Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images

All things must end. Thank you to all cineosis blog subscribers, commenters, and readers.

The cineosis blog began in mid-2010 and ended mid-2016, the idea being to popularise Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophy by affirmative explorations of cinematic releases as they hit the screens (of Manchester, UK). In due course, films encountered at special screenings, on DVD and TV snuck in. Why not? Many of the films encountered in this blog are now included in Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (as the third introduction; alongside a philosophical genealogy of the taxonomy and a serial exposition of the images and signs of the cineosis). For the book, the films have been revisited and rewatched, and the engagements revised and rewritten. Accordingly, the original posts have been redacted from the cineosis blog; the films that did not make it into the book remain. Why not find out more about the Three Introductions?

Dogville (Lars von Trier, Denmark | Sweden | UK | France | Germany | Netherlands | Norway | Finland | Italy, 2003)

‘This is the sad tale of the township of Dogville’ – so intones the gnarled mellifluous voice of the narrator, over the first shot of the film: a god’s eye view of Elm Street, and the shacks that border it. Prior to this we have been presented with two intertitles...

Director Lars von Trier ensures we are always aware of the storytelling function. This is a movie – this is a story. Intertitles, the black/white and chalk environment, the soundscape of the narrator’s voice and invisible objects are the aspects of the mise-en-scène that forefront such a process... These are the noosigns of Dogville: a cinema of the brain, where the brain becomes the screen, and the storytelling function of cinema is made visible...

To read the full exploration of Dogville through the Deleuze's sign of 'cinema of the brain,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

 

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...

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, USA, 2008)

The theatre piece was never named, although Caden Cotard played with a few titles, amongst them (early on) Simulacrum, and (much later) Infectious Diseases in Cattle. It is in ruins. Caden walks through the mise-en-scène: deserted, graffitied, rubbish strewn streets. He is old now, balding, what hair he has is silver-white, he treads judiciously, moving onwards with the aid of his cane, stooped. Soon he will sit, and speak these words: ‘I know how to do this play now… I have an idea… I think…’. But before he can speak further, he is given the direction: ‘Die.’ On a wall nearby is a clock face spray-painted on raw brick. It reads 7:45. One of the three women (more-or-less) in his life, Hazel, once told him: ‘the end is built into the beginning.’ 7:45 was the time Caden awoke at the beginning of the film, the day when he became aware everything had changed.

Caden Cotard awakes, the alarm clock is receiving a broadcast, the DJ announces it is fall, and an academic reads a poem about death. On the TV downstairs – as Caden eats his breakfast with his partner Adele Lack and their daughter – a PBS channel cartoon shows farm animals learning about viruses. Things are going on beneath the surface... Director Charlie Kaufman – with Synecdoche, New York – creates a crystal image, a hyalosign: a film exploring the seed and the environment. Hyalosigns are films in which the actual image on-screen is opened up to virtual correlates, and the seed and the environment is one way of creating such a relation of the actual and the virtual: actual seed → virtual environment...

To read the full exploration of Synecdoche, New York through the Deleuze's sign of 'seed and environment,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Five (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran | Japan | France, 2003)

Fade in: the camera frames a small section of the seashore, where tide laps beach. A small hunk of driftwood, rotten and barnacle clad, is discovered on the sand, licked by the breaking waves of the Caspian Sea – the water apparently having relinquished the driftwood in its ebb. Troubled by the incoming tide, the chunk of dead branch rolls and spins on the grey, wet sand, is ensnared and released before inevitably being drawn into the flow once more, and carried with longshore drift. During all this, the camera has kept the driftwood in the centre of the frame but as it is buffeted by the breaking waves it is broken into two, and the pieces float apart until one is carried out-of-frame. Or rather, the camera must choose which piece of wood will remain within the frame. Sometime later, however, the escaped chunk returns to the frame, much farther out to sea and drifting away: fade out. Such is sequence one of Five, ‘Drift-Wood.’...

Here we encounter pure optical and sound situations - opsigns and sonsigns: the crisis of the action-image. And this crisis has ‘five apparent characteristics: the dispersive situation, deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of clichés, the condemnation of plot’ (C1:210; Deleuze’s italics). These five characteristics correspond exactly to what Deleuze has previously designated the five laws of action-image, laws which cohere movement-image narration. First law (S→S`): the determining of an initial situation (S) that governs the required restoration of the final situation (S`). Second law (S→A): the situation (S) devolves into behaviours, or actions (A), distributed to characters. Third law (A): the action in-itself (A) necessary to realise, by way of the duel, the final resolution. Fourth law (An): the action is not simply the ultimate moment, but is structural, duels permeate the film (A1+A2+A3+…). Fifth law (→): the whole flow (→) of the plot, which carries situation to action and action to situation through the character in the world. The essential aspect, however, is this: action-images – by way of these five laws – organise perception-images, affection-images and mental-images. Perception, affect and mental states appear in the service of and are dominated by action. Thus, the crisis of the laws of the action-image simultaneously sets free perception, affect and thought: there are no longer perception-images, affection-images and mental-images. No longer is there a solid character at the centre around which all other images are organised; instead perception becomes gaseous and all images vary in respect to each other. No longer are affects recognisable and identifiable human facial expressions of internal intensities; affect becomes ahuman, produced through any-space-whatevers. And no longer are mental spaces assigned to characters as images of thought; the whole film is now an image of thought. The crisis of the action-image is also a collapse of the movement-image function: its compositions of and linkages between domains.

Five laws of the action-image, five characteristics of the crisis, five sequences to Kiarostami’s Five. What are the chances? It is as if three dice have been cast, and each come to rest presenting the same number of dots. It thus is tempting – very tempting indeed – to allow each of the five sequences of Kiarostami’s film to correspond with each moment of crisis, and in so doing, explore the collapse of the movement-image and the creation of a time-image through opsigns and sonsigns...

To read an extended exploration of Five through the Deleuze's 'opsigns and sonsigns,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

To read the full exploration of Kiarostami's 5 Long Takes - F I V E - Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu in the context of the films of the Japanese director see ‘Look? Optical / Sound Situations and Interpretation: Ozu – (Deleuze) – Kiarostami’ in Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Jinhee Choi.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2010)

Riding the subway, Nina glances at her own reflection in the now blackened windows of the train. She touches her hair, her skin. Something catches her attention out of the corner of her eye. When she turns – through the glass doors separating the cars – she sees someone she recognises. Although she cannot at first place this figure. Turned slightly way from her, this woman – Nina realises – reminds her of herself. Except, this doppelgänger is dressed in a long black coat; while Nina is in the palest of pink with white scarf. The woman will leave the train at the next stop, and before Nina is able to catch her face, she disappears into the crowd. This moment, at the beginning of Black Swan, has an essential function in the film, for it immediately links the reflected image with the doppelgänger, and such a doubling of the body with an echoing of bodies. In other words, director Darren Aronofsky creates and develops mirror images: bodies in mirrors; the mirrored body and the mirroring of bodies. These three mirror images are without doubt interrelated, they interpenetrate and circulate through one another – and as the film progresses they will become increasingly inseparable, so much so that we no longer know where one begins and another ends. Black Swan creates a film-world of mirror images.

To read the full exploration of Black Swan through the Deleuze's sign of 'mirrors face to face,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Se7en (David Fincher, USA, 1995)

‘We’ve got one dead guy,’ carps the Captain of Police, ‘not three.’

1 – Gluttony. A murder victim is discovered, and homicide detectives William Somerset and David Mills are asked to check out the scene. Bound and force fed with a gun to his head, a morbidly obese man has been tortured to his death. Somerset sees something here: ‘This is just the beginning.’ He wants off the case, he can’t see it through – his last week in his role on the murder team before retirement. Mills wants it, first day in job, just arrived from a small town up-state with his wife Tracy. Mills is dropped; they need Somerset’s experience.

2 – Greed. The next day, Mills – awaiting some action – is called to some hotshot lawyer’s office. There’s another dead guy here, one who has been persuaded to cut a pound of flesh from his own body. On the floor, in blood, the words ‘greed’. Back at the station, Somerset believes the crimes are connected: possibly something to do with the Seven Deadly Sins. Either way, Mills and Somerset are back on the same case. Stomach contents from the fat man lead Somerset to find the words ‘gluttony’ scraped in grease behind the fridge at the first crime scene; an upside down picture at the second scene gives them some fingerprints. ‘So many clues,’ says Somerset, ‘just lead to others’. And so it is…

3 – Sloth. The fingerprints are a clue which lead to Victor, tied to a bed for a year, drip-fed the drugs he used to deal.

Se7en is inspired by the power of a habitual series of elements. Such a cinematic series is what Deleuze calls a relation-image, where the elements are designated through the sign of the mark...

To read the full exploration of Se7en through the Deleuze's sign of the 'mark,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor (Nick Hurran, UK, 2013)

‘Three of them!’ exclaims the general at Gallifrey High Command, ‘…all my worst nightmares at once.’ He has returned – three incarnations, simultaneously.

The planet of the Time Lords is under attack by the Daleks. War between two of the most powerful species in the universe. On the one hand, the Time Lords – humanoids who long ago overcame the limits of space, time and mortality; passive observers from Gallifrey of the joys and woes of planets, systems, and galaxies, the rise and fall of civilisations past, present and future. On the other hand, the Daleks – organic mutants devoid of all emotion housed inside metal travelling machines; creatures intent on enslaving or killing everyone and everything. This is the Time War – and it has been raging for eons. In the process, every lifeform in the universe has suffered, caught between an immovable object and an unstoppable force. But now the conflict appears to be in its final phase – and the Daleks are winning. Gallifrey is under siege, the Time Lords are surrounded by the entire Dalek army orbiting the planet, bombarding it from above. And if the Time Lords are beaten, the universe will have new masters.

Such is the scenario of Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor: the 240th tv story (approximately, valid number systems vary) in a series running (on and off – at time of screening) for 50 years. The series concerns – at the centre – the Doctor, an errant Time Lord who ‘borrowed’ a TARDIS (time and space machine) and went off to explore the far corners of the universe. During an early trip to Earth, the chameleon circuit on the TARDIS malfunctioned, so its image is now fixed as an old 1950s British police box, instead of changing to fit the landscape in which it arrives. However, the Doctor has become, over the years, rather attached to its form. Selecting companions from the worlds he chances upon, pitching up where he will to have adventures, the Doctor has been aroaming for well over a thousand years, fighting evil wherever he may find it. Many, many years ago now, when an old man for the first time – grouchy, frail and beginning to lose his faculties – he regenerated (much to the surprise of his friends) into another body. Since then, his companions – and there have been many – have witnessed numerous such regenerations and incarnations... And after each regeneration the Doctor has continued his quest – to travel from world to world, intervening on the side of justice, to set right the wrongs he encounters, to heal the hurts and bind the wounds of the universe. This is the Doctor – all of them.

However, now – in The Day of the Doctor – the Eleventh Doctor must confront a secret he has hidden for a long time. We have known since the Ninth Doctor appeared on the scene that he was the last of the Time Lords, that his race was annihilated in the final battle of the Time War, that he was caught up in events, and that these events haunt him. In The Day of the Doctor the story is revealed. It was he who killed his own people – every last man, woman and child. Or rather it was an incarnation of this renegade Time Lord we have never seen...

Except – the incarnation of the Time Lord who committed these atrocities was not the Doctor. In order to explore such a paradox, we can turn to Deleuze’s cineosis – or cinematic semiosis – and the avatar of the relation-image. A relation-image is constituted through a succession of images that create a habitual series... However, ‘it is always possible,’ writes Deleuze, ‘for one of these terms to leap outside the web and suddenly appear in conditions which take it out of its series, or set it in contradiction with it’ (C1:203). This is the demark...

To read the full exploration of Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor through the Deleuze's sign of the 'demark,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

The Machinist (Brad Anderson, Spain | USA, 2004)

Actor Christian Bale captures Trevor’s deterioration through his emaciated frame, blank stares, mumbling drawl and slow movements; and director Brad Anderson shoots the film in half-light, all murky blue-greys. It is as if The Machinist is a dream, or dream-like. Accordingly – and as the film progresses – it becomes uncertain if Trevor does sometimes sleep and dream, or if dreams are invading his waking world as hallucinations. (Or even some complex amalgam of the two, some back and forth between these states). Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations – this is Trevor’s real world. Where does the nightmare end and the world begin? Deleuze describes such dream-images as an ‘unhinging,’ the restrained dream. Restrained in the sense that the transformation of the real world into the dream or the dream world into the real is not signalled by rich cinematographics. No closing of eyes and crossfade into the weird and crazy images of the unconscious. No return from dreams through a character opening their eyes and retaining awareness of the dream: images as well as the condition. Rather, in the restrained dream the image ‘“looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete’ (C2:58). Dream world and real world become ambiguous; and the effect of each domain on the other is very powerful: the character believes or thinks the dream was a moment of the real.

To read the full exploration of The Machinist through the Deleuze's sign of the 'restrained dream,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

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...

Russian Ark (Alexander Sukurov, Russia | Germany | Japan | Canada | Finland | Denmark, 2002)

Alexander Sukurov’s Russian Ark has everything to excite an aficionado of time travel movies: a spectacular temporal enfolding; a vast array of characters, fictional, fictionalised and real; strange situations and baroque settings, both historical and imaginary; ravishing beauty and permeating unease; mystery and revelation; self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and an inventive filmic process at once spontaneous and rigorous. An unnamed twenty-first century Russian filmmaker – (Sukurov himself?) – arrives in the past from our present. Hooking-up with a fellow traveller in time, the nineteenth century French aristocrat Marquis de Custine, together they wander the St. Petersburg’s Hermitage – Winter Palace of the Czars, grand museum of Mother Russia. Leaping this-way and that-way in time, the Unnamed and the Marquis encounter a cascade of moments spanning some 300 years of Russian history: the founding St. Petersburg; the (renamed) city under threat of destruction during the Second World War; Nicholas II, Anastasia and family on the morning of revolution. Russian Ark abounds in many such cinematic pleasures. Yet the film not only celebrates the possibilities of time travel in the movies; it also disrupts the genre through an ungrounding.

The general principle of time travel concerns an immediate encounter with temporal paradox. No longer is time merely chronological: a past begetting the present begetting a future. No longer is time simply homogenous: a chain of presents – the present a now preceded by a now that has passed, to be superseded by a now to come. Rather, the present interfolds with pasts and futures; pasts and futures interfold with the present. A traveller jumps from one time to another (from a present to the past or the future; from the past or the future to a present) disturbing homogenous chronological time with non-chronological relations, generating temporal paradox. In this way, the as-it-was or yet-to-come are reconfigured or revealed, in turn transforming the as-it-is. Time travel, in other words, creates or averts a temporal crisis – sometimes even averting the very crisis it created. Thus the tendency of the narration: to mend time, put time back together as it was or reconstitute it as it should be. To re-impose order upon the chaos that has arisen. Yet Russian Ark neither creates nor averts a crisis. The travellers are witnesses, seers – sometimes of a relative past, sometimes of a relative future. They do not intervene and what they witness will not transform their relative presents. We encounter here a fascinating reversal. Russian Ark does not disturb chronological time with non-chronological relations. The film rather considers time as fundamentally non-chronological. Temporal paradox is not introduced into the narration through time travel, but is exposed as being the essence of time. An always there; and being so, irresolvable. Chronological time is a ruse, mere appearance, a chimera. Time is – as Deleuze puts it in Cinema 2 – a time-image and composed of sheets of the past.

Sheets of the past: ‘[b]etween the past as a pre-existence in general and the present as infinitively contracted past’, writes Deleuze, there are ‘all the circles of the past’ (C2:99). In this way, temporality is captured from the perspective of pure pastness (rather than the past being a function of the present, as in the movement-image). With the time-image the now is effaced and pasts appear as moments of coexistent singularity arranged non-chronologically. There is no cause and effect, just events that resonate with each other, backwards and forwards. These sheets of the past are seen in exemplary fashion in Russian Ark...

To read the extended exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's sign of the 'sheets of the past,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

To read the full exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's image of the chronosign, and signs of the 'sheets of the past,' 'peaks of the present' and 'powers of the false,' see the essay 'Time travel and temporal paradox: Deleuze, the time-image and Russian Ark' in Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games edited by Matthew Jones  and Joan Ormrod (McFarland, 2015)... and there are loads of other great essays by some really wonderful writers...

Star Trek – First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, USA, 1996)

Without doubt – one of the most beautiful camera moves in cinema history. Neither a dolly-out nor
zoom-out as such, but effectively both in (and possible only through) CGI – the camera pulls back from a black screen to reveal an eye. The eye becomes a face – Jean-Luc Picard, now captain of the Enterprise-E – and the face stares straight into the lens. As the camera continues on its reverse trajectory, the mise-en-scène reveals Picard is captured in a glass tube that is part of a spaceship, either side of him other beings, and behind each of them, many more. This section of the ship is but a fragment of an immense superstructure, the core or hub in an area so impossibly vast the camera never seems to encompass it. It is like a fractal – never-ending. Cut to corridor, the camera flies through the space, side to side, a disembodied spirit. Picard restrained on an operating table, his head encased in machinery. Picard in his tube – eyes close – he gasps. Picard with his face now augmented with Borg technology – merely an outward sign of his assimilation into the hive mind: ‘Locutus’ – comes a woman’s voice at the edge of consciousness. The image on screen distorts. ‘I am Locutus of Borg,’ whispers what was once-Picard, and turning to face the camera: ‘Resistance is futile’. A drill enters Picard’s eye.

Picard awakes from this dream-image. Director Jonathan Frakes, by zooming in on a sleeping Picard as he opens his eyes, signals this first moment of Star Trek – First Contact as a dream. As a nightmare. These are not memories, as such. Rather – they are perceptions, affections and actions subsumed within an unconscious state. For Deleuze, dream-images conjure up a ‘metamorphosis of the situation’ by linking dream situation to waking situation and so negotiating the latter through the former (C2:273). Accordingly, the dream-image of Star Trek – First Contact describes the sign of the rich dream...

To read the full exploration of Star Trek – First Contact through the Deleuze's sign of the 'rich dream,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

The Wandering Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, France | Taiwan, 2005)

It was only a matter of time – of course – before a film such as The Wandering Cloud. The pornographic musical. Or, musical-porno. Take your pick. Yet such descriptions – which no doubt director Tsai Ming-liang would appreciate, as provocation – belie the subversive nature of the movie, and the power of Tsai’s images of sex and music. The setting is Kaohsiung, an affluent port city in southern Taiwan. The long hot summer rolls on, people move slowly through the wide, beautiful parks and along the boulevards shadowed beneath sky-scrappers. Kaohsiung is in the midst of a drought – the reservoirs are depleted, the rivers running dry and household water services intermittent. Here we find Hsiao-Kang and Shiang-chyi, a man and a woman aimlessly drifting through life. Hsiao-Kang sleeps wherever he finds himself when needing a nap: children’s playgrounds, stairwell suicide nets, roofs of tall buildings. Shiang-chyi wanders the streets collecting empty water bottles to stockpile tap water, amusing herself with diverting conundrums, or lazing in her apartment watching television. Inevitably, they meet – vaguely recognising one another (Hsiao-Kang sold Shiang-chyi a timepiece in a previous film by Tsai, who tends to reuse characters without any real deference to continuity). They begin an affair – although their interactions, even when close, are disconnected. When they eat, one will sit on a chair at the table, the other underneath. When they share a room, both will be occupied in separate tasks. This distance between the lovers is further evoked by a radical lack of dialogue. The Wandering Cloud – in these sections – is essentially silent, only a word or phrase occasionally spoken. Shiang-chyi has misplaced the key to a locked suitcase. She finds it set into the tarmac of the road beneath her high-rise. Yet when Hsiao-Kang retrieves the key, still the case cannot be opened. Is it the right key? Or is the lock no longer functioning? Tsai is a master of the cinematic metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche: images echo one another, scenes evoke associations, inconsequential actions point to the real, implied situation, which remains an ellipsis.

Shiang-chyi is addicted to watermelons... Hsiao-Kang is working as a porno actor... The musical-episodes do not emerge through a natural flow from an event in the day-to-day film-world, but appear as a break, a rupture. They cleft the screen, for a moment. Nevertheless – they extend from and through the everyday-moments and pornographic-sequences, combining the figure-elements of the characters: watermelons and sex. In this way, these musical-episodes echo moments and sequences from the rest of the film, evoke associations and refer to the real, implied situation, which remains an ellipsis. They are the expressions of joy and disappointment neither Hsiao-Kang nor Shiang-chyi are able to actualise. The Wandering Cloud creates images of thought – what Deleuze calls plastic figures: where ‘the action does not immediately disclose the situation which it envelops, but is itself developed in grandiose situations which encompass the implied situation’ (C1:182)…

To read the full exploration of The Wandering Cloud through the Deleuze's sign of the 'plastic figure,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, UK | Netherlands, 2009)

Mia dances for herself. There is an empty, abandoned flat in the estate where she lives. With faded, ripped wallpaper, tatty carpet, but a space apart from the world – away from the lads and lasses hanging around the tower blocks, and her mum and sister at home. Sometimes tanked up on cheap booze (bought by teenagers old enough to pass for eighteen), Mia dances for herself. To get good; to get better. To exhaust herself. To empty herself – of the rage, of the sadness, of the loneliness. But rage, sadness and loneliness are in endless supply. There are thus two escapes in Mia’s dancing – an escape from the world, and an escape from herself. These escapes are inseparable, but one feeds the other. For the world determines her being, her actions, her behaviour. Director Andrea Arnold’s mise-en-scène in Fish Tank thus has a precise function. This is no urban wasteland. This is no zone on the edge, on the periphery, this is a fairly well-maintained estate, with shops and social spaces to hang out. A vibrant community. This is a common space, a naturalised space, a space where many of us live. Yet Mia is at war with everyone. With her mother – who feels her youth slipping away, and sees her daughter only in terms of her sexuality; ordered out of the flat when there is a party, there will be men there. With the boys of the estate – who will harass and attempt to rape her as punishment for her interference in their activities. With the girls – who appear only to desire acceptance from the lads as some kind of validation. Such is the situation of the film-world of Fish Tank. Such are the powerful forces permeating Mia as she discovers her sexuality. This is her rage, her sadness, her loneliness. Although she has not got her head around it all – not yet. Arnold’s project is to allow Mia to traverse this world of the film, to perceive and be affected by that world; to become saturated by the milieu. How much can Mia endure before something happens? Before Mia decisively reacts?

Fish Tank is a film of the imprint: the impression of the milieu upon the body at the centre. For Deleuze, the imprint is an action-image; where perception, affect and thought are orientated toward and so dominated by action. Here, the characters perceive, feel and think so they can act. Action-images explicate situations (milieus, environments) and explore actions (behaviours, being in the world). In the first place, the small form action-image (ASA) extends through perception-images and affection-images towards an action that reveals the situation; in the second place, the large form action-image (SAS) begins with a given situation and determines the actions of the characters through their perceptions and affects. With the large form action-image, accordingly, the logic of the sensory-motor system as a linear trajectory (perception → affect → action) reaches its fullest expression. This is the fundamental essence of cinematic realism and where the movement-image is ultimately fulfilled. Milieux are givens, and the characters are caught in the forces of that world, which organise into conflicts – binomials: duels. And it is through the actions, the behaviours of the characters, that the situation will be resolved. ‘[T]he cinema of behaviour,’ however ‘is not content with a simple sensory-motor formula’ (C1:158). With the imprint, according to Deleuze, there is a ‘much more complex behaviourism,’ one which explores ‘internal factors’ (C1:158). It is as if the affection-image does not immediately pass through the body for an action-image, but affects accumulate, build-up, until they become intolerable. In this way the duel is no longer externalised in the world, or rather, that is not its primary domain. The conflict is within the body at the centre of the film.

To read the full exploration of Fish Tank through the Deleuze's sign of the 'imprint,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

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...

Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2 (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, USA, 2010 | 2013) and Minions (Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin, USA, 2015)

The minions are – on the one hand – a mass. Their forms composed of a restricted number of elements, they have limited differentials. Elongated or rotund bodies; short, medium or tall in height; bald, bristly or centre parted hair, one or two eyes. From these elements a number of composite types

are generated, perhaps as many as forty or fifty possible combinations. This limited palette results in hundreds of similar individuations composing the thousands of actual existing minions. Yet – on the other hand – it appears each will have some semblance of a sense of self, of an I. We even know some of their names: Kevin (tall, thin, two eyes); Bob (short and rotund, with one eye); Dave (short, rotund, with two eyes and a centre parting); Larry (medium in height, two eyes). Thus while evidence suggests that they are genderless, their names are those usually associated with certain groups of human males, though this may well be simple affectation and a sign of cultural assimilation. Where and how they originate is still mysterious, it has been said they are clones, although recent research indicates they have been around since well before the Holocene.

Minions are thus neither a homogenous mass nor heterogeneous individuals: they are both. They are dividual: a pack, a group, a multitude. The deindividualisation of entities and the individualisation of the mass – this is the dividual. Here are ‘produced,’ writes Deleuze ‘compact and continuous intensive series, which go beyond all binary structures and exceed the duality of the collective and the individual (C1:92)...

To read the full exploration of Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2 and Minions through the Deleuze's sign of the 'dividual,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images

The Terrorist (Santosh Sivan, India, 1998)

Malli is nineteen. Her eyes captivate: large, luminous white with hazel then ebony centres. Her lips are generous, but secretive. Hair lustrous: long, black, straight. Her dark skin glows with vitality. A

face of gentle features, yet with a strength that belies her years. This is how the screen sees Malli – in close-up, and extreme close-up. A dance between the camera and the face of actor Ayesha Dharker. Malli is caught up in events in the world, or a hidden observer looking on, lost in her thoughts, her recollections, and the camera remains on her face, focuses upon her eyes, her mouth, her expression – the shot or sequence lasting a wonderful little eternity. Such shots and sequences will approach silence, except for her breathing and the ever-present sounds of nature; or sometimes such images are overwhelmed by a score of synthetic strings. Everything is in close-up. The whole film is organised around this aesthetic: the dominion and the potential of the close-up. Director Santosh Sivan focuses upon a life, moments in a life, life through the expressions of a woman’s face, expressions of the affects, intensities and forces within. Sivan and Dharker create a film of the icon.

For Deleuze, the icon is an affection-image, a sign of the unfilmable internal intensities of the body expressed through a face in close-up.

To read the full exploration of The Terrorist through the Deleuze's sign of the 'icon,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images

Naqoyqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, USA, 2002)

Autumnal monochrome: a long, slow zoom-in upon a three-dimensional rendering of Pieter Bruegel’s painting The (Little) Tower of Babel (c. 1563). Corkscrewing upwards from the ground the expansive

base of the edifice supports a conical structure, still far from complete – and apparently already in the process of disintegration. In every way, an impossible project. Everything appears unstable, askew; the construction sinking into the ground upon which it has been built; the non-perpendicular arches (supporting the gentle incline of the spiral concourse) a threat, the spectre of collapse. A male choir chants ‘na-qoy-qat-si.’ The drumming of a heartbeat. Cut to an image of the disused and decaying Michigan Central Railway Depot: first the murky, dank interior; then the exterior in glorious sunlight. The camera explores this neo-classical architecture cutting between vertiginous crane-shots, extended tracking shots and almost imperceptible pans. Pulsating cello repeats phrasing, orchestral strings gather and shimmer. A raging sea – heavily digitalised. Mountain tops, the stars slash the dark firmament with light. A river, the still surface reflecting the clouds of the sky above – insubstantial forms that race and churn in fast-mo doubled as mirror images. A purely digital environment: black space mapped with a flat grid of white contour lines; the animation erupting to create a complex, flourishing conical structure – a structure reminiscent of and echoing Bruegel’s tower.

So begins Godfrey Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi, a film composed of hundreds, thousands of disparate visual-images, accompanying and accompanied by the music-images of Philip Glass. This is gaseous perception.

To read the full exploration of Naqoyqatsi through the Deleuze's sign of 'gaseous perception,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images

Timecode (Mike Figgis, USA, 2000)

In an elegant white business suit, Lauren skips down the stone steps leading away from the mansion. Parked in the driveway are two cars, a sleek black limousine with attendant uniformed chauffeur and

an old, slightly battered, run-around. Carefully kneeling at the rear of the second car, Lauren releases the air from the tyre, before being offered the passenger door of her limo by her driver. Rose, arriving just moments later, immediately perceives her car has a flat. This scene is a moment in a long take filmed with a handheld mobile camera. Such mobility allows the characters to be followed, relinquished, and recaptured at varying distance (from long shot to medium shot to close-up) – all without montage (without editing between framings). In this way, while the presence of camera can be felt through its movements, through its anticipations of character trajectories, in the moments when nothing happens, in its aberrations; it appears as if without the set as an existential non-presence in the film-world.

Yet, when Rose spies the tyre, the camera tilts and pans, following the direction of her gaze, simultaneously reorienting its position, a movement allowing it to become her vision. The camera has aligned with the point-of-view of a character, it has become the perception of that character, the camera is – for a moment – the character. Camera eye becomes human eye; and then the human eye relinquishes the camera eye as the action within the event continues. Rose is pissed off, and suspicious; must now accept a ride with Lauren. That this exchange has happened with no montage (cutting from a perception of the character to the character’s perception) makes it a visceral encounter with shifting modes of cinematic image through the visibility of the flow of a transformation. This is a moment of liquid perception, an instant in Timecode capturing the cinematic philosophy of the movie. For the entire film is composed of such flows, of liquid perception...

To read the full exploration of Timecode through the Deleuze's sign of 'liquid perception,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images