Triangle (Christopher Smith, UK | Australia, 2009)

Jess faces Jess with a shotgun. ‘You’re not me,’ she whispers, finger on the trigger, priming herself to
fire. ‘You’re not me,’ she says again, tears in her eyes. This confrontation takes place in the once-plush ballroom of the Aeolus, a ghost-ship, an ocean liner long lost in the mysterious seas of the Caribbean. Director Christopher Smith’s camera will swoop around and between, encircle and encompass the doppelgängers: hyper-fast tracking shots, bullet-time; close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots flip-flopping and reorienting the point-of-view from one Jess to the other, back and forth. Jess with the shotgun cannot – however – seem to pull the trigger. The other Jess backs away, breathing slowly, she turns, and flees. Jess lowers the gun. Turns to Victor, who is slumped against a wall, dying, covered in his own blood: ‘this didn’t happen before, don’t you see?’ Jess now thinks she understands what is happening. Events and the people who traverse them are caught in a circuit, a helter-skelter with infinite rides – but the instants that fill out each circuit are not fixed. Jess can change what happens, make up for what she has done, escape the loop. The present can efface the past for the future. She just has to kill everyone first...

No doubt a lot of fun can be had trying to figure out how Triangle works, the logic of cause and effect that powers the narration. Such solutions would necessarily point toward spatio-temporal dissonances: time-travel, which would be subject to grandfather paradoxes, in turn referring to the cutting edge of physics and the quantum inspired speculative situations of many worlds; worlds which would fold back upon themselves overlaying and becoming exposed to one another. However, there is another approach – at once far simpler, and infinitely more complex. We can begin by referring to Deleuze’s cineosis, and to a type of recollection-image named the forking path. Recollection-images describe memories: perceptions, affects and actions coalescing on-screen as moments of the past actualized in the present for the future. In their most familiar aspect, recollection-images will be constituted through flashbacks, memories actualised to provide – in varying degrees – ‘an explanation, a causality or a linearity’ (C2:49). However, the recollection-image can also give us memory as the ‘fragmentation of all linearity… [as] breaks in causality’  (C2:49)...

To read the full exploration of Triangle through the Deleuze's sign of the 'forking path,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

True Grit (Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, USA, 2010)

One moment emblematic of True Grit: Lucky Ned Pepper’s teeth. Dental calculus fused to crooked pegs, a fresh coating of furry biofilm the colour of English mustard set in a grimace of dried, cracked lips. Some real dirty realism. Take the voices: the almost subsonic, sometimes incompressible growl of Rooster Coburn; the transformation of LaBoeuf’s measured, dignified articulations to comic thwollen tongued thounds; the educated, erudite precision and farm-hand tenacity of young Mattie – all circumscribed by the style of the King James Bible. Wonderful. And the same goes for the situations traversed by the characters: Mattie and the pony salesman, Rooster getting drunk on his horse, LaBoeuf and his hissy-fits – all encompassed in a wintering wild west, the indifference of humanity and nature both sides of the river frontier: Fort Smith and the lands of the Choctaw. Realism, yet more-so. True Grit is a joy.

Yet the question has been asked, do we need True Grit? In the first place, it is an old style classic western. In the second place, it is a remake of old style classic western. ‘This True Grit,’ writes Will Self, ‘says nothing more substantive about the role of Manifest Destiny in American self-conception (which is what, in the final analysis, all serious westerns are about) than the last one did’. Self’s target is not simply True Grit, but the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. For Self ‘it was inevitable that, sooner or later, they would feel compelled to make – or rather, remake – a western.’ Why? Because the ‘central problem’ with the Coens’ is ‘their reflexivity as directors, making films of films rather than films tout court… this is why – even at their best – the Coens’ films have a feeling of being refracted rather than immediate experiences’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01).

Is it enough to respond to Self by saying that True Grit is not a remake? That it is, instead, a ‘different version,’ a different take on the original novel by Charles Portis (Philip French, The Observer: 13.02.11). I think not. For Self it is the films of the Coens’ in general that perpetrate a refraction through other films, True Grit is simply the most obvious sign of such poverty.

Perhaps, by way of response, in order to affirm rather than negate the film, we should rather begin, at least initially, by agreeing with a certain aspect of Self’s diagnosis. We must say ‘yes’ True Grit is a remake. A remake of the 1969 version. Further, we should push on… surely Self does not go far enough? We are also tempted to say the film is a remake of The Wizard of Oz. As Krishna Stott, director-producer-writer at Bellyfeel, remarked after we saw the film, Mattie has something of the look of Judy Garland. But it goes beyond the look: a girl enters a world of dreams and nightmares. She is carried from one world to another, over the river by her horse, and – at the end of her adventure – back through the night by Rooster. The girl has adventures with a bullying coward, a man of tin and a drunken scarecrow. Or perhaps a remake of Tarkovsky’s Stalker? Which itself can be seen as a remake of The Wizard of Oz…

And of course True Grit, both films, are also interpretations of scripts, which were re-imaginings of a book. And the tone of the movie can be said to be a resituating of the literary atmosphere of a Cormac McCarthy novel, or even, in an entirely different way, the gaming environments of Red Dead Redemption. In other words, a whole nexus of remakes of remakes, including a remake of all the other films the Coens’ have made, which in turn remake other films. Is not every film a remake of other films, books, plays and paintings?

Yet we must not be hasty and claim that the problem is the exact opposite of the one posited by Self, that no film can be anything other than ‘refracted,’ that no film can reach ‘immediate experiences.’ Rather, we would like to say that the dichotomy is a false one, a false problem with a long history. Plato – in his the first version of the problem – describes a world of pure, ideal Forms that exist beyond our senses and the manifestations of those pure Forms on the Earth appear as particular objects. However, the artist, in this narrative, only makes a copy of the object, a copy of a copy, an imitation (Republic). In other words, all art is condemned as being a third degree away from the truth. Plato, will attack his own theory (Parmenades) and rework it, going on to describing two types of copy, the true and the false (Statesman; Sophist). This false copy is what will become known as the simulacrum, that which distorts. A few thousand years later Jean Baudrillard will describe the simulacrum as being a fourth remove from the truth. First comes a reflection of reality; second the distortion of reality; third the loss of reality; and finally the simulacrum, which ‘bears no relation to any reality whatsoever’ (Simulacra and Simulations). Self’s analysis is in this lineage.

It seems to us that these, and other, versions of the simulacrum partake of a fundamental negativity. Rather, we would like to suggest that every image has two sides: one true, one false; one faithful, one a simulacrum; one ‘refracted,’ one an ‘immediate experience’; one original, one a remake. Each image, each filmic composition of images, cannot but put these forces into play… the dynamics of any image, of any film, are thus the outcome of this play of forces…

Gilles Deleuze explores just such a play of forces in a number of ways throughout many of his books. For example, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sees Plato’s negative-simulacrum as a lost opportunity. Rather than a distortion opposed to a faithful copy, the simulacrum can become an affirmative falsification, can indicate a circulation of images not a stratification of levels of truth. Deleuze will abandon the concept of the simulacrum in later work, replacing it with the rhizome, with deterritorialisation, with machinic assemblages and various other conceptual fragments. One trajectory is that of the cliché. And it here we can re-approach cinema.

As Philip French beautifully maintains, the way the courthouse is dressed and filmed in True Grit ‘evokes the paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia recorder of emerging middle-class life, and represents the bourgeois world that's encroaching on the frontier’ (The Observer: 13.02.11). In his book on painting, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, Deleuze has this to say about the cliché:

‘It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface… If the painter were before a white surface, he – or she – could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model. But such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model, he paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy’ (FB, 86).

We can clearly see here the Deleuzian take on the faithful reproduction and the simulacrum… and he goes on to restate this thus ‘clichés are always already on the canvas, and if the painter is content to transform the cliché, to deform or mutilate it, to manipulate it in every possible way, this reaction is still too intellectual, too abstract: it allows the cliché to rise again from its ashes, it leaves the painter within the milieu of the cliché, or else gives him or her no other consolation than parody’ (FB, 87). So, there needs to be a second moment, ‘it would be much better to abandon oneself to clichés, to collect them. Accumulate them, multiply them, as so many prepictorial givens’ (FB, 92). In this way, ‘only when one leaves them behind, through rejection, can the work begin’ (FB, 92). Yet the question remains ‘how do I proceed so that what I paint does not become a cliché?’ (FB, 93). There is, of course, no universal solution… ‘one can fight against cliché only with much guile, perseverance, and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every paining’ (FB, 96).

In other words, even though Self’s critique of the Coens’ is badly formed (the films are bad because they are copies, rather than, all images have to escape cliché), it is none-the-less a crucial one. The question becomes, do the Coens’ – through their filmic images and procedures – manage to escape cliché, and if so, how? What is the Coens’ way? In particular with True Grit, and in general across their oeuvre.

Deleuze’s returns to the problem of clichés in his cinema books. He describes two broad domains of cinema, the movement-image and the time-image. The former aligns, more or less, with classical cinematic codes, while the latter with modernist, arthouse and postmodernist strategies. The former flows from image to image, binding the spectator to the images so as to ensure they think with the film, the latter operates through different tactics, attempting to break the flow of images, and give the spectator the chance to read, rather than simple see, the film. It might be thought that the move from movement-image to time-image describes the path from cliché to an overturning of cliché… yet this is not the case: ‘there is no value-judgement here, because this new regime – no less than the old one – throws up its ready-made formulas, its set procedures, its laboured and empty applications, its failures, its conventional and ‘second-hand’ examples offered to us as masterpieces’ (C2: 132). In other words, the moving beyond cliché has nothing to do with the move beyond classical realism. So, how do we know if a film escapes cliché…? Only in the particular strategies it puts into play…

Let us return to Self’s coup de grâce for True Grit, that the film ‘says nothing more substantive about the role of Manifest Destiny in American self-conception (which is what, in the final analysis, all serious westerns are about) than the last one did’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01). We may baulk at the idea that all westerns, all so-called serious westerns, must engage with the concept of Manifest Destiny, but let us leave this to one side. We may also not want to compare True Grit 1969 to True Grit 2010, we may prefer to think the film in and of itself, but by way of conversation, let’s allow ourselves to do so…

Mattie Ross, a precocious fourteen year old girl, turns up at Fort Smith to bring the killer of her father to justice. However, Tom Chaney, the killer, has crossed the river, disappearing into ‘Indian territory’. So Mattie hires Rooster Cogburn , a man who answers – she is told – her request for a bounty hunter with true grit. Trouble is, Cogburn is a fat old drunk, well past his prime. The scenario is thus set for revenge!

In the 1969 film Cogburn takes centre stage, in the 2010 film it is Mattie. And while in both films it is Mattie who kills Chaney, and in doing so is thrown backwards by the recoil of the rifle into a snake pit, in the 1969 film she recovers, while in the 2001 film she does not. This is made explicit in the coda, which reminds us that the film began with the voice over narration of an older Mattie, thus positioning the entire film as a flashback, as a memory, a narration of an older Mattie.

This leads us on to the most crucial differentiation between the films, which can be explored through the Deleuzian cineosis. While both films are of the movement-image, their component image differs. In True Grit 1969 the action-image dominates. Action-images explore the way in which situations are associated with character behaviours. However, as we have seen, True Grit 2010 is caught within a flashback. Flashbacks operate within the domain of thought, mental-images, which explore the way in which a film captures the thinking of characters. Flashbacks are recollection-images, powerful component of the domain of thought in that they attempt to depict on-screen the remembrances of a character or characters. For Deleuze flashbacks are the instrument of ‘psychological causality,’ a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:47; 49). When unambiguous this is a strong sense of destiny… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present and will dictate the future.

Mattie looses her arm, remains unmarried woman, appears severe. This is not what we expect. The trials in the lands of the Choctaw were not adventures that would drag the girl from a cloistered adolescence towards a fulfilled maturity. This is why the Coens’ went into such detail of Mattie’s character in Fort Smith. These adventures essentially ruined her. The film does not explore the glory of revenge, but rather explores the futility of revenge through loss. Many years later she attempts to find Rooster at the Rodeo, but he is gone, is dead. Absences permeate the film, her father, the disappeared killer, her arm, Rooster – and… so beautifully absent we barely notice it – the Choctaw. The people are missing…

The manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon colonizers is revealed for what it is, the annexation of territory after territory, betrayal upon betrayal, as we know so well through Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Rather than an allegorical Colombia, bringing civilisation and justice, these whites are whites doing what whites do. The Coens’ True Grit does indeed have something very different to say about manifest destiny… It is the colonizers' right, their ‘manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty,’ so wrote John O'Sullivan, democrat and New York editor of The Morning Post in 1845. And now the spirit of manifest destiny crosses oceans with democracy and oil. The Coens’ True Grit, in this way, enters into a machinic assemblage with 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq…


In a sense, you could say that the film has gone back to the book, is more true to the book than the original film. However, as we have already discovered, this is no way to designate the originality of a film, the escape from cliché. However, in the case of the Coens’ this could at least be said, in this specific instance, to be a clue, an indicator. This is a film that takes the conventions of the classic western seriously, deploys those conventions through the politics of the neo-western yet has the self-reflexive surface of the ‘post-modern’ western. The film manages to have its cake, eat it… and then throw it back up. True Grit is a return to the classic western made possible only by passing through the neo-western and the post-modern western. Which is to say, more classical than the classical, a reverence for the classical, not to copy or imitate it, but to return to the very beginning and re-invent it. To look again. And this, surely, is the procedure of the Coen’s in general, across all their films, to return to the beginning to look once more, to rediscover originality before the cliché. And this is why they are not simply content to make a western, but instead to remake a great western, one of the last great classical westerns. This is not a tribute, this is not nostalgia, this is an affirmation of cinema.

‘Sometimes,’ writes Self, ‘it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch. It’s a dirty, thankless task, but someone has to do it’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01). The Nietzschean response – a response echoed in the very procedure of Deleuze’s cinema books, where he only discusses what he considers to be masterpieces – would be ‘let looking away be my only negation!’ (The Gay Science: 173).

The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, Argentina | Spain, 2009)

Espósito’s face is shrouded with darkness. The old wooden door whispers softly as he slowly pushes it open. Cautiously, Espósito enters in silence. His eyes explore the hidden space. At the far end are two doorways. To his left, the first – fitted with makeshift, bent and twisted, iron bars – leads to a room with a bricked up window. It appears empty. The second doorway, off to his right, is open wide, the room beyond brightly lit. Inside is Morales, his back turned toward Espósito, bent over, arranging items in a small storage area. Unseen as yet, Espósito turns his attention to and approaches the improvised cell. As he does so, he spies the chamber has a small opening inside. It is through this opening that a listless figure shuffles. A broken, balding, unkempt old man. A ghost from the past.
And we cannot escape our past. What has passed haunts the present. Imprisons us. Such is the lesson of director Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes. Accordingly, the film employs the power of the flashback to ground such a reciprocity: memory as the condition of the present; the subject as a product of the past. Yet Campanella does not limit this exchange to the individual. Rather through the individual we discover the milieu – the socio-political environment. There is no memory without history, and no history without memory. The Secret in Their Eyes will thus exploit the cinematic function of the flashback to explore the psychological subject within the historical setting which encompasses it, circumscribes it, motivates it, and determines it. The filmic space is Argentina; the temporal zones 1999 (the present) and 1974 (the past). Campanella begins and ends the film in the present – and this present will be the ground for a series of flashbacks into the past...

This is the pattern: present → past → present; present → past → present; and so on. In this way, the film reconstitutes and reactivates the elements of crime, politics and romance of the past in and for the present. The past is brought into the present, for the present through memory. And memory is actualised as an image on the screen. Such actualisations of memory are explored in the cinematic realm through what Deleuze will name the recollection-image. Recollection-images as flashbacks give us ‘an explanation, a causality or a linearity’ as a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:49). Actualising an image from the past serves to inspire the present, to create and accentuate affects for the character at the centre, in order to determine actions in and upon the world for the now. Accordingly, a recollection-image is a sign of ‘psychological causality’ (C2:47). The Secret in Their Eyes is structured by such recollection-images, flashbacks overwhelm the narration and thus function as Espósito’s impetus, stimulation, drive. Espósito has no choice. Deleuze designates such a recollection-image as strong destiny – everything that has happened impacts the character and sets them upon a path they cannot escape, along a trajectory that will allow no deviation...

To read the full exploration of The Secret in Their Eyes through the Deleuze's sign of 'strong destiny,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, UK, 2010)

Arriving like the hit men from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (with a nice line in digressive, tangential conversation) the activities of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are soon discovered to be both far more prosaic and – subsequently – outlandish. They are company men, representatives of an enterprise which specialises in disinterring the past. Their clients are middle class, heterosexual, countryside dwelling couples… seemingly caught up in a fad they only half believe in. After attempting to ensure their clients fully understand the process they are about to open themselves up to (through a number of forms and verbal statements which must be corroborated according to a strict series of rules) Mr Davis and Mr Bennett begin…

The film initially presents itself as a comedy, and the sparing between Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are no doubt in the comedic mode. But the film has a dark underbelly. It is somehow oddly disturbing. Set amongst the English countryside, in well presented bourgeois homes with chalk white walls, comfy sofas, and tea and cake… the film integrates elements of the gothic, or as Gail Ashurst has specified, the green Gothic. No doubt this is a function of the wonderful music which pervades the action… mystical English mediaeval chanting and non-synthetic instrumentation. Yet it is not this alone. Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are revealed to be esoteric practitioners, there to scratch the surface, to unearth secrets, treacheries, lies. Using an unspecified technological device that locates psychic energies, they identify a wardrobe (or closet… wait for it) then, through the use of two strange stones, explore the past lives of the couples. Hence the ‘skeletons’ of the title! Once discovered, they reveal all: her secrets to him, and his to her.

It is these trips back to moments of past lives that structure the film, give it power, make it uncanny and provide is central themes. Upon entering the wardrobe, Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are able to walk invisibly through the mise-en-scène of the past… to replace the characters they are investigating, to live out their actions, feel their feelings and think their thoughts. Crucially, these past events are already written, they cannot be changed, only experienced from either a subjective or objective viewpoint. As Mr Davis says, at one point, these past events are like ‘tape loops’.

And it is Mr Davis who feels the lure of the past himself… as senior partner he is custodian of the stones. During a week’s leave he spends his time in elicit ‘glow chasing’, reliving a moment from his boyhood, cuddled up on the sofa with his dad and mum, being told a particularly strange story, a fairytale. This event is accessed through an old photograph and on continual repeat. These repetitions become hypnotic, swamp like, and ultimately debilitating… but for all this, give him a sense of security…

It is in this way – between these two uses of the stones to revisit the past – that the film reveals its central themes. First, there is the positioning of the past as a secret place… second there is the need to have those secrets revealed… yet we can’t have it both ways. So, there is a fundamental resistance, a tension at play with regards to the past. It is this tension between secrecy and revelation that, according to Whitfield, we must overcome. For the tendency will be to keep secrets. And here the danger lies, for the future can become entrapped by the past. The past can bear down on the present, overwhelm it. It is a maze you can get lost in. The true power of memories is, in this way, malign, if taken in-and-of-themselves. Rather, memories should be overcome… the first step in this process is sharing them. In this way their destructive power is diminished, they become benign. As we have seen, the couples are having revealed secrets they already know, as they occurred in their own pasts. Thus the activities of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are interventions into silences…

This theme is made explicit in the events that occur at the home of Jane. Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are informed they are up for promotion. To secure this advancement they are given a job in which the complexities far outstrip the domestic jobs they have so far been involved in. They must investigate what happened to a husband and father who disappeared some ten years previous. The mother Jane is locked in the past, digging up the woods around her house in search of his body… and her daughter Rebecca is physically locked in silence, having not spoken in a number of years. The arrival of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett will not only unlock the secrets behind the husband’s disappearance, but also Mr Davis’ own secrets. These unlockings occur, needless to say, through a number of trips back into the past, through a number of interventions which see Rebecca become involved in the use of the stones.

This idea of intervention becomes a skeleton key to the film through the way in which Whitfield constructs these journeys into the past. These excursions are essentially flashbacks. However, in that anyone can visit another’s past, these are flashbacks of a very strange kind. Someone can explore someone else’s past as flashback… and that person can not only observe the scene, but become that other person. These are, in other words, cinematic flashbacks.

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinematic images, describes films which operate through flashbacks as recollection-images. For Deleuze flashbacks are the instrument of ‘psychological causality,’ a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:47; 49). Deleuze calls this destiny, and when unambiguous is a strong destiny indeed… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present and will dictate our futures. This may, initially, sound as if Deleuze is saying that we cannot escape our pasts. Yet what Whitfield reveals is this, that in calling up a flashback this destiny with regards to the future is not fixed. The journey from the present to the past need not lead to endless future repetitions. Rather, the flashback can lead to us overcoming our pasts… this too can be our destiny and in no way contradicts the laws of psychological causality. For Whitfield, for this to happen, we need only let another in… and isn’t that the point of cinematic flashbacks? To share a subjective, psychological moment, to explain the past, and in sharing give the character strength to prepare for a different future, a future which can escape the lure and debilitating security of repetition.

White Material (Claire Denis, France | Cameroon, 2009)

An unnamed country in post-colonial Africa: economic stagnation, civil conflict, political violence, child soldiers. All the signs are gathering of the onset of a failed state. Dangerous ground for a European filmmaker. And director Claire Denis dares further, she focuses the narration on the character of Maria Vial, a white plantation owner. Accordingly, White Material is primarily a film about the exploiters as exploiters; not the exploited as exploited. An exemplary moment comes when Maria shows her newly hired field workers their lodgings. It is night, a single torch is shone around bare concrete cells, with dirty bedding discarded on the floors. The workers look on in disgust. Maria is oblivious, she points out the amenities (a water pump); then retires to her beautiful, vast, whitewashed villa. The structure of this society is not simply divided racially, essentially racist, but also has concomitant feudal and capitalist dimensions: land-owners and peasants, bourgeois and proletariat. In other words, the antagonisms have complex and particular social, economic, political, historical and racial co-ordinates. But everything is about to change. Violently.

White Material is organised so we feel the imminent nature of this change, the approaching paroxysm. The film’s ‘present’ finds Maria stranded on a dirt track before continuing with an uncomfortable ride back to her plantation in a rusty old bus. During the trip, Denis uses a flashback structure to describe the events of the previous few days... For Deleuze flashbacks ‘insert themselves between stimulation and response,’ are the instrument of ‘psychological causality’ (C2:47). The flashback is marked in transition ‘it is like a sign with the words: “watch out! recollection”’ (C2:49). Deleuze calls this destiny: the way in which the past inexorably saturates the present. And we can designate strong and weak types. Strong destiny: in which cause and effect are unequivocally linked, where the past returns to explicate the present in full. Weak destiny: which retains elements of the strong form (explanation, causality, linearity) but is instead concerned with integrating ellipses into memory, history and the past. Accordingly, the weak form is a more radical mode of flashback than the strong...

To read the full exploration of White Material through the Deleuze's sign of 'weak destiny,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...