January 15, 1985

The ideological criticism is that Eisenstein has an idealist conception of nature that replaces history. And in fact, the story for Eisenstein is the dialectical unity of man and nature. We cannot say that the criticism is false! I mean, it may be wrong to blame him. He seems to have held on to an idealistic conception of nature that replaces history. Second criticism: he seems to have held on to a dominant conception of montage which crushes the plane. Third political reproach: he seems to have poorly conceived or conceived “abstractly” the sensori-motor relation, because he had not seen where it is connected. He seems to have been satisfied with a far too broad nature-human framework without seeing where the sensori-motor, namely, the self-conscious hero, is connected. Within the self-conscious hero, on the contrary, he did not conceive as a “subject” in the interiorization of nature within man and in the exteriorization of man within nature; Eisenstein only imagined abstract masses. He believed in cinema as an “art of masses”, and henceforth, man who became subject of nature, nature being only the objective-human relation, man who became subject of nature, this was not the self-conscious man; it was abstract masses.

Seminar Introduction

As he starts the fourth year of his reflections on relations between cinema and philosophy, Deleuze explains that the method of thought has two aspects, temporal and spatial, presupposing an implicit image of thought, one that is variable, with history. He proposes the chronotope, as space-time, as the implicit image of thought, one riddled with philosophical cries, and that the problematic of this fourth seminar on cinema will be precisely the theme of “what is philosophy?’, undertaken from the perspective of this encounter between the image of thought and the cinematographic image.

For archival purposes, the English translations are based on the original transcripts from Paris 8, all of which have been revised with reference to the BNF recordings available thanks to Hidenobu Suzuki, and with the generous assistance of Marc Haas.

English Translation

Edited
Duras, India SOng
Marguerite Duras, India Song, 1975.

 

First reviewing two movements in thought-image relations for Eisenstein, Deleuze proceeds to Eisenstein’s third plane, the identity of image and concept or “Nature and man” and reviews Eisenstein’s dispute with Griffith and with Stalinists. With key points derived from Eisenstein in place, Deleuze shifts to the post WW II era, reviewing the three forms of rupture, with the third  (the rupture with metaphor) as best illustrated in films by Duras and Godard, to which Deleuze adds a fourth series of rupture in figurative language: the rise of artificiality, the function of literality, and the collapse of interior monologue. Citing Dos Passos’s fiction as an influence on cinema effects, Deleuze argues that the shift toward plurilingualism is accompanied, notably in Godard, with cinema becoming “serial,” and might be linked to so-called “serial” or atonal music. Deleuze draws characteristics from Robbe-Grillet, and to address how such images might be attained, Deleuze turns to examples from Godard’s cinema, how the series created for each film are situated within a genre or a category. After tracing different Godardian genres, Deleuze concludes by asking participants to consider in the next session what the connections might exist between categories invented by Godard.

 

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema and Thought, 1984-1985

Lecture 09, 15 January 1985 (Cinema Course 75)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, Tounsi Mehdy correction : N.O. (Part 1) and Nadia Ouis (Part 2 and Part 3); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

English Translation Forthcoming

Notes

For archival purposes, the augmented and new time stamped version of the complete transcription was completed in August 2021. Additional revisions were added in February 2024.

Lectures in this Seminar

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Reading Date: October 30, 1984
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