"Cinema 2: The Time-Image", Gilles Deleuze




Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher and author of several monographs on Kant, Bergson, Espinosa, Nietzsche and Proust, and he discussed cinema as a serious philosophical matter. Through his two seminal books The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, Deleuze discusses the changes that have been observed in cinema, in the pre and postwar period, the classical and the modern. 

The Time-Image is related to the modern cinema. According to Deleuze, after the Second World War, the action-image enters in crisis. It needs to be released from the sensory-motor situations and be replaced by pure optical and sound ones. Images convey a greater sense of solitude, cuts are delayed, characters no longer act, they rather see. Time is presented and felt by the spectator. Among other aspects, Deleuze discusses the depth-of-field in Welles, still lifes in Ozu, memory in Resnais and "crystal-images", that is, portraits of duration where past and present, real and imaginary, actual and virtual, can coexist and are indiscernible (the mirror sequence in The Lady from Shangai).

Excerpts:
"Time ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself and itself gives rise to false movements. Hence the importance of false continuity in modern cinema: the images are no longer linked by rational cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts. Even the body is no longer exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather the developer [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tirednesses and waitings (Antonioni)."

"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. (...) From The Eclipse onwards, the any-spacewhatever 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 (for example, The Passenger)."

"The crystal-image is, then, the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

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