What is contemplative cinema?
It must be recognized that the question has a two-fold answer. Who contemplates? The film contemplates; the viewer contemplates. They are different contemplations, for the film's contemplation is given to the viewer's experience for the sake of his or her own contemplation while viewing, as well as for his or her reflection upon the film. Contemplative cinema is a mode of thinking, is the thinking of film, in film, filmed, a direct thought of which we are incapable of, for we can only represent in thought. Contemplative cinema is more, and less, than our contemplation. More, because it assembles and produces time and image — and we cannot do that. We cannot create a time within time, for we are already living in time and our mode of being offers no possibility of stepping outside of the time that we are in, and which unfolds through us is it carries us. No, we cannot create time, or times, for we are subject to time. Film, as a subjectivity of image and time, creates its own time, in a time that it takes from us, or which it draws us into. Cinematic time is a synthetic time, a time realized through the effect of continuity engendered at 24 frames per second; it is also time as an effect of montage, of cuts and sequences arranged to produce a a direct experience of time: a temporal illusion of immediacy.
Cinema's subjectivity is its own, but in contemplative cinema it is given to us to contemplate. But in our contemplation of cinema, we can only reflect on it, can only think about it, that is, we cannot contemplate it without translating it first into a representational schema by which we then make conceptual associations around it. Cinema's own contemplation is direct; ours is indirect.
The early cinema was a reconfiguration of drama, of narrative story-telling for the camera, indirectly, instead of for the audience, directly. But its creation, film, is direct image and sound, unburdened by the instabilities of the stage, and the relations that an audience might take up to its actors, sets, and production. The production of film is invisible. It comes to us directly. And so its own contemplation, its own thought of time, of action, of space and movement, its own speed, rhythm, continuity, is already complete for us. Its production is invisible.
Cinema thinks as we cannot, for it can think its own world as it thinks. It is a perceptual thinking, directly in and through image, a thinking that precedes the invention of concepts and ideas, but which can arouse concepts and ideas as it suggests them by means of its perception. Cinematic thought, direct and in the image, is thinking as perception, perception that thinks and after which no amount of reflection is necessary to the film's essential creative act. Film thinks as in what it sees, but in seeing it has already finished, for it cannot compare, cannot reconsider, cannot think by analogy or reflect on its own ideas. It is the being of thought prior to reflection, direct and in the image. It is a thinking that cannot communicate, and yet we are often moved by its beauty or sublimity, but its gift and talent and for its effort to present us with better, more resonant, more sensible worlds. It will seem to conceal its reasons, on occasion, but in truth it has none, for it cannot but arouse our reasons, and those are something it knows nothing about. Cinema contemplates, directly, hermetically, within and unto itself. But if we are fortunate, and present, and contemplative, we will experience its sensibilities and be moved. And with the right cinema, we will be given a contemplation to contemplate, and from the cinematic contemplation we will be able to think further, to reflect on and through the film. For the film cannot. It cannot contemplate outside of itself, cannot become what it is not, cannot be other than what it already is. Its contemplation is complete, and we would be mistaken to make it contemplate what it has not given itself to contemplate. But if we did not contemplate the film, we would miss an opportunity to think new thoughts, to think the possibilities the film has offered us, and from which, moved, we might renew our being. The cinema is an outside that moves us to contemplation, if we take it in.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Ozu's Any-Space-Whatever, read through Gilles Deleuze
Marina, I was inspired by your post on Ozu, which is spot on, to type up a section from Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2 book that deals with one of Ozu's particular contemplations, the "any-space-whatever." I think it's clear that Ozu's inventions are used again and again, though perhaps often only as a reference or gesture. Where Ozu's films contemplate space, later films contemplate Ozu? We have to think hard to see the difference, for in film, the distinction between an original image and the appearance of one is illegible in the image itself and is revealed only through the film's particular assemblage. A film might contemplate, or it might contemplate contemplation. Not all examples of contemplative cinema think original thoughts. Some might only reflect on contemplation, recollect periods of contemplation, or consider contemplation (only to abandon it). I think you'll like this:
"Although he was subject, from the outset, to the influence of certain American authors, Ozu built up in a Japanese context a body of work which was the first to develop pure optical and sound situations (even so he came quite late to the talkie, in 1936). The Europeans did not imitate him, but came back to him later via their own methods. He none the less remains the inventor of opsigns and sonsigns. The work borrows a trip/ballad form, train journey, taxi ride, bus trip, a journey by bicycle or on foot: the grandparents' return journey from the provinces to Tokyo, the girl's last holiday with her mother, an old man's jaunt... But the object is everyday banality taken as a family life in the Japanese house. Camera movements take place less and less frequently: tracking shots are slow, low 'blocs of movement'; the always low camera is usually fixed, frontal or at an unchanging angle: dissolves are abandoned in favor of the simple cut. What might appear to be a return to 'primitive cinema is just as much the elaboration of an astonishingly temperate modern style: the montage-cut, which will dominate modern cinema, is a purely optical passage or punctuation between images, working directly, sacrificing all synthetic effects. The sound is also affected, since the montage-cut may culminate in the 'one shot, one line' procedure borrowed from American cinema. But there, for instance, in Lubitsch, it was a matter of an action-image functioning as an index, whereas Ozu modifies the meaning of the procedure, which now shows the absence of plot: the action-image disappears in favor of the purely visual image of what a character is, and the sound image of what he says, completely banal nature and conservation constituting the essentials of the script (this is why the only things that count are the choice of the actors according to their physical and moral appearance, and the establishment of any dialogue whatever, apparently without a precise subject-matter. ....
It is clear that this method immediately presents idle periods, and leads to their increase in the course of the film. Of course, as the film proceeds, it might be thought that the idle periods are no longer important simply for themselves but recoup the effect of something important: the shot or the line would, on this view, be extended by a quite long silence or emptiness. But it is definitely not the case, with Ozu, that we get the remarkable and the ordinary, limit-situations and banal ones, the former having an effect on, or purposely insinuating themselves into, the latter. We cannot follow Paul Schrader when he contrasts, like two phases, 'the everyday' on one hand, and, on the other, 'the moment of decision', 'the disparity', which introduce an inexplicable break or emotion into daily banality. This distinction would seem strictly more valid for neo-realism. In Ozu, everything is ordinary or even banal, even death and the dead who are the object of a natural forgetting. ....
The philosopher Leibniz (who was not unaware of the existence of the Chinese philosophers) showed that the world is made up of series which are composed and which converge in a very regular way, according to ordinary laws. However, the series and the sequences are apparent to us only in small sections, and in a disrupted or mixed-up order, so that we believe in breaks, disparities and discrepancies as in things that are out of the ordinary.... It is just that we have to admit that, because the linkages of the terms in the series are naturally weak, they are constantly upset and do not appear in order. An ordinary term goes out of sequence, and emerges in the middle of another sequence of ordinary things in a relation which takes on the appearance of a strong moment, a remarkable or complex point. It is men who upset the regularity of series, the continuity of the universe. There is a time for life, a time for death, a time for the mother, a time for the daughter, but men mix them up, make them appear in disorder, set them up in conflicts. This is Ozu's thinking: life is simple, and man never stops complicating it by 'disturbing still water'....
Daily life allows only weak sensory-motor connections to survive, and replaces the action-image by pure optical and sound images, opsigns and sonsigns. In Ozu, there is no universal line which connects moments of decision, and links the dead to the living, as in Mizoguchi; nor is there any breathing space or encompasser to contain a profound question, as in Kurosawa. Ozu's spaces are raised to the state of any-space-whatevers, whether by disconnection, or vacuity (here again Ozu may be considered one of the first inventors). The false continuity of gaze, of direction and even of the position of objects are constant and systematic. One case of camera movement gives a good example of disconnection: in Early Summer, the heroine goes forward on tiptoe to surprise someone in a restaurant, the camera drawing back in order to keep her in the centre of the frame; then the camera goes forward to a corridor, but this corridor is no longer in the restaurant, it is in the house of the heroine who has already returned home. As for the empty spaces, without characters or movement, they are interiors emptied of their occupants, deserted exteriors or landscapes in nature. In Ozu they take on an autonomy which they do not immediately possess even in neo-realism, which accords them an apparent value which is relative (in relation to a story), or consequential (once the action is done with). They reach the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation, and immediately bring about the identity of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and the object, the world and the I. They correspond in part to what Schrader calls 'cases of statis', Noel burch 'pillow shots', Richie 'still lifes'. ....
A still life cannot be confused with a landscape. An empty spaces owes its importance above all to the absence of a possible content, whilst the still life is defined by the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own container: as in the long shot of the vase almost at the end of Late Spring. .... for instance in Ozu, the marvellous composition with the bottle and the lighthouse, at the beginning of A Story of Floating Weeds. The distinction is none the less that of the empty and the full, which brings into play all the nuances or relations in Chinese and Japanese thought, as two aspects of contemplation. If empty spaces, interiors and exteriors, constitute purely optical (and sound) situations, still lifes are the reverse, the correlate." Excerpted from pages 13-17, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, by Gilles Deleuze
"Although he was subject, from the outset, to the influence of certain American authors, Ozu built up in a Japanese context a body of work which was the first to develop pure optical and sound situations (even so he came quite late to the talkie, in 1936). The Europeans did not imitate him, but came back to him later via their own methods. He none the less remains the inventor of opsigns and sonsigns. The work borrows a trip/ballad form, train journey, taxi ride, bus trip, a journey by bicycle or on foot: the grandparents' return journey from the provinces to Tokyo, the girl's last holiday with her mother, an old man's jaunt... But the object is everyday banality taken as a family life in the Japanese house. Camera movements take place less and less frequently: tracking shots are slow, low 'blocs of movement'; the always low camera is usually fixed, frontal or at an unchanging angle: dissolves are abandoned in favor of the simple cut. What might appear to be a return to 'primitive cinema is just as much the elaboration of an astonishingly temperate modern style: the montage-cut, which will dominate modern cinema, is a purely optical passage or punctuation between images, working directly, sacrificing all synthetic effects. The sound is also affected, since the montage-cut may culminate in the 'one shot, one line' procedure borrowed from American cinema. But there, for instance, in Lubitsch, it was a matter of an action-image functioning as an index, whereas Ozu modifies the meaning of the procedure, which now shows the absence of plot: the action-image disappears in favor of the purely visual image of what a character is, and the sound image of what he says, completely banal nature and conservation constituting the essentials of the script (this is why the only things that count are the choice of the actors according to their physical and moral appearance, and the establishment of any dialogue whatever, apparently without a precise subject-matter. ....
It is clear that this method immediately presents idle periods, and leads to their increase in the course of the film. Of course, as the film proceeds, it might be thought that the idle periods are no longer important simply for themselves but recoup the effect of something important: the shot or the line would, on this view, be extended by a quite long silence or emptiness. But it is definitely not the case, with Ozu, that we get the remarkable and the ordinary, limit-situations and banal ones, the former having an effect on, or purposely insinuating themselves into, the latter. We cannot follow Paul Schrader when he contrasts, like two phases, 'the everyday' on one hand, and, on the other, 'the moment of decision', 'the disparity', which introduce an inexplicable break or emotion into daily banality. This distinction would seem strictly more valid for neo-realism. In Ozu, everything is ordinary or even banal, even death and the dead who are the object of a natural forgetting. ....
The philosopher Leibniz (who was not unaware of the existence of the Chinese philosophers) showed that the world is made up of series which are composed and which converge in a very regular way, according to ordinary laws. However, the series and the sequences are apparent to us only in small sections, and in a disrupted or mixed-up order, so that we believe in breaks, disparities and discrepancies as in things that are out of the ordinary.... It is just that we have to admit that, because the linkages of the terms in the series are naturally weak, they are constantly upset and do not appear in order. An ordinary term goes out of sequence, and emerges in the middle of another sequence of ordinary things in a relation which takes on the appearance of a strong moment, a remarkable or complex point. It is men who upset the regularity of series, the continuity of the universe. There is a time for life, a time for death, a time for the mother, a time for the daughter, but men mix them up, make them appear in disorder, set them up in conflicts. This is Ozu's thinking: life is simple, and man never stops complicating it by 'disturbing still water'....
Daily life allows only weak sensory-motor connections to survive, and replaces the action-image by pure optical and sound images, opsigns and sonsigns. In Ozu, there is no universal line which connects moments of decision, and links the dead to the living, as in Mizoguchi; nor is there any breathing space or encompasser to contain a profound question, as in Kurosawa. Ozu's spaces are raised to the state of any-space-whatevers, whether by disconnection, or vacuity (here again Ozu may be considered one of the first inventors). The false continuity of gaze, of direction and even of the position of objects are constant and systematic. One case of camera movement gives a good example of disconnection: in Early Summer, the heroine goes forward on tiptoe to surprise someone in a restaurant, the camera drawing back in order to keep her in the centre of the frame; then the camera goes forward to a corridor, but this corridor is no longer in the restaurant, it is in the house of the heroine who has already returned home. As for the empty spaces, without characters or movement, they are interiors emptied of their occupants, deserted exteriors or landscapes in nature. In Ozu they take on an autonomy which they do not immediately possess even in neo-realism, which accords them an apparent value which is relative (in relation to a story), or consequential (once the action is done with). They reach the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation, and immediately bring about the identity of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and the object, the world and the I. They correspond in part to what Schrader calls 'cases of statis', Noel burch 'pillow shots', Richie 'still lifes'. ....
A still life cannot be confused with a landscape. An empty spaces owes its importance above all to the absence of a possible content, whilst the still life is defined by the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own container: as in the long shot of the vase almost at the end of Late Spring. .... for instance in Ozu, the marvellous composition with the bottle and the lighthouse, at the beginning of A Story of Floating Weeds. The distinction is none the less that of the empty and the full, which brings into play all the nuances or relations in Chinese and Japanese thought, as two aspects of contemplation. If empty spaces, interiors and exteriors, constitute purely optical (and sound) situations, still lifes are the reverse, the correlate." Excerpted from pages 13-17, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, by Gilles Deleuze
Justifying the frame
Asia's participation during the Second World War is marked by incredible loss, politically, socially and culturally speaking. However, we often fail to understand, as Richard Bach said, that "what the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly." The rapid westernization of the region, which the Great Chinese Wall couldn't counterpoint this time, provoked deep local reactions that are still proving to be fruitful. The West's damnation of dictatorship regimes and society's mistrust towards communism are leading China and its neighbours in an alternative direction of achieving progress and prosperity. And in such a period of crisis, Eastern culture returns to its rich roots to seek self-respect and a base for further development. In her book "South-Eastern Asia. Traditions and Contemporaneity" Hristina Mircheva talks about "the Asian way of thinking" of progress and prosperity:
A catalyst of these bold thoughts is the Asian way of thinking about the responsibility of every person, about the requirement of relying on your own strength, to serve the nation without expecting a reward, to believe in the rebirth of the Asian origin, to devote one's strength to this revival.
And this strong notion expresses itself in Asia's age-old nationalism, its realising the difference of European societies, its "self-dependence and independence."
This process of returning to the roots can clearly be seen in Eastern Asia's contemporary cinema. However, present cinema - looking into itself through contemplation - is an inheritor of another XXth century cinema, that of Yasujiro Ozu.
Since the similarities between Ozu's films and today's "contemplative cinema" have already been spotted, let me explore and try to justify my way of understanding Ozu's slowness, preliminary stating that this retardation today has evolved on a much larger scale.
Ozu's post-war contemplative style can be seen forming in his earlier custom-focused films, such as the later-remade 1934 A Story of Floating Weeds. Although here the purpose of the camera is to turn the viewer into a kind of stalker (a decision implied in Bruno Dumont's Flandres in a more distant and coldly transitioned way), certain moments hint towards observing, namely those post-action, empty-framed, after-the-content-curve seconds, which Girish spoke of, during which the viewer is left with a bare shot, deprived of human presence, confusedly wondering what to make of the inanimate setting.
During the 12th and 13th century Japan discovered and perfected a kind of garden that surrounded tea-spaces and comforted towards contemplation, self-observation and meditation. These gardens, constructed similarly to Buddhist monastries, were entered through a path which lead, along a corridor, to the small tea-room at the far end. While entering, visitors had to bend their head (due to the low door), which expressed their respect. The path to the room was considered a road of thinking. It seems to me that those after-the-content-curve moments in Ozu's film are, in fact, such little paths, though, in reverse orther. If a person has to purify and think before the tea ceremony, here one needs the event of the shot in order to comprehend it. The director occasionally provides such meditation paths, which are an actionless continuation of the action.
Another point, which applies to all of Ozu's films, is the low camera angle at the height of a sitting man. This is a position close to the one of a meditating Buddha - isolated from the world and devoted to self-observation, but also of a kneeing man, expressing admiration. Thus, the viewer is placed in a position which intuitively provokes contemplation as well as unprejudiced appreciation.
One thing that especially puzzled me was the recurrence of still, inanimate pots-full shots. The same is present in Eric Khoo's 2005 Be With Me, although there the dramaturgian validity is due to a different cause, possibly the suggestion of deafness, stillness, muteness. Then, a Japanese garden style gave me an answer. "Shinden" or "rock arden", or "zen garden" is an artistic composition of a number of rocks. It plays with the conceptions of beauty and the way we experience the three dimensions. Ozu's household compositions very much resemble their zen-ness and minimalism in searching a simplicity of forms and organising space.
During the Tang dynasty (and later the Song dynasty, 10-13 c.) between 7-10 century, the Chinese landscape painting was developed and mastered as well as transfered in Japan and South Korea. It carried the idea of nature being a vastness of space which the human eye can embrace in only one look. Thus was initiated a tradition of interpreting Chinese landscapes (mountains and rivers, mainly) into wide or long silk canvases of succeeding plans. When a mountain chain had to be drawn, the artist unfolded the silk roll horisontally; while when the landscape consisted of high sharp peaks, he unfolded it vertically in order to spread the image into a number of plans one on top of the other. The same technique was later adopted by Japanese masters and can be detected in Ozu's organisation of the frame.
The last shot, on the other hand, forwards to Angelopoulos's The Weeping Meadow.
The sky had to compulsory be present in the painting.
Three times can Ozu's camera be seen moving and it is done linearly. Every time it tries to envelop a large group of people/objects. Two of these three times it spreads aside an audience - too big to detailedly be grasped as a whole. The last time it slides along a sequence of organised pots - gradually separating groups of structured "zen compositions."
I perceive this directorial decision as a reference to the imposibility of encompassing the immensity of the landscape painting. It was drawn in such detail and accuracy of the lines that one had to got close in order to appreciate them. Thus, however, one couldn't see the whole, but could only read it - image by image. I believe Ozu applied this technique in order to create a similar effect: add an emphasis on the beauty of the single detail and how it flows rhythmically into the whole entity.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Old Joy
As the blog-a-thon draws to an end, I've read and enjoyed much but contributed little. This isn't a contribution in the form of discussion as much as a review I did of a film on the list, namely Old Joy, which I posted on my Melbourne Film Blog at the start of the month after seeing it at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Photo: Will Oldham and Daniel London, Old Joy
Photo: Will Oldham and Daniel London, Old JoyThis is a low budget independent film directed and co-written by Kelly Reichardt that recently had four screenings at ACMI. Maybe it’s the seasonal vacuum of quality cinema one expects this time of year, or the film has some reputation preceding it, or the fact that I saw it at its final ACMI screening on Sunday – I was surprised at the huge turnout. ACMI’s smaller cinema 1 was packed to capacity.
Old Joy is a quietly accomplished film. Poetic and observational, aspects of it remind me of different films. The observational aspect reminds me of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, particularly the capturing of seemingly meaningless passing details. The poetic nature and cryptic relationship dynamics reminded me of the quietly confident nature of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Iklimer (Climates, 2006), my favourite film at last year’s MIFF.
Like Climates, the film is a nuanced reflection on a disintegrating relationship. The premise is simple: two thirty-something friends from college, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), meet up after a long break for a weekend camping trip to a secluded spot in the mountains.
There is tension between the characters, and the film observes this without giving clarification for the causes or any resolution. Mark seeks permission to go camping from his expectant partner Tanya (Tanya Smith) who appears not overly happy at the idea.
Mark’s character seems quietly introspective (he’s meditating in the garden when Kurt’s call is made) and doesn’t talk a lot. When Kurt first suggests they take Mark’s aging Volvo station wagon rather than Kurt’s beaten up old truck, there is a hint of someone who is a hanger-on, an idea supported by Kurt borrowing ten dollars from Mark.
For Mark, the outing seems to represent an escape from domestic life while for Kurt it’s another adventure. While neither appears to have progressed materially in life (nor particularly inclined to), Mark has concerns about family, home and security while Kurt seems to have changed little since college days. Close friends at college, they have drifted apart and Kurt is keen to bridge the divide that time and circumstances have created.
In the absence of dialogue, we get a sense of what goes on in Mark’s head by the radio program he is listening to in the car as it travels out of the city. This is a very clever device that adds a subtle and interesting layer to the film. Discussion of the war in
Some may find this boring; I found it fascinating as it captures the quiet minutiae of life that are usually overlooked in mainstream films attempting to overwhelm the senses. It’s consistent with my belief that everyone’s life is worthy of a story and reminds me of Matt Riviera’s 10 Thoughts on Watching and Appreciating Film. Point three: If a film is slow get into the Zone. For me, I didn’t need to get into the Zone; I was right in there with it and enjoying the ride.
The meandering music of Yo La Tengo (who also contributed to the vastly different Shortbus) really added a nice ambience to the road journey. The dialogue, mostly by Kurt was also interestingly idiosyncratic but believable – including egocentric ideas about the basis of the universe. My interpretation of the dialogue was that Kurt was trying to appeal to the intellectualism shared during their college days and hadn’t really moved on in life as Mark had with his ‘real-life’ concerns. Kurt notes an uncomfortable gulf between them.
The title derives from a dream Kurt has in which a woman tells him that “sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy”. Sorrow is the subtle theme of the film. By the director’s minimalist approach, we are left to trust our own instincts as to what has happened in the past (in terms of friendship), what has been lost and what may become of the protagonists.
I found the destination of the men, Bagby Hot Springs, quite uplifting. It reminded me of drives I had taken to places like
Of some interest is that the film was co-produced by Todd Haynes, director of significant films like Safe and Far From Heaven.
If your idea of a night out is a visit to the local cinemaplex, forget Old Joy. If you happen to get the opportunity to see it, don’t expect a masterpiece or anything profound. In its own quiet melancholy way and oozing with authenticity, it is a beautifully poetic rumination on human relationships that ends as subtly and ambiguously as it starts. It leaves a quiet resonance in the mind as one leaves the cinema or even now as I recall it. I hope it comes out on DVD as I’d like to buy it.
Dir, Ed: Kelly Reichardt Rating: Unclassified Duration: 76 min Genre: drama Language: English Country: USA Release: 4/1/07 – 7/1/07, ACMI Scr: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt Prod: Joshua Blum, Todd Haynes, Lars Knudsen, Jay Van Hoy, Neil Kopp, Mike S. Ryan, Anish Savjani, Rajen Savjani Sound Des: Eric Offen Phot: Peter Sillen Prod Des: Morgan Currie Mus: Yo La Tengo Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith
Gilles Deleuze and Contemplative Cinema
"Against those who defined Italian neo-realism by its social content, Bazin put forward the fundamental requirement of formal aesthetic criteria. According to him, it was a matter of a new form of reality, said to be dispersive, elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with deliberately weak connections and floating events. The real was no longer represented or reproduced but 'aimed at.' Instead of representing an already deciphered real, neo-realism aimed at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered real; this is why the sequence shot tended to replace the montage of representations. Neo-realism therefore invented a new type of image, which Bazin suggested calling 'fact-image.' This thesis of Bazin's was infinitely richer than the one that he was challenging, and showed that neo-realism did not limit itself to the content of its earliest examples. But what these theses had in common was the posing of the problem at the level of reality: neo-realism produced a formal or material 'additional reality'. However we are not sure that the problem arises at the level of the real, whether in relation to form or content. Is it not rather at the level of the 'mental', in terms of thought? If all the movement-images, perceptions, actions and affects underwent such an upheaval, was this not first of all because a new element burst on to the scene which was to prevent perception being extended into action in order to put it in contact with thought, and, gradually, was to subordinate the image to the demands of new signs which would take it beyond movement?" p 1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Deleuze opens his second book on cinema with a suggestive thesis: that post-war cinema engages thought, is a thought cinema, an emergence of a new kind of cinematic production (he would avoid the term "language" for specific reasons) interested in exceeding the limits of action and narration. He situates this break in the films of neo-realism, which offered us scenes and shots that fall outside the conventional use of camera to capture the actors' physical and motivated participation in a visual story.
In these shots the camera chooses to dwell on its subjects not to show us their motivation, their actions or reactions, but to show us their subjectivity, their physicality, their presence outside of dramatic narration. The shots may even resemble a conventional reaction shot, but be placed in a segment of the film that has no need of it. The technique is common today but was not at the time.
In films like those of Lou Kerrigan, in examples like The Last Life in the Universe, Cafe Lumiere, or Morvern Callar, we are given subjects standing alone, or alone amongst others, mute or stuck, frightened or distressed, emptied out or meditative, attached to some interior trouble or block that renders them unable to find an action that might correspond to their present situation. The films give us situations in which actors have no present and immediately-available course of action.
These are new images for film. Characters are not meant to step outside of the dramatic flow of a narrative story-telling. The challenge of doing this in theater risks creating an untenable situation, for the character's sudden pause can so easily make those of us in the audience uncomfortable and distressed for the actor. Theater places the audience in relation to stage actors in a way that makes it difficult for them to change their role vis a vis performance without also threatening to break the "third wall" between them and the audience. In film, the camera enables the possibility that we might see the character watching, stilled, and silent without feeling that something is going wrong, without feeling that a performance has now stalled or that an actor has possibly changed his or her relation to us.
On the relationship of viewer to actor/action in convention film:
"What the viewer perceived therefore was a sensory-motor image in which he took a greater or lesser part by identification with the characters." p 3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Painters would inevitably paint with paint alone, apart and away from representation, from perspective, away from the picture and with the contrast, movement, and force of paint itself Composers would discover the sounds and rhythms that lay just off the page of sheet music, where sounds might break free of the harmonies and melodies whose own familiarity made it difficult to sound something new without sounding something recognizable. In film, too, the signifying production of moving image and sound would have to peel off the printed page to unravel on the cutting room floor, awaiting new modes of reconstruction and assemblage.
"This is how, in an ordinary or everyday situation, in the course of a series of gestures, which are insignificant but all the more obedient to simple sensory-motor schemata, what has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no response or reaction. The eyes, the belly, that is what an encounter is... " p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Deleuze sees some of the films of the 50's and 60's as participating in this movement: a movement to rewrite the art of film-making. For the sake of creating new films, finding new moves and new movements, new ways of constructing time, of capturing it, freezing it, stilling it, cutting it or drawing it out...
"What defines neo-realism is this build-up of purely optical situations (and sound ones, although there was no synchronized sound at the start of neo-realism), which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism. It is perhaps as important as the conquering of a purely optical space in painting, with impressionism." p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Time through movement and motion within a shot, and not just through the whole that a film presents. Time, as in Tarkovsky's case, as a pressure within the shot. Or in Tarr's case, as the time that it takes to walk from a village to the market square. Time as waiting, for a daughter to return or perhaps for knowledge. For example, Antonioni and Ozu each created new ways to place shots within a film, found new relations between the camera and subject, set up symmetries or wanderings that were like inverting the relationship between footnotes and a text: the viewer would now become stuck within footnotes. The film's action seemed undercut, and a story so under-told, that something else had to be going on. It is the mark of these new films that their departure from conventional constructions seems at first boring, incomplete, uninteresting or unsatisfying. All of which could be said of any attempt to speak in a new tongue: is it the language, or what is being said, that's nonsense? One would need to learn the language to know if an utterance made sense or not...
"This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent." p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Having described, in just two pages, the needs of this new cinema, Deleuze can now proceed to develop some of its inventions. Christian Metz's well-known and accomplished account of a semiotics of film makes a similar attempt at teasing apart a grammar of film's signifying language. He identifies shots as as units; scenes, phrases, cliches, and on up to stylistic and narrative elements of genres. And indeed many of these phrases are so widely known that an animation like The Simpsons can produce parodies by quoting cinematic codes. But to Deleuze, Metz makes a critical mistake by approaching film as narrative, one that he believes eliminates the possibility of discovering cinematic material and substance, not to mention the construction of films themselves. We can take Deleuze's comments on the widespread use of the banal in the films of Antonioni and Ozu (many contemporary indie and art films insist on the banal almost by rule) as a means of liberating place from setting. The banal, he claims, provides a new image because it so easily asserts itself. The film-maker only has to lift it out of its conventional role as a setting for action and story-telling.
"Similarly, if everyday banality is so important, it is because, being subject to sensory-motor schemata which are automatic and pre-established, it is all the more liable, on the least disturbance of equilibrium between stimulus and response (as in the scene with the little maid in Umberto D), suddenly to free itself from the laws of this schema and reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable, giving it the pace of a dream or a nightmare. There is, therefore, a necessary passage from the crisis of image-action to the pure optical-sound image." p 3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
From the slackening of the sensory-motor schema in neo-realism, Deleuze claims that film can now create pure optical and sound situations. Situations divorced from action, from narrative, and the film's traditional organization of itself as dramatic and representational form. In Visconti and Antonioni, we are now not only given actors to observe (who are themselves observing, rather than acting), but we are given objects and places disembedded from story-line and from their role as grounding storyline (as settings).
"After Obsession, however, something appears that continues to develop in Visconti: objects and settings [milieux] take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves. It is therefore essential that not only the viewer but the protagonists invest the settings and the objects with their gaze, that they see and hear the things and the people, in order for action or passion to be born, erupting in a pre-existing daily life. .... So the situation is not extended directly into action: it is no longer sensory-motor, as in realism, but primarily optical and of sound, invested by the senses, before action takes shape in it, and uses or confronts its elements." p 4 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
"And Antonioni's art will continue to evolve in two directions: an astonishing development of the idle periods of everyday banality; then starting with The Eclipse, a treatment of limit-situations which pushes them to the point of dehumanized landscapes, of emptied spaces that might be seen as having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only a geophysical description, an abstract inventory of them. As for Fellini, from his earliest films, it is not simply the spectacle which tends to overflow the real, it is the everyday which continually organizes itself into a travelling spectacle, and the sensory-motor linkages which give way to a succession of varieties subject to their own laws of passage." p 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Spaces now present new opportunities for relations, for the construction of relations between actor and space, action and space, space and situation, and ultimately, for the viewer and the cinematic image. Where spaces as settings were conventionally governed by their need to situate actor in action, they were subordinate to narration and requirements of dramatic staging: they were the stage and set design, if you will, in which action might unfold.
"The space of a sensory-motor situation is a setting which is already specified and presupposes an action which discloses it, or prompts a reaction which adapts to or modifies it." p 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
The new image would be free of those needs, free of drama, and thus free to suggest, show, and become either on their own terms or in new relations (to viewer, to actor, to situation). We need only think of Herzog, Kieslowski (especially in Double Life of Veronique), of Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Greenaway, even Kurosawa (whose love of drama is complemented by his own talent as a painter) to recognize this.
Another step is now taken. The image, becoming free to take on new significations, is assigned: to a subjective or objective position.
"In short, pure optical and sound situations can have two poles—objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental." p 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
A sheet of rain can be given to us as an image, or it can be given to us as a mental image: a sheet of rain through a character's eyes. In the second case, the possibilities for meaning or interpretation are multiplied. Is this a sheet of rain here and now, or in memory, in fantasy, or dream? What are we seeing? What the character sees, or what the film is made of (the landscape dream sequence in Fata Morgana, which he obtained from his brother's 16 mm and which is utterly alien to the film, visually and in terms of location or setting)?
"As for the distinction between subjective and objective, it also tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action. We run in fact into a principle of indeterminibility, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask." p 7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Deleuze invents new terms. These are signs, but not direct indexical signs (e.g. smoke = fire) but optical and sound signs. Deleuze is giving cinema a "language," but it's a "language" that has nothing to do with narration...
"No longer being induced by an action, any more than it is extended into one, the optical and sound situation is, therefore, neither an index nor a synsign. There is a new breed of signs, opsigns and synsigns...subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies, where the character does not act without seeing himself acting..." p 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Film, even when they contain individuals, couples, families, and other personal compositions, can be told impersonally. He sees this especially in Antonioni's trilogy (Avventura, Eclisse, La Notte). This is not just a tale of modern alienation, of aimless drifting, or of existential crisis and loss. That would be the narrative reading (and it's fine, as that). But to measure the invention at the level of the image, of the sound, and of the assemblage of these Antonionis we must see more than just the muted angst and longing, in the ennui distributed across Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, and Marcello Mastroianni.
"...it is noticeable that Antonioni's objective images, which impersonally follow a becoming, that is, a development of consequences in a story [recit], none the less are subject to rapid breaks, interpolations and 'infinitesimal injections of a-temporality'..." p 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
For Deleuze, Antonioni has invented spaces whose presence provides possibilities for characters in transit, transit emotionally, privately and unto themselves, spaces open for occupying, moving through, but not for making into a home, not for making familiar, not for personalizing. Spaces perhaps alien, whose distance is almost contagious, infecting those who find themselves in them suddenly afflicted with a modern purposeless. Spaces as were available in the American western, for the taking and colonizing, for the occupying and purchase, for the railroad and the law. But spaces as they were just before they were mapped: urban deserts.
"We are returned once more to the first form of the any-space-whatever: the disconnected space. The connection of the parts is not given, because it can come about only from the subjective point of view of a character who is, nevertheless, absent, or as even disappeared, not simply out of frame, but passed into the void." p 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
"From The Eclipse onwards, the any-space-whatever had achieved a second form: empty or deserted space. What happened is that, from one result to the next, the characters were objectively emptied: they are suffering less from the absence of another than from their absence from themselves...." p 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
But I have already said too much, for Deleuze insists that we avoid "reading" cinema, for it is to be seen.
I wanted to present Deleuze's film theory by providing a close reading of just a couple cinematic inventions that would seem critical to our Contemplative Cinema blogathon. Deleuze is, for me, the only theorist whose work makes a serious attempt at grasping film from the inside, from what it does as it unrolls at 24 frames a second, as if magically staging whole places and times, people, and events, succeeding at folding us in and taking over our position in time and space... There is much more in these books, some 500 pages of film theory (I've covered only nine of those pages here!). It would be possible to seek out the new images of contemporary Contemplative Cinema, I think, if we got down inside them, swept the floor, and took the lid off those cans... Black and white versus color, Christopher Doyle vs Sven Nyquist, action vs meditation (is there not contemplation in Wai's Fallen Angels?), scene vs event, and so on. Can CC still be CC if it makes up only a part of a film's style (e.g. 101 Reykjavik; Last Life in the Universe)? Can it be CC if it is of the Asian Tartan Extreme variety (e.g. Snake in June)? Is a haiku a form of poetry, and if so what's an epic tale told in verse? Is CC in the form itself, in elements, in style, or in the film-maker's own ambitions? I think Deleuze would have an easy time of this one, but a Deleuze comes along only once in a great great while.
I'll try to get another one together, this time on camera moves, before the blogathon is over. A shorter one, I hope!
Deleuze opens his second book on cinema with a suggestive thesis: that post-war cinema engages thought, is a thought cinema, an emergence of a new kind of cinematic production (he would avoid the term "language" for specific reasons) interested in exceeding the limits of action and narration. He situates this break in the films of neo-realism, which offered us scenes and shots that fall outside the conventional use of camera to capture the actors' physical and motivated participation in a visual story.
In these shots the camera chooses to dwell on its subjects not to show us their motivation, their actions or reactions, but to show us their subjectivity, their physicality, their presence outside of dramatic narration. The shots may even resemble a conventional reaction shot, but be placed in a segment of the film that has no need of it. The technique is common today but was not at the time.
In films like those of Lou Kerrigan, in examples like The Last Life in the Universe, Cafe Lumiere, or Morvern Callar, we are given subjects standing alone, or alone amongst others, mute or stuck, frightened or distressed, emptied out or meditative, attached to some interior trouble or block that renders them unable to find an action that might correspond to their present situation. The films give us situations in which actors have no present and immediately-available course of action.
These are new images for film. Characters are not meant to step outside of the dramatic flow of a narrative story-telling. The challenge of doing this in theater risks creating an untenable situation, for the character's sudden pause can so easily make those of us in the audience uncomfortable and distressed for the actor. Theater places the audience in relation to stage actors in a way that makes it difficult for them to change their role vis a vis performance without also threatening to break the "third wall" between them and the audience. In film, the camera enables the possibility that we might see the character watching, stilled, and silent without feeling that something is going wrong, without feeling that a performance has now stalled or that an actor has possibly changed his or her relation to us.
On the relationship of viewer to actor/action in convention film:
"What the viewer perceived therefore was a sensory-motor image in which he took a greater or lesser part by identification with the characters." p 3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Painters would inevitably paint with paint alone, apart and away from representation, from perspective, away from the picture and with the contrast, movement, and force of paint itself Composers would discover the sounds and rhythms that lay just off the page of sheet music, where sounds might break free of the harmonies and melodies whose own familiarity made it difficult to sound something new without sounding something recognizable. In film, too, the signifying production of moving image and sound would have to peel off the printed page to unravel on the cutting room floor, awaiting new modes of reconstruction and assemblage.
"This is how, in an ordinary or everyday situation, in the course of a series of gestures, which are insignificant but all the more obedient to simple sensory-motor schemata, what has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no response or reaction. The eyes, the belly, that is what an encounter is... " p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Deleuze sees some of the films of the 50's and 60's as participating in this movement: a movement to rewrite the art of film-making. For the sake of creating new films, finding new moves and new movements, new ways of constructing time, of capturing it, freezing it, stilling it, cutting it or drawing it out...
"What defines neo-realism is this build-up of purely optical situations (and sound ones, although there was no synchronized sound at the start of neo-realism), which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism. It is perhaps as important as the conquering of a purely optical space in painting, with impressionism." p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Time through movement and motion within a shot, and not just through the whole that a film presents. Time, as in Tarkovsky's case, as a pressure within the shot. Or in Tarr's case, as the time that it takes to walk from a village to the market square. Time as waiting, for a daughter to return or perhaps for knowledge. For example, Antonioni and Ozu each created new ways to place shots within a film, found new relations between the camera and subject, set up symmetries or wanderings that were like inverting the relationship between footnotes and a text: the viewer would now become stuck within footnotes. The film's action seemed undercut, and a story so under-told, that something else had to be going on. It is the mark of these new films that their departure from conventional constructions seems at first boring, incomplete, uninteresting or unsatisfying. All of which could be said of any attempt to speak in a new tongue: is it the language, or what is being said, that's nonsense? One would need to learn the language to know if an utterance made sense or not...
"This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent." p 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Having described, in just two pages, the needs of this new cinema, Deleuze can now proceed to develop some of its inventions. Christian Metz's well-known and accomplished account of a semiotics of film makes a similar attempt at teasing apart a grammar of film's signifying language. He identifies shots as as units; scenes, phrases, cliches, and on up to stylistic and narrative elements of genres. And indeed many of these phrases are so widely known that an animation like The Simpsons can produce parodies by quoting cinematic codes. But to Deleuze, Metz makes a critical mistake by approaching film as narrative, one that he believes eliminates the possibility of discovering cinematic material and substance, not to mention the construction of films themselves. We can take Deleuze's comments on the widespread use of the banal in the films of Antonioni and Ozu (many contemporary indie and art films insist on the banal almost by rule) as a means of liberating place from setting. The banal, he claims, provides a new image because it so easily asserts itself. The film-maker only has to lift it out of its conventional role as a setting for action and story-telling.
"Similarly, if everyday banality is so important, it is because, being subject to sensory-motor schemata which are automatic and pre-established, it is all the more liable, on the least disturbance of equilibrium between stimulus and response (as in the scene with the little maid in Umberto D), suddenly to free itself from the laws of this schema and reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable, giving it the pace of a dream or a nightmare. There is, therefore, a necessary passage from the crisis of image-action to the pure optical-sound image." p 3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
From the slackening of the sensory-motor schema in neo-realism, Deleuze claims that film can now create pure optical and sound situations. Situations divorced from action, from narrative, and the film's traditional organization of itself as dramatic and representational form. In Visconti and Antonioni, we are now not only given actors to observe (who are themselves observing, rather than acting), but we are given objects and places disembedded from story-line and from their role as grounding storyline (as settings).
"After Obsession, however, something appears that continues to develop in Visconti: objects and settings [milieux] take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves. It is therefore essential that not only the viewer but the protagonists invest the settings and the objects with their gaze, that they see and hear the things and the people, in order for action or passion to be born, erupting in a pre-existing daily life. .... So the situation is not extended directly into action: it is no longer sensory-motor, as in realism, but primarily optical and of sound, invested by the senses, before action takes shape in it, and uses or confronts its elements." p 4 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
"And Antonioni's art will continue to evolve in two directions: an astonishing development of the idle periods of everyday banality; then starting with The Eclipse, a treatment of limit-situations which pushes them to the point of dehumanized landscapes, of emptied spaces that might be seen as having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only a geophysical description, an abstract inventory of them. As for Fellini, from his earliest films, it is not simply the spectacle which tends to overflow the real, it is the everyday which continually organizes itself into a travelling spectacle, and the sensory-motor linkages which give way to a succession of varieties subject to their own laws of passage." p 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Spaces now present new opportunities for relations, for the construction of relations between actor and space, action and space, space and situation, and ultimately, for the viewer and the cinematic image. Where spaces as settings were conventionally governed by their need to situate actor in action, they were subordinate to narration and requirements of dramatic staging: they were the stage and set design, if you will, in which action might unfold.
"The space of a sensory-motor situation is a setting which is already specified and presupposes an action which discloses it, or prompts a reaction which adapts to or modifies it." p 5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
The new image would be free of those needs, free of drama, and thus free to suggest, show, and become either on their own terms or in new relations (to viewer, to actor, to situation). We need only think of Herzog, Kieslowski (especially in Double Life of Veronique), of Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Greenaway, even Kurosawa (whose love of drama is complemented by his own talent as a painter) to recognize this.
Another step is now taken. The image, becoming free to take on new significations, is assigned: to a subjective or objective position.
"In short, pure optical and sound situations can have two poles—objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental." p 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
A sheet of rain can be given to us as an image, or it can be given to us as a mental image: a sheet of rain through a character's eyes. In the second case, the possibilities for meaning or interpretation are multiplied. Is this a sheet of rain here and now, or in memory, in fantasy, or dream? What are we seeing? What the character sees, or what the film is made of (the landscape dream sequence in Fata Morgana, which he obtained from his brother's 16 mm and which is utterly alien to the film, visually and in terms of location or setting)?
"As for the distinction between subjective and objective, it also tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action. We run in fact into a principle of indeterminibility, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask." p 7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Deleuze invents new terms. These are signs, but not direct indexical signs (e.g. smoke = fire) but optical and sound signs. Deleuze is giving cinema a "language," but it's a "language" that has nothing to do with narration...
"No longer being induced by an action, any more than it is extended into one, the optical and sound situation is, therefore, neither an index nor a synsign. There is a new breed of signs, opsigns and synsigns...subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies, where the character does not act without seeing himself acting..." p 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Film, even when they contain individuals, couples, families, and other personal compositions, can be told impersonally. He sees this especially in Antonioni's trilogy (Avventura, Eclisse, La Notte). This is not just a tale of modern alienation, of aimless drifting, or of existential crisis and loss. That would be the narrative reading (and it's fine, as that). But to measure the invention at the level of the image, of the sound, and of the assemblage of these Antonionis we must see more than just the muted angst and longing, in the ennui distributed across Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, and Marcello Mastroianni.
"...it is noticeable that Antonioni's objective images, which impersonally follow a becoming, that is, a development of consequences in a story [recit], none the less are subject to rapid breaks, interpolations and 'infinitesimal injections of a-temporality'..." p 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
For Deleuze, Antonioni has invented spaces whose presence provides possibilities for characters in transit, transit emotionally, privately and unto themselves, spaces open for occupying, moving through, but not for making into a home, not for making familiar, not for personalizing. Spaces perhaps alien, whose distance is almost contagious, infecting those who find themselves in them suddenly afflicted with a modern purposeless. Spaces as were available in the American western, for the taking and colonizing, for the occupying and purchase, for the railroad and the law. But spaces as they were just before they were mapped: urban deserts.
"We are returned once more to the first form of the any-space-whatever: the disconnected space. The connection of the parts is not given, because it can come about only from the subjective point of view of a character who is, nevertheless, absent, or as even disappeared, not simply out of frame, but passed into the void." p 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
"From The Eclipse onwards, the any-space-whatever had achieved a second form: empty or deserted space. What happened is that, from one result to the next, the characters were objectively emptied: they are suffering less from the absence of another than from their absence from themselves...." p 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
But I have already said too much, for Deleuze insists that we avoid "reading" cinema, for it is to be seen.
I wanted to present Deleuze's film theory by providing a close reading of just a couple cinematic inventions that would seem critical to our Contemplative Cinema blogathon. Deleuze is, for me, the only theorist whose work makes a serious attempt at grasping film from the inside, from what it does as it unrolls at 24 frames a second, as if magically staging whole places and times, people, and events, succeeding at folding us in and taking over our position in time and space... There is much more in these books, some 500 pages of film theory (I've covered only nine of those pages here!). It would be possible to seek out the new images of contemporary Contemplative Cinema, I think, if we got down inside them, swept the floor, and took the lid off those cans... Black and white versus color, Christopher Doyle vs Sven Nyquist, action vs meditation (is there not contemplation in Wai's Fallen Angels?), scene vs event, and so on. Can CC still be CC if it makes up only a part of a film's style (e.g. 101 Reykjavik; Last Life in the Universe)? Can it be CC if it is of the Asian Tartan Extreme variety (e.g. Snake in June)? Is a haiku a form of poetry, and if so what's an epic tale told in verse? Is CC in the form itself, in elements, in style, or in the film-maker's own ambitions? I think Deleuze would have an easy time of this one, but a Deleuze comes along only once in a great great while.
I'll try to get another one together, this time on camera moves, before the blogathon is over. A shorter one, I hope!
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