May 7, 1985

So, I thought a lot about last week. Let’s try to understand something, what happened last week. Something always happens, since we risked this method of multiple interventions … For me, it was going well. I saw my sound framing arriving and receiving a satisfactory definition, from the highest technological perspective. At that point, … something slipped, skidded, from a certain necessary point of view, and from my viewpoint, not necessary. And this slippage having occurred at that point, we found ourselves in a state where the very problem had disappeared, that is, this very precise problem: is there a framing of sound? And we found ourselves, either confronting some very general problems of music, or confronting problems of technology in these relations with art, even more general, and my story of framing could no longer be retrieved… So, I have a principle, I believe, I have a principle: when something goes wrong, we don’t go back into it, we cross it out. There were reasons why it went wrong. We won’t start over. One must never start over. I will say later what I am deriving from that. Notice that, inspired by a God, I planned to be able to fall back on a weak assumption even if I gave up the strong assumption to which I held. So, I will tell you the weak hypothesis, the strong hypothesis, and then we move on.

Seminar Introduction

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

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

English Translation

Edited

Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, 1970

 

Starting this session with questions on sound framing and taking up the second phase of spoken cinema, Deleuze examines how the sound component gains its own quite distinct framing in relation to visual framing, proposing two hypotheses, one “strong” and one “weak”. First phase: the new image regime after World War II and the idea of a specific sound framing emerging increasingly through specific technological operations. However, student questions and comments intervene (on the role of animated films in this development; the role of stereo versus monaural sound for this framing), and then, in the second phase, the disappearance of an out-of-field (hors-champ) occurs, replaced with an interstice between visual and sound framings. Deleuze proposes different manifestations of automata in various national cinema traditions and discusses issues of framing in comparison to issues of abstract expressionism, suggesting that by whatever means, sound framing served as a means for cinema authors to beckon the future. Then, insisting that this marked a shift toward an “heautonomy”, Deleuze defines more precisely each type of image or framing (cf. Rohmer’s “Claire’s Knee”; Resnais’s “Last Year in Marienbad”), suggesting that, on one hand, the sound image is a speech act as fabulation or founding act of the event, and on the other hand, the visual images now are “any-spaces-whatever.” Exploring examples of spatial layers, he again points to different works (Resnais, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) with different ways of examining not just spatial layering, but also how each layer buries something necessarily revealed. Deleuze considers how these images attain an incommensurable, irrational, free indirect relation, extract a pure speech act from an environment, and more precisely, speech acts ripped from materials that resist, but also resistance arising from the speech acts themselves. Then shifting to the visual image, i.e., empty, geological and telluric spaces, Deleuze argues that the visual image’s role is to bury what the speech act ripped out to be expressed, providing examples of the circuit between the telluric image and the sound images, both maintaining at once their “heautonomy” and their indirect, irrational and incommensurable relationship. [Much of the development corresponds to The Time-Image, chapter 9.]

 

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema and Thought, 1984-1985

Lecture 21, 07 May 1985 (Cinema Course 87)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, Antoine Garraud (Part 1), Guadalupe Deza (Part 2) and Laura Moscarelli et de Marie Descure (Part 3); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

English Translation Forthcoming

Notes

For archival purposes, the augmented version of the complete transcription with time stamp was completed in September 2021. Additional revisions were added in February 2024.

Lectures in this Seminar

square
Reading Date: October 30, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: November 6, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: November 13, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: November 20, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: November 27, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: December 11, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: December 18, 1984
right_ol
square
Reading Date: January 8, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: January 15, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: January 22, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: January 29, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: February 5, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: February 26, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: March 5, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: March 12, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: March 19, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: March 26, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: April 16, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: April 23, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: April 30, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: May 7, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: May 14, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: May 21, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: May 28, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: June 4, 1985
right_ol
square
Reading Date: June 18, 1985
right_ol