Movement! Action! Belief?

Abstract

Deleuze's philosophy of cinema departs from the standard conception of modernist aesthetics that sees art withdrawing from representation in order to reflect upon the specificity of its medium. While ambitious and influential, Deleuze's attempt fails. Overdetermined by its own metaphysics, it forsakes the real importance of the movies. It is unable to explain how they function and why they matter. This essay pursues three lines of criticism: Deleuze cannot account for the aesthetic specificity of cinema because he deposes the primacy of action in the movement-image in favour of the primacy of belief (the time-image). This failure is connected to the fact that a cinema of the virtual depends on the very Bazinian realism it is meant to displace. Realism must be acknowledged as the cinematic condition and truth of virtuality. Further, Bazinian realism is the cinematic form of philosophical modernism, preferable for many reasons to Deleuze's philosophy, which returns to pre-modern cosmology in its desire to escape the agent-based, anti-metaphysical commitments of modernism. I apply these criticisms to my analysis of Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, a movie that prima facie looks made to fulfil the terms of Deleuze's theory but which I argue is an object lesson in realism.

Keywords:

• Gilles Deleuze
• André Bazin
• Hiroshima mon amour
• Alain Resnais
• Marguerite Duras
• Stanley Cavell
• film and philosophy
• cinematic aesthetics

Notes

Notes

1 All references in the text to C1 or C2 followed by a page number are to: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006); and idem, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006).

2 See Laura Mulvey's Preface to her Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006) 13–15.

3 In the Preface to the English-language edition of her Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, trans. Alisa Hartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) xii–xv, Paola Marrati forcefully raises just this conundrum about the relation between action and the time-image. My debt to Marrati's writing on Deleuze should be patent.

4 I am borrowing this diagram from James Chandler, “The Affection-Image and the Movement-Image” in After Images of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy, ed. D.N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) 243.

5 This reading of those romantic comedies derives, of course, from Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981). Deleuze nowhere objects to the utopian caste of these movies, nor their life-promoting illusions – all perfectly sound Nietzschean coordinates for action. Only the fact that those illusions become hollow, vapid and useless for the advantages of life demands another cinema.

6 See Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) for an argument that it is one of the functions of aesthetic judgment, and hence art, to demonstrate what it would take to make the world morally intelligible in a manner sufficient to ward off the threats of nihilism.

7 For two recent examples of an acknowledgement of the centrality of the notion of belief in the world for Deleuze but that fail, as far as I can see, to show that he succeeds in wedding this thought to his general account of modern cinema, see D.N. Rodowick, “The World, Time,” and Ronald Bogue, “To Choose to Choose – to Believe in the World”, both in D.N. Rodowick, ed., After Images of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy, chapters 6 and 7 respectively.

8 Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972).

9 I owe this suggestion in full to Matt Congdon.

10 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979) 117.

11 Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 332.

12 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in his What is Cinema?, vol. I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 15. That Bazin's account of love of the world is attached to his theory of cinema's photographic basis is, I presume, the reason for Deleuze to want to distance himself from it. Belief is an alternative to Bazinian love. This becomes even more evident when we recall the penultimate sentence (16) of Bazin's essay in which he offers his view as an explicit alternative to Pascal's condemnation of representational art: “Henceforth Pascal's condemnation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love …”

13 All references in the text to HMA are to Hiroshima mon amour, text by Marguerite Duras for the film by Alain Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove, 1961).

14 See Siobhan S. Craig, “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima: Desire, Spectatorship and the Vaporized Subject in Hiroshima mon Amour,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.1 (2005): 25–35.

15 In order to underline how forgetting is constitutive of love, in a late scene, at the Casablanca Café, the Japanese man will be displaced, so that he and we come to see both their love and its displacement at the same time, their being joined and “love's forgetfulness” (HMA 68).

16 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge UP, 1976) 229.

17 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” 14.

18 Idem, “The Myth of Total Cinema” in What is Cinema? I: 21.

19 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami, trans. C. Irizarry and V. Andermatt Conley (Brussels: Gevert, 2001) 44. For a fine exposition of Nancy's photographic existentialism that has influenced my thinking here see Fiona Jenkins, “Souls at the Limits of the Human: Beyond Cosmopolitan Vision,” Angelaki 16.4 (2011): 159–72. I should note here that all the dominant themes of my analysis of Hiroshima – its fragmentary structure, the relation to other modernisms, and, above all its existentialism – are already clearly grasped in the remarkable round-table discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doniol-Valcrose, Jean Domarchi, Pierre Kast, and Jacques Rivette that appears in Cahiers du cinéma 97 (July 1959). An extract from the round-table, translated by Liz Heron, appears in the pamphlet accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of Hiroshima mon amour.

20 Collected in What is Cinema?, vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971). References to this essay in the text are abbreviated ARN.