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

Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy | Germany | Switzerland, 2010)

Roman centurions in the back of a rusty old truck. This image throws out-of-joint the day-to-day linear time that has so far been experienced following the life, and eventual death, of Fuda, an aged goatherd in the southern Italian countryside of Calabria. While the ancients are revealed as participants in a modern-day passion play, this does little to re-anchor a linear temporal flow. Rather, it exposes the durations that subsist in the spatial field, and announces an ongoing series of such spatio-temporal disturbances. Director Michelangelo Frammartino uses the real time of the long take to make us feel the affect of time, reveal the clamour of times in the spaces we inhabit. The shot is simple, at least in terms of camera movement, panning this way then that through 180 degrees. A dog patters up and down a country lane, the truck and centurions arrive, people in costumes and every-day work-wear gather, the procession begins, from the village and out into the fields. The past subsists in this space and this present is the coexistence of all kinds of pasts, many different spatial strata. History, myth and cyclical time arise, real and imaginary events, yearly repetitions. Four Times: linear time, cyclical time, mythical time and time out-of-joint. The affects of these disparate but interfolding times are explored by Frammartino through the rigorous unfolding of the film: four sections on the duration of the existence of human, animal, vegetative and non-organic states. These four spatio-temporal series can be seen as four aspects of the any-space-whatever, Deleuze’s cinematic sign of indeterminate affects.

The any-space-whatever concerns affection-images. Affection-images, in the first instance, can be said to be close-ups of an expression on a character’s face, outward signs of internal intensities, after perception, before impulses or actions, and at the gateway of thought. Yet it is not only the face as sign that can express affect. The second sign of composition is the dividual, complex qualities and powers of the mass, group, assemblage. Then there is the any-space-whatever, genetic sign of the affection-image – from which the affects of the mass and the individual arise. A pure background, indeterminate space-times where the affect is encountered without the necessity of mediation of a character of characters. A setting as an intensity of forces, empty or disconnected spaces developing the indeterminacies of gaseous perception and resisting the determinate space-time of action. Ahuman affects, forces prior to the human or after the withdrawing of human centres. Any-space-whatevers – however – belong to the movement-image and thus tend to be captured up in compositions of the dividual and the icon, the ascension of the assemblage and an emergent central and privileged image. Ahuman affects are composed into human affects. Yet such mappings have a certain fragility: in other conditions (set free from the movement-image) an any-space-whatever can become an opsign-sonsign, a pure optical and sound situation, a time-image, an actual on-screen undifferenciated visual and audio image. Without human centres to express affects there is a univocal coalescence of genetic forces: the coalescence of indeterminacy. We experience time in its raw state, no longer an image of thought, but an image that is disruptive of thought. Accordingly, the four states of the any-space-whatever: (1) captured up through the icon; (2) sustaining the assemblage of the dividual; (3) in itself as reference to the affection-image and movement-image; (4) in itself as a condition for the time-image.

It is tempting to align these four states of the any-space-whatever with Frammartino’s Four Times...

To read the full exploration of Four Times through the Deleuze's sign of the 'any-space-whatever,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Shed Your Tears and Walk Away (Jez Lewis, UK, 2009)

In the documentary Shed Your Tears and Walk Away, Jez Lewis takes us by the hand and leads us through the streets and parks of Hebden Bridge… all in an attempt to discover why his friends are dying. At the beginning of the film he states his purpose: ‘I left my hometown of Hebden Bridge twenty years ago… but I’m coming back for yet another childhood friend’s funeral… this valley is paradise for some people, but purgatory for others… dozens of my old friends have died young… it’s as if the town’s lost its survival instinct’. The deaths are all due to drug and drink dependency, Lewis’s friends have all become junkies and alcoholics. During the film there are three more deaths. Overdoses, suicides, drink and drug related accidents… it is this that is taking his friends away… and their kids. As the graffiti has it on entry to the town… ‘Welcome to Hebden Bridge… the place for alcoholic children’. But why?

The film focuses predominately upon two former junkies, now die-hard alcoholics, Cass and Silly. Both are in their early forties, they spend their time in Hebden Park, drinking special brew and hanging out with a cast of younger binge drinkers and smack heads. Shed Your Tears operates through Lewis initiating conversations with his subjects from behind the camera. And the camera unflinchingly captures the lives and thoughts of Cass and Silly by focusing upon their faces. And it is the state of the faces that captures our attention: faces with enlarged capillaries, puffy faces, blotchy skin, red cheeks, bloodshot eyes. Shot on video, there is a rawness to these faces, marked as they are by alcohol, drugs, poor food… old before their time. This is a film of faces, of faces looking away from the camera, and faces crying…

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes this kind of film as an affection-image. Rather than concentrate upon a character’s actions, affection-image films are organised through close-ups of faces which express intensive forces: internal emotions. Close-ups express power and quality. Powers mark the way in which the face changes and negotiates a series of states (anger, confusion, resignation, etc) and qualities are faces immobile (caught in thought and so essentially unreadable). When organised in definite states, these powers and qualities are icons: they define moments of consciousness. In Shed Your Tears, however, it is as if we are watching while powers and qualities dissolve... the effects of drink and drugs, the affects of drink and drugs...

‘Ordinarily’, writes Deleuze ‘three roles of the face are recognisable: it is individuating (it distinguishes or characterises each person); it is socialising (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communication between two people, but also, in a single person, the internal agreement between his character and his role). Now, the face, which effectively presents these aspects in the cinema as elsewhere, loses all three in the case of the close-up’ (C1:99). In other words, the affection-image doesn’t simply present individuated subjects, but rather, intensities in-and-of-themselves, expressed through faces… the ‘face and its effacement’ (C1:100). In Shed Your Tears the faces are numb with drink and drugs, eyes hooded... What we discover is not only the person, but the entity of a disease.

Finally, it is by looking at the film through the affection-image that we encounter the central paradox of the film. Cass and Silly are alcoholics. Both are dying of liver disease, which will take them if they cannot change their lives. Alcoholism is a chronic disease, a nexus of social, genetic and psychological factors. And Lewis explores each in the film. Hebden as a 60s drug haven. Hebden as a place where the locals are being squeezed out by bourgeois newcomers. Hebden as a place where there is no work and nothing to do. Hebden simply as a place where people drink and take drugs. Then: the way in which parents drink, and so do their kids, and their kid's kids... And to forget: Cass his bullying stepfather, Silly his experiences as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. It is this nexus of determining and retroactive causes which means they feel they have no choice.

This is crucial, affection-image films explore choice. For Deleuze, ‘there are choices that can only be made on condition that one persuades oneself that one has no choice’ (C1:114). This is the state of both Cass and Silly. However, this is a ruse, rather ‘there is a choice of choice or non-choice’ (C1:114). Thus ‘the alternative is not between terms but between modes of existence of the one who chooses’ (C1:114). In other words, we choose not to choose in having a choice. And we can choose to choose in having a choice.

While Cass and Silly believe they have no choice, strangely enough, it is with Lewis where we encounter choosing choice. The most startling aspect of this documentary is that the director comes out from behind the camera and enters the frame. It is in this sense ultimately overtly interventionist. He breaks the unwritten commandment of the documentary. He becomes involved. He helps Cass into rehabilitation in Hebden… and when that does not work takes him to London. He engages with Silly on the path he is taking. The title of the film Shed Your Tears and Walk Away comes from a line Silly delivers about the suicide of his brother. The title becomes exactly what Lewis cannot do. So, in the end, the original purpose of the documentary is abandoned. There may be answers to the ‘why’ (genetic, social, psychological). But none are definitive. The documentary thus gains another, far more powerful purpose. To intervene…

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2010)

The first standard critical response to an encounter with Roger Greenberg is that he is ‘unlikable.’ This seems to indicate that an audience can’t identify with him. However, against this, what if we were to make the assertion that it is not that the audience can’t identify with him, but rather, the tendency is to resist identification? This question, of course, hits right at the heart of Hollywood. Isn’t identification supposed to be effortless? Aren’t the conditions for identification the work of the filmmaker, not the audience? Shouldn’t identification be an invisible process, allowing an easy coupling of character-spectator, creating a seamless integration of the audience into the film so actions can be experienced as a reasonable response to the situation (no matter how unreasonable the actions, no matter how unreasonable the situations)?

What if we were to allow ourselves, make an effort to identify with Roger Greenberg? What would we find? That we too, if we peel back the layers, are a little, a lot, like him? What exactly are those layers? For Noah Baumbach the answer is clear, the things that keep us ‘sane’ are, in no particular order: marriage, a nice house (preferably with a pool), a decent car, money coming in, a great job, family, children, friends. In short ‘to embrace the life you never expected’ when you were young. We need stuff and activity: the habitual keeps us sane, keeps us reasonable. Take this away, you are Greenberg.

Roger can’t see this. Florence Marr, however, can. Two crucial moments in the movie – playing with repetition and difference – centre on Florence. Twice, she is filmed in extreme close-up, predominately in profile, driving her car. The first time she mutters ‘let me in, let me in’ as she attempts to change lanes. This happens. However, later in the film the event repeats. ‘Let me in, let me in’. But the other driver won’t let her in. By the time of this second jump-cut sequence she has met Greenberg, and he just won’t let her in. She sees this. Florence operates within the film as a way to experience Roger Greenberg. If she can see something in him, why can’t the spectator?

However, Florence is not simply a cinematic trick to identification with Roger. Baumbach makes it clear this is as much a film about Florence, as it Greenberg. Or rather, she too is a Greenberg (just like us), she has a certain Greenbergness… she is awkward, does not have a house with a pool, has no real family, a few friends, yes, but she is younger… she is at the point in her life when she could either become a Greenberg or something else… the age difference, as we will see, is very important…

The two moments of Florence in extreme close-up in her car are crucial not only in orientating an approach towards Greenberg identification, but also in exploring the second critical response to the film, that it ‘has no plot.’ In his typology of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze describes a kind of film that focuses on affect. Rather than juxtaposing situations and characters then allowing those characters to act to resolve or reveal the situation (plot driven action-images), affection-images explore the feelings and emotions of characters. These films concentrate upon the face. Faces are expressive of intensive affects. Firstly, through what Deleuze calls qualities, reflecting the world in the face. Secondly, through powers, the movements of the face that communicate changes in emotion. In this way the reflecting face is orientated toward the world, while the intensive face is orientated towards the thoughts of a character. This is what Deleuze calls the icon and ‘every icon has these two poles…’ (C1:97).

In an affection-image film it is not simply that faces are shot in close-up, but that the close-up becomes the methodology of the film. The affection-image is ‘primarily a way of treating the medium shot and the full shot as close-ups’ (C1:107). In the close-up spatio-temporal co-ordinates becomes less important, the face expresses, bodies express, language express intensives forces. Determined situations are not necessary, worlds do not need to be described in order to be resolved or revealed through character actions. In short, it is not a plot that that affection-image film describes, but rather the feelings and emotions of people.

At the party held by Greenberg’s young step sister, Roger, as usual, feels distanced. The distance here is accentuated by age difference (he is early 40s, everyone else – as is Florence – early 20s). But someone offers him some coke and for the first time we see him open up. He begins to act… it is as if for this brief moment we have left the domain of affect for the domain of action… he leaps and jumps around the house, he puts forward his viewpoint with humour and engages others, rather than standing while others are sitting, he is in amongst them… sexy young women are interested in him, get close to him, and he does not flinch… he can banter with the guys, exchange violence-orientated dialogue. He can phone Florence and articulate his love for her… In other words, cocaine makes Greenberg active…

If Baumbach’s film proposes that sanity is the drowning of the self in habitual activity, then in turn habitual activity is aligned with drugs. And so, if the end of the film leaves it unclear if Roger and Florence can get it together, surely the signs are not promising… as it is clear that if drugs are not the answer for Baumbach then by extension neither is habitual activity. Florence can only experience Greenberg opening his heart via the recorded message on the answerphone from the night before.