Philosophical understandings of cinema - 3

Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deluzian

- Michael Foucault

In my last two columns, I discussed the writings of Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and Christian Metz. In today's column, I wish to focus on the cinematic exegeses of the distinguished French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The epigraph of this column, that extravagant claim made by Foucault, clearly underlines the great importance of Deleuze's thinking. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.

Unlike most other prominent cultural theorists who have emerged in recent times, Deleuze had a profound and abiding interest in cinema. He had a confident breadth of cinematic understanding. The large number of films, filmmakers as well as film concepts discussed by him bears testimony to this fact. Indeed, some of his most interesting formulations emerge from his sustained engagement with cinema.

If you look up standard books on film studies and film theory, you probably will not come across the name of Deleuze. This is because he has been influencing film thought only since the mid 1980s.In addition, there is the compounding problem of his being recognized as an influential thinker in English-speaking countries relatively recently. His books have had an electrifying impact in France; it is rumored that 'Cinema 2' sold out its first printing on its first day in bookshops.

Deleuze wrote on such vitally important topics as psychoanalysis, desire, capitalism, modernity, social ethics and so on, always from his distinctive vantage point. Many philosophers sought to combine the thinking of Marx and Foucault, the scholars associated with the Frankfurt School being the most obvious example.

The results were always mixed. Gilles Deleuze, too, sought to put into play a dialogue, a mutual interrogation, between Marx and Freud, but through the intermediary of Nietzsche. This, I submit, was a very clever move. This strategy is vital to understanding the unfolding of Deleuze's thought. Deleuze was the first French thinker to treat Nietzsche as a systematically coherent philosopher.

Deleuze is the author of a large number of important books such as Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), 'Difference and Repetition' (1968), 'Spinoza' (1970), Cinema 1 (1983), 'Cinema 2' (1985). He co-authored with the eminent psychoanalyst Felix Guattari such books as 'Anti-Oedipus' (1983) and 'A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

His writings have exercised a deep influence on the leading edge of thought of disciplines like architecture, science, law, mathematics, economics, arts, literature, cinema, education, cultural studies etc. However, not everyone is happy with his writings. Some find him difficult because he has a tendency of introducing unusual terms and concepts that cannot be facilely mapped onto prevalent structures of knowledge; some, quite mistakenly in my judgment, conceive of him as a celebrant of chaos and anarchy.

Gilles Deleuze had a distinct idea of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise. He saw it as a site of the production of new concepts. As he remarked in the book 'What is Philosoph?'(1994), that he co-authored with Guattari, he remarked, philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, fabricating concepts.' He went on to assert that, 'concepts are not waiting for us ready-mad, like heavenly-bodies.

There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated or rather created and would be nothing without their creators signature.' The declared intention of 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2' is to develop philosophical concepts that, 'relate only to cinema, to a given genre of film, to a given film or some other concepts proper to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically.'

The central question animating Deleuze's writings on cinema is, how does a focused speculation film shed light on the complex intersections of image and thought? It is his considered judgment that cinema furnishes us with a productive site for understanding the various transformations in strategies of signifying, comprehension, and belief; these, he says, are equally valid for pondering philosophical and scientific issues as they are for examining aesthetic issues.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that when Deluze says that he is interested in creating a philosophy of cinema, he is not seeking to apply philosophical concepts to films, but to shuttle back and forth between cinema and philosophy. The concepts emerge from cinema itself, but are given philosophical articulations.

Commenting on one of his favorite film directors, Alain Resnais, Deleuze says, '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 cinema, but that he invents a cinema of philosophy, a cinema of thought, which is totally new in the history of cinema.' For Deleuze, what is distinctive about the art of films is that it permits us to explore the ideas of motion and time productively. He maintains that cinema makes possible the investigation into motion and time itself in depth. The movement of images, for Deleuze, constitutes the quintessential expressiveness in cinema.

Unlike most other philosophers of cinema, Deleuze asserts that creators of films do not need the assistance of philosophers to comprehend the depth of significance of their work; they are fully capable of accomplishing that themselves. What philosophers do is to explicate how cinema itself generates perceptual experiences that can re-inflect our understandings of movement and time. Deleuze was greatly influenced by the writings of the philosopher Henri Bergson who focused meticulously on the concepts of time, space and duration. Deluze's two books 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2' cannot be properly understood without knowledge of Bergson's path-breaking work on the discourse of time.

'Cinema 1' published in France in 1983 can be described as an innovative work on film scholarship and cinema. He conceived of philosophical concepts as images of thought that needed to be comprehended on their own terms. Drawing on Bergson's and C.S. Peirce's semiology, Delueuze, in this book, offers a new inventory of images, which are applied to films of such eminent directors as Eisenstein, Griffith, Bresson, Rhomer, Passolini, Bunuel, Dreyer etc. According to him, the distinguishing mark of films made in the first half of the twentieth-century is movement of images. He says that in films made after World War II, time comes to dominate movement. Consequently, he devotes the second book, 'Cinema 2', to explaining this change and its implications for the understanding of cinema,

In 'Cinema 2' he focuses on what he termed time-image; in movement image, movement dominated time, while in time image time dominates movement. Time images become sites of reflection. Deleuze aims to explain the rise of time image in cinema in relation to various social transformations that took place in Europe after World War ii. He talks about spaces, 'We no longer know how to describe', and characters who 'see rather than act.'

For him, the films of Italian neo-realists inaugurate this shift, although in Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' he seems to think that we can observe how time cunningly leads many lives. By focusing on the work of such diverse directors as Resnais, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, Ozu, Pasolini, Rosselini, de Sica, Deleuze endeavors to exemplify the crucial role played by the time image.

Deleuze is fascinated by the ways in which films communicate multiple and contradictory 'sheets of time.' This is what time images point to.

According to him, time image signifies the exhaustion of the movement image. Breaks in time foreground the being of time in the same way that when something breaks, when a habitual act ruptures, we are made aware of it more insistently - a point made by such philosophers as Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger. Time image replaces action with seen-action, rational curs with irrational ones. He believes that the field of cinema is constructed upon movement-images, and like Bergson, he divides and sub-divides endlessly these images into perception-images, action-images, affection-images etc.

Irrational cuts and startling juxtapositions, enforced discrepancies often serve to focus on the time-image. A filmmaker like Godard accomplished this cogently. For example, in a film like weekend we see images with disconcerting background nose that has the effect of undermining the unity of the image we are observing and thereby drawing attention to the image. Discussing the work of the Japanese film director Ozu, Deleuze says, 'and if Ozu's famous still lifes are thoroughly cinematic, it's because they bring out the unchanging patterns of time in a world that's already lost its sensory-motor connections.'

Deleuze;s writings on cinema served to usher in a new period of film analysis by dislodging the regnant paradigm which consisted of Saussurian linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Instead, he makes use of Bergson's ideas of time and Pierce's notion of signs to construct his paradigm. In an interview Deleuze said, 'it is catastrophic to apply linguistics to cinema.' Interestingly he said that, 'it's not to psychoanalysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should for principles.' His analysis of signs and their relation to sensory-motor activities are premised on this conviction. On another occasion he proclaimed that, '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.' Why? Because films put images in motion that continually trace ad review the circuits of the brain.

There are many aspects of Deleuze's thinking that have a bearing on cinema. I have focused primarily on his distinction between movement-image and time-image which is pivotal to his approach. Let me illustrate this distinction with reference to some Sri Lankan films. For example, in Lester James Peries' 'Wekanda Walawwa' - a film with Chekhovian undertones - the lake by the mansion, the way it is caught by the camera and woven into the narrative, enhances the significant of the time-image. Similarly, in 'The Village in the Jungle', the jungle occupies a time-space conjuncture which points to the power of the time-image. To cite another example, in Dharmasena Pathiraja's film 'Ahas Gawwa', there is a recurring image of a flock of birds in flight. It emblematizes the sense of freedom that the young characters in the film long for; and reminds us that freedom makes no sense without the constraining shadow of un-freedom. Once again we see the play of the time-image.

What is interesting about Peries' ' Wekanda Walawwa' is that he has shown how the movement image can be modulated to carry the weight of the time image as for example in the way that Sujatha Rajasuriya responds to the situation in her mansion after her return from London. Without the customary disjunctions and displacements, the jump-cuts of Godard and conscious mismatches of Resnais, Peries is able to transpose the movement image to a time image. I, for one, am persuaded by his move.

Despite Dleuze's brilliance, there are numerous shortcomings in his writings. He is a difficult writer to read; often he is elusive because he is allusive. There is a forbidding analytical stringency to his work, and he displays an unsparing desire for endless taxonomy. He demands scrupulous attentiveness from his readers as well as an unusual breadth of reference. Some have asserted that he misread the neo-realists. Others like Jacques Ranciere have charged that his bifurcation of movement and time images is a misplaced effort. However, it is clear that the distance of his writings from the ruling paradigm is decisive and revelatory. He almost always stages the dignity of boldness.

In cinema studies, as one conquers a new conceptual space, one realizes that another frontier of silence of understanding awaits charting. In the provisional light of Deleuze's thinking, we are emboldened to move up towards that silence. In the final analysis, Deleuze, in his effort to philosophize cinema succeeded in cinematizing philosophy.