The future of the past

Abstract

It is foolish to talk about the death of the cinema because cinema is still at the beginning [début] of its investigations … Yes, the cinema if it is not killed by a violent death guards the power of a beginning [un commencement].

Deleuze, “Preface,” The Time-Image1

Notes

1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta modified (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) xii–xiii.

2 Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988) 170–71.

3 Jacques Derrida, “La Vérité blessante, ou le corps à corps des langages,” Europe (May 2004) 18. Translations in the text are mine.

4 The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book II 164.

5 “La Vérité blessante” 16.

6 Ibid. 18.

7 “[Le moment ‘génial’] aurait l’air de suggérer que chaque fois que je fais un cours, j’invente quelque chose de nouveau. Non, loin de là. Je précise aussi que ce qui arrive là, je ne m’en sens pas l’auteur.” Ibid. 18.

8 Ibid. 18.

9 “D’où le sentiment aigu à la fois de responsabilité et irresponsabilité – et c’est ça l’événement.” Ibid. 18.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003) 109. Page numbers of the English edition are given in parentheses in the text.

11 It is not the question of having “wipe[d] away the horizon” that is the source of such “cheerfulness” in Nietzsche: “our ships may venture out again”; rather, what is forgotten is the memory of the vanishing of the outside. What makes the desert a terrible place, inhospitable to life, is not absence. This time I paraphrase Deleuze: to cross a desert is nothing; to grow up in it is fatal – one does not notice when what one does not know about is not there. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, DVD (Paris: Éditions Montparnasse, 2004). Letter I.

12 Martin Arnold's last film, Deanimated, progressively empties the images it borrows from The Invisible Ghost, a B series Hollywood film-noir, from its human figures, leaving us with camera movements lacking in purpose, without the presences that caused the animation. See Martin Arnold, Deanimated, Catalogue of an Exhibition, Kunsthalle, Wien, 11.10.2002–9.2.2003 (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2002).

13 For a detailed discussion see my “Fourth Repetition” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. C. Boundas (Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh P, 2006).

14 Martin Arnold, Cinemnesis: Pièce touchée, 16 mm film, b&w, 16 minutes, 1989; Passage à l’acte, 16 mm film, b&w, 12 minutes, 1993; Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 16 mm film, b&w, 15 minutes, 1998. The limitation to this one example is not a hindrance. If it is to subvert the universal drive for “generalization,” each FF work needs to be singular, “improbable.” Indeed, in his perceptive critique of Arnold's last film, Deanimated (2002), Akira Mizuta Lippit writes: “it develops an architecture of cinema unimagined by Lyotard. Unimagined and unimaginable in the terms that bind Lyotard's economy, but also an unimaginable cinema as such. A cinema of the unimagined and unimaginable.” “- - - - MA,” in Gerald Matt, Martin Arnold: Deanimated (New York: Springer, 2002) 31.

15 These geological layers, which correspond to different anachronic temporalities, include: the memory of a certain kind of cinema (B series, 1950s, b&w, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney) that is inextricable from our biography; the memory of “histoires” (of romantic love, clichés of domestic life, chaste kisses, twin beds, filial relations, sterile suburban domesticity) that this same cinema fabricated and which now constitute a distinct episode in the history of our “civilization of/by the cinema”; and then the inhuman memory of the medium itself, at once mercilessly precise (objective) but also becoming, becoming denser, richer, and more complex with the passage of time. We say that an image is “dated.” What we mean by this is not precision at all but variability, it is at variance with itself. Yet it does not simply become different or another image, but rather, having passed through (the time of) the archive, it preserves and involuntarily projects multiple histoire(s) that correspond with geological layers of time.

16 Harun Farocki's Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (1995) is one such memory work: it screens old clichés of “workers leaving factory” but projects a new history that passes in between images of workers – walking through the open gates of the Lumière factory in 1895, then in 1926 (Detroit, Ford Motor Company) filing out “as if they had already lost too much time,” then again in 1975 (from the VW factory) leaving as if “carried away by something,” and in Lyon again, in 1975, “running” outside. Home Stories (6 minutes, 1990) by Matthias Muller is another: a painstaking montage composed entirely of 1950s Hollywood extracts capturing women, alone and in fright – anxiously listening, peering out of windows, waking as if from a nightmare, running past emptied halls, anxiously turning heads – the film projects the memory of the history of the stories told, in a certain period of its history, by Hollywood cinema.

17 See especially Akira M. Lippit, “Martin Arnold's Memory Machine,” Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 24.6 (1997) 8–10 (see also <http://www.r12.at/arnold/pages/press/press.html>), and Emmanuelle André, “En souvenir du professeur Charcot: Le Montage hystérique de Martin Arnold,” Trafic 51 (2004): 63–73.

18 The original strip in each case depicts an iconic scene from B series cinema: the husband's “homecoming” from Human Jungle is followed by “family breakfast” from To Kill a Mocking Bird (Passage à l’acte), and scenes of “family romance” lifted from the films of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

19 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen & Unwin, 1911). Elsewhere (“Fourth Repetition” in Deleuze and Philosophy) I have tried to show how Bergson's Habit finds pure expression in the mechanical repetitions of the cinema. This will be not without significance for Arnold's cinema, which, on the one hand, deploys a complex apparatus of repetition and, on the other, attacks the original on the level of micro-habits, starting from the ensemble of ordinary gestures of which habit is composed.

20 “What I found convincing in these continuous forwards [sic] and backwards [sic] movements was that it did not actually break the gestures of the actors.” Mike Taanila, “Interview with Martin Arnold,” 2001, Avanto Festival, <http://www.avantofestival.com>.

21 “Car la matière originelle, la substance poétique du film,” cites André Béla Balàzs, the great but almost forgotten theorist of the early cinema, “c’est le geste visible.” Emmanuelle André, “En souvenir du professeur Charcot” 66.

22 Jean Baudrillard, “La Violence faite à l’image,” Le Pacte de lucidité ou l’intelligence du mal (Paris: Galilée, 2004).

23 Jean-Luc Godard, Ėloge de l’amour, b&w, 94 minutes, 2001.

24 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard par Godard, vol. 2 (1984–1998) (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998) 409.

25 Gilles Deleuze, “Preface to the French Edition,” Cinema 1, The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) xiv.

26 “Une image en appelle une autre, une image n’est jamais seule, contrairement à ce qu’on appelle ‘les images’ aujourd’hui qui sont des ensembles de solitudes.” Godard par Godard, vol. 2, 173.

27 FF is not manufactured, it is hand-made. In an interview Arnold said: “I worked on it [PT] very intensely for one and a half years. Using an optical printer I made myself – very simple and fragile – I photographed 148,000 single images and wrote down the sequences of frames in a two-hundred-page score.” Scott Macdonald, “Martin Arnold,” Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998) 347–62 (349).