May 18, 1982
You see roughly where we are: … We’ve move on from the action-image since everything we have done for several sessions … had developed this notion, this concept of “pure optical-auditory images”. And a cinema that is based or that produces optical-auditory images as pure, this is what allowed us to group together, what? A whole aggregate that included both Italian neorealism and the two aspects … and the new French cinema with its two branches, … namely: New Wave, on one hand, what we called, at one moment … the “Right Bank,” and then the other trend that was roughly simultaneous, the Resnais tendency. And in fact, we will need to see how these are not the same thing. But for now, I’m looking for the common denominator of all this.
Seminar Introduction
In the first year of Deleuze’s consideration of cinema and philosophy, he develops an alternative to the psychoanalytic and semiological approaches to film studies by drawing from Bergson’s theses on perception and C.S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs. While he devotes this first year predominantly to what he considers to be the primary characteristic of cinema of the first half of the 20th century, the movement-image, he finishes the year by emphasizing the importance of the post-World War II shift toward the domination of the time-image in cinema.
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
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Deleuze continues to confront the concept of pure optical and sound images outlined in the previous session based on Italian Neo-Realism and the different branches of French New Wave, thus beginning to recap the first year’s study of the movement-image with some examples presented concisely in chapter 1 of The Time-Image. Unfortunately, the session (the first thirty minutes in particular) reveals Deleuze to be uncommonly disturbed by a loudly squeaking door due to students’ comings and goings, and as a result, his focus is constantly broken, agitating him, producing several breaks. Once he gains greater ease gradually, the session corresponds generally to different sections of The Time-Image (notably, chapters 1 and 3). After outlining the commonalities between the French New Novel and the New Wave cinema (of the 1950s-1960s), and Robbe-Grillet’s four propositions on the New Novel, Deleuze traces what he calls the collapse of previous, traditional sensory-motor situations (e.g., the old realism, the action-image) which prepares the emergence of pure optical and sound situations. Drawing from Robbe-Grillet’s reorientation of realism toward surfaces and lines, referring to a total subjectivity, Deleuze takes Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” as an exemplar. Then, in the second part, he returns to Bergson’s Matter and Memory to consider nuances around memories and perceptions, and he discusses in this vein Wyler’s “Jezebel”, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane”, and Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year in Marienbad”. Deleuze reflects on how one makes mental jumps in order to create memory circuits of recognition, linking this to an introduction of a study of time in Resnais. He concludes by stating that in this session, he has sketched out the program for another year, namely the problem of time-images in cinema, when the optical and sound images enter into direct relation with the complex temporal structures constituting the very object of cinema. However, the session closes on a question from Georges Comtesse on “Marienbad” who insists that this is not a film about time.
Gilles Deleuze
On the Movement-Image, Bergsonian Lessons on the Cinema
19th session, 18 May 1982
Transcription: Andrée Manifacier (part 1) and Céline Romagnoli (part 2) ; supplementary revisions to the transcription and time-stamp, Charles J. Stivale.
Translated by Christian Kerslake
Part 1
[We are coming] to the end, and we will have to go very quickly because I would like to do a final session of recapitulation, and above all of recapitulation of all the missed opportunities, where it would be you who would do the talking, pointing out things we have not seen, and which we should have seen, that kind of thing. Then I continue.
You can see roughly where we have got to. As a matter of fact, I would have liked us to have already left behind the action-image without realizing it, and perhaps also to have got a bit further on besides. We’ve left behind the action-image because of everything we’ve done over the last few sessions. [1:00] [Aggravating noise of a creaking door, students arriving late]. All that we have … Damn! … [Pause; the noise happens again; laughter] … all we have done is to isolate the notion, the concept, of pure optical-sound images. Now a cinema which is based on, or which produces, optical-sound images as pure [2:00] permits us to group together what? A whole set [of things], a whole set that includes both Italian neo-realism and the two aspects … [Another noise from the door]. No! Please, pity, please! Agh [Pause; one can hear Deleuze’s groans] … Agh! Look at all that … yes, both Italian neo-realism and the new French cinema with its two branches, with what is commonly designated as its two branches, [3:00] namely: the New Wave, on the one hand, which at one time was called (I believe I am not mistaken) the Right Bank [rive droite], and then the other trend, which was more or less simultaneous, the Resnais tendency.
And we will have to look into how it is not the same thing, but for the moment, I am looking for the common denominator. The Resnais tendency was called, I believe, the Left Bank, whilst the New Wave coming from the Cahiers [du cinéma] was the Right Bank. But the Right Bank cinema, and the Left Bank cinema, and then the new American cinema that we encountered, all that constitutes a whole ensemble in which really we leave behind [4:00] the domain of sensory-motor images – whether they belong to the classical form S-A-S or to the classical form A-S-A. Sensory-motor images are left behind in order to attain something that has now begun to take shape for us, but which remains very unusual in its status: optical images and sound images, pure optical images, pure sound images.
And it is at this level that perhaps something was realized that had long been sought for and which had perhaps at last been found [Another noise; pause] – I’m going to have a fit! I can feel a crisis coming on! [Deleuze whispers, either to himself or to someone nearby] Ah! Here are some more! And it’s not over! [5:00] [Pause, door noises continue as students come in late] Listen … [Deleuze gets up] [Interruption of the recording]. [5:25]
[Sounds of students, Deleuze comes back] Yes, I can usually handle it, but right now I can’t bear it. Okay … Now this production of these kinds of images, I say that in a way they realized a dream which was common, which was common … [The door creaks again] [6:00] [Deleuze is heard murmuring: I’m going to get a revolver] … which was common, well, which had existed for a very long time in cinema, and it was the same dream that was also posited for many in painting or in literature, which was: how, in a certain fashion, does one overcome the duality between an abstract cinema and a narrative-illustrative cinema? I would say that just as the duality is overcome between a painting … [Long pause; sounds of the creaking door, whispering] [7:00] It blows the mind. Yes, you see how to overcome all that [Laughter] … I think that especially in what we can call, very broadly, the French school before the war, it was an absolute concern, it was a very active concern for them: how to overcome this duality, since they were very sensitive to the existence of an abstract, purely optical cinema. [8:00] On the other hand, forms of narration existed and were emerging, both of the S-A-S and the A-S-A type, and they were now looking for something else, even at the level of Grémillon, of L’Herbier: how to transcend this duality of abstract and figurative-illustrative-narrative? Well … [Music is heard from outside]. Oh well, that’s very nice … Nice, but listen, I’m trying to settle down and get on with it.
And I think that, for example, if you go back – we will have to do it, but happily not today – if you go back to Artaud’s texts on the cinema [9:00], you see that he constantly comes back – and in my opinion, he didn’t invent it, this theme – he constantly comes back to a basic proposition: how to get out of this duality? And he keeps on insisting: ‘Abstract’ cinema is purely optical: yes. But it does not determine affects. It does not attain, it does not attain real affects. But of narrative-illustrative cinema, he says: not interesting. And he goes so far – we will see some very curious texts by Artaud – he goes so far as to ask how to attain “optical” situations[1] [10:00] – the word is in Artaud himself, when I found it while re-reading Artaud, I was extremely happy – how to attain “optical” situations that “shake the soul”?[2] Curious, this formulation! Since he himself participated in making a film,[3] that will pose [a question] for us … and particularly since he broke with the director of this film, saying that he had been betrayed, and so on. What had he wanted? Obviously, it’s not a question of saying that he had a presentiment of what will happen afterward, that he has a premonition of neo-realism or the New Wave, obviously not. But what was he really looking for, and how is it that, by absolutely different means, it all comes back into play later on: that is to say, optical-sound images, which shake, or which are meant to shake, as he says, the soul?
We have seen how these optical images go beyond [11:00] the action-image. They go beyond the action-image because they break with the linkage of perceptions and actions. They break with the linkage of perceptions and actions, at what level? Understand, at a double level: both of the spectator who sees the image, obviously, but above all, at the level of the character, since it is not abstract cinema, at the level of the character we see on the screen. The character we see on the screen is no longer in a sensory-motor situation, or at least it is nuanced. Of course, he still is in it a little bit, but we saw, with the whole theme of the stroll [balade], with the whole theme of the character who goes for a stroll, and who finds himself caught up in situations and events outside his control, we have seen how this character was a new type of character, [12:00] just as there was a new type of character in the novel, and that the only way to define this character on the screen was to say: yes, he is in a very particular type of situation, he is in pure optical or sound situations. And in a sense, if you watch it, I’d say that Tati, the comedy of Tati, is a comedy of the optical-sound image. What does Tati do? Absolutely nothing but stroll about [une démarche].
But what is funny here? It is the play of optical and sound images for themselves with this character who strolls [déambule], the walk [promenade] of the character amid the pure optical-sound situations. We have absolutely left the sensory-motor process behind, and it is because this cinema has left the sensory-motor process behind that I can say: we have therefore left the action-image. [13:00] How is it that at the same time, I would suggest, we have more profoundly left the movement-image, and we are in the process of approaching, in effect, something we have kept in reserve from the beginning, since the beginning of the year: we have been preoccupied with the movement-image, but we have been saying all the time: beware, it is only one kind of image. And we made our movement-image ramify in all directions, perception-image, action-image, affection-image, with each type of image in turn ramifying itself. So we now have all manner of categories, we have 20, we have 30, we have as many as you like, whatever we needed. But the movement-image which branched out in this way was only one type of image.
Nevertheless, optical-sound images seem to remain movement-images. Something moves. But observe: yes and no. [14:00] I say yes and no because is it by chance that the fixed shot or sequence shot takes on a fundamental importance in this kind of cinema, in liaison with the optical-sound images? That does not prevent that, in many cases, there is no fixed shot, there is no sequence shot, and there is really movement, a movement both of the camera and of the movement captured by the camera. Yes, there is movement, but what is important is that when the movement is reduced to the interplay of optical and sound images, perhaps the image then – although affected by movement on its own account (but it is no longer at all the same movement as in the sensory-motor schema) – perhaps then these images, optical and sound, [15:00] even in movement, enter fundamentally into relation with another kind of image which for its part is no longer movement-image.
So, I would say: the concept … [Door noises and movements of people] Oh, listen [Silence, then laughter]. But what time is it? It’s tragic [16:00] It’s tragic. [Pause; general silence] What’s strange is that I don’t normally notice it by this point, but today … Well, you’ll see … Right, let’s see, I no longer know what I want you to see, but I sense that I’d like you to see something. So, therefore, you’ll see, you’ll see.
So … [Pause] I would say, yes, this is going on at the same time in cinema and elsewhere. And in fact, I insisted on the encounter for us, for example, in France, between the New Cinema and [17:00] the New Novel. I’ll take four basic propositions that Robbe-Grillet presents as the fundamental elements of the New Novel. And their translation into cinematic terms is carried out immediately. Which is to say: how did the same thing happen in cinema?
First proposition: privileged character of … these propositions you will find scattered in his theoretical collection, For a New Novel[4] – first proposition: the privileged character of ‘the optical’, [18:00] privilege of the eye. Hence the name given, once again, to the New Novel from the beginning: the ‘school of the gaze’. Notice in fact that it should rather be said that it is a privilege of the eye-ear. It is no less sonorous than optical. And why is it that, according to Robbe-Grillet, … why is it that he upholds this privilege at least of the eye – since in the pages I’m thinking of, he only talks of the optical – why this privilege of the eye, and at a pinch, of the ear? He says because it’s the only … [Creaking of the door again]. Because he says that in the end, you have to make do with what you have, he is very nuanced – these are practical remarks – you have to make do with what you have, and if you think about it, the eye is [19:00] the least ‘corrupted’ organ. And what he means by ‘corrupted’? [Door noises and movements; pause]
I am in a situation where I’m hesitating; I’m hesitating. Am I going to have a nervous breakdown or am I not going to? Because… I would have to say to myself: if I have a nervous breakdown … Yes, no … [Someone speaks]. What?
A student: You’ve got to breathe.
Another student: You’ve got to breathe.
Deleuze: Yes, you’ve got to breathe, but maybe I want to have it, my breakdown. [Laughter]
Student: You’re not serious!
Another student: You’re laughing! [20:00]
Deleuze: Well, it’s a rictus, it’s no longer a [smile] [Laughter] … Oh well, listen … [Students talk to each other]. Still, it’s not in my head today, is it, it’s [the door] not usually like that?
Various students: It’s often like that … You’ll have to ask to get the door greased … It’s a storm … It’s the noise of the door.
Deleuze: Well, listen, I’m going to pop out and see the secretary, as I’ve got some things to do there, and then … I’m sorry, but it’s not my [21:00] fault! [Interruption in the recording] [21:02]
Deleuze: … Right, yes, so earlier, it was last week… [Laughter] I’m saying, yes, [Robbe-Grillet] said something that is in the end quite simple: what prevents us from seeing [voir]? In this first point, what is concerned is necessarily the most concrete thing possible. How is it that we see nothing? You understand already what is in question here. As I’m looking for common denominators: Godard also says the same thing all the time. But we are in a situation where we see nothing, we do not see images. Obviously, they do not tell us what to see, they are images! But all that, no, it’s not … You are in front of the images, but you don’t see. And why don’t we see an image, or why don’t we see what is in an image? Well, for all sorts of reasons. It’s because at [22:00] every moment … I will summarize everything by saying (it’s not difficult) that it’s because we live in a world of sensory-motor images and extracting pure optical or sound images already supposes a whole mode of production which is the domain of art, while the images that make our world are sensory-motor images. So, in a way, it’s inevitable that we don’t see anything.
It’s a whole labor: to extract images which are given to be seen [qui donnent à voir] Our images, they are not given to be seen. Common images are not given to be seen; they are truly ‘common’ in the exact sense of the word. And why do ‘common’ sensory-motor images give us nothing to see? They give us nothing to see, and here Robbe-Grillet becomes more precise, because [23:00] finally, from the moment we look at something, we are assailed by what? We are assailed by recollections [souvenirs], associations of ideas, metaphors, significations. All of that is not the same, but it’s like a cluster of shadows that prevents us from seeing. We already have in our heads: what does this signify, what does this resemble? What does it remind us of? And in fact, this is our sad condition; it’s a very sad condition, you know, afflicting everyone, and one is just like everyone else, unless one pays a great deal of attention! People cannot see anything, without it reminding them of something else.
And all this literature and all this culture of memory, of the association of ideas, [24:00] all this childishness, all these metaphors that assail us and in which we live, all that, it absolutely destroys us! And so Robbe-Grillet launches his great attack on significations, metaphors, etc., thinking that the eye – and this is where he will privilege the optical – is the essential organ, and taking everything else into account, relatively speaking the organ most suited to shaking up the apparatus of metaphors, significations, associations, in order to see nothing but what it sees, that is to say, lines and colors, but above all the lines. This is [25: 00] Robbe-Grillet’s first remark.
Second remark: but beware! If we suppose an eye which is therefore extracted from sensory-motor situations and their cortège (signifying, associative, mnemonic, etc.), if we suppose such an eye, what does it see, this eye? It sees images. But what are ‘images’? Images are not objects; they are descriptions of objects. And here [Robbe-Grillet] puts forward the notion of ‘descriptions of objects’, to which he is quite attached since, according to him, the New Novel, but also the new cinema, will not make us see objects or persons, but will make us see [26:00] descriptions. What is optical is the description of persons and objects.
Moreover, [it] is not excluded that in certain forms – and this is maybe where the art would begin (but also maybe not) – the description replaces the object. Not only would it be valid for the object, but it would itself be the true object. It would replace the object, it would destroy the object, it would erase the object.[5] And Robbe-Grillet tells us: yes, in the classical novel, if you take a description in Balzac, you will see that it aims at an object or a situation. But in the New Novel, it is not like that. The description has replaced the object, [27:00] the description has erased the object. Page 73 [of For a New Novel]: “Optical description is, in effect, the kind which most readily establishes the fixation of distances: the gaze [le regard], if it seeks to remain simple gaze, leaves things in their respective place”[6] – that is to say, without metaphor or association of ideas – “the gaze, if it seeks to remain simple gaze, leaves things in their respective place. But it also involves risks. Coming to rest, without preparation, on a detail, the gaze isolates it, extracts it, seeks to develop it, fails, insists, no longer manages either to develop the detail or return it to its place. …Yet these risks remain among the least … We must work with the means at hand [les moyens du bord].”[7]
And what, then, will be the means at hand of the pure optical description? Page 147: [of For a New Novel] [28:00] [Pause while Deleuze looks for the passage in the book] In the old novel, “description served to situate the chief contours of a setting, then to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements […] It once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality” now on the contrary, “it asserts its creative function. Finally, it once made us see things” – in the old novel – “and now it seems to destroy them, as if its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether.”[8] — [Noise of the door]. Not so closed then? — “It is not rare, as a matter of fact, in these modern novels, to encounter a description that starts from nothing; it does not afford, first of all, a general view, it seems to derive from a tiny fragment without importance, [29:00] … starting from which it invents lines, planes, an architecture; and such description particularly seems to be inventing its object when it suddenly contradicts, repeats, corrects itself, bifurcates, etc. Yet we begin to glimpse something, and we suppose that this something will now become clearer. But the lines of the drawing accumulate, grow heavier, cancel one another out, displace themselves, so that the image is put in question as it is constructed.”[9]
“The image is put in question as it is constructed”; for example, there is a film that is the very example of this procedure, “the image is put in question as it is constructed”, Godard’s Carabiniers [1963], which has a very precise technique, for which there is no other description than “the image is put in question as it is constructed.” But … [Deleuze reads on:] “A few paragraphs more and, when the description comes to an end, we realize that it [30:00] has left nothing standing behind it: it has instituted a double movement of creation and of erasure [gommage].”[10] Here, then, is the second principle that Robbe-Grillet seeks to isolate: optical description.
You see: first principle: privilege the eye; second principle: not the optical object, but the optical description. Third principle: Why? Why insist so much on the optical description which ends up erasing the object, replacing the object, substituting itself for the object? It’s because – and this is why Robbe-Grillet did not like the expression ‘school of the gaze’ at all – it’s because he holds firmly to the idea that pure optical images are not at all objective or objectivist images. The New Novel is much rather, he will say, but perhaps then exaggerating the other aspect, [31:00] the novel of total subjectivity; it is the novel of total subjectivity, hence the importance of not linking the pure optical image or the pure sound image, to the objectivity of the object, to the objectivity of the object [Deleuze repeats], to the objectivity of something. If the pure optical image is pure description that erases the object, it is obvious that it refers back to a total subjectivity.
And in fact, I would maintain that what has sometimes been called ‘the optical situation’, is this third great idea of Robbe-Grillet in his theoretical writings, the idea of the New Novel as the novel of subjectivity. It’s very simple to understand. Again, you have to imagine yourself in pure optical situations. I’ll take my new example here from a case we’ve already [32:00] studied from American cinema, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [1976]. How is the protagonist in his meandering [balade] (he meanders because he drives a taxi), how is he in a pure optical situation? It is true that he is in a sensory-motor situation in relation to his car in so far as he drives it. But his attention as floating, with regard to its tension, makes a contribution to psychopathology, to the pathology of the taxi driver.
Why is he delirious? Why does he fantasize? If we know the answer, we understand why this type is fundamentally racist, why they stew away in a kind of enormous racist delirium. In any case, Scorsese showed very, very well – but with our own taxi drivers, [33:00] it also works very well – that they are indeed in a rather delirious situation. I mean from the point of view of occupational disease, the occupational disease of the taxi driver, you understand, he’s stuck inside his little box, where he is in a sensory-motor situation, excitation-reaction. A car is coming, you have to avoid it, you have to overtake it, all this is purely sensory-motor.
But simultaneously with that, we can clearly see how something else can be mixed in; here is a very good example of those nuances we wish to bring out each time. Of course, he has a whole sensory region of himself that is engaged in the sensory-motor process, but he also has a part left to himself, which gets bizarrely mixed up with it, and which is in a pure optical situation and no longer in a sensory-motor situation at all, namely his trailing [traînante] attention, where what’s happening on the sidewalk – and this is what Scorsese shows admirably; this is what makes Scorsese’s film a modern film [34:00] … his floating attention, where what’s happening on the sidewalk is no longer grasped in the sensory-motor situation at all – namely: I see, I act in function of what I see – but in a pure optical situation. He passes through the streets: he sees a group of prostitutes on the sidewalk, next to three guys who are fighting, next to a small child who rummages in a trash can, who is next to … etc., and he is exactly, all things considered, in the same situation as Rossellini’s bourgeois woman in Europe ‘51 [1952] who, for other reasons, but also for reasons of class … if you will, true sociology is not what this cinema represents, contrary to what was believed by the first commentators on neo-realism; [35:00] on the contrary, in this cinema itself, [this situation] is much deeper since, in the class situation of the bourgeois woman in Europe ’51, it is the factory, the factory, well, she’s in a purely optical situation, and it is because she is in a purely optical situation … You will say to me, everyone is in a purely optical situation in relation to a factory unless they are a worker – not at all. We might pass ten times in front of Renault, and remain in a sensory-motor situation, saying: “Oh, that’s just a factory”. But what would an optical situation be? What does Rossellini’s bourgeois woman do? She has a capacity [un pouvoir], she does not make a special effort. It is not a special effort, she is standing there and all of a sudden, she says: “But what is that? What is that? What do I see in it that is intolerable? What difference is there between that and a prison? What’s the difference?” [36:00] This is the optical situation. This is where we already find the theme that we will never cease to rediscover. The optical situation is not at all a situation of indifference, it is a situation which fundamentally permeates and shakes the soul.
When the guy in Taxi Driver goes out for his meandering drive [balade], he is in an optical situation in relation to the streets, but, if you like, in a sensory-motor situation in his relation to the roadway. But in relation to the streets and to everything going on in the streets, he is in a pure optical situation. If need be, he will look through his rearview window. He sees there, parading by, a pure optical and sonorous parade, and at the same time, what is turning round in his head? You can see that the joints, the sensory-motor articulations, have been severed. In an optical situation, what is fundamentally severed [37:00] is the perception-movement, perception-action articulation. This, as we saw at the end of the last session, is where those maladapted gestures and the like arise, when one is in an optical situation where the detail rings false, as [Robbe-Grillet] says[11]: the importance of the detail that rings false, the maladroit action, the frozen action, or the action that occurs at an unsuitable moment, etc.
So, I don’t know what else there is; I’m already losing my mind today. Ah yes. So, in relation to the roadway, he’s in the ordinary sensory-motor situation, but in relation to the sidewalk, he’s in a pure optical situation. And this optical situation where the perception-action linkages, or the perception-movement linkages seem severed – we’ll see what that means, this was [38:00] what I was talking about at the end of last time – they seem cut, interrupted, allowing for an outbreak of delirium, in particular of racist delirium: [Growling:] “Oh, but this no longer feels like home”, or “Everywhere you look, all the women are whores”, etc. etc., a common delirium in the mind of the taxi driver, but which you cannot understand, it seems to me, independently of the pure optical situations that – how to put it? – call up concretions that are now fantastical, now delusional, now dreamlike, a whole world that we could broadly qualify – but we’ll see where that leads us – as the ‘imaginary’, the situation of fantasies, of delirium. [39:00] Hence the final delirium of the taxi driver, his passage to the act at that moment; when he reconnects with the sensory-motor level, it will be under the form of catastrophe, slaughter, even if he hesitates, still subject to his awkward or alternative side: “Shall I kill myself? No, I will kill someone else”, etc., etc. So here is the third characteristic: pure optical images are images invested with a total subjectivity.
And finally, the last characteristic of Robbe-Grillet is when, if only to mark the difference between the generations, he says, yes of course (ultimately, he was paying homage, he does not belong with those pathetic types who tell us that Sartre is over and out of date), but in a very nuanced way, there is indeed a generational difference between Sartre and us. [40:00] And he attempts to situate this generational difference; he says obviously Nausea was very important for us; the whole of Sartre’s work, all that was essential. But what distinguishes the New Novel from a novel, for example, like Nausea? He says, well, it’s precisely that we – he wasn’t saying that it is better – we have been led to highlight pure optical situations, whereas in Sartre, there is a presence of the world, but it is not primarily an optical presence, not an optical presence at all. And then nor is it, how should I put it … he didn’t suppress all significations; even if he translated them into the absurd, or into nausea, it is still a mode of signification. Nausea, the absurd, Robbe-Grillet says, for our part, we do not even say that the world is absurd anymore, [41:00] because while it was once perhaps true, now it’s over; for us, it is not absurd … This makes me think of a remark by Altman: the world is not absurd, since the characters are just as absurd as the world. In any case, the problem is no longer that of the absurd, that is no longer the problem. And he also demarcates himself from Sartre by saying: for our part, obviously we no longer believe in commitment [engagement], we no longer believe in a literature of commitment. You can see how this really forms the fourth principle of pure optical situations.
Why does he no longer believe in commitment? For lots of reasons. An engaged literature, he says, no, that’s not the problem for us, and he says, one will call that ‘art for art’s sake’, but that’s not it, that’s not what’s at issue. We have ended up thinking that the important thing is that art makes its own proper mutations. No one believes in socialist realism anymore [he says]; but he says all this without being too facile, without jibing too much, which is good. [42:00] We no longer believe in socialist realism, we no longer believe in commitment, we think that art should rather make its own mutations, and that is how … [Interruption of the recording] [42:10]
… In this perspective, the proper task of this art – I am not saying of all art, it’s really about one kind of venture, he is talking about a precise kind of venture – the task of this art, it was what? It was in fact to produce optical and sound images. And how was it active? This was not commitment; no, it’s not commitment. And yet, it is not at all indifferent, since, once again, that would presuppose we do not know what such an image is. We live in a world of clichés. Obviously, a shameless advertiser, a shameless publicist would say: “Producing sound and optical images is what we’ve being doing since [43:00] …, that’s my job.” Not at all. He produces the opposite, he produces clichés. He produces clichés, that is to say, he produces visual excitations that will trigger suitable behavior in the perceiver, the spectator. Namely, he produces a cliché for a box of noodles, and the cliché is supposed to trigger people to “go buy this brand of noodles.” And thereupon the shameless publicist says, “I am the poet of the modern world.” Well, poet my ass, because it’s … obviously, there’s no need to say it, it’s the opposite of all poetry. But what is difficult to pinpoint is how it is the opposite of all poetry. Evidently, it is the opposite of all poetry, because poetry, [44:00] at least at the level that is specific to it – I do not say that this holds for all poetry – at the level that is specific to it, is about erasing clichés, suppressing clichés, breaking sensory-motor associations, to make emerge, beyond the clichés, pure optical and sound images which, instead of triggering predictable behaviors in individuals, will shake the individual in the depths of his soul.
Hence the ongoing theme, as we know, of Godard, but obviously, it’s true both that we live in a world of clichés and that we do not see and do not even know what an image is, because we don’t know to see an image, and we don’t know to see what there is in an image. [Pause] [45:00]. Hence the whole theme that one doesn’t need an art of commitment, one needs an art that has its own action in itself, that is, which provokes in us, what? Which, producing images, literally unheard-of images in the case of sound images, and visual images with a certain indefinable quality, is such that it makes us grasp what is intolerable, and stirs up our love and compassion, to speak like Rossellini. You will tell me that all that is passive. No, the construction of a revolutionary movement, in which such a production would participate, by [46:00] producing images which make us see the intolerable and which stir our deepest love and compassion, well, it goes without saying that such an art could very well participate in a revolutionary machine, but nevertheless this is not at all a committed literature, it is not a committed cinema; it is a cinema of the pure optical-sound image.
These, then, are Robbe-Grillet’s four characteristics. I would say that they apply to the New Novel, but also to the whole of the new realism, the new French cinema and the new American cinema. So, a question arises. I would like to specify it because things will go on to become a little more complicated. And since today is off to a bad start, who knows what’s going to happen?
You can see the point I’ve reached. What I consider now as fact, [47:00] is that these optical and sound images are something other than action-images. But what still concerns me is their status, that is to say: these optical and sound images, what are they going to stir, what are they going to germinate in us? [Pause] What are they going to give birth to in us? What do I mean? Well, I’m always coming back to the same problem: are there other kinds of image than the movement-image, and what would these be, the images of another kind, images which will no longer be movement-images? It’s because of this that I would say we are far from having arrived at finding a real status for the optical-sound image. [48:00] Well, what would this be? Well, very broadly, I would say that it is necessary to start again from new foundations; we are completely done with the action-image. The conclusion we arrive at now could be entitled ‘Beyond the Movement-Image’, my question being once again: do optical and sound images … [Noise of the door] Is it shut? Ah, I think it gotten calmer — Do optical and sound images give rise to images in us, or give rise to images of another type beyond, images that are no longer [49:00] movement-images?
Well, here, then, I propose to you – as then, it will coincide, our end will coincide with our beginning – I propose to you to come back to that author we have left behind, and yet whom in a way we have never really left, namely Bergson. Because recall the point we arrived at very quickly at the beginning of our sessions on Bergson. We said that there was a very famous thesis by Bergson which consists in saying: positions in space are instantaneous sections [coupes][12] of movement, and real movement is something other than a sum of positions in space. But we saw that this thesis pointed beyond towards another, much more profound thesis, where he says to us: no, it is no longer that [50:00] positions in space are instantaneous sections of movement, but where he would say to us, much more profoundly: movement in space is a temporal slice [coupe] of becoming or duration. Movement in space is a temporal slice of becoming or of duration; movement in space is a temporal slice [Pause] of becoming or of duration. [Pause]
What is meant by that, exactly? It will mean that, literally, the movement-image was only a slice of … what, must we say of a ‘deeper’ image? The movement-image would be the temporal slice of, or the temporal perspective on, [51:00] a more profound, more voluminous image. The movement of translation, movement in space, thus appears to us in a very different way to how Bergson is usually presented, and it is so interesting, this idea of a temporal slice, of a temporal perspective and no longer a spatial perspective, a temporal slice of a more voluminous image. For his own part, as we will see, Bergson gave a name to this kind of image, he called it the memory-image [image-mémoire], or the recollection-image [image-souvenir]. The movement-image was thus only the temporal slice [52:00] of a more profound image, the memory-image.
What was this memory? What strikes me most is that in many texts, even every time, almost every time Bergson attempts to define memory, he defines it not in a single way, but in two ways. He defines it in two ways. I will take a text precisely from Matter and Memory. I’m always asking you to trust me a little, that is, you may have the impression that I’m starting all over again and talking about completely different things. In fact, we will rediscover our problem very clearly, very quickly, but I have complete need of this apparent detour.
Here is a passage from the first chapter of [53:00] Matter and Memory: “memory under these two forms …” – so we learn that memory has two forms – “memory under these two forms, covering as it does with a sheet of recollections [une nappe de souvenirs] a core of immediate perception …”[13] First form: it covers a perception with a sheet of recollections; it covers a perception with a sheet of recollections [Deleuze repeats]. I would say that this is memory in so far as it actualizes a recollection in a present perception. It actualizes recollections, a sheet of recollections, in a present perception. This is the first aspect of memory. [Pause] [54:00]
And now I continue: “… and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment”, “and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment,”[14] Wait, so is there another memory? Are there two memories, or is it that these are two aspects of the same thing? It is very curious. The first one is at first sight not that difficult for us. When we are told that memory is what covers a perception with a sheet of recollections, we say to ourselves, that’s a bit strange. Why does he express himself like that? No doubt, we say to ourselves, it’s bizarre. He is using a very poetic expression. What does he want to say? Well, we will find out. This is, once again, memory in so far as it actualizes recollections in a perception. [55:00]
Imagine I see someone, and I say to myself, “Oh yes, I’ve met him, he’s the one I saw yesterday at such and such a place.” So, I have a little sheet of recollections that actualizes itself in a very simple perception. But it’s also … This is the first memory. So, let’s call it, keeping Bergson’s word, let’s call it ‘sheet’ – we’ll look into whether it is necessary to substitute other words for it – the ‘sheet’-memory.
Then he tells us that there is another memory, one that contracts two moments into each other. Let us take the simplest case: the previous moment and the present moment. At this moment, there would [already] be memory everywhere, because what I call my present is a contraction of moments. [56:00] Therefore, such a contraction is more or less tight [serrée]; indeed, my present varies. My present has a variable duration, not without limits, but sometimes I have relatively relaxed presents, sometimes I have very condensed presents. It all depends on what is going on. But what I call my present – not at each instant, I cannot even say at each instant – what each time I call my present, is a contraction of instants; I contract several successive instants. If we also call this second aspect memory, then there is a contraction-memory which is not at all the same thing as sheet-memory. The first actualizes a sheet of recollections in a present perception. The second contracts several moments [57:00] in a present perception. It is not the same thing [Pause].
These two aspects, contraction and sheet, why does this evoke in me something that concerns cinema? If I had had the time – and I’ll assume that you’re familiar with it, that it’s familiar to most of you – if I had had the time, we would have had to devote a session to something very well-known in the history of cinema, namely the problem of depth of field. When, in connection with certain techniques, a depth of field effect had been used or had been [58:00] obtained in the cinematographic image, and when it then went on to be rediscovered under new conditions (it had already been used for a long time, it seems, and at a certain point fell out of use, the histories of cinema tell us), with new technical means, it underwent a resurrection at the hands of Orson Welles, with the discovery of what would go on to be called a sequence shot, no longer a shot sequence, but a sequence shot with depth of field. The whole thing is so well-known, otherwise I would have spent a long time on it, but here, at the point where we are, we have to go quickly, you’ll grant me that. And I’ll just note that it’s interesting that the great images which are always cited as examples [59:00] typical of great depth of field images are from Welles first of all; only after him did the procedure go on to be generalized: in Welles’s Citizen Kane, and also in [William] Wyler – is that how it is pronounced? – Wyler – in a celebrated film by Wyler, Jezebel [1938].[15]
Let me tell you about two depth of field sequence shots. In Jezebel, there is a very curious sequence shot. The camera is at ground level, at the level of the floor, behind the man’s back; [60:00] so we see the man from behind, he has a cane, he is in evening clothes, and he is holding on to the cane with all his might. And the woman in front, we see her from the front, she has a very striking, very complicated dress, and is staring at the man; it’s a rather long depth of field sequence shot that allows us, as one says, to embrace the totality of the situation, and to embrace it in depth. In fact, how could we have done so otherwise? Well, it could have been done through a shot-reverse shot procedure; you would have an image for [61:00] the man and his cane, and then a reverse shot of the woman and her dress, and one would understand that they were both looking at each other, but we the spectators cannot see it. But the depth of field gives you … [Unfinished sentence] What is more [with the shot-reverse shot procedure], one does not see [the interaction?]. No doubt one could have seen it, nevertheless, the shot-reverse shot procedure is ruinous, why? In this specific case, it would take too much time. This is not always why. But in this specific case, it would take too much time.
Here, with depth of field, you have full simultaneity. You have the simultaneity of the man who is clearly furious with the way the woman has dressed and tries to calm his mounting crisis. He’s in the same situation I was in earlier [Laughter], he cannot take it anymore, he’s going to crack; and she is looking at him [62:00] with an air that is simultaneously a little fearful and completely provocative. She has put on a dress that makes her stand out when she is already in a delicate situation. All that is going to turn out badly. The guy is going beserk, she is utterly provocative: there you have an image that has remained classic, which is held up as one of the most beautiful examples of depth of field.
Understand why I cite this long example; it’s one of the finest cases of the contraction-image, a very fine case of the contraction-image, in which the depth of field ensures the contraction of a shot and a reverse shot or, if you prefer, of what would have been presented by other procedures in the form of two successive moments. Contaminating the two moments brings about a contraction of the two moments. Similarly, [63:00] in a famous depth of field from Citizen Kane, his second wife has just attempted suicide … the famous depth of field, the second wife has just attempted suicide [Deleuze repeats], and the depth of field shows us in close-up the glass she used to put her poisons in, in a medium shot, the woman lying down, the bed and the woman lying down, and in the background, Kane, the character, who breaks down the door. In other procedures, you could have had a sequence, a sequence of shots (and not a sequence shot), that is to say, you would have seen on the other side of the door, Kane [64:00] breaking the door down, then entering into the bedroom where he sees his wife and the glass; thus a sequence of shots. Here, Welles’s famous sequence shot gives you a contraction-image. Several moments are contracted.
Why is that important to me? You know well why it’s important to me. I would say that the first function of depth of field is to produce contraction-images. You will tell me that these are movement-images; okay, I don’t care, that’s not what interests me. What I attribute to depth of field is to bring about contractions that one cannot obtain, temporal contractions that one cannot obtain with [65:00] other means.
But is it necessary to immediately add that the depth of field also has the inverse effect? It’s because after all, if I have taken that up, if I have taken up this example, it’s because I have an idea in the head. I mean it’s well known that Welles, in a specific way, is a great filmmaker of what? If I continue my very arbitrary classifications, I would say that he belongs to a certain tradition, the great filmmakers of time. There aren’t that many of them. Even if it is not a strength of the Americans (the problem of time in cinema), I think that if there is one American – but it is not by chance that it is this one, with his anti-American side – [66:00] if there is one American who has truly created, who has attained to a cinema of time, it is Welles. The great filmmakers of time, you can sense that it’s going to be … Who is going to interest me very much from now on? We could make a list; everyone can make their own list, right? For my part, I can see immediately that in America, it’s Welles; in France, it’s Resnais – I’m not saying these are the only ones –; in Italy, it’s Visconti. In Canada, there is one who appears prodigious to me, it’s Pierre Perrault. But it’s a very specific group, the filmmakers who truly had the time-image as their problem.
You will tell me, of course, that all this can be reconciled with the movement-image. Okay. But I feel that we are sniffing out, making contact with a peculiar type [67:00] of image. The structure, what is it? Just like in music, there are musicians who are musicians of time. What they set to music is time. What they render sonorous is time. But they are not better, they are no more brilliant than the others, no more brilliant; in one sense, it is no more difficult to render time sonorous than to render space sonorous, or to render anything sonorous. But we assume that there are a certain number of filmmakers – and you’ll grant me this even if all your lists are different from each other – whose work cannot be grasped at all, quite literally, unless one asks, in effect, what temporal structure is present in the images [68:00] they make us see. They make us see time. Okay, I’m saying a platitude when I say that time is an obsession of Welles, okay … But what structure of time is involved? As Robbe-Grillet would say, well, there is the time of Faulkner, for example, and this is not the time of Proust, yes, of course.[16]
When is there a problem of time? It’s not difficult. There is a problem of time from the moment time is abstracted from the form of succession. I say that a filmmaker is not interested in time if everything that concerns time for him borrows from and conforms to the form of succession, and I understand by form of succession … even flashback, even returns back in time, have never compromised the form of the succession. Directors who utilize flashback and all that are directors who have nothing to do with time, even if they are geniuses in other regards. [69:00] To have to do with time is quite another thing.
So, what is this other form? I would say that it’s obvious, for example, that the time, the structure of time, that Visconti makes us see, is quite different, renders visible – and it’s not easy, you know, to render visible a structure of time, through a story, or through images, through optical and sound images. Again, one has to have a taste for that … I might have the air of enthusing here, but no, it’s not that I like it more, it’s rather that I want to make it clear to you that this is a very particular case. For example, Godard has equal genius, but it doesn’t seem to me that Godard has much to do with time, no; on the other hand, it is indeed a central problem for Resnais.
Moreover, what makes [70:00] the joint work of Robbe-Grillet and of Resnais so marvelous? It is that, as is often the case in great co-authored works [travaux à deux], the two creators never understand one another [Laughter]. It’s great. To have made a work as consistent as Last Year at Marienbad, by putting in there things that are even worse than opposed, which are absolutely different, and for that to stand up all the same, now that is the sign of a successful work à deux. From one end to the other, they have not understood each other, it’s a marvel, a marvel. We’ll look into that a bit further if we have the time.
Visconti time is not Orson Welles time. Okay, I’m talking nonsense there – so I’ll add … a first function of depth of field … Observe that Welles is already a sign for us … Let me carry on a little and I’ll rediscover the thread. [71:00] Visconti, in order to make us see time, has no need of depth of field; that has never interested him much. Fellini, who, at certain moments, truly borders on a cinema of time, has no need for depth of field. I would say that if depth of field has any relationship with a time-image, it is with a very particular form of time-image, which will be, among others, that of Welles.
But anyway, let’s continue in our somewhat blind quest. I say: if it is true that depth of field has as its first function to produce contractions, that is to say, to give us contraction-images, it also has the apparently opposite function, namely to produce sheets, to produce sheets… [Interruption of the recording] [71:55]
Part 2
… And in fact, recall the extent to which all of Welles’s [72:00] films have something to do with an investigation into the past. Everyone knows that. And that Citizen Kane is constructed under what form? A series of distinct sheets regarding the past of one man – Citizen Kane – depending on a blind-spot: what does Rosebud signify?
And in many cases, depth of field will only intervene at a level … well, it’s very, very secondary, [73:00] whether it’s the testimonials about Kane, namely A’s recollections, B’s recollections, C’s recollections, all that is at a more superficial level; this doesn’t touch the structure of the film, it is what is absolutely superficial in the film. – What counts is not that it’s A’s recollections of Kane, then B’s recollections of Kane, then C’s recollections of Kane. What counts is that it is the past of Kane, taken at different levels of depth, as if there were a probe operating. Every time a sheet is attained, a sheet of recollections, one will ask whether this particular sheet fits, whether this one coincides with the question: [74:00] what does Rosebud mean? Let’s see, is this sheet suitable? No. Then is this other one suitable? No, etc.
And this time depth of field will be a sheet-image, and it will intervene here as the deployment of a given sheet, for example, depth of field indicating relations of … [unfinished sentence] For a great image using depth of field, take the sheet connected to the small party he gives (or rather that his collaborators put on for him) at the moment of his newspaper’s success. In the foreground you have the collaborators, in the background of the depth of field, you have the little dancers who dance, and then he is in the middle [75:00] in medium shot: all that corresponds to a sheet of Kane’s past. And then you have another sheet, with the rupture with the collaborators, all that also in depth of field.
I would say that depending on the case, therefore, the same depth of field … well, it can be easily understood that the same technical means might have two very different effects. I only see these two functions of depth of field: sometimes it brings about a maximal contraction between successive moments, sometimes it describes a sheet of recollections, [76:00] apt or not, to be actualized in a present. You see: sometimes it contracts successive moments in the present, sometimes it describes a sheet of recollections as apt or as inapt to be actualized in the present. In this sense, I would say that depth of field is constitutive of a very particular form of time-image, namely, the memory-image in its two forms: contraction and sheet, or the recollection-image in its two forms: contraction and sheet; it being understood that recollections can be unconscious. [77:00]
And I don’t see what else it would be used for, depth of field. And yet we know, we feel that it must be used for something quite different, too. But in any case, this is already to say that the structure of time in Orson Welles – this would only be a beginning, because we would need a very, very long time [to develop this] – well, we have acquired this at least: it seems to have two poles; it is a bipolar structure, contraction-sheet/contraction-moments [on the one hand], sheet of recollections [on the other]. Once again, you can think of very great filmmakers of time among whom you would absolutely not find this structure. [78:00]
Now precisely – I might seem to be jumping all the time from one point to another, but I cannot do otherwise – now precisely, recall that Bergson, in the second chapter of Matter and Memory – since back at the very beginning, we gave a complete commentary on the first chapter – advances a theme which is the following: the past survives in two ways. [Pause] The past survives, on the one hand, in motor mechanisms which prolong it [79:00] – and this is contraction-memory – and on the other hand, in recollection-images which actualize it, and this is sheet-memory. So that, Bergson tells us, by way of direct consequence, if there are these two subsistences of the past in motor mechanisms which prolong it and in recollection-images which actualize it, the immediate consequence is: there will be two ways of recognizing something or someone. There are two modes of recognition. [80:00] This is what you have to see. The first mode of recognition – you’ll see how and to what extent this links up with what we were just saying – Bergson will call ‘spontaneous’ or ‘sensory-motor’, spontaneous or sensory-motor recognition. Okay.[17]
Now I’m going to try to go through this very quickly – it would be good if you could cast your minds back a bit to what we did at the beginning, perhaps you recall – what distinguished the living being from things, [81:00] according to Bergson? When we treated everything – living beings, things, people – as image, he explained to us: there are only images. But what distinguishes the images that one calls living from the images that one calls inanimate? It’s quite simple, it’s that a thing undergoes an action – it has a reaction, a leaf and the wind, for example, and it is immediate – whereas animals, from a certain stage, right up to us humans, especially us, we have a brain. And what does that mean, a brain? It simply means a gap [écart].[18] In a sense, a brain is a void [c’est du vide un cerveau] – as Bergson defined it; it’s a damn good definition – a brain is a void. It just means that, instead of the reaction being immediately linked to the action, there is a gap between the action undergone and the reaction executed. Do you remember? It does not follow automatically. [82:00] And that’s why the reaction can be new and unforeseeable. The brain uniquely designates a temporal gap, a temporal gap between the action undergone and the reaction executed. A marvelous definition of the brain.
What, then, is it to recognize? I undergo an action; that means, I receive an excitation, or I have a perception. Then I react; that means, I act according to my perception, and a certain gap is made between my perception and my action. It is in this sense that my reaction is or can be called ‘intelligent’. This gap can be very small, [83:00] but there will all the same be a gap. This does not prevent that the more I take on a habit, the smaller the gap is. If I saw someone only once a year ago, and then pass by him in the street, before saying to him, ‘Hello, how are you?’, it is necessary, as they say, to ‘place’ him [il me faut, comme on dit, le temps de le remettre]. Then sometimes I get it wrong – I say, ‘Oh hello … oops’. The more one takes on a habit, the smaller the gap, that is, my action becomes immediately linked to my perception. Yes. Why?
Normally, what is the cerebral gap good for? Up until now Bergson has defined it for us in solely [84:00] negative terms: the brain, once again, is a void. It is the void between, it is the interval between excitation and reaction. But as he tells us, it is only void from the point of view of the movement-image, and indeed, up until now, we have remained with the movement-image. It is only void from the point of view of movement. It is absence of movement or a molecularization of movement. In passing through the brain, the movement received, the excitation received is divided into an infinity of micro-movements. It is therefore only from the point of view of movement that one could say that the brain is a gap. For from another point of view, if there is another point of view, we will say to ourselves, what is it that takes advantage of the gap in order to fill it? [85:00] What comes to introduce itself into this gap? Bergson’s answer: what comes to introduce itself into this gap is recollection; recollection, that is, the other type of image.
In a recognition, in an act of sensory-motor recognition, what happens? Let’s take one case: the cow recognizing grass.[19] It makes no mistake about it; let it loose in the meadow and it recognizes the grass. This is the case … this is a common example of sensory-motor recognition. Which means what? That [86:00] the simple perception of this green and of this form triggers in it the motor activity of grazing. Okay. You can assume that, however small it is, however clever the cow, however ready to graze it is, very little learning is necessary; the little calf that has just been weaned, he can miss a few tufts. He can pass by. Fine. So, I would say that sensory-motor recognition consists in this: that, depending on a given excitation, the animal shows increasingly rapid and better and better adapted reactions. That is, perception [87:00] prolongs itself more and more into action. You have there a sensory-motor recognition.
But how is it that there can be learning, that is, that action can be perfected, can be better and better adapted and form an increasingly rapid response? It is obviously because there is a weight of the past that there is learning. Fine. Is this to do with recollections? No. We cannot say – or at least we have no reason to say, we would willingly say so if necessary – … well, is there any need to say that the calf remembers [se souvient]? Does it remember the grass it ate yesterday? Observe that it’s different, it’s different for us, because [Pause] when I recite a [88:00] poem by heart, I recite it by heart, but I can also remember the times when I repeated it. Since there is no reason to think that the calf recalls the particular times it ate grass rather than something else. In other words, what renders its action more and more rapid and better and better adapted? … [Interruption of the recording] [1:28:22]
… is prolonged into motor mechanisms, [Pause] motor mechanisms which are the same as those that the present perception of the grass calls upon. If I were to draw a schema on the board, you can imagine what it would look like: I would have a perception segment; a gap, a cerebral gap; an action segment, introducing the recollection into the gap, the recollection, but the recollection only intervenes here under its most contracted form, [89:00] that is to say, it is so contracted that it naturally prolongs itself into motor mechanism. And thereby will be ensured the reinforcement of the motor mechanism which, under the weight of the past and of learning, will become more and more – you follow me? – more and more efficient, more and more adapted. I would say that this is sensory-motor recognition.
First problem, which we keep on one side because … What happens if there is a problem with this recognition? One must examine all the possibilities. If there is a disturbance of this kind of recognition, what will it be, in what will the disturbance consist? What will be the pathology of this recognition? The pathology of this recognition is if the motor centers are affected. [90:00] If the motor centers are affected, what happens? Then one will no longer be able to recognize. No, one will no longer be able to recognize. Someone will no longer be able to recognize, but what then? Has he lost his recollections? No, he has not lost recollections. No, no, he won’t have lost any recollections! What do you mean, will he have recollections, but he won’t be able to use them? Exactly that. He will have recollections, and he won’t be able to make use of them: that means what? He will even have intact recollections, but he cannot make use of them; that is to say, the affection of the motor centers will prevent him from making the contraction, from prolonging recollections into motor movements identical to those called upon by perception. That starts to get complicated.
Let us attempt to imagine such an abominable case. [91:00] Someone knows a town – if this doesn’t conjure up for you anything cinematic, well, it’s up to you to find it – Someone knows a town. Here, I’m talking of a case, a pathological case. Someone knows a town so well that on the map, he can tell you all about it on the map, how next to such a street, there is such a street, he knows the whole town inside-out. Where such and such a street makes a bend, etc., etc. He possesses an integral map of his town. The only problem is that he goes there and doesn’t recognize it. He does not recognize it. These are the famous cases that enchanted the psychiatry of the 19th century. Fine it’s … [Deleuze does not finish the sentence] [92:00]
Or: a pencil, you talk to someone about a pencil, and he knows very well what it is; you say to him: what is a pencil? He says: well, it’s long, it’s pointed – one would swear that it was Robbe-Grillet; it’s actually in the declarations of aphasiacs that you will find descriptions that most approach an embodiment of the ‘New Novel’ – it’s long, it’s pointed, there is a lead at the end, and it is useful for writing. And he will tell you all that without any problem. Then we pass him a pencil, and we say to him, write me something. He no longer knows. He no longer knows. Okay, but why does this interest us, this fundamental disorder? It is a disturbance of sensory-motor recognition. It is a typical sensory-motor disorder. [93:00] It is a disorder of spontaneous recognition. He keeps the recollection and the comprehension of the town in all its details. And yet he no longer knows how to navigate the town.
You can see that this is no wonder; if you have understood our little schema, it’s quite simple. Sensory-motor recognition does not imply any intervention of recollections by themselves. It does not imply any intervention of recollections as such; we can agree on that. It is uniquely constituted by excitation, action. The recognition consists in the fact that the action is better and better adapted to the excitation. [Pause] But then how can the action be perfected in this way? [94:00] Because the recollections do not intervene as such, we have assumed that. They are no less there. They are there. And they contract themselves, they contract themselves in such a way that they are directly prolonged into motor movements, those very motor movements that present perception calls upon. Suppose then that I say this is a recognition that is not made by recollection. Nevertheless, the recollections are there; this is a recognition which is made by the contraction of the past in the present. It is a contraction-recognition, and not a sheet-recognition. If motor disorders of the contraction [95:00] come about, the recollections are there, but precisely they are no longer prolonged into motor mechanisms. As soon as they no longer prolong themselves into the motor mechanisms that present perception calls upon … from that moment, you no longer recognize your town, of which you nevertheless have the most perfect recollection. But there is such a choice of disorders that … We will see that there are other disorders if that one does not work for you.
Is that clear or not? Well, it will have to be; we don’t have enough time for anything more; if only we hadn’t lost so much time this morning. Good, then you see. Would you like a short break?
Okay, good. So, here, we are immersed in contraction-images; the contraction is no longer made there. [96:00] So you can see that Bergson can tell us, in his schema of recognition, this sensory-motor recognition, it is absolutely curious, once again, it comes about independently of recollection, and yet the past is there. But the past is not there under the form of recollection; it is there in the form of past so contracted that it is prolonged into motor mechanisms. And if recollection intervenes, it is solely in so far as it is taken into the contraction. But it is not actualized as recollection, since moreover, you have the counter-proof: the patient I’m talking about, he completely actualizes his recollection of the town, he perfectly evokes the recollection, he therefore has an actual recollection, an actualized recollection. But it’s no use to him because he cannot make the contraction. Good. He lacks this fundamental [97:00] aspect of time: the contraction of moments. I would say that here – to talk like Shakespeare, because there is one phrase I particularly love in Shakespeare, it is: “the time is out of joint [le temps sort de ses gonds]”. The contraction and the sheet are the two hinges [gonds] of time, that is, what it revolves around. If the contraction no longer occurs, it has at the very least come loose from one of its primary hinges. Let us pass to the other hinge.
Are you following, or not at all? Because my question is that … I have the impression that this is very … I am not sufficiently on form today to be very clear on this, but …. because if you don’t follow this, it’s slightly annoying. But anyway, it’ll just be a bad moment that will pass, [Laughter] because it’s not absolutely necessary [98:00] for what follows. Good, okay, onto the second kind of recognition. But listen, it’s 12.25, we’ll take a five-minute break, but I’m begging you, be nice, don’t leave, I’m watching you, because I know you … otherwise you’ll make the doors creak again. I’m going to tune out here for five minutes. No, three minutes. [Pause] It’s a bit of a race, because if I don’t manage to get to the end of something, it will be impossible to take it up again. So, if you could refrain from … [The door starts creaking]. And there we are! There we are! They’re off! They’re off! [Noises from the door] And why? To drink, to eat… Fine… [Interruption of the recording]
… [Bergson] tells us, there is a completely different sort of recognition. [99:00] You have attentive recognition. What type is it? You understand, I have a sensory-motor recognition when there is my pencil on the table, for example, and then I take it, and I start to write. It was necessary … that I did not take a fork! [Laughs] I’m laughing because you don’t seem to see that that’s quite an amusing thought. So, I took my pencil, there was a sensory-motor recognition; it was not done by recollection. The recollections were there, but my recollections of the pencil were so contracted that they prolonged themselves naturally into the motor act, to write, which was called upon by the present situation. Then all goes well. But on another occasion, I might say to myself, oh dear, where is my pencil, where is my pencil? First, I hope that [100:00] you constantly have this experience, that if you do not remember clearly what you are looking for, you are not likely to find it. This happens to us all the time: I’m looking for my pencil, and then I say to myself, but what I am looking for again? Well, yes, it is necessary that I remember that I am looking for my pencil. Or you encounter someone running along in the street, and you say to yourself, I’ve seen him somewhere, where was it? It’s a totally different type of recognition, when you’re trying to find your pencil. This is not sensory-motor; no one has ever seen a cow looking for a pencil in the meadow. [Laughter] There is something else, I mean; something else. This is a kind of recognition Bergson will call, taking up the most straightforward word, ‘attentive’ recognition.
But what is interesting here? It’s what it’s comprised of. Sensory-motor recognition consisted in this: that my present perception prolongs itself into action, which action [101:00] was all the more perfect the better my past is contracted. This new kind of recognition is completely different. It is no longer: my perception prolongs itself in action; but — [Sound of the creaking door] Yes, it’s true, I forgot, it is the time when some people have to leave, so it’s going to start like that all over again. [Pause] The problem is my nerves. [Deleuze makes comical groans]. – So, you understand, this attentive recognition, it is no longer at all your perception prolonged into action — [102:00] [Door noise; Deleuze moans repeatedly] just notice that this is ending as it began, a catastrophe, it’s a catastrophe so, — You’re doing something completely different. For example, [Students attempt to quiet those who are moving around or leaving] you cross someone in the street, and you say, who’s that? You look, and instead of a perception which is prolonged into action, your action, your action is very curious, it is an action on the spot [sur place], consisting in a returning to the object. You return to the object; you [103:00] return to the object. Even if it is an object that is not there, you return to the image of the object that you seek. You return, that is, you form a little circuit, a circuit on the spot, a minimum circuit.
This return to the object, how will Bergson describe it? How will he define it? He will say that you “retrace the contours” [repassez sur les contours].[20] You retrace the contours, that is to say, you apply a description of the object to the object. You [104:00] apply a description of the object to the contours of the object. What does ‘describe’ mean here? In the most general sense: highlighting at least some features [traits], not necessarily all of them. For example, there is something that struck you about the guy you were passing, something about his neck. You retrace this neck in your mind [Vous repassez en esprit sur cette nuque]. You form a circuit, you see, constituted by your present perception and your present description; the contours of the thing, and the act of retracing its contours: minimum circuit [Pause] [105:00]. You haven’t found anything yet, it’s an appeal to what? As Bergson says, you are going to make a leap, a leap on the spot, into what? You have strange presentiments: at such and such a level of your past, or at some other level of your past.[21]
Sorry, I’ll give an example, so that all this is clear. I meet someone in the street, about whom I have the impression … anyway, I haven’t seen him for a long time. And I try [to place him], but at full speed; it’s done at full speed, at full cerebral speed, well, in my case very slowly, but [Laughter] there are very, very … One attempts successive, and completely heterogeneous [106:00] leaps. It is not a single leap, and you can stop. Each one has its destination; if you miss it, you have to start the leap again. You say to yourself, well, in my case, I say to myself: right, first thing, that’s not a guy from Paris, I didn’t know him in Paris. No. Vague impression. It wasn’t in Paris that I knew him … No? I do not know … Well, why I do I say that? It’s because I passed over the contours, I retraced the contours, good, and it does not gel [colle], with what? With other contours, contours which are in my memory … of what? Of things from Paris, of Parisian things, you see? It’s not as if the lines. … no.
Then I say to myself, ah, I remember. I was a teacher at Lyon. Could this be a student from Lyon? Then I say to myself: according to his age, according to his head … yes, [107:00] he has the head of a Lyonnais. [Laughter]. Wasn’t it in Lyon that I knew this guy? I make a leap to what? I make a leap, at the level of a sheet of recollections, to my sheet of Lyon recollections. And plof, I miss; something tells me: no. That doesn’t stick. I feel like it doesn’t stick. So, what do I say to myself? I say: no, it can’t be Lyon. I come back to my present, I retrace him again – unless he’s gone [Laughter], in that case I retrace the image I have retained – and I install myself: ah, maybe it was at Paris, but in my childhood. Maybe we were classmates? I say to myself … ah, you’ve got it, you might have the answer there … it’s like a computer program: I [108:00] load this program, the high school program, or a small classroom. It could answer ‘no’, or answer ‘yes’; and if it answers yes, but then which particular class was it? Was it in the eleventh grade? Okay … all that.
You see, I install myself, I make leaps which will carry me to such-and-such a level of recollections, or to some other level of recollections. If I get the right level, before knowing who it is, I have the feeling that that is where it’s situated. It’s very curious, these kinds of experiences of ‘ah, it is that’, before knowing what it is. I say to myself: of course, it’s a Lyonnais, yes, that could only be a Lyonnais. Then if I pass by him again, that’ll be useful as I can ask him, ‘What’s the time?’, and [109:00] he can then answer me with an accent that will be unmistakable. [Laughter] Then I’m certainly on the right level, I’m on the right sheet of recollections. It works. I can be sure of myself on that, and I can ask him, “Didn’t we meet at Lyons?” And then: job done. [Laughter] You understand?
What is the figure of recognition here? I started from, I would say, the most contracted circuit. But you see, it is no longer the contraction of earlier at all. What I now call the most contracted circuit or the minimum circuit is the circuit through which I started from the contours, the lines, and then retraced the contours. I retraced and did not stop retracing the contours; I formed my basic minimum circuit. Starting from there, I leapt – we no longer need to speak of ‘sheets’, [110:00] which is a bit of a confusing word – I leapt into deeper and deeper circuits, into echeloned [étagés] circuits, and at each circuit, there was a whole region of my past, until I at last came upon the right circuit. Then at this moment, what happened? The recollections of this circuit, what were they doing? Well, you see, they weren’t contracting themselves anymore; they actualized themselves in such a way that I appropriated the useful recollection. And what, in this case, is the useful recollection? It is no longer at all a recollection contracted with other recollections; it is a recollection whose lines [111:00] coincide with the lines of the thing that I perceived.
If I was to outline a figure for this second form of recognition, I would make a very small circle which would be like the common point of larger and larger circles.[22] You see? I won’t do it now; it should be done on the blackboard. I make a point, which is the common point of several circles inside each other, which become wider and wider. You follow me? It’s easy. That is the schema of attentive recognition.
So I can now say for further convenience [112:00] that I rediscover my two structures of time, my two temporal structures: contraction, contraction-memory; and on the other hand, the memory that I no longer need to call ‘sheet-’, but circuit-memory. A plurality. I look for the recollection I need in the circuit of the past which is capable of providing it to me. If I miss it, I miss; I didn’t find the recollection; the recollection remains unconscious as they say. If my leap fails – especially since these circuits, you understand, do not pre-exist all ready-made – then I find the right region by giving myself a ‘Lyon’ circuit, a ‘childhood’ circuit. Everyone can perform this kind of procedure, but in fact such circuits are like electrical circuits, created at the time and dependent on specific situations, and are not even always the same for the same individual, varying enormously [113:00].
For example, I can have a circuit and can make a ‘love’ circuit. That is particularly stirring. I cross someone in the street, and I say to myself: is that someone I loved? Or hated, I can also make a ‘hate’ circuit. Oh him! [Laughter]. Today, that would be more suitable, more adapted to my case, as you can see … Okay, so I cross someone in the street, and it’s terrible, that, after all, it’s terrible; it’s no laughing matter when you pass someone in the street you may have loved and whom you hardly recognize. My example is a sad one. Can something like that happen? No, surely that can’t happen. Some examples like it then. Well, it does happen, so there you have an example.
Fine, I have my two schemas. But I talked about disturbances. [114:00]. What did I say the disorder was in the first schema? In fact, I don’t have two figures of time, I have four. For I come back to my first disorder, sensory-motor recognition disorder. That was a strange thing, that disorder. The recollections were there. I would say: all the circuits were intact. Notably, for example, in my example, the town-circuit was there. Only the recollections no longer contracted themselves into the sensory-motor present. I was therefore in the following situation, if I try to describe the disorder: I was in a present that I did not recognize … [Pause] I was simultaneously in a present that [115:00] I did not recognize, and in a past that I recognized, but which I could no longer make use of. The past was conserved, but it stood in a kind of confrontation, no longer being able to contract itself. It was stuck in a kind of terrifying face-to-face with a present that I no longer recognized. Do you see?
Attentive recognition also has its own fundamental disturbance. If you have followed me, suppose that my circles – you see, you have to get your head around this figure again … I start from my little circuit, [116:00] a present circuit which is like a point. And from this point, I trace larger and larger circles, inside each other, which have this common point on their periphery. I can say that all the circles are only merged at the level of this point. Otherwise, they have their own centers, they have radii, and variable, different diameters. You don’t see my design? Yes? Oh, dear. [Deleuze takes a piece of paper] A piece of paper, you’ll see. I make very moving circles. There. [Pause as he writes] They are nice, eh? [117:00]. Everyone gets it, good.
So, what can happen? Attentive recognition disorder. What happens? I would say that this time it is, in a way, the recollections that no longer actualize themselves. In the previous case, the recollection actualized itself perfectly well. Recollections no longer actualize themselves, what does that mean? It means I will indeed have my virtual circuits, I have all my virtual circuits, in a way, I don’t have possession of them, but they are there. I have all my virtual circuits, but they no longer coincide, they no longer coincide in the common point of their peripheries. [118:00] So that each of these circuits will have something like a present at its periphery, it will have a present the same as the others do, that is, the present of now, but it will not be the same present. This present will not have the same content at all. A terrible malady, which one is worse? This time, I will no longer find myself in a kind of alternative; in the first case, I was in an alternative, literally, what I would call an undecidable alternative. In the other case, I find myself in an indiscernible confusion. My virtual circuits of the past, I can no longer distinguish them [119:00] from each other. I can no longer distinguish the different levels of my past, any more than I can distinguish the levels of my past from my current present. In other words, each of the circuits has an actual present which does not coincide with the actual present of the other. And I am constrained at this moment to live all these actual presents at the same time.
Well, listen, we can do no more, so I’ll summarize. But that should have been a whole session, all that. But don’t worry about it. I’ll take an example, because in fact, my object was to arrive at it for next time, when we can start things anew in a healthier and clearer mode. I would say: understand, we no longer have a problem. Let us take an example.
I would say, the first two structures of time that [120:00] I see clearly emerging are, in conjunction with depth of field, contraction-time and sheet- or circuit-time. And that seemed to me to correspond very well with … well, with an opening up, with an introduction, if you like, with what could have been an introduction to time in Welles. Take my first disorder, the first disorder of recognition. A disorder, we understand, a disturbance can reveal to us something about time which is not itself a disturbance. What interests me is not at all whether it is a disturbance or not; what interests me, is: is it a different structure of time or not? In the first case of disorder, sensory-motor recognition disorder, I find myself in an odd situation, since [121:00] there remain in radical confrontation, once again, a present in which I no longer orient myself and no longer recognize myself, and a recollection I can no longer make use of. I would say, I am in the situation of an encounter and an unbearable tête-à-tête between a present that is nothing more than optical, and a recollection which no longer has anything of the psychological.
In my opinion, I’ll say it very quickly, that would also be an introduction – and I insist an introduction – a possible introduction to the study of time in Resnais. [Pause] [122:00] For the places and characters in Last Year in Marienbad, it is this same basic structure that is at work. Obviously, it gets very complicated. And then, through a very curious refinement, it is also the basic structure – but as a function of two different places, which stand in a confrontation, Hiroshima-Angers[23], with different persons this time, but the same temporal structure is applied – in Hiroshima mon amour, and I think that precisely because the places are different in this case, the temporal procedure, the temporal structure, gains in richness, gains a kind of fantastic richness [123:00]. Well, if you grant me that – and again, these are only very timid introductions – let us seek out the other disorder.
Well, the other disorder is that my actual present is, literally, multiplied, volatized, into as many different and simultaneous presents as there are virtual circuits of the memory, as there are virtual circuits of the past. [Pause] I take an example.[24] At one level of the past, the kidnapping has not taken place. At another level of the past, the kidnapping has taken place. At yet another level of the past, the event was in the process of taking place. [124:00] Take these three circuits. Consider that they no longer blend in relation, that they no longer merge in a point which would be an ‘actual’ present. Each circuit is valid for itself virtually with its own present. And the three presents – the present in relation to which the event, the kidnapping, took place; the present in relation to which the kidnapping has not yet taken place; the present of the kidnapping itself – will form a sort of broken line where I will no longer be able to distinguish what is past, what is present, nor what is future. I will have constituted an indiscernible bloc. [125:00]
In one case, I was in an undecidable alternative, Angers [Nevers], Hiroshima; Hiroshima, Angers [Nevers]. In another case, I am in an undecidable bloc – no, indiscernible, sorry – in an indiscernible bloc. Has the kidnapping taken place, is it going to take place, is it in the process of taking place? Moreover, isn’t everything I am in the process of doing so that it does not take place – isn’t that what makes it take place? Those who know will have recognized here in my example of the kidnapping a characteristic Robbe-Grillet film, the one entitled Playing with Fire [Le Jeu avec le feu] (1975).
But I say to conclude, the marvel is that between Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, when they worked together … For why is it that Robbe-Grillet, who is less pleasant, I find, than Resnais [126:00] … Resnais, every time he has worked with someone, has always given them the maximum [freedom]; but with regard to Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet keeps on saying “my film, my film”, and he has no hesitation in saying that Resnais hasn’t understood it. But I think it’s him who has not understood something; it’s because in fact, Resnais understood something completely different from him, and what Resnais understood was no less interesting than what Robbe-Grillet understood. Because, what is very curious in a film as bizarre as Last Year at Marienbad is that Robbe-Grillet sees in it a temporal structure which not at all the same as what Robbe-Grillet sees in it … sorry, I mean as what Resnais sees in it. This is why it’s often said that Resnais thinks that there was a last year at Marienbad, while Robbe-Grillet in his famous texts explains that one would have to be an idiot to believe that there was a last year in Marienbad, [127:00] there was no last year in Marienbad.
Anyway, I’m not sure that the idiot is Resnais. I mean, neither of them is an idiot. But it goes without saying that Resnais is not at all talking nonsense when he says: for my part, I prefer to believe that there was a last year at Marienbad, because the conception of time in this film, such that one can relate it back to Resnais, implies the confrontation between a present that is no longer recognized and a past that no longer serves. So there must have been [a last year at Marienbad], otherwise the temporal structure collapses. And it is not at all because Resnais is more or less of a philosopher than Robbe-Grillet; on the contrary, Resnais’s temporal schema seems to me to be much more complex as a schema – and here I’m only talking about the basics – much more complex. Whereas in Robbe-Grillet’s case, in effect, there cannot have been [128:00] a last year [at Marienbad] for the simple reason that for his part he takes up the other temporal structure, namely, a structure of indiscernible blocs, where the circuits coexist, each having its own present, without one being able to distinguish between the presents. From that moment, it cannot have taken place, since in effect, ‘Is it present? Is it from the past? Is it from the future?’: the question has lost all meaning. What counts is just the coexistence of all these circuits, each with a present: a present where it’s already done, a present where it’s not yet done, a present where it’s in the process of being done.
Let us redouble the difficulties. Because it is not sufficient to oppose Resnais and Robbe-Grillet; once again, it’s admirable, what a work. Whatever the case, it’s a very great film, this thing. And they made it by not understanding each other. But it’s not enough not to understand each other to achieve something; I would say that there is another, very special way of not understanding each other, which [129:00] at this moment wonderfully happens to come into its own. And I say, to complicate matters: we can say that the two structures – the Resnais structure and the Robbe-Grillet structure – coexist. If you privilege a little the character of the woman in the Last Year at Marienbad, it is obvious that it is Resnais who is right: there was a last year at Marienbad; there was a last year at Marienbad [Deleuze repeats]. As the same time, the woman does not recognize herself. She does not recognize herself in the present, and she does not recognize the man. Yes, this is obvious. So, if you then privilege the man, it is Robbe-Grillet who is right. There was no last year at Marienbad. So I’m not making a facile synthesis here, not at all; it’s not a [130:00] a synthesis at all. I propose that this film is founded on two extremely different temporal structures, of which we can, it seems to me, of which we can legitimately – well, with reason, with certain reasons – relate one to the proper contribution of Resnais, and the other to the proper contribution of Robbe-Grillet.
Now, to finally finish, what I have just tried to sketch out, that should have been the program for another year, namely the problem of time-images in cinema. I might add some things next time, but what I take away from this is, you see, I would say, if I summarize my conclusion in order to link it up to the totality, that what I called pure optical and sound images are images which imply [131:00] or which mimic a disorder of recognition, [Pause] and which from that moment (these pure optical and sound images) can – I do not say that this is necessary, one will see that there are other cases – can … well, it can happen that these optical and sound images enter into direct relation with the complex temporal structures which will constitute the very object of cinema, which will constitute the object of a film, just as they can constitute the object of a musical work, and they can constitute the object of a literary work. In this regard, cinema is absolutely not [132:00] condemned to the uninteresting procedure of flashback; or of succession, of return, etc. So next time, we will look further into these relations.
Georges Comtesse: Can I make a comment? Can I make a comment? About what you said about Last Year in Marienbad, maybe ultimately the important thing is not whether the event took place or not. In the film by Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, the important thing is to get out of the labyrinthine space of the château, which is held under the sway of the master of the game. It doesn’t matter if the event took place or not! The important thing is to leave a space of repetition.
Deleuze: I’m not opposed to that, Comtesse; you are saying something else, you are saying something else which no longer concerns time. I specify that for my part, I have not … I don’t think … Indeed, I am like you.
Comtesse: Last Year at Marienbad [133:00] is not a film about time.
Deleuze: Ah, okay then, okay. [End of the recording] [2:13:08]
Notes
[1] Possibly a reference to a sentence from ‘Reply to an Inquiry’, in Artaud’s writings on cinema: “The cinema implies a total reversal of values, a complete disruption of optics, perspective and logic” (Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, Volume 3, translated by Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), p. 59).
[2] In this section it sounds like Deleuze intends the sentence “Comment atteindre à des situations optiques qui ébranlent l’âme?” [“How to attain optical situations that shake the soul?”] to be a direct quotation from Artaud, but this does not seem to be the case. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (p. 165; cf. 310n. 18) there is a similar discussion of Artaud, but there is no use of the sentence in question, and instead there is a paraphrase of various passages from Artaud’s writings on cinema, such as the following one from the ‘Scenario to The Shell and the Clergyman’ (subtitled ‘Cinema and Reality’): “It is obvious that everything we have so far been able to see in the guise of abstract or pure cinema is far from satisfying what appears to be one of the essential demands of the cinema. Because however capable of conceiving and adopting abstraction man’s mind may be, we cannot help being irresponsive to purely geometric lines, of no valid significance on their own, which do not belong to any sensation which the eye of the screen can recognise and classify. However deep we may look into the mind we find, at the bottom of every emotion, even if it be intellectual, an effective sensation of a nervous order. This contains the susceptible, even if elementary recognition of something substantial, of a certain vibration which invariably recalls states, either known or imagined, clothed in one of the multiple forces of nature, in real life or in dreams. Pure cinema would therefore imply the restitution of a certain number of forms of this type moving according to a rhythm which is the specific contribution of this art.” Collected Works, Volume III, p. 19. Cf. also ‘Cinema and Abstraction’, p. 61, ‘The Shell and the Clergyman’, p. 63, ‘Witchcraft and the Cinema’, p. 65-66, ‘The Precocious Old Age of the Cinema’, p. 77-78.
[3] The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928, written by Artaud and directed by Germaine Dulac.
[4] Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Originally published in 1963 as Pour un nouveau roman.
[5] Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’, in For a New Novel, pp. 147-148.
[6] Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’, in For a New Novel, p. 73, translation modified.
[7] Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, pp. 73-74. Cf. the discussion of description in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 12, 45, 68.
[8] Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, p. 147.
[9] Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, pp. 147-148, translation modified.
[10] Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, p. 148, translation modified.
[11] Robbe-Grillet, ‘From Realism to Reality’, in For a New Novel, p. 163.
[12] In Matter and Memory, chapter III, Bergson says that “the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass [of becoming]” (Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 139) (“Le moment présent est constitué par la coupe quasi instantanée que notre perception pratique dans la masse en voie d’écoulement”, Matière et mémoire, Paris: Alcan, 1903, 150). Bergson then goes on to identify a “fundamental illusion” consisting of in “transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it (p. 149) (“transporter à la durée même, en voie d’écoulement, la forme des coupes instantanées que nous y pratiquons”, p. 162). The term coupe could be translated as ‘cut’, but ‘section’ and finally ‘slice’ have been used here, keeping in mind the desire to mitigate the aforementioned “fundamental illusion.”
[13] The original French passage reads: “Bref, la mémoire sous ces deux formes, en tant qu’elle recouvre d’une nappe de souvenirs un fond de perception immédiate et en tant aussi qu’elle contracte une multiplicité de moments, constitue le principal apport de la conscience individuelle dans la perception, le côté subjectif de notre connaissance des choses …” (Bergson, Matière et mémoire, p. 21). The English translation reads: “In short, memory in these two forms, covering as it does with a cloak [nappe] of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of things …” (Matter and Memory, p. 34). The use of ‘cloak’ for nappe is informative, but in order to conform to the English translation of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, we shall retain the translation of ‘sheet’ for nappe.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Starring Bette Davis. Deleuze uses the French title, L’insoumise.
[16] Cf. Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, p. 151.
[17] Cf. the discussion of Bergson’s theory of attentive recognition in Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, pp. 44-47.
[18] Cf. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 32-33 on the ‘zone of indetermination’; cf. also Deleuze, Bergsonism (translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 24-25, 52-53.
[19] Cf. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 158-159.
[20] Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 101: attentive recognition “retrace[s] the outlines of the object perceived” (“repasser sur les contours de l’objet aperçu”, p. 103).
[21] For a discussion of this proposition, see Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 80.
[22] Cf. the schema in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, p. 105.
[23] In fact, the French town that plays a role in Hiroshima mon amour is Nevers, not Angers.
[24] As is shortly made clear, the example is Robbe-Grillet’s Playing with Fire [Le Jeu avec le feu].
For archival purposes, the augmented and new time stamped version of the transcription was completed in February 2021. The translation was completed in March 2022, with additional revisions in February 2024. [NB: The transcript time stamp is in synch with the WedDeleuze recording link provided here.]