Deleuze, G.(2000)
‘The Brain Is The Screen: An Interview with
Gilles Deleuze’, in Flaxman, G.(Ed).The Brain
is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of
Cinema, London: University of Minnesota
Press: 365--76.
[This was originally in the
form of an interview in 1986 after Deleuze had
completed his two books on cinema.The
interview first appeared in Cahiers du Cinema.
NB again-- after reading lots more stuff, I think
all this material about communicating directly
with brains might well be a reference to the work
of G Tarde, who saw in it the basis of human
interaction. Deleuze likes Tarde, as do lots of
other French theorists like Latour. Even so, to
reproduce it like this without question still
leaves Deleuze open to the lashing I've given him
here].
Deleuze attended cinema before
and after the war.In the later period, he was already a
student of philosophy, and noticed one immediate
‘conjunction’: he had already begun to see the
point of introducing movement of thought in
philosophy, and he saw that the cinema introduced
a real movement into the image.He saw
some immediate link, so that one could go directly
from cinema to philosophy and vice versa.In
particular, cinema showed not only behaviour but
‘spiritual life’ [in a debates, thoughts and so
on—‘the domain of cold decision, of absolute
obstinacy, of the choice of existence’ (366).He
didn’t just mean ‘cinematic catholicism or
religious kitsch’.Rohmer even seemed to divide existence into
spheres—aesthetic, ethical, religious [so a kind
of early hint of different planes?].This
immediate connection means that ‘Cinema are not
only puts movement in the image, it also puts
movement in the mind [since] Spiritual life is the
movement of the mind’ (366).
Neither linguistics nor
psychoanalysis contribute much to cinema [because
they are focused on static images and universal
processes?], but the ‘biology of the brain’ does,
since ‘thought is molecular’, operating at
molecular speed.The circuits of the brain are traced by
‘stimuli, corpuscles and particles’, and cinema
does the same thing, ‘it makes bodies out of
grains’.These
linkages exceed simple associations of images,
since they also indicate motion.
There are deficient brains,
however, as well as creative ones.Music
videos began by indicating new linkages and real
images, but soon ‘collapsed in pitiful twitches
and grimaces, as well as haphazard cuts’ (367).These
examples travel through circuits in the lower
brain, as seen by the ‘violence and sexuality in
what is represented’.Real
cinema also has violence and sexuality, but it is
‘molecular’, not localised, and can help compose
movement images [the example here the characters
in Losey].
The link between philosophy and
cinema or is not a matter of one reflecting on the
other, but rather discovering that there are
similar problems to be solved.This
permits comparative criticism, the only true kind,
much better than criticism that closes in on the
cinema as a ghetto.Thus Godard shows the problems of painting
in Passion,
constructs a ‘”serial cinema”’ [apparently a
musical term in which ‘components are arranged an
arbitrary order, which then serves as the basis
for development’, so says note five, 373], and
even a cinema of catastrophe, as in the
mathematics of Thom.All work links up like this, ‘in a system
of relays’: in his case, philosophical problems
‘compelled’ him to look at cinema (367).
[The interviewers point out
there are lots of classifications and taxonomies
in the cinema books {even more in the dreaded anti
Oedipus}].Deleuze
finds them ‘fun’ [he definitely as OCD], as an
essential part of preparation.He
admires the classifications in natural history, in
Balzac and in Borges.Classifications
are creative and flexible, and some categories are
empty.The
process of ordering things with very different
appearances ‘is the beginning of the formation of
concepts’ (368).The usual classifications of cinema are
insufficient, based on similarities of signs not
general forms.Proper classifications are
symptomologies—they help formulate a concept as an
event not an abstract essence.In this
way, the different disciplines should be seen as
‘signaletic’ [collections of signs?To be
interpreted to produce symptoms?].This is
what cinema is, not language but ‘signaletic
material’ (368).
Thus light can be classified in
cinema—an impassive milieu; an indivisible force
that clashes with shadows; ‘a white of principal
opacity’; a light that alternates, to produce
‘lunar figures’ [with examples of prewar French
cinema].New
events of light can also be created, for example
in Passion
[which shows paintings being composed in the
classic realist style, using the effects of light
to produce depth and perspective—the examples look
a bit like Rembrandt or Caravaggio].We could
also produce an ‘open classification of cinematic
space’—organic or encompassing spaces for example
in westerns; ‘functional lines of the universe’;
the flat spaces of Losey; disconnected spaces with
undetermined junctions [Bresson is the example
here—Deleuze especially likes his Trial of Joan
of Arc for its disconnected spaces—see Cinema two]; empty spaces
as in Ozu; ‘stratigraphic spaces that are defined
by what they cover up’, so that we can read the
space [the Straubs]; the topological spaces of
Resnais' (368-9).Many other spaces are possible.The
lights and spaces can combine in different ways.Some of
these classifications belong to the cinema, and
yet they also refers to science or art [I think
this stuff is a lot more useful than the attempts
to define cinematic signs in the impenetrable
Glossary of Cinema one].
[The interviewers asked if
there were still auteurs]
It is important to maintain the
distinction between the commercial and the
creative, although it is fashionable not to do so.When we
merge the two, we are succumbing to one of ‘the
demands of capitalism: rapid turnover'(369).Advertisements
are not poetry, since ‘no real art tries to create
or exhibit a product in order to correspond to the
public's expectations', no matter how shocking
this might seem.Art, by contrast, is produced 'from the
unexpected, the unrecognised, the unrecognisable.There is
no commercial art' (369) [pretty standard Bourdieu
concept of elite vs. popular culture revealed here
then?].The
same form can be used both in arts and
commercials, however—great novels and bestsellers
both appear as books and are sold in a market, and
the market favours quick turnover.'...worse,
the bestseller will aspire to the qualities of the
great novel, holding it hostage.This is
what happens in television, where aesthetic
judgement becomes that’s tasty,",
like a snack, or "that's too bad," like a penalty
in soccer' (369).There is a tendency to promote from the
bottom, to make all literature mass consumption.
There is an interest in blurring the commercial
and the creative
The concept auteur refers to
artwork, and is essential if we are still to
distinguish between the commercial and the
creative.Cahiers
did much work here.
‘Every [truly creative piece of
work], even a short one, implies a significant
undertaking or a long internal duration' (370)
[another classic hallmark of elite taste, to shun
any hint of industrial production.This is
the aesthetic that valorises 'primitive' art,
according to Clifford.Incidentally,
the set
of square brackets in this quote is original].Art
always involves creating new spaces and times, not
reproducing naturalistic or predetermined ones.Thus
rhythms and space-times can appear as characters
in their own right.Syntax is far more important than
vocabulary. Cinematic syntax involves linking and
relinking of images, and also relating sound and
visuals.
'If one had to
define culture, one could say that it doesn't
consist in conquering a difficult or abstract
discipline, but in perceiving that works of art
are much more concrete, moving, and funny than
commercial products…There is a multiplication of emotion, and
liberation of emotion, and even the invention of
new emotions.This distinguishes creative works from the
prefabricated emotions of commerce' (370) [with
special mention of the cinema of Bresson and
Dreyer].[This
does point to one omission in Bourdieu, I think,
who tends to see emotional involvement as
exclusively a matter of the popular aesthetic.There
are clearly elite forms of emotional involvement
as well.They
obviously refer to the ‘higher’ emotions of
course—pure love, divorced from any nasty sexual
excitement, duty and obligation to abstract
ideals, and the rest. This discussion of the
auteur must surely also raise the issue of the
humanist subject again. Auteurs seem above to
escape the various determinations that make the
rest of us mere spokepersons for ontological
forces? How come? Natural
gifts rise above these forces that constrain all
the rest of us?]
Auteur cinema has its own
circuit [in France], and is not required to
compete with commercial cinema.It also
permits the creation of new films, and gains
capitalist funding.'In this sense maybe cinema isn’t
capitalist enough' (370).It has a
financial circuit of its own.This
corresponds to capitalist funding of ‘fundamental
research now and then’.(371).
[The interviewers suggest that
the main scandal of the cinema books was the
importance of the time- image and the denial of
the present as the dominant tense]
Images represent the present,
but there is more, 'an ensemble of time relations'
(371).The
image reveals these linkages in ways which is not
seen in ordinary perception.An image
might show a man walking along the riverbank,
which depicts ‘three coexistent "durations”, three
rhythms.' (371).[I would have liked more clarity here—I can
see there is a present, hints of a past which got
the man to the riverbank, but what is the third
one—the future in that he is clearly heading
somewhere?].Examples include 'a still life in Ozu, a
travelling shot in Visconti, and depth of field in
Welles'[the last one at least is comprehensible,
and well discussed and illustrated in the cinema
books e.g. Cinema 2].Simple
things are represented in these examples, but they
should also be seen as images—‘Ozu’s still life is
the form of time that doesn't change, even though
everything changes within it…The car
in Visconti’s film is embedded in the past, and we
see it at the same time as she travels through
space in the present…The
character in the image is literally embedded in
the past, or emerges from the past' (371).
Once cinema breaks with
Euclidean space, it can convey new relations with
time.Resnais
points to 'the coexistence of heterogeneous
durations', regardless of actual flashbacks;
‘false continuity or the disjunction between
speaking and seeing in the films of the Straubs,
or Marguerite Duras, or even the feathery screen
of Resnais, or the black or white cuts of Garrell'
(372).None
of these stick with the present.
Cinema doesn't reproduce bodies
but creates them, 'with grains that are the grains
of time' (372).It is still just exploring these
possibilities.Television by contrast 'clings to images in
the present…Except when it is directed by great
cineastes.The
concept of the image in the present only applies
to mediocre or commercial images.It's a
completely ready made and false concept, a kind of
faked evidence' (372).Overall,
'the present is not at all a natural given of the
image' (372).
[The informative notes at the
end describe Deleuze’s books on cinema as
‘producing concepts that explain movement', but
also delineating 'each auteur’s place, his proper
aesthetic configuration relative to key concepts:
light, space, time, and signs' (372)]