I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, USA | Germany | Canada, 2007)

Bob Dylan: the American singer songwriter. In I'm Not There, Dylan is played by six different actors: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw. Five white actors, and one black; one woman, and five men; five adults and one child. Each character has a name designed by director Todd Haynes to express a different aspect of Dylan and echo antecedents, real and fictional both within and without the film...

Haynes creates what Deleuze would name a body of attitude. The actors do not perform an act of mimesis, but expose and accentuate Dylan... In this way, the character becomes a multiplicity and the body is ‘dispersed in “a plurality of ways of being present in the world,” of belonging to sets, all incompatible and yet coexisting’ (C2:203)...

To read the full exploration of I'm Not There through the Deleuze's sign of 'body of attitude,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...