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

marxism today [prologue] / unnamed (Phil Collins, UK / Germany, 2010)

Archive footage takes us back to the classroom. The lecturer has just finished drawing a chalk diagram on the blackboard expressing one aspect of the Marxist theory of production. A pyramid structure, a hierarchy. At the apex, the company director; at the bottom, the foundation, the workers. And from this pyramid, emerge commodities. Next to the diagram: ‘exploitation’ (with a specific meaning in the German, the exploitation of the class system). This is the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), before die Wende, the turning point; before Deutsche Einheit, German (re-)unification. So, the lecturer asks: who thinks workers in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) are exploited? One student’s reply… my uncle [in the FRG] has a car, a washing machine, he earns a good wage… how is he exploited? The lecturer draws a question mark: ‘exploitation?’ A statement turned interrogative. Let us ask if your uncle is exploited…

marxism today (prologue) is neither paean nor eulogy. Director Phil Collins is neither interested in mourning nor affirming the triumph of capitalism over socialism, ‘West’ over ‘East,’ the ‘end’ of the/a communist experiment. Rather, the film explores a milieu, its passing, and its legacy. Using archive footage and filmed interviews as monologues, Collins wishes to explore theoretical Marxism, its propagation through the East German state, and its material effects in the lives of the people who lived within such an encompassing... In other words, the film describes a specific spatio-temporal geo-political socio-historical situation. The student who found it difficult to understand how his uncle was exploited, modestly rich as he was with all the trappings of the West, is a subject of ideology. Ideology – according to Marx and Engels – needs to be exposed, and the tool for this is materialism. Ideology obscures material being in the world, the actualised economic milieu. The West employs ideological methods, the East exposes and lives the reality. In the classroom, the question mark must be erased – but not before capitalist ideology is exposed. Materialism is a science, not a belief system composed of ideas. Historical materialism is an empirical study of the world, the world in process through its social conditions and relations. The world has passed through many regimes: slave-based societies → feudalism → capitalism. For true socialism to arise the working classes must become conscious of the reality of the world thus laying the conditions for communism.  As Marx famously wrote, philosophy should not simply explain the world, but transform it. Thus the duel between capitalism and socialism. This is theoretical Marxism: realism. And it is the historical coordinates of this duel as experienced before and after die Wende that are explored in marxism today (prologue). Accordingly, Collin’s film is realist cinema.

Realism in the cinema – for Deleuze – is an action-image. The action-image expresses various relations between situations and actions through two reciprocal formula: actions → situation and situation → action. In the first case, the actions of characters throughout the film explore the world and reveal the situation; in the second case, the situation is a given reality lived through the characters. The small form action-image reveals; the large form action-image determines. marxism today (prologue) is of the large form... Deleuze describes the most assured aspect of the large form through the cinematic sign of the milieu. As Deleuze puts it, the milieu is ‘determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times,’ it is the ‘Ambience or the Encompasser,’ it is the ‘situation’ (C1:141)...

To read the full exploration of marxism today (prologue) through the Deleuze's sign of the milieu,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, UK, 2010)

Wrapped in a wee yellow dressing gown, Sandra makes her way onto one of the vast shop floors at Ford’s Dagenham plant. The space is empty and silent, save for a small corner set up for a photoshoot. Car production at Dagenham has ground to a halt, the entire workforce sent home by the management in the wake of strike action by the female sewing machinists. ‘There she is’ leers the photographer, ‘drape yourself across this vehicle.’ Sandra slowly allows the dressing gown slip from her shoulders, revealing the latest in 1960s beach fashion, a risqué electric blue bikini. The film cuts to a close-up. Across her belly, written in red lipstick, are the words EQUAL PAY.  Cutting back to a wide shot, Sandra asks: ‘How does this look?’ Yet it is Sandra who is looking, first at the silenced photographer; then, eyes moving, with a confrontational stare, out of the frame. Another cut: up above the shop floor in a glass fronted office complex, Ford’s American boss (flown in to break the strike by any means necessary), turns and walks away. Sandra: ‘Nah?’

Made in Dagenham has all the attendant, complex pleasures of cinematic realism. The film recounts the story of a strike at Ford’s main UK plant in 1968. One of hundreds in the emancipatory climate of the 1960s, it was, however, an almost unique event: a strike by working women for working women. Caused by a management decision to downgrade the female labour from semi-skilled to unskilled status, the true aim was to enact a brutal wage cut on a group with seemingly little recourse to action. During the strike, and not in small measure a consequence of the unsupportive male dominated union, the walk-out transformed to encompass the rights of working women in general: equal pay for the same jobs as men. The strike was successful in that it resulted in a change in the law. And, as the film points out, this inspired similar laws across ‘most’ industrialised nations. Made in Dagenham tells this story through a number of the women characters who rise up against the encompassing patriarchal order of management, union and husbands – focusing upon Rita O'Grady, a worker who becomes the voice and champion for the sewing machinists. A wonderfully enjoyable film, Made in Dagenham creates these characters – who do not exist in the real – in order to explores a situation by way of capturing up an audience through the pleasures of the mainstream movie, through the entertainment of cinematic realism...

Made in Dagenham is at the centre of the movement-image, a (large form) action-image, a realist film par excellence, the most distinctive sign of which is the binomial. Here we encounter a filmic structure that proceeds through a conflict, by two dominant lines of force devolving from a situation and embodied in characters who express their relation through the duel. These duels will be romantic, as much as violent or indeed political (and Made in Dagenham explores all these manifestations)...

To read the full exploration of Made in Dagenham through the Deleuze's sign of the 'binomial,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Mother (Joon-ho Bong, South Korea, 2009)

Why is Do-joon’s mother dancing?

The joy of the perfect thriller comes with the reveal. A number of conditions – of course – apply. The image that will be revealed needs to be well hidden throughout the film, the truth must remain in

ellipsis right up to the denouement. There is nothing worse than reasoning out the mystery before the final disclosure. A caveat here: the ruse, the red herring. With an amalgam of satisfaction (at our own cleverness) and disappointment (at the filmmaker giving too much away) we think we’ve got it! Only to discover cinematic subterfuge, it was someone or something else entirely. Even subtler still, a ploy or stratagem is signalled as possibly being as such, or appears as a fake reveal. Thus propagating ambiguity with a self-reflexive quality before the true disclosure. In the second place, the exposé also needs to be a function of the narration. The conditions for the disclosure need to have been there all along, embedded in moments of the movie, hidden in plain sight. The twist should not be imposed from the outside. There is nothing worse (really, this time) than discovering the reveal was impossible to reason. Finally, the reveal must have a certain necessity. That which is disclosed by the actions of the characters – in retrospect – must be the only possible outcome. This does not strictly concern images and narration, but rather narrative. The perfect thriller does not simply reveal what happened, but through revealing what happened determines the situation. Anything other will simply be an arbitrary answer to any-old-question, rather than the completion and consummation of a permeating theme.

Mother is the perfect thriller. There is misdirection. There is a twist – and you do not see it coming. That which is revealed is not imposed from the outside, it appears both functional and essential; it is something that is integral to the narrative of the film, making the theme vital and vivid.

We can describe this type of film as an action-image of the small form operating through an index of lack.

To read the full exploration of Mother through the Deleuze's sign of 'index of lack,' 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...