Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2 (David Yates, UK | USA, 2010 | 2011)

In one of the most beautiful and disturbing moments of recent cinema, Harry Potter – defeated by the evil wizard Voldemort with a killing curse – awakens to discover himself dead. Apparently… Yet all

is not as it at first seems. Harry walks in his own limbo-construct. Curiously, he encounters a dying version of the evil Dark Lord, curled up foetus-like. This bloody abortion is a horcrux, torn from its host – Harry. As Harry explores the immense brilliant-white dream environment (‘like King’s Cross Station, only cleaner’), he stumbles upon a manifestation of his old mentor Dumbledore, and – finally – learns the truth. Harry is not dead. Rather, Voldemort has unknowingly destroyed a part of himself that was hidden within Harry, and Harry is now free of his horcrux function. His body in the real world is merely unconscious.

Horcruxes are magical objects that host a quantum embodiment of one’s soul, effectively making the owner immortal. If you have transformed an object into a horcrux and your body is destroyed, you can be resurrected through the power of a horcrux. Yet the deal is monstrous. These objects can only be created in the wake of a killing. Voldemort, known as Tom Marvolo Riddle when young, discovered this forbidden dark spell and, over the years that followed, set about creating a number of horcruxes for himself as he arose to become the Dark Lord. However, just before he attained total power over the world, he was involved in an event that brought Harry into the story and which also stymied his diabolical plan. For Voldemort – attempting to annihilate all resistance – killed the Potters, but in so-doing was himself destroyed. Yet, at that moment of his death, a part of his soul attached itself to their son, Harry. Since this event, Harry has been a horcrux of his reptilianesque foe – unbeknownst to himself and indeed the subsequently resurrected Voldemort. It is such a resurrection that concerns the films of the cycle preceding the Deathly Hallows diptych; and it is the final diptych that will see Voldemort once again attempt to take over the world. Concomitantly, Harry and his friends discover the source of Voldemort’s immortality: the horcruxes. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 begins the quest to identify, locate and destroy these magical objects – a particularly difficult and dangerous task, and one that remains unfulfilled, awaiting Part 2. In this second film of the Deathly Hallows, furthermore, it is revealed Harry must also sacrifice his own life to the cause – there has always been a link between himself and Voldemort, forged in the moment of the Dark Lord’s first death, and Harry is led to believe severing this link is essential. Hence the duel in the woods with the evil wizard, and Harry’s apparent martyrdom. Yet in the limbo-construct, Harry understands the subterfuge, a necessary secret kept from him by Dumbledore so Voldemort would not discover the deception. For the Dark Lord – the creator of this horcrux – was the only one who could destroy its function without annihilating Harry.

The scene is now set for the young wizard’s consciousness to return to his body, his friends and the fray – in order to complete his mission. For only once all the remaining horcruxes are obliterated will Voldemort be mortal, and only then can he finally be killed. These horcruxes are thus very powerful magical objects, and can be seen to be essential to the story of the Deathly Hallows. Indeed, the whole Harry Potter cycle is dependent upon these and other magical objects: wands, crystal balls, amulets, broomsticks, animals, even sports equipment. Deleuze calls such objects ‘fetishes’. Fetishes are impulse-images, the condensation of primal forces and intensities from the world in special objects. It is these objects which sustain, retain and preserve energies, and which, under certain conditions, will discharge these energies back into the world...

To read the full exploration of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2 through the Deleuze's sign of the 'fetish,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Belgium | France | UK | Japan, 2004)

The park – during the long summer days – is a vast woodland playground. After lessons are out, or at

weekends, they can enjoy themselves here. Pretty little waterfalls cascade over rocks covered in lichen, feeding the river which meanders through the trees, the wide banks creating shallow areas where the girls can swim. The high stone wall that surrounds the park, covered with climbing plants, keeps them safe from the outside world. Nearer to the school, the forest thins out into well-maintained glades interspaced with open areas to play hoopla, or ride on swings. Little pathways connect all these spaces, running from the five houses which the girls now call home, and to the main school building.

At night, however, the paths are forbidding trajectories. Lit from above with electric lamps strung between the trees, they barely cut through the dark and the now impenetrable woods where night time noises echo. Ominous, sinister pathways that wind this way and that, and terminate in unknown events. Bianca will leave the younger girls at the house, and walk these paths alone. Director Lucile Hadzihalilovic places her camera at the mouth of this dark entry, and a static frame captures Bianca as she moves through each pool of light, until the darkness finally engulfs her. Bianca will join the other oldest girls from each of the houses; but we will not follow, not yet. It is – for us, for now – forbidden knowledge. Such is the cinematographic image of Innocence, a world in which primal forces permeate the mise-en-scène.

Hadzihalilovic creates an originary world. An originary world is an impulse-image, an image of the powerful intensive and primal forces that permeate the milieu from its beginning to its end. The milieu is a defined space, a determined environment with geographical and historical co-ordinates. Yet this space floats upon a world of primal, nameless and undefined forces. Deleuze writes, this impulse-image is ‘the world which is revealed as the basis of the social milieux which are so powerfully described… an originary world, which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them’ (C1:125)...

To read the full exploration of Innocence through the Deleuze's sign of the 'originary world,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

The Human Centipede [First Sequence] (Tom Six, Netherlands, 2009)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is nasty, sickening, permeated with gratuitous and terrifying violence – everything, then, a great horror film should be. Yet the movie also produces laughter – in a certain way, up to a certain point. The film seizes upon the passion hidden deep within for cruelty, and the laughter that emerges is that of the purest pleasure in the suffering of others. Horror unbound takes you through and beyond nervous and ironic laughter (beyond the uncanny of classical horror; beyond the knowing self-reflection of post-modern horror). Toward a laughter to which we will not admit, a laughter that sticks in the throat, where enjoyment turns, returns, once more, to horror. The enjoyment of horror, and the horror of enjoyment...

Such a procedure can be seen as an encounter with what Deleuze names an impulse-image. Impulse-images describe types of films where primal forces ravage the universe; and the horror movie is exemplary in allowing such permeating forces to be captured up in the perceptions, acts and affects of characters and of the audience. Bodies, in horror films, are transformed into the symptoms of an elemental world. Impulses are energies, impelling urges that overwhelm, that are – as Deleuze writes – ‘too strong for the character’ (C1:137). The impulse-image explores ‘acts… prior to all differentiation between the human and the animal. These are human animals’ (C1:123-4). In this way, symptoms become ‘inseparable from the perverse mode of behaviour which they produce and animate: cannibalistic, sado-masochistic, necrophiliac, etc’ (C1:128). It is here – in the productive domain of the symptom, when the characters animate symptoms of an originary world – that the horror film operates.  And in this way The Human Centipede is a film of the impulse-image, an actualisation of becoming animal in Katsuro-Jenny-Lindsey through the perverse symptomatic acts of Dr. Heiter. The film explores the symptom, the film is a symptom of the primal forces that ravage the universe beneath the determined and determinable situations of the world. And the laughter of cruelty is a symptom of these forces, a laughter too strong for the audience, a laughter that overwhelms the spectator, for a moment…

To read the full exploration of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) through the Deleuze's sign of the 'symptom,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...