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...

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...