Se7en (David Fincher, USA, 1995)

‘We’ve got one dead guy,’ carps the Captain of Police, ‘not three.’

1 – Gluttony. A murder victim is discovered, and homicide detectives William Somerset and David Mills are asked to check out the scene. Bound and force fed with a gun to his head, a morbidly obese man has been tortured to his death. Somerset sees something here: ‘This is just the beginning.’ He wants off the case, he can’t see it through – his last week in his role on the murder team before retirement. Mills wants it, first day in job, just arrived from a small town up-state with his wife Tracy. Mills is dropped; they need Somerset’s experience.

2 – Greed. The next day, Mills – awaiting some action – is called to some hotshot lawyer’s office. There’s another dead guy here, one who has been persuaded to cut a pound of flesh from his own body. On the floor, in blood, the words ‘greed’. Back at the station, Somerset believes the crimes are connected: possibly something to do with the Seven Deadly Sins. Either way, Mills and Somerset are back on the same case. Stomach contents from the fat man lead Somerset to find the words ‘gluttony’ scraped in grease behind the fridge at the first crime scene; an upside down picture at the second scene gives them some fingerprints. ‘So many clues,’ says Somerset, ‘just lead to others’. And so it is…

3 – Sloth. The fingerprints are a clue which lead to Victor, tied to a bed for a year, drip-fed the drugs he used to deal.

Se7en is inspired by the power of a habitual series of elements. Such a cinematic series is what Deleuze calls a relation-image, where the elements are designated through the sign of the mark...

To read the full exploration of Se7en through the Deleuze's sign of the 'mark,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor (Nick Hurran, UK, 2013)

‘Three of them!’ exclaims the general at Gallifrey High Command, ‘…all my worst nightmares at once.’ He has returned – three incarnations, simultaneously.

The planet of the Time Lords is under attack by the Daleks. War between two of the most powerful species in the universe. On the one hand, the Time Lords – humanoids who long ago overcame the limits of space, time and mortality; passive observers from Gallifrey of the joys and woes of planets, systems, and galaxies, the rise and fall of civilisations past, present and future. On the other hand, the Daleks – organic mutants devoid of all emotion housed inside metal travelling machines; creatures intent on enslaving or killing everyone and everything. This is the Time War – and it has been raging for eons. In the process, every lifeform in the universe has suffered, caught between an immovable object and an unstoppable force. But now the conflict appears to be in its final phase – and the Daleks are winning. Gallifrey is under siege, the Time Lords are surrounded by the entire Dalek army orbiting the planet, bombarding it from above. And if the Time Lords are beaten, the universe will have new masters.

Such is the scenario of Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor: the 240th tv story (approximately, valid number systems vary) in a series running (on and off – at time of screening) for 50 years. The series concerns – at the centre – the Doctor, an errant Time Lord who ‘borrowed’ a TARDIS (time and space machine) and went off to explore the far corners of the universe. During an early trip to Earth, the chameleon circuit on the TARDIS malfunctioned, so its image is now fixed as an old 1950s British police box, instead of changing to fit the landscape in which it arrives. However, the Doctor has become, over the years, rather attached to its form. Selecting companions from the worlds he chances upon, pitching up where he will to have adventures, the Doctor has been aroaming for well over a thousand years, fighting evil wherever he may find it. Many, many years ago now, when an old man for the first time – grouchy, frail and beginning to lose his faculties – he regenerated (much to the surprise of his friends) into another body. Since then, his companions – and there have been many – have witnessed numerous such regenerations and incarnations... And after each regeneration the Doctor has continued his quest – to travel from world to world, intervening on the side of justice, to set right the wrongs he encounters, to heal the hurts and bind the wounds of the universe. This is the Doctor – all of them.

However, now – in The Day of the Doctor – the Eleventh Doctor must confront a secret he has hidden for a long time. We have known since the Ninth Doctor appeared on the scene that he was the last of the Time Lords, that his race was annihilated in the final battle of the Time War, that he was caught up in events, and that these events haunt him. In The Day of the Doctor the story is revealed. It was he who killed his own people – every last man, woman and child. Or rather it was an incarnation of this renegade Time Lord we have never seen...

Except – the incarnation of the Time Lord who committed these atrocities was not the Doctor. In order to explore such a paradox, we can turn to Deleuze’s cineosis – or cinematic semiosis – and the avatar of the relation-image. A relation-image is constituted through a succession of images that create a habitual series... However, ‘it is always possible,’ writes Deleuze, ‘for one of these terms to leap outside the web and suddenly appear in conditions which take it out of its series, or set it in contradiction with it’ (C1:203). This is the demark...

To read the full exploration of Doctor Who – The Day of the Doctor through the Deleuze's sign of the 'demark,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, Spain, 2010)

A black screen: darkness. Silence. Breathing…
A blurred, flickering, indistinct image – then darkness once again.
Shouting… Screaming… Paul Conroy is buried alive. The flame of his zippo reveals to him his situation. Such is the wonderful economy of the audio-visual field (no image, no articulate language) of the first few minutes of Buried, directed by Rodrigo Cortés. A truck driver in Iraq, Conroy comes to in what he soon discovers to be a makeshift coffin buried underground. He has his lighter, his mobile phone; and later discovers a torch and another mobile hidden there by the insurgents who want to ransom him to the US government. And that is it. With these tools Conroy must design an escape. And Cortés must fashion a movie. To do so Cortés instates an aesthetic imperative: we must never leave the coffin and we must remain with the Conroy at all times. In this way there is a reduction of both spatial and temporal fields. The mise-en-scène curtailed to a 2x2x6 wooden box. There is one character on screen. The film is shot in real time. Framing varies, in the most part, from close-up to extreme close-up… the heat, the sweat and the blood, dirty fingernails… what we get are abstract patterns in the light and dark… the qualities changing with the source, zippo, mobile phone, torch. Action happens out-of-field, off screen… his rescuers, the insurgents, his company, his family… all are voices at a distance... A wonderful achievement. Cortés: ‘From the very beginning, I received every kind of, um, let's call them “kind suggestions” to take the camera beyond the coffin. I was told it would bring some oxygen to the audience if we were to show the surface or to cut out to the other side of the [phone] line, for instance, or if we showed the other characters, like the leader of the hostage-taking group or his wife or the federal authorities. There was talk of doing flashbacks. All of this, I thought, was the perfect way to spoil everything and ruin the film’ (Los Angeles Times, 12.9.2010). Beyond the minimalist aesthetic, why impose such a cinematic philosophy? Geoff Boucher provides a clue towards answering this question: ‘Cortés said his compass point for the film was pure Hitchcock — the real-time suspense of Rope, the confined quarters of Lifeboat and the paralyzed point of view in Rear Window’ (Los Angeles Times, 12.9.2010). This Hitchcock parallel should be taken seriously – at least as a starting point – not simply for the aesthetic imperative (setting the filmmaker a seemingly impossible task) and not simply for the precision in which that imperative plays out (the framing, the shots and edits). Rather, we should look to what the Hitchcockian process announced and articulated for cinema in general, before going on to explore how Cortés, in his own way, takes up these procedures.

Deleuze writes ‘it was Hitchcock’s task to introduce the mental image into the cinema and to make it the completion of cinema, the perfection of all other images’ (C1:200). For Deleuze, classical cinema – or, the movement-image - operates through three constituent domains: perception, affection and action. A character in the world sees, feels and acts: perception-image, affection-image, action-image. Movement-image cinema uses all these components, but in any film one tends towards domination; a melodrama, for example, is an affection-image; an adventure movie an action-image. Mental-images take up these co-ordinates and reinscribe them within the domain of thought. Deleuze will go on to specify three types of mental-images. There are recollection-images, which include flashbacks and explore memory; and dream-images, which use dreams, nightmares and hallucinations. Both of these actualise perceptions, affections and actions as thought in another space-time. With Hitchcock, however, Deleuze identified another type of mental-image: the relation-image. Here, thought is the foundation of the flow of the narration. Thus, in ‘inventing the… relation-image, Hitchcock makes use of it in order to close the set of action-images, and also of perception and affection-images… Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit’ (C1:204). With relation-images, then, ‘the essential point… is that action, and also perception and affection, are framed in a fabric of relations. It is this chain of relations which constitutes the mental image, in opposition to the thread of actions, perceptions and affections’ (C1:200). At the most basic level, this is suspense. As Deleuze continues, ‘[w]hat matters is not who did the action – what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit – but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught’ (C1:200). There are, for Deleuze, two types of relations which play out through three types of sign. First, there are natural relations, which are signs of composition: marks and demarks. Second, there are abstract relations, genetic signs: symbols. With the mark ‘we see a customary series such that each can be “interpreted” by the others’ (C1:203). With the demark ‘it is always possible for one of these terms to… appear in conditions which take it out of its series’ (C1:203). Marks establish patterns, and the demark disturbs such a pattern. With the symbol, however, we find ‘a concrete object which is the bearer of various relations or of variations of as single relation’ (C1:204)...

To read the full exploration of Buried through the Deleuze's sign of the 'symbol,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...