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...

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2010)

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

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

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...

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands, 2010)

If this film is strange and unsettling, maybe it is because of the temporal disturbances. The final scene in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, in this regard, is not exceptional, but exemplary. Boonmee is dead. His family are in a hotel room after his funeral. A fundamental split in time occurs: they stay in the hotel room watching tv / they go to a bar to eat. Both events occur at the same moment. We must resist seeing this as simply some trick, a ruse, or joke. Or at least, not only a trick, a ruse, a joke. For to think this moment in-and-of-itself apart from the film as a whole (and indeed, as we will see, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wider project of which Uncle Boonmee is just one element) is to miss something far more essential...

In his Cinema books, Deleuze names this kind of filmic organisation ‘peaks of the present,’ a film composed of chronosigns through which certain (inexhaustible) temporal strategies undo causality. Thus the question ‘can the present… stand for the whole of time?’ and the response ‘Yes, perhaps, if we manage to separate it from its own actual quality…’ – the quality of the present as now (C2:100)...

To read the full exploration of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives through the Deleuze's sign of 'peaks of the present,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2009)

So ‘police’ as an adjective, a word that modifies a noun… yet with no noun to modify. Something is missing… but what? Which word does ‘police’ prefigure? It is tempting to specify immediately: ‘officer’. Perhaps we should, however, resist this temptation. What has the title deliberately done? In not specifying the noun, an indeterminacy is foregrounded, in the sense of an in/finite delay. The title, in this way, becomes significant in what it leaves unsignified. First, this can be seen as an indicator of the centrality that language will have. Words become politicised. Second – and, I maintain, far more importantly – the missing noun becomes a structural device in the film’s form. And it is here, with the way the missing noun structures the images, that a far more radical political reading of Police, Adjective appears. The transition between, or clarification of, these two politics takes place in the (now famous) penultimate scene of the film. Cristi has been called into Captain Anghelache’s office. The meeting is to review the case Cristi has (reluctantly) been working on...

A young plain clothes police officer, Cristi has been tasked with following Alex, a teenage student suspected of being a drug dealer. Cristi soon ascertains Alex just smokes a little weed with his mates. It is nothing. Porumboiu films these sequences in long takes, endless followings and waitings (the film form beautifully – and bravely – capturing the longueurs of the investigation). For Deleuze, this is the task of modern political cinema which has as its time-image the noosign. Noosigns constitute a new image of thought, tear thinking away from the domain of thought (the already thought, the movement-image, classical cinema) and explore the unthought. The unthought: that what cannot (yet) be thought. In Police, Adjective this unthought appears through the body as gest. ‘It is no longer a matter of following and trailing an everyday body, but of making it pass through a ceremony, of introducing it into a glass cage or a crystal, of imposing a carnival or a masquerade on it which makes it into a grotesque body… until at last the disappearance of the visible body is achieved’ (C2:190). Isn’t this just the trial that Cristi’s body undergoes? The everyday body that is seen in the first part of the film exists until the ceremony in Anghelache’s office, and thereafter, it disappears. This is Cristi’s body as gest – in its collective enunciation. ‘The gest is necessarily social and political, following Brecht’s requirements, but it is necessarily something different as well… It is bio-vital, metaphysical and aesthetic’ (C2:194)...

To read the full exploration of Police, Adjective through the Deleuze's sign of 'the body of gest,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Self Made (Gillian Wearing, UK, 2010)

Self Made (2010) is a paradox. And it is the nature of the paradox that gives the film its power. Yet the paradox is chimeric, a shadow of the actual images on-screen. The paradox emerges indirectly, a consequence of the two modes of narration of the film. First mode: documentary. The participants – through their facilitator, Sam Rumbelow – explore the techniques of ‘the method,’ method acting, which will allow them to encounter themselves anew and so generate their own ‘self-made’ film. In this way each participant goes on to star in their own short, which while encompassed by director Gillian Wearing’s documentary, appears as its own moment of narration. So, second mode: fiction...

In Self Made documentary and fictional episodes reflect upon each other: they are hyalosigns. Hyalosigns, or crystal-images, are complex signs composed of actual on-screen images and powerful virtual connections. They can be decomposed into three signs: ‘two mirrors face to face,’ ‘the limpid and the opaque’ and ‘the seed and the environment’ (C2:71). Each performs an exchange between the actual on-screen image in the present and its virtual connections off-screen in relation to the present image, past images and images to come. With ‘two mirrors face to face’ the actual image describes a mirroring on-screen in such a way that what is actual and what is virtual is indeterminate. ‘When the virtual image becomes actual [and]… the actual image becomes virtual in its turn’ we discover the second sign of hyalosigns, the limpid and the opaque (C2:71). Here we see the ‘expression of [the] exchange’ between the actual and the virtual (C2:71). We can see each of these aspects in Self Made. The documentary and fictional aspects mirror each other. Yet, when the documentary aspect is limpid, the fiction is opaque, and when the fiction becomes limpid, the documentary becomes opaque. What dominates... is the exchange between the two modes of the film. And while the modes are foundational, they are the bedrock of the exchange between participant and actor, between actor and role: ‘[t]he actor… makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous’ (C2:71). Accordingly, ‘[t]he actor is a “monster,” or rather monsters are born actors – Siamese twins, limbless men – because they find a role in the excess or shortcoming that affects them’ (C2:71). Thus, for Deleuze, the virtual image of the character becomes actual, or limpid, as the actual image of the actor becomes opaque, or virtual; and reciprocally, actual-virtual, limpid and opaque are on-going exchanges throughout the film...

To read the full exploration of Self Made through the Deleuze's sign of the 'limpid and opaque,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Alternatively, a very similar but slightly extended version of the essay is available as 'Now you see me... Gillian Wearing's Self Made' in Gillian Wearing (Ridinghouse, Whitechapel, Pinakothek der Moderne and K20, 2012) alongside some other great essays on Wearing by some other really cool writers...

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, France | Germany | Italy, 2009)

Like a storm, raging through the synapses of the brain. Like a cloud, millions of star systems orbiting around a galactic central axis. A dispersive amorphous map of smoke pulsates: purples morph into orange morph into white morph into red. Like an eye – a big, bloodshot eye – staring down at you,

looking into your skull, gazing into your mind. Like jellyfish swarming in the night sea, thousands of teeming tentacles in the invisible movement of the water. Like a toy kaleidoscope, turning the lenses under the sheets when everyone else is asleep, when you were a child. Like the centre of a flower, the stigma effervescent, open; the stamen vibrating, reaching out. Like being inside the still, quiet centre of a violent hurricane. Like red blood exploding in slow motion out of the dark hole of a wound. Like blood diffusing into water.

Enter the Void has some of the most potent cinematic images ever created – beginning with Oscar’s trip-out with a toot on a wee pipe of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine): a six minute real-time odyssey of abstract shapes overwhelming a willing consciousness. This pattern image – which is at the centre of the film’s opening sequence – is a beautiful expression of an intensive state: a formless, dispersive cinematic duration. Oscar has seen his sister, Linda, out of the Tokyo apartment where they both live and is awaiting the arrival of Alex, his friend. Director Gasper Noé utilises the point-of-view shot, aligning camera perception with the perception of the character – even inserting a black frame every few seconds mimicking the blinking of Oscar’s eyes. Similarly, the speech and thoughts of Oscar are rendered in the same blank voice-over, sometimes making the status of speech and thought indeterminate. Noé will sustain this method of shooting Oscar both before and after the DMT trip, when Alex will arrive and they will walk the streets of Tokyo toward the club where Victor is waiting for a drug deal. The only exception to this rule will be the DMT trip sequence, which begins and ends by cutting in with blurred staccato images of Oscar lying on his unkempt bed, zoned out. An out of body experience, a body looking at itself from a disjunctive position, a hallucination, a fantasy. After the trip, after the stroll through Tokyo to the club and Victor, Oscar will be shot by the police in the toilet of The Void. As he dies – his consciousness appears to leave his body, the camera gazes down upon Oscar, curled up in shit, piss and pills, his blood seeping across the broken tiles. Accordingly, the DMT trip will become the impetus for the main section of the film. An out of body experience – Oscar traversing the past, present and future. A cavalcade of images from Oscar’s past, the present where Linda, Alex, and Victor live through the aftermath of Oscar’s passing, and various possible futures. Past, present and future interweave to create a fluid mosaic, fragments from the past, present and future, mental landscapes and disparate bodies – from the point-of-view of the dead Oscar. Finally, in a short coda – Oscar is reborn.

Enter the Void is an exceptional cinematic event: a time-image – which through its extreme cinematic processes can be said to explore in particularly productive circumstances what Deleuze names hyalosigns, chronosigns, and noosigns. Time-image fragments, narrations and narratives. In so doing, the film is an exemplary lectosign: an image which must and can only be interpreted, an image which is in itself an interpretation...

To read the full exploration of Enter the Void through the Deleuze's sign of the 'lectosign,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Iran, 2010)

A man and a woman sojourn in an Italian town. Some years into their marriage, events somehow crack open years of silence… So, boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration… This is Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1954).

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy can be seen, at least in part, as a simulacrum of Rosselini’s original film. This, of course, is just how Kiarostami wants it. Exploring the very idea of the original and the copy is Kiarostami's surface project. And, if the second half of the film ‘copies’ Rossellini’s, the first half is a series of meditations that open up what will come. It is here the notion of the original and the copy are explored in a number of ways… the writer’s lecture, conversations in the car, the revered painting revealed as fake. Isn’t a copy an original in a sense? Is a copy any less authentic than its original? Is there any such thing as an original? Such are the questions explored. It is in this way we enter in to the second part of the film and the failing marriage.

The film begins in a provincial Tuscany lecture hall. James Miller, a moderately famous English art historian, gives a lecture organised by the Italian translator of his book. In the audience is Elle. She attends with her son, but has to leave due to his disruptive behaviour. Before walking out, however, she gives her number to the translator and asks him to get the author to contact her. They go on a kind of a date. At first the talk is of his book, she gets him to sign some copies for friends. Later, when they go for a coffee, la patronne du café mistakes them for man and wife. James is out taking a call, and Elle, mischievously, plays along with la patronne. When James returns, Elle tells him what she has done…

From this point on they are husband and wife, fifteen years into a marriage. Their trip is recompense for the previous night. It was an anniversary; he fell asleep while she was making herself look good for him. Events somehow crack open years of silence… boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration…

So, the second part of the film is a playing out of the concepts explored in the first part of the film. And this is done through a reification of, or reflection upon, Rossellini’s film. Yet such a reading remains superficial. There is something far more essential at stake here. For instance – and a clue to what is essential – it would be entirely wrong to think of the second part of the film as an act, as James and Elle caught up in some kind of fantasy, some kind of game. Rather, Kiarostami performs a wonderful sleight of hand… he ensures that both the first part and the second part of the film have their own essential ‘truth’ in-and-of themselves. Or, to put this another way, from the position of the first part, the second part is ‘fake’; from the position of the second part, the first part is ‘fake’. Which is as much to say that each of the two aspects are indeterminate in relation to the other…

And there is a third aspect to the film, a third ‘truth’. Taken as a whole, the film compresses fifteen years of a relationship – from first date to fifteenth anniversary – into a day. ‘It is actually based,’ says Kiarostami, ‘on something that happened to me ten, 15, maybe even 20 years ago – I’ve no real sense of time. And I wonder whether the woman in question, if she sees the film, will recognise herself. Is it just a memory I myself kept from what happened? After all, we spent just one day together’ (The List, 'Profile: Abbas Kiarostami'). As we will see, it is this ‘sense of time,’ or maybe the ‘no real sense of time’ that is essential to Kiarostami’s film. However, first, we must ask what can account for this structure, for the three indeterminate aspects?

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes a type of film created from a particular chronosign he calls peaks of the present. As Deleuze puts it, chronosigns concern ‘narration,’ a narration of ‘false continuity’ which ‘extend crystalline description,’ the interactions between actual on-screen images and their virtual (brain-screen) components (C2:127). These false continuities take a number of forms, but the least common (at least as far as I have witnessed) are peaks of the present. ‘Points [or peaks] of the present’ explore the way in which any present moment is fundamentally divided between the present-in-itself, the present’s past and the present’s future (C2:100).

As Deleuze puts it, with peaks of the present ‘narration will consist of the distribution of different presents… so that each forms a combination that is plausible and possible in itself, but where all of them together are “incompossible”’ (C2:101). Not impossible, but each possibility is possible. This kind of film disrupts the order of time, ‘gives narration a new value, because it abstracts it from all successive action’ (C2:101). Rather, the narrative appears in the repetitions of the different presents. In this sense we can see the three aspects of Certified Copy as incompossible, each aspect a copy, or version of a situation. And each version the original. James and Elle’s first date to fifteenth anniversary is, in-itself, the present of the present. The first half of the film (the date) the past of the present; and the second half of the film (the disintegrating marriage) the future of the present.

Now we can apprehend what is essential in the film. It is not simply a meditation on the copy and the original, but what the copy and the original do to time. The copy puts time out of joint. The original and the copy would seem to have a temporal ordering. But admitting the copy is of equal value as the original, that there is no such thing as an original, that the copy is original in its own way, disrupts temporality, opens up onto what Henri Bergson calls duration. It gives a different reading to time. Time is no longer succession but simultaneity. In this sense the peaks of the present of Certified Copy are ‘setting time free’ (C2:102). And freedom is choice, the choice between ‘inextricable differences’ (C2:105). The last shot of the film: James takes a piss while Elle is in on the bed of the hotel room. Kiarostami allows James to leave and leaves an empty frame. What will they do? Which aspect of duration, which peak of the present will they choose?

Will we treat each day, each moment, as a recurrence of the day, the moment, before? Or as duration… as something in-and-of-itself, as the beginning of something new, as the end of something? These three incompossible aspects of duration make time ‘frightening and inexplicable’ (C2:101). For, on the one hand, the possibility of action is torn between living in the moment, reacting to the influences of the past and acting for the future. Yet, on the other hand, somehow these different repetitions of time overlay each other. And because of this we can discover there is always a choice, there is always choice… and choice is freedom…

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, USA / Germany, 2009)

It seems a simple premise. A whacko holed up in a house with a shotgun. He’s got two hostages and has just run his mother through with a sword. A couple of cops arrive on the scene. What has happened is clear… why it has happened is another matter… Detective Hank Havenhurst, trying to extract the dude and save the hostages, interviews his girlfriend, his mentor and the neighbours who witnessed the slaying. Yep, a simple premise for a film, yet a formula which Werner Herzog takes in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, warps and sprinkles with a dash of madness. Wonderful, of course. But why? Why did the killer do what he did..? and what is Herzog doing in the film..?

The film operates predominately through flashbacks, which seems – at first – a straightforward enough way to contextualise and explicate the events happening in the present. The present of the film starts just after the murder of Mrs. McCullum. Detective Havenhurst and his new partner, Detective Vargas, turn up at the suburban street to find the body in a neighbour’s house. Brad, her son, did it; they are told… and is across the street. Havenhurst soons discovers Brad to be more than a little disorientated. He demands to be called Farooq, believes God talks to him, rolls a tube of bran down the drive… His fiancé turns up. Havenhurst, looking for a way to understand his opponent, interviews her. Essentially, it is the interviews with Ingrid that constitute the trips into the past through flashbacks, though not all of them are encountered first hand. For instance, Ingrid begins by relating a story about how Brad was the only survivor of an accident in Peru, when he came back he was changed.

Next to arrive on the scene is theatre director Lee Meyers. Meyers tells us how Brad is a wonderful if unpredictable actor. They had been working together on a production of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The play, as Meyers explains, is about the murder of a mother by a son.

Yet it is exactly here we encounter a problem. These flashbacks are in excess of a causal explanation, are anecdotes and diversions … a meal with mum turns into a surreal exploration of jello… Uncle Ted’s plan for an advert where a midget riding a miniature pony is chased by one of his giant chickens round a massive tree… Brad showing Ingrid a packet of oats with the picture of a pilgrim on it… who Brad believes is god, and who has been talking to him since he was a little boy. In short, there is nothing that explains why Brad murdered his mum, which to say, there are too many possibilities and explanations. There is nothing for Havenhurst to use… and little for the spectator to understand Brad as a psychologically motivated character.

According to Gilles Deleuze, the flashback is a recollection-image and has 'two extreme poles,' on the one hand there is the flashback as 'an explanation, a causality or a linearity' (C2:49). This is destiny… the past which leads inexorably to the present. On the other hand there is the flashback as forking paths, 'a fragmentation of all linearity… [as] breaks in causality' (C2:49). This is marked by multiple flashbacks from multiple characters. Forking paths allow the dissolution of the movement-image, which for Deleuze is the way in which a film organises the perceptions, affects, thoughts and actions of a character within a specified setting. Forking paths, in this way, are the conditions for the emergence of time-images, films which create opsigns and sonsigns, pure optical and sound images, which stymie character actions, make affects opaque and do not allow a clear differentiation between objective and subjective perceptions. In short, rather than the spectator thinking with the film, the film demands thought from the spectator.

Thus, the forking paths of the recollection-image put cause and effect into crisis, are a condition for the very collapse of the recollection-image and the emergence of time-images. It is clear that My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done has this aspect to it. The flashbacks are all ‘about’ Brad, yet none of them emanate directly from the character of Brad. They have their source in the narratives of Ingrid, Meyers and the two neighbours. Both the present of the film (the events happening in the suburban street after the murder of Mrs. McCullum) and the past of the film (the events leading up to the murder of Mrs. McCullum) interweave in the most common of ways, and proceed with a certain linearity. Yet the actual events in the present and the past are illusive, allusive, fragmented, inexplicable, opaque, strange… In short, Herzog is operating at the very boundaries of the movement-image and the time-image… the structure is movement-image, the way in which they play out time-image: forking paths…

Interestingly, Herzog makes an appearance twice in Deleuze’s cinema books, once in respect to the movement-image, once in respect to the time-image. With regards to the movement-image, Herzog creates inversion-images… the quotidian, the sublime and the enfeebled… where the character is a visionary, ‘a man who is larger than life frequent[ing] a milieu which is itself larger than life,’ or the characters are ‘weaklings and idiots’ (C1:184-5). Or both at one and the same time. No doubt there is something of this in the film too. Brad is an opaque character, brooding, apocalyptic, grandiose… yet he lives in suburbia, he has no job, lives with his mother… has no aim or plan…

With regards to the time-image, Herzog creates ‘crystallised spaces’ (C2: 129). This is the crystal-image, or hyalosign, where Deleuze discusses Herzog in respect to what he calls the ‘seed and environment’ (C2:71). A warning from Deleuze ‘the virtual image [appears as] “pure recollection”, the better to distinguish it from mental images – recollection-images, dreams or dreaming – with which it might readily be confused. In fact, the latter are certainly virtual images, but actualised or in the course of actualisation in consciousnesses or psychological states’ (C2:79). With crystal-images things are different… for example… Meyer’s production of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides of The Oresteia… Brad is ousted despite being a wonderful actor, because of his unpredictability: his refusal to dress in Greek clothes (preferring his Peruvian poncho)… not using a Greek sword (preferring Uncle Ted’s cutlass)… on-the-spot editing of the text of the play in his own way. At the performance in Calgary he gatecrashes he performs from the audience… This is crucial in respect to the seed and the environment. Deleuze writes how in the crystal-image ‘the film is reflected in a theatre play, a show, a painting… a film’ (C2:75). With the seed and environment we encounter this specifically as ‘the film [or play, etc] which takes itself as its own object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made’ (C2:76). Thus in this instance the seed ‘never reaches completion’ and ‘we no longer know which is the role and which is the crime’ (C2:76;72).

What is a seed? What is an environment? How do the seed and environment inter-relate? Deleuze writes ‘the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallise an environment which is at present amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallisable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image’ (C2:74). Crucially ‘the actual and the virtual are exchanged in an indiscernibility which on each occasion allows distinction to survive’ (C2:74). We have the present, we have the past… but what do they give us? The ‘present’ and the ‘past’ use the flashback formula to undo what flashbacks do. Rather, the film presents a double aspect. In the present, Brad is effectively erased. A disembodied voice emanating from the house. A shadow at the door. A hand grabbing a pizza box or shoving out a tape recorder. In the past he only appears through the stories of other characters. Rather than progressively actualise Brad throughout the course of the film (inversion-images, the destiny of the recollection-image), the film uses flashbacks (forking paths of the recollection-image) to put the movement-image into crisis. In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, we thus pass through and go beyond the movement-image. Herzog creates time-images, the indeterminate regime of the seed and the environment. In so doing Brad ‘appears’ as a virtual entity… an absent centre.

The Refuge (François Ozon, France, 2009)

The Refuge is a kind of triptych, the central ‘panel’ the longest section, flanked by two much shorter parts. A refuge bookended by death and life. From tri ‘three,’ and ptychē ‘ fold,’ the cinematic structure of the narrative seems to enclose the characters. Or perhaps, more accurately, this enclosure is a function of the way in which François Ozon presents the characters. They do not act in the world so much as experience it. They are avoiding, enjoying, tired, vital, lost, nomadic, numb, sensitive. If there is movement in The Refuge, it is an exchange between these various poles of life, avoidance becomes enjoyment; tiredness becomes vitality, and so on. They do not yet know their place in the world… and this is liberating yet frightening, confusing but with moments of perfect clarity…

The central story, the refuge of The Refuge, revolves around the relationship between Mousse and Paul. Mousse is a pregnant heroin addict, in recovery with methadone; Paul is a rich boy, queer, setting himself adrift on an endless holiday. They are staying in a lovely cottage in the south of France, near the sea. During their short time together, Paul – agile, open, active – passes on some of his vitality to Mousse. In this way, it is Mousse who is the main focus of the film, in the sense that it is her pregnancy which is at the heart of things. They originally meet in the first part of the triptych. Mousse and her boyfriend overdose on heroin. He dies. She lives. Upon awaken from a coma she is told she is pregnant. Her boyfriend’s mother offers to pay for her to abort the foetus. Paul is the boyfriend’s brother. The final part of the triptych, also set in Paris, sees Mousse being visited by Paul in hospital after giving birth. If they are connected by death, they are now also connected by life… Mousse abandons the baby for Paul to look after.

Why does Mousse abandon her baby? Why does Paul visit Mousse in the refuge? Why do Paul and Mousse sleep with each other? Answers to these questions, and many others, remain opaque. This opacity is crucial. It is the nucleus of Ozon’s cinematic strategy in The Refuge. It is in this sense we can say that this film does not focus upon actions, emotions or thoughts, but on the body. Dead bodies, sleeping bodies, dancing bodies, tired bodies, bodies making love, tanned bodies… but – above all – pregnant bodies.

The Refuge is an encounter with the opacity of another’s body. This means we must confront the ambiguity of bodies that do not act, that do not express emotion, that do not – or cannot – express their thoughts. Yet this is not the purpose of the film… but rather the impetus, the beginning. And it is from these enclosures we approach the true power of The Refuge. To understand why, we can turn to the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze, in his great taxonomy of cinema, calls this type of film the time-image. The time-image operates, in the first instance, by creating opsigns and sonsigns, pure visual and audio images. In opposition to the cinema of the movement-image, which organises a narrative through the linkage of distinct moments (such as perception, affect, action and thought), opsigns and sonsigns resist this flow. Rather, these signs appear in-and-of-themselves. They do not link image to image, they link what is actual (on-screen) to the virtual (what is not on screen). In short, while the movement-image asks the spectator to think with the film, opsigns and sonsigns attempt to get the spectator to think for themselves in respect to what the film does not think. This is the unthought. The unthought of the film generating what would have remained unthinkable by the spectator. This is the power of The Refuge.

We can be more specific. Time-image opsigns and sonsigns can be organised in a number of ways, at the level of image (hyalosigns), narrative (chronosigns) and story (noosigns). Without doubt all these factors come to bear on a time-image film, however, any film of the time-image will tend to prioritise, or be organised around one of these aspects. It is clear that Ozon’s film produces hyalosigns, Mousse in the bath with her belly is a complex image in-and-of-itself, as is Mouuse in the mirror, or the couple at the piano while Paul sings the song ‘The Refuge’. At the level of narration, the triptych structure is a powerful chronosign, a simple linear organisation which places each ‘panel’ into its own temporal zone, a past, present and future. However, The Refuge is film which foregrounds the story of the characters above and beyond images and narration. This is the noosign. One of the signs of the noosign is what Deleuze calls the body of ‘attitude’, ‘the everyday body’ (C2:192;190).


Crucially, for Deleuze, ‘the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life’ (C2:189). Mousse is numb from the tragedy of her own near death and the death of her boyfriend, is numb to the potential for life that is within her and her belly. Paul is the catalyst for her awakening, but in the devastating abandonment of her child, Mousse becomes a catalyst for Paul finding a place in the world, one that reflects his own origins (he was adopted). These are all events, generated through bodies. The point is they occur without reference to defined contexts, reasonings, explications, justifications. Why does Mousse abandon her baby? Why does Paul visit Mousse in the refuge? Why do Paul and Mousse sleep with each other?

The Refuge resists thinking these things for us. ‘It is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought’ (C2:189).

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...