inBresson's _Pickpocket_, the airport in Marker's _La Jetee_, e.g.),but then Deleuze shifts from a represented space to anany-space-whatever redefined on the basis of his own conceptualedifice. Deleuze creates his own concept which does not exactly jibewith Auge: An any-space-whatever *is not an abstractuniversal*, for all time, in any place: it's a perfectly particularspace which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is to say theprinciple of its numeric relations or the connection amongst itsproper parts, so well that the interrelations amongst them may bemade in an infinite number of ways (cited at 146; from C1155). Pages such as these by Bensmaia give the readera better position from which to approach Deleuze's cinema book and to'read' it -- where 'reading' here does not mean simply extracting'abstract concepts' which one might then 'apply', but ratherunderstanding, for example, why the idea of an 'abstract concept' isso far removed from what Deleuze is doing. Bensmaia isn't able to get around to sayingmuch about how the any-space-whatever is a conceptual persona,because this would mean dedicating as many fine pages to the conceptof 'conceptual persona' as were written on that of'any-space-whatever'. Bensmaia's reading concludes by urging thatDeleuze's *tour de force* in the cinema books is not in themultiplicity of concepts he brings forth but rather in the way hemakes them part of a textual movement which can appear deductive(150). Just how deductive it seems will depend upon the reader. Inall events, a footnote referring to another article by Bensmaia willbe something that some will want to follow-up: 'Les Transformateurs-- Deleuze ou le cinema comme Automate spiritual' in _Deleuze,Pensare il Cinema_ (Rome: Quaderni di Cinema/Studio, 1993), pp. 89 etseq. III. C. Deleuze and The Event Tom Conley's essay 'The Cinema-Event' is athoughtful and complex consideration of the key terms 'event','spiritual automaton', 'any-space-whatever' and 'ritournelle'. Thesenine pages are so elegant and compressed that, although they givegreat pleasure to read, they are not simple to explicate. Conleybegins to think about what 'the event' might mean by discussing oneof Montagne's essays in which a near-incapacitating horse-ridingaccident introduces a caesura into the writer's life andconsciousness, thus giving rise to Montagne's essayisticmemorializing project as a sort of belated echo of the traumaticevent. While it seems like 'event' here is being used as a synonymfor 'trauma', the discussion pertains as much to the work ofHeidegger, Blanchot and Derrida on the 'event', as it does toDeleuze. Conley relates the concept of the event to anecstatic mode of subjectivity, and he focuses on Deleuze'sdiscussions of the videos and _Film_ of Beckett in order to isolatethe kind of event taking place in those texts: namely the 'using-up'of a limited set of possibilities. (I have seen Bellour lecture onthese same texts of Deleuze as well.) Conley goes on to relate theconcept of the event to Deleuze's _Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque_ andto Whitehead's _The Concept of Nature_, also helpfully marking outthe places in the cinema volumes where the concept of the event ismost central. In the end Conley claims that Deleuze'sanalysis of the deep-focus long shot is betrayed by the exampleDeleuze offers, the theory thereby becoming itself an 'event'. Conleyaims to remedy this by himself discussing the final sequence fromAnthony Mann's _Winchester 73_, but this discussion itself is marrednot only by its own brevity but by its allegorical tendencies. Conleynotes in passing that he thinks the cacti in the scene are phallic,and then he goes on to use the word 'interval' in a sense that isboth complexly theoretical on the one hand and banally literal on theother hand: sometimes 'interval' seems to refer to nothing more thanthe distance between the two feuding, chasing brothers, and at othertimes it refers to something more ontological. At such points the'interval' between the film and its reading seem too great to besustained. Some readers will find the same thing to be true ofConley's use of the word 'event': it yokes together literal andfigurative meanings in such a way as blunt its conceptual force.Others, however, will find this same yoking evocative. IV. Overviews A second tier consists of essays which givelengthy and perhaps useful summaries of Deleuze's cinema books,usually with some particular emphasis, but without a precise andilluminating thesis or detailed points of contact in Deleuze's texts.Here I class: De Gaetano (the most useful), Fahle, Grande, Buttnerand Ries. These are essays which may have some introductory value,although this value is curtailed by the probable need for somefamiliarity with Deleuze in order to understand what's beingintroduced. IV. A. Image vs. World. The most useful of the batch is Roberto DeGaetano's 'Cinematographic Worlds'. In a sense, where Deleuze wouldsay 'image' De Gaetano substitutes the term 'world' ('monde'). Infact, De Gaetano is so fond of the concept of a 'world' that hewrites it in everywhere: instead of different genres, he talks aboutdifferent worlds; instead of different forms, different worlds;instead of different Powers and Qualities, different worlds; insteadof different figures -- well, you get the picture. This strikes me asgiving a more phenomenological twist to Deleuze than he would reallyhave us do, despite his affinities with a phenomenological mode ofthinking from Bergson in one way and Peirce in another. I would saythat the weakness of this approach is that it distorts Deleuze andsubstitutes for a reading an exposition -- albeit an extremelyelegant one Strangely, De Gaetano believes that for Deleuze'Cinema is reality'. While it is true that Deleuze is interested inhow we apprehend cinema itself rather than how cinema *represents*something outside of itself -- cinema is not for Deleuze an image inthis sense -- to me this does not justify the equation of cinema with'reality'. It is *a* reality but not *reality* *per se*. Nevertheless, despite De Gaetano's ratherpuzzling insistence on reading Deleuze in terms of 'worlds' and'reality', his essay is illuminating. He underlines the way Deleuzeconceives of space in cinema in ways that differ gravely from the wayspace is conceived in American cinema studies. We tend to conceive ofcinema as fundamentally representational of a spatiotemporalcontinuum, which continuum cinema may represent well or poorly, thisway or that. But Deleuze opens up ways of conceptualizing cinema notas representing a space and a time that are continuous and withoutgaps but rather of giving different kinds of images of space and time-- as different as sound and color. By implicitly measuring cinema'simages against a determinate conception of a Euclidean space, we readthese images in terms of an assumed ground rather than in terms ofthemselves. De Gaetano points out that instead of variousapproximations of a single space, Deleuze takes the movement-image tounfold in a Euclidean and 'hodological space' (in Kurt Lewin'sterms), while Bresson, neorealism, the New Wave and the New YorkSchool unfold in a Riemannian space, Robbe-Grillet in a quantumspace, Resnais in probabilistic and topological spaces, and Herzogand Tarkovsky in crystallized spaces. Here one gets a much bettersense of what Deleuze means by 'image' and of the difference betweenDeleuze's way of reading films and the familiar way in which filmsare measured on the basis of a representational norm. This strikes asso central to understanding Deleuze's work on cinema that although DeGaetano's essay is in many ways a recapitulation, the essay seemsextremely useful. IV. B. History Again. In Oliver Fahle's 'Deleuze and the History ofCinema' the author begins by admitting that Deleuze doesn't intendhis work as a history of cinema. Nevertheless Fahle wants to ask whathistorical conceptions are implicit in what Deleuze calls his'natural history' of certain types of cinematic images. Fahle pointsto the way early cinema theorists like Bazin and Kracauer sought anessence of cinema and in defining this essence in terms of realismthey appealed to the neorealist movement as historical evidence tounderwrite an ontology of cinema. Fahle wants to find some kind ofhistorical 'accent' or emphasis of this kind in Deleuze's work, andhere the example of neorealism turns out to do double duty, since forDeleuze it's not the end of the line, the telos of cinema finallyrealized, but rather only the beginning of another direction: towardsthe time-image. Thus Fahle helps us to see the way Deleuzeconceptualizes the history of cinema in terms of a different telos --a modernist one rather than a realist one. After a detaileddiscussion of the cinema books which breaks them down into componentparts, Fahle draws the reader's attention to the historic break whichDeleuze situates around 1960 -- just where it is conventionallylocated by film historians. I think the value of Fahle's re-framing ofDeleuze is to show the way Deleuze's conception of cinema as evolvingtowards a time-image gives an historical frame which allows one tomake a certain sense of the history of cinema, even if thedistinction which allows this historical sense to emerge is itselfconceptual rather than historical. Nevertheless I think Fahlesomewhat distorts the historical dimensions of Deleuze's text, sincethe division between the two volumes and their two respective kindsof images (movement-image and time-image) is not at all a historicalbreak, as a simple glance at the two tables of contents willdemonstrate: if Welles in the second volume can give us a time-imagein 1941 with _Citizen Kane_, then clearly the time-image is neither apost-World War II nor a post-1960 phenomenon. Here Bellour's claim that there are no valuejudgments in Deleuze's cinema books becomes more evidently false:there is no need to comment on any of the films which would stillfall under the category of the action-image, conventional films. Onlynew types of images are considered. This strikes me as a valuejudgment of sorts -- one that stands in need of revision as more workis done on Deleuze's text and with his concepts. What is _Titanic_ ifnot a highly conventional film which gives us atime-image? IV. C. Miscellany In Maruizio Grande's 'Non-derived Images', theauthor discusses realist and anti-realist tendencies in Deleuze'scinema books, but it is ultimately difficult to say what hisconclusion is. Early on Grande suggests that for Deleuze the cinemareconstitutes reality as movement and that 'For Deleuze themovement-image is reality ('that which appears')' (285). Yet a fewpages later Grande concludes that Deleuze's conception of cinema is'anti-reproductive and anti-illusionist' (288). Again, I don't thinkDeleuze's concept of 'image' is tantamount either to 'representation'nor thus to 'reality', and 'that which appears' does not thereforeindicate a relation to 'reality' in the traditional sense -- witnessDeleuze's remarks on vertigo. (A note at the end of Grande's textindicates that the author died in December 1996 before the essay waspublished.) Elisabeth Buttner and Marc Ries' essay,'Deleuze on the Subject of the Nature of the Event in Cinema', setsout to underline the centrality of the concept of the event forDeleuze's cinema books, but I don't think the essay ever quite getsthere. The authors bring Deleuze's _Logic of Sense_ and _Differenceand Repetition_ to bear on a discussion of the way time is conceivedin Deleuze's time-image in order to place the time-image in thecontext of those earlier works, but I don't think the payoff is thatgreat. Fans of Delphine Seyrig in _L'annee derniere a Marienbad_ and_Muriel_, however, will appreciate the authors' discussion of theactress's voice in the last few pages of the essay. These pages areperhaps more expressive of fandom than analysis, but they may perhapsthereby illuminate one of the guilty secrets of academic film studies-- namely, the proximity of the two. V. How Not To Read a Text Finally, a third tier consists of essays whichI would put under the rubric of: How Not To Read. Here the authorsmake claims which are overly broad, fail to define their terms withprecision, make pointless and unjust 'criticisms' of Deleuze's works,or simply give us essays whose relationship to Deleuze's work is tootenuous to be deeply illuminating of Deleuze's work -- and sometimesof much else. Here I would include: Vandenbunder, Raessens,Spielmann, Martin, Engell, and van Malderghem. One particular annoyance to this reader was thepresumption of measuring Deleuze's work not against its own goals butagainst those imposed by the writers. Measuring a work against itsown goals, however, assumes some ability to discern what those goalsare. Since this is not so easy with Deleuze, for the more attentiveand less presumptuous writers in this volume discerning those goalsconstitutes almost the entire task. The writers described below,however, were not so cautious. V. A. Peirce and Bergson In 'The Deleuze-Peirce Encounter', AndreVandenbunder aims to examine the semiotics of Deleuze and Peirce.While Deleuze draws on Peirce, it is in a fashion that is so highlyidiomatic that I don't think simply drawing points of contact isnearly enough: Bensmaia's essay on the way Deleuze takes up Auge (andothers) is emblematic of a careful and precisely analysis of how such'use' of one writer by another is hardly straightforward. Whetherindeed Deleuze can be said to have a 'semiotics' or a conception ofthe sign is itself in question, as Esquenazi demonstrates eloquentlyelsewhere in the same volume. But Vandenbunder claims that where Peirce'ssemiotics is a general theory of signs, Deleuze examines oneparticular 'language' -- that of cinema. But to assert this is toforget the passage that a large number of other writers in thecollection cite, one of the most famous in the cinema books, aboutthe distance between cinema as a subject matter and semiotics as amethod (C2, 43-45), a passage which Vandenbunder himself cites butdoesn't seem to take to heart. Then in introducing 'Deleuze'ssemiotic' (a somewhat absurd phrase to describe the works of anauthor for whom Esquenazi concludes that the very notion of a signplays an ambivalent role at best) the author turns to Bergson inorder to make the extravagant claim that 'The entire semiotics ofDeleuze is nothing but a lucid and searching commentary on thesepages [the beginning of the first chapter of _Matter andMemory_] and illustrated by some ingenious and profound analysesof films of great cineastes, from Griffith to Godard' (87). It israther strange to read an analysis of the Peircean aspects ofDeleuze's cinema books which then claims that these books are merelya footnote to Bergson illustrated with clever examples; the claim isreductive, off-topic and not very illuminating. Vandenbunder goes on to list in bullet-pointfashion some points of contact between Deleuze and Bergson. Deleuzedoes not deny his rapport with Bergson: he makes it explicit. But alist is not an argument, and Vandenbunder gives us the former ratherthan the latter. He calls attention to the relations -- multiple,complex, attenuated -- between the concept of the 'sign' and conceptslike 'image', 'perception' and 'experience'. But in so doingVandenbunder collapses everything Deleuze says about the image as ifit is the same thing as a sign. This approach lacks precision. Therelation between Deleuze and Peirce is significant and needsanalysis, but Vandenbunder does not provide it. While Vandenbunder's references to Peirce showa more than glancing acquaintance with that writer, some of remarksgive the reader pause about the thoroughness of that acquaintance:Vandenbunder describes the sign's object as 'the world designated'and the interpretant as 'the same world, this time interpreted' (89),which is a strange reading of Peirce to say the least. When theauthor finally observes, I believe correctly, that Deleuze's work oncinema owes more to Bergson than to Peirce, this makes the author'sown elaboration of Peirce's work a questionable goal. Vandenbunder criticizes Deleuze for not beingPeircean enough, but this strikes me as rather missing the point,which is to say precisely in what this distance and differenceconsists. The question of how Peirce and Bergson can havea point of intersection in Deleuze's text is one of the most crucialones, but it's not one Vandenbunder helps us out with much.Nevertheless, in reading his text it becomes possible to see somepotential affinities between American pragmatism in both Jamesian andPeircean varieties and European phenomenology, as in Bergson. Namely,both attempt to think of signs and ideational material in somerelation to action. Part of the tension between the two traditionscomes in the fact that one aspect of American pragmatism, namely itssemiotic formalism, has taken the upper hand in film studies, whereasthe holism that can be found in both the pragmatist andphenomenological traditions has not been dominant in film studies.Deleuze's rupture with Peirce's semiotic vocabulary would thus stemprecisely from the divergence between a phenomenological account ofthe sign (present in Peirce but not necessarily central) and alogical account of the sign, which is Peirce's greater concern.Deleuze's concern with an image which is separated from asensori-motor response -- the rupture between the movement-image andthe time-image -- would thus also mark a rupture with Peirce and thepoint at which an appeal to Bergson becomes necessary. Even ifVandenbunder does not spell this out, his text nevertheless prods thereader to speculations that the text itself cannot provide -- andthis in itself is of some use. Finally, Vandenbunder lines up someresemblances between Peirce and Deleuze, all the while admitting thatsuch superficial similarities are not necessarily significant. Theseare hit and miss. I don't believe Peirce's theory of graphs has muchbearing on Deleuze's opsigns and soundsigns. But Vandenbunder isprobably right in seeing a connection between Peirce's analyses ofcontinuity, what Peirce called his synechism, and Deleuze's concernwith difference. At a certain point, however, Vandenbunder is reducedto reading passages from commentaries on Deleuze by simply replacingthe words of the commentary term-for-term with more Peircean terms(95). Is Peirce's 'Germinal Nothing' Deleuze's 'zeroness'? IsDeleuze's 'rhizome' Peirce's 'musement'? These potential'translations' from one to the other are not without interest, but asposed they are unanswerable. If this kind of paint-by-numberssubstitution worked, then it would be no problem to translate Platointo Kant or Kant into Nietzsche by just changing some words. Theproblem of actually reading begins when one recognizes that puresubstitution on a one-for-one basis cannot account for meaning in anysignificant sense. V. B. Unjust Criticisms and UnfoundedComparisons Other writers make pointless criticisms ofDeleuze based on assuming that Deleuze is setting out to do somethinghe never tries to do. In 'Deleuze and Cinematographic Modernity'Joost Raessens sets out to bring the two titular terms into somerapport. This would be easier if Raessens would define the secondone, even in a cursory fashion. Though only about six pages long,Raessens' essay tries the reader's patience severely. ApparentlyRaessens' work tries to discover how philosophy can contribute to thedevelopment of the concept of 'cinematographic modernity'. ApparentlyDeleuze's work plays a large role in Raessens' analysis of thisconcept. Were Raessens ever to explain what he means by'cinematographic modernity', this reader might be moresympathetic. Since Raessens is interested in drawing fromDeleuze's text a conception of 'cinematographic modernity', he puts alot of emphasis upon aspects of Deleuze's text which were neverintended to have an historical character. While Raessens admits thatDeleuze does not equate the difference between the movement-image andthe time-image with the difference between classical and moderncinema, *nevertheless* he offers a 'new interpretation of Deleuze,putting in the central not the opposition 'movement-image' versus'time-image' but the relation between the classic cinematographicimage and the modern image' (269). (This is a bit like offering a'new interpretation' of _Hamlet_ in which Hamlet is understood asMacbeth.) Nevertheless, modern cinema isn't just the time-image,since Raessens believes that cinematographic modernity (again, stillundefined) appears under three forms -- the movement-image, thetime-image and thought. Thus Raessens for some reason finds value inreplacing Deleuze's clear-cut differences with an opposition whichitself remains not only undefined but dispersed throughout Deleuze'stext. This does not seem advantageous. Raessens also foregrounds the role ofdifferential thinking and the critique of Platonism in Deleuze'scinema books, as do other writers in the volume. Finally, Raessensclaims to have identified the political and normative character ofDeleuze's book. While I don't doubt the normative aspect, and Deleuzenever hides his politics, I don't think Raessens demonstrates this,or even says what he means by it. Instead, the author piles onhypotheses, all of which restate the same observations, observationsexpressed in terms that are never defined. Raessens refers to some writing on Deleuzewhich could be of use, perhaps despite the brevity of Frenchfootnotes: Leutrat's 'Deux temps, trois mouvements (sur GillesDeleuze)', _Kaleidoscope, Analyses de films_ (Lyon, 1988); Bensmaia,'Un philosophe au cinema', _Magazine litteraire_, number 257, 1988;Alain Menil, _L'Ecran du temps_ Paris, 1991. Since the reader of thepresent essay now has these references in hand, the necessity ofslogging through Raessens' six pages has been mercifullyobviated. Yvonne Spielmann's 'Digitalization: Time-Imageand Space-Image' is one of those tennis racquet/bicycle things: youknow, the author says, 'this tennis racquet is useless -- it'smissing both wheels, it has no pedals, and the chain's missing'. Ah,well that's because it's not a bicycle. Spielmann complains thatDeleuze puts the emphasis on time rather than space: yes, this isexactly what Deleuze sets out to do and then does in an original andcompelling fashion. Speilmann somehow believes, however, thatDeleuze's avowed purpose represents some kind of shortcoming. Deleuzeis then criticized for failing to take account of (522) and omitting(523) Spielmann's interest in space. Spielmann then tries to re-read Welles' use ofdeep-focus as an emblematic spatial image rather than an emblematictime-image, which is how Deleuze interprets it. There's nothing novelabout the way Spielmann thereby reads Welles: indeed, Spielmann seemsto enact the error other writers in the volume (like De Gaetano)describe: of taking the representation of space as a base or normupon which to measure cinema's aesthetic merits. In the processSpielmann brings in writing on _Citizen Kane_ as if Deleuze somehowleft these out rather than simply having other interests. Spielmannrefers to Jameson's well-known comments on cognitive mapping in orderto demonstrate how memory might be thought along spatial rather thantemporal lines, but again this exactly denies the interest ofDeleuze's approach by negating the temporality of time (to paraphraseHeidegger). The author highlights spatial and space-related concepts,which might be of interest to someone, but a glance through the tableof contents would have much the same results. A listing of such termsdoes not, however, constitute an analysis. Ultimately, Spielmann wants to bring somerapport between a concern with the time-image and new mediatechnologies. I don't find these reflections terribly convincing, butthe topic is an emerging one and so this essay may afford someinterest to others writing about it. V. C. Leibniz, TV and _Providence_ In the domain of the simply not so useful isJean-Clet Martin's essay 'The Virtual Image, or The Construction ofthe World'. Martin essentially gives his own reflections on thephilosophical thought of Leibniz together with a certain number ofreferences to various texts by Leibniz. The essay conceives ofphilosophy in a very traditional manner in terms of doubt, and thisto me limits its interest. Martin makes gestures towards expoundingthe way Leibniz's thought is already 'cinematic' or perhaps organizedaround the notion of the image or of a world, but he makes nosystematic links. Martin also makes passing references toinformation-age developments in computers and cybernetics, but heneither systematically expounds how Leibniz would fit into theseconcepts nor how Deleuze fits into what he says about Leibniz. Thispiece may be of some interest to Leibniz scholars, although I thinkthe level of generality makes its interest limited. Last in the volume and also in my estimationare three essays which seem to be what one once would have called an'application' of the philosopher's thought to a certain text orproblem. Lorenz Engell's 'Watching Television with Gilles Deleuze' isnot without its charms: it begins with a parody of Proust ('For along time, I went to bed early') in which the writer imagines himselfnot only as the addressee but as the subject of the televisionbroadcast. Engell claims he will demonstrate that television's'electronic image' can be understood in terms of Deleuze's concept ofthe time-image, thus demonstrating limitations on the way cinemagives a time-image. What follows is mostly an ontological reflectionon the nature of the television signal with terms drawn from Deleuzealthough without precise connections made which would link thediscussion to Deleuze's actual text. Engell also refers to McLuhanand Baudrillard, but I do not think any of these observations areeither so striking or so specific as to merit being recalled at thismoment. The author seems to be guilty of a techno-ontologicaldeterminism: the author deduces the essence of television from itstechnological basis and on the basis of this ontology of televisiongrounds the forms of broadcasting which have historically emerged.Such an approach downplays the contingencies of history: the serialform of television programming is not linked to economic imperatives,nor to the formative influence of radio programming, but rather tothe essence of the television signal. Ultimately the comparison of the televisionsignal to the time-image devolves on the way television functions asa sort of memory-machine constructing its own temporal rhythms. Suchhas already been observed by English-language authors with whom theauthor does not demonstrate a familiarity -- Cavell, Morris,Mellencamp and Doane, to name only the most obvious. Engell's essayis thus neither terribly convincing or novel on the subject oftelevision, nor terribly illuminating about Deleuze. Olivier van Malderghem's 'The Memory-Image:Alain Resnais' _Providence_' is a 12-page discussion of Resnais'_Providence_. Although this may be of some interest to those whowrite on Resnais, the essay's summary of the film's plot will be oflimited interest to those who have seen the film. Much of whatremains is what used to be called 'thematic analysis': it aims toexplicate the film's meaning with little attention to the surfacestructures of the text. Explicit references to Deleuze are few, noris Deleuze's terminology deployed with any consistency. The authordoes make some references to the concept of the time-image, and givesa chart which seems to summarize a semantic analysis of the film, butagain the references to Deleuze and his thought do not seem to me tobe substantive enough to merit close analysis other than by those whowant to see what a Deleuzian reading of Resnais might look like whenwritten by someone other than Deleuze. VI. Conclusion While numerous essays in this volume are richlyrewarding, they do not really constitute an 'introduction' toDeleuze. Readers familiar with some aspects of Deleuze's work willfind the many connections which some of the writers in this volumedraw amongst parts of his oeuvre fascinating, and those already adeptat reading Deleuze will find much food for thought. It is alsopossible that those just encountering Deleuze's work on cinema forthe first time will find some use for those essays which providelengthy overviews of the cinema books, since Deleuze's texts arethemselves so bristling with detail and complex in argumentation thatthey may be unapproachable on the first few tries. In this respectsome of the less original essays in this volume will be less dauntingthan Deleuze and may be illuminating enough if one does notsubstitute them for the original. In all events, a cursory knowledge of French orGerman would not be sufficient to appreciate the full complexitiesthis volume has to offer. University of California, Los Angeles,USA Bibliography Marc Auge, _Domaines et Chateaux_ (Paris:Seuil, 1989).----- _Un ethnologue dans le metro_ (Paris:Hachette, 1986).----- _Non-Lieux: Introduction a uneanthropologie de la surmodernite_ (Paris: Seuil, 1992).----- _La Traversee du Luxembourg_ (Paris:Hachette, 1985). Raymond Bellour, _L'analyse du film_ (Paris:Albatros, 1979). Reda Bensmaia, 'Un philosophe au cinema',_Magazine litteraire_, No. 257, 1988.----- 'Les Transformateurs -- Deleuze ou lecinema comme Automate spiritual', in _Deleuze, Pensare il Cinema_(Rome: Quaderni di Cinema/Studio, 1993), pp. 89 et seq. Gilles Deleuze, _Difference et Repetition_(Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1968).----- _L'Image-mouvement_ (Paris: Les Editionsde Minuit, 1982).----- _L'Image-temps_ (Paris: Les Editions deMinuit, 1985).----- Interview with Jean-Luc Godard, _Cahiersdu cinema_, November 1976.----- 'Lettre a Serge Daney', Preface to SergeDaney, _Cine-Journal_ (Paris: Editions des _Cahiers ducinema_).----- _Logique du sens_ (Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1969).----- _Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque_ (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1988).----- _Pourparlers_ (Paris: Editions de Minuit,1990).----- _Proust et les signes_ (Paris: PressesUniversitaire de France, 1979).----- _Qu'est-ce que la philosophie_ (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1991). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,_L'Anti-Oedipe_ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972).----- _Mille Plateaux_ (Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1980). Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, _Film, Perception etMemoire_ (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1994). Francois Jost, _L'oeil camera_. J. M. G. Le Clezio, 'L'extra-terrestre',_L'Arc_, no. 45. Jean-Louis Leutrat, 'Deux temps, troismouvements (sur Gilles Deleuze)', in _Kaleidoscope, Analyses defilms_ (Lyon, 1988). Alain Menil, _L'Ecran du temps_ (Paris,1991). __________________________ Edward R. O'Neill, 'Apprehending DeleuzeApprehending Cinema', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 2 no. 2, January1998<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol2-1998/n2oneill>. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_1998 Save as Plain TextDocument...Print...Read...Recycle Join the Film-Philosophysalon,and receive the journal articles via email asthey are published. here Film-Philosophy (ISSN1466-4615)PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD,EnglandContact: editor@film-philosophy.com Back to the Film-Philosophyhomepage  |
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