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...

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...

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).