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...

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...

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...

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...

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, UK, 2010)

Who are the monsters? This is the question for director Gareth Edwards: the aliens, or humanity? NASA once sent a probe to investigate the possibility of extra-terrestrial life in the far reaches of the solar system. Six years ago, upon its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, the probe crash landed in the jungles of northern Mexico. In so doing, an alien species was let loose upon the planet. Growing from wee fungus pods into massive squid-like beasts, a vast area of the border between the USA and Mexico is now known as the Infected Zone. At the South American end, a soaring metal fence cuts across the continent; while a reinforced concrete dam divides the zone from humanity at the US border. Inside, the area has been abandoned by humanity. Cities, towns, villages have been reclaimed by jungle, now the home of the alien horde. And with each passing year – as the beasts breed and their population surges – the threat of a breaching of the boundaries becomes an ever more likely event. Accordingly, US and Mexican planes traverse the skies above the zone, laying down poison into the jungles below, in what is increasingly being seen as a futile attempt to corral the animals. Enter Scoot and Whitney: he a photojournalist who will do just about anything to hit the front page; she the daughter of the owner of Scoot’s US based newspaper. Caught up in the evacuation of Mexico where the containment barrier is first breeched, their journey takes them into the heart of darkness and out the other side: from San Jose through the Infected Zone and – after a number of close encounters with the alien beings – into the heartland of Texas. Holed up at a deserted service station awaiting transport home, they now believe themselves safe. However – just as in Mexico – the aliens overwhelm the defences. Scoot and Whitney are the first to witness aliens on US soil. Edwards plays out this scene perfectly – riffing off Jurassic Park (1993) and War of the Worlds (2005), Whitney hides beneath the counter of the shop as alien tentacles weave through the environment, searching out the nooks and crannies of the room. However – this attack is a ruse – the alien is seeking contact with its mate. Edwards creates a scene of incredible beauty as two of the aliens entwine, their tentacles enfolding tenderly, their bodies aflame with electricity, inner luminescence creating astonishing patterns in the night sky. Scoot looks on with wonder – then he and Whitney kiss for the first time.

Such a mirroring of humanity and the aliens has – in truth – been unfolding from the very beginning of the film. In the first instance, our heroes and the aliens are both adrift in the zone, in an unfamiliar environment they are not naturally disposed to. Each are attempting to survive the world which has been given to them. In the second instance, the aliens are under constant attack from the humans with their bombs and chemical weapons; while the humans are essentially prey to the alien predators. The environment describes a situation which devolves into a duel: aliens versus humanity. This mirroring – accordingly – creates a certain reciprocity. Thus the question at the heart of the film: who are the monsters in Monsters? Such a question is made possible through a cinematic process Deleuze will describe as the extreme limit of the large form action-image...

To read the full exploration of Monsters through the Deleuze's sign of 'the limit of the large form action-image,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

24 City (Zhang Ke Jia, China | Hong Kong | Japan, 2008)

Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, is a city caught up in the country’s economic boom, the result of the ongoing transformation from a centrally planned to market economy. On what was once the outskirts of the city is Factory 420. Founded in the late 1950s to produce components for the aerospace industry in the wake of the Korean War, its purpose was a state secret. It was thus built to be a city-in-and-of-itself, apart from Chengdu, having its own schools, restaurants, cinemas, its workers brought in from all over the country. In the post-Cold War period Factory 420 was retooled for peacetime products, white goods. This, however, was the beginning of its end, a slow decline leading to the current events of the film. Factory 420 is to be demolished and its remaining workers laid off. In its place will rise 24 City, a premier development of state-of-the-art apartments, a complex for the middle classes in ascension. The film itself consists predominately of face-to-cameras, static long takes of interviews with the workers and their families...

[However]... some of the interviews are fake. Fake in the sense that they are ‘acted’ by ‘actors’ speaking ‘lines’ composed out of interviews with ‘real’ people. But only some, some interviews are with ‘real life’ people. In a particularly fascinating move, Little Flower’s story tells of how she was named such after a movie starring Joan Chen. Little Flower herself is played by that actress... To understand this cinematic process more fully we can turn to Deleuze his cinematic concept of ‘powers of the false’ (C2: 131)...

To read the full exploration of 24 City through the Deleuze's sign of 'powers of the false,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani, Germany | Israel, 2009)

There is Omar, a young Arab who, as head of his family, must traverse the line of a deteriorating situation initiated by his uncle’s attempt to resist a Bedouin protection racket. There is Malek, an ‘illegal’ from the Palestinian territories, working in the kitchen of a restaurant, trying to earn money to support his ailing, dying mother. There is Dando, a Jewish cop, searching for news of his younger brother who has recently disappeared returning from an army posting. There is Binj, a dope smoking chef and all round party dude, an Arab dating a Jewish girl. There is Abu Elias, a respected community leader, restaurateur, a Christian who wants to stymie any chance of his daughter ending up marrying Omar.

Such are the coordinates of Ajami, a film named after a district in Yafa, Tel Aviv – the space in which the movie is accordingly set. This area, once predominately Palestinian populated, is a ‘mixing pot,’ with Muslims, Jews and Christians living alongside one another other, yet immediately riven with permeating temporal historical and contemporary forces. Accordingly, Ajami uses this location, and its people, to explore the state: Israel. Stressing this Ajami-Ajami matrix is essential. Directors Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani (one a Palestinian, born and raised in Yafa; the other a Jewish Israeli) mostly employed non-professional actors from the territory to play out the events of the film. Working with and within the community, their basic script was developed, improvised and eventually captured on film. Over eight hours of footage was created, guerrilla-style, taking over a year to edit down to the final on-screen presentation. All of which gives the movie – as its starting point – a certain documentary vérité look and feel.

However, it is the structure – the narration, the assemblage of images – that is essential. Ajami tells five stories, each based around one of five central and privileged characters: Omar, Malek, Dando, Binj and Abu Elias. These stories are organised into five episodes, each of which interpenetrates and comes to bear on the others; the central character in one becoming a minor character in another. Furthermore, while the events in each of the five chapters are parallel; at the same moment each advances the ongoing storyline across the whole film. Ellipses created in one episode are answered, echoed or reoriented in another. In this way, Ajami constructs a very powerful image of heterogeneity composing a homogeneous world, and the lines of force that traverse such a complex whole. This structure is an incarnation of what Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, will name the vector.

To read the full exploration of Ajami through the Deleuze's sign of the 'vector,' 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...

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, USA, 2009)

That Capitalism: A Love Story has been produced in the uber-capitalist nation-state par excellence is an achievement equalled only by its reception. It is being watched, and debated. The procedures of American capitalism are vividly dissected: kids in Pennsylvania sold to detention centres for profit… ‘dead peasant’ insurance taken out by corporations who can turn a tidy sum from the death of a worker… a coup d'état by the board of directors of Goldman Sachs at the US congress to bail out the banks in the wake of the economic crisis… home repossessions by the very banks the government has propped-up and the low-rent vulture-capitalists that sell on those homes for an instant return. The whole complex bloody machinery…

Yet nothing quite prepares you for the end of the film: ‘capitalism is an evil, and you can’t regulate evil. You have to eliminate it, and replace it with something that is good for all people.’ What needs to happen now for the United States of America, says director Michael Moore, is that capitalism needs to be replaced… with democracy.

On the one hand, a clear statement: capitalism is evil and must be replaced. On the other hand, what is to replace capitalism? Democracy? Wait a minute… hasn’t the USA always been democratic? That’s rather vague. Surely Moore wants to say – gulp – ‘socialism’? The alternatives explored in the film sound like socialism. The bit where he says ‘something that is good for all people’ sounds like socialism too. Yet Moore doesn’t come out and say it (and indeed, he is consistent in avoiding saying subsequently). Is this a failure of nerve? Many socialist reviewers, most of whom believe Moore to be one of the ‘good guys,’ think so. He is guilty of naïve tub thumping without clearly articulating the alternative; guilty of cowardice, of not being willing to speak out loud his socialist vision to the American people.

Perhaps, however, before jumping to these conclusions based upon what he has not said, we should explore what he does say? In order to do so, we can begin by thinking through the central problem of his concluding manifesto…

The central problem is this: capitalism is a political economic system while democracy is a political ideological system. Political ideology and political economy are linked, inextricably so in most cases, yet they remain different in kind. Thus the question arises… how can a political ideology replace a political economic model? Especially if the political system in question is already is in place and on the face of it the very condition of the existing economic model? Indeed, surely the economic system (capitalism) is one of the practical applications of the theoretical ideology (democracy)? Is Moore, in other words, guilty of ignoring the differences and interactions between political institutions (ideology and economics)… Let us first answer ‘yes’ and try and understand why this might be the strategy of the film.

Love stories, in American cinema, seem to require a series of assumptions. A man and woman meet, fall in love, pass through a series of trials and tribulations until the end of the film when the situation is resolved. This occurs through an invisible heterosexuality, the aspiration of a monogamous relationship, a bourgeois-esque setting and an overtly melodramatic realism. Most usually a happy ever after results… though, of course, that is the beauty of the end of the film, for while it resolves everything it does so by becoming timeless and unverifiable.

The crucial point about the love story of American cinema, however, is that it operates within a binary logic in order to describe the hopes and fears of the milieu. Gilles Deleuze, in his great cinematic taxonomy, offers us an insight into this kind of filmic organisation. He calls it the large form action-image and it obeys five laws. A general situation is established that will need to be resolved. The resolution of the situation can only occur through the actions of characters within the film. The action proceeds through a number of duels. These duels are a preparation, the limbering up of the characters to become equal to the situation they find themselves in. It is the final duel between the two main characters at the end of the film which resolves the situation.

In other words, this kind of action-image works through a formulaic simplification at the level of structure. Yet, it is this very procedure that gives the narrative its power. What is crucial is this: that while the focus is the great central duel between the lovers, there are lots of other duels ( with the rival, the mother-in-law, the job overseas, the play-station). However, all these duels are in the service of the great duel, which when it finally plays out resolves everything.

Is this not exactly what is happening in Capitalism: A Love Story? It is the 1980s. One of the lovers, the American people, is captivated by the promise of dosh by the delicious Regan (and – subsequently – the Bush double act). This rival will de defeated by Obama (as an embodiment of the constitution), who represents the true love of the American people… preceded by such figures as (a heavily revised) FDR.

Thus in suggesting the replacement of capitalism with democracy Moore is simplifying, obeying the tenants of the action-image. This kind of simplification is not a problem for Deleuze: ‘it is easy to make fun of Hollywood’s historical conceptions. It seems to us, on the contrary, that they bring together the most serious aspects of history as seen by the nineteenth century’ (C1:149). Don’t be fooled that this is a backhand compliment. It is not. Deleuze explores this claim through Nietzsche’s analysis of history. For Nietzsche there are three co-ordinates of what he calls universal history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. The monumental looks at parallels between the present and the past, between civilisations, between great men (we see this in Moore’s comparisons of America with the USSR, Japan and Europe, as well as looking back to FDR). The antiquarian takes a past as hermetically sealed, creates origins which constitute the true traditions (here, for example, we return to the constitution). With the ethical conception of universal history, the monumental and antiquarian dovetail. As Deleuze puts it ‘the monumental and antiquarian conceptions of history would not come together so well without the ethical image which measures and organises them both’ (C1:150).

Quoting Cecil B. DeMille, Deleuze sees this as ‘a matter of Good and Evil’ (C1:151). Here ‘the… past must submit to trial, go to court, in order to disclose what it is that produces decadence and what it is that produces new life; what the ferments of decadence and the germ of new life are, the orgy and the sign of the cross, the omnipotence of the rich and the misery of the poor. A strong ethical judgement must condemn the injustice of ‘things,’ bring compassion, herald the new civilisation on the march, in short, constantly rediscover America…’ (C1:151). The battle must reduced to a binary of good and evil. Yet, in the final analysis, for Deleuze ‘the marvel is that, with all these limits… [the American cinema] has succeeded in putting forward a strong and coherent conception of universal history’ (C1:151).

However, while this analysis plays out, the central problem still remains. Moore is simplifying the situation and is ignoring the differences between a political ideology and a political economy. What then, if we approach Moore’s manifesto head-on, and ask the question, ‘what does he actually mean by replacing capitalism with democracy?’ What if he is not ignoring the differences between ideology and economics? Once again, we can turn to Deleuze. As well as describing the organisation of the large form action-image, he goes on to explore how it can extends itself, transforms itself. How it goes towards its limit and becomes a discourse-image, the very limit of the large form action-image. Here it is not simply that a situation is inexorably resolved by pre-determined actions. Rather, the situation is explored as ‘the givens of a question which is hidden in the situation, wrapped up in the situation’ (C1:189). In this way ‘the “response” therefore is not merely that of the action to the situation, but, more profoundly, a response to the question, or to the problem that the situation was not sufficient to disclose’ (C1:189). It is a ‘secret question’ that must be discovered, and once discovered it will change the obvious conclusions that were originally to be drawn (C1:189). The response would thus be a ‘considered response’ and only arrived at through the process of the exploration, ‘the dogged search for the question and its givens through the situations’ (C1:190).

In other words, rather than cowardice or simplifying the argument, Moore is doing something far more strategic. In arguing democracy needs to replace capitalism, he is claiming capitalism is undemocratic. What Moore has attempted to do, then, is this. First, break the ‘natural’ link between the ideology of democracy and economics of capitalism. Second, instead, link the economics of capitalism with an ideology of authoritarianism (or at least semiauthoritarianism, or quasi-democracy: democracy as a façade). Third and finally, reveal the economic system that true democracy inherently delivers: socialism. It seems that just as the ideology sustaining capitalism is left unspoken but illustrated on screen, so is the economic system behind democracy. The strategic silences of a mass-media realpolitik… Or in terms of the cineosis, the limit of the large form action-image which while going beyond the action-image, extending it, serves at the same time as a mask. As Deleuze writes in another context, on the face of it there is a ‘fairly mundane humanist message,’ but really there is ‘something quite different… putting something into circulation, as much as possible, however little it may be…’ (C1:192).