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...

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...

The Human Centipede [First Sequence] (Tom Six, Netherlands, 2009)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is nasty, sickening, permeated with gratuitous and terrifying violence – everything, then, a great horror film should be. Yet the movie also produces laughter – in a certain way, up to a certain point. The film seizes upon the passion hidden deep within for cruelty, and the laughter that emerges is that of the purest pleasure in the suffering of others. Horror unbound takes you through and beyond nervous and ironic laughter (beyond the uncanny of classical horror; beyond the knowing self-reflection of post-modern horror). Toward a laughter to which we will not admit, a laughter that sticks in the throat, where enjoyment turns, returns, once more, to horror. The enjoyment of horror, and the horror of enjoyment...

Such a procedure can be seen as an encounter with what Deleuze names an impulse-image. Impulse-images describe types of films where primal forces ravage the universe; and the horror movie is exemplary in allowing such permeating forces to be captured up in the perceptions, acts and affects of characters and of the audience. Bodies, in horror films, are transformed into the symptoms of an elemental world. Impulses are energies, impelling urges that overwhelm, that are – as Deleuze writes – ‘too strong for the character’ (C1:137). The impulse-image explores ‘acts… prior to all differentiation between the human and the animal. These are human animals’ (C1:123-4). In this way, symptoms become ‘inseparable from the perverse mode of behaviour which they produce and animate: cannibalistic, sado-masochistic, necrophiliac, etc’ (C1:128). It is here – in the productive domain of the symptom, when the characters animate symptoms of an originary world – that the horror film operates.  And in this way The Human Centipede is a film of the impulse-image, an actualisation of becoming animal in Katsuro-Jenny-Lindsey through the perverse symptomatic acts of Dr. Heiter. The film explores the symptom, the film is a symptom of the primal forces that ravage the universe beneath the determined and determinable situations of the world. And the laughter of cruelty is a symptom of these forces, a laughter too strong for the audience, a laughter that overwhelms the spectator, for a moment…

To read the full exploration of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) through the Deleuze's sign of the 'symptom,' 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…