Contents of spoon-archives/seminar-10.archive/papers/decinau.lgs

Louis Schwartz University of Iowa Deleuze/Cinema/Nation/Author The force of Giles Deleuze's Cinema I: The Movement Image and Cinema II: The Time Image lies in their contribution of a new approach to the study of the cinema. Traditionally, the cinema is studied as a kind of language, as a psychological process, as a national industry and its products, as a the experience of an empirical audience, as the aesthetic product of an artist, or as the expression of a particular genre. To these approaches Deleuze introduces the possibility of studying film as a mode of thought. His two volumes on film seek to compare cinema to philosophy. While the traditional approaches to film studies treat the cinema as a mode of signification or as the expression of something else, Deleuze's approach treats the concepts proper to film texts themselves. Deleuze claims that directors "think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts." [Deleuze, 1986 #2] His project then is to explain the forms of thought that are cinema to his readers. In order to see the gains and losses of Deleuze's approach, I will try to position Deleuze's treatment of French cinema up to the second world war in the context of other works on the field. This comparison will reveal that despite the originality of Deleuze's taxonomy of the cinema, the transparency of the national categories he constructs limits his analysis. Although Deleuze's books are a study of thought in films from around the world throughout the history of the cinema, I have chosen to concentrate on a restricted but important segment of that study because most of the work that concerns itself with the whole of world cinema is not developed enough in its methodology to merit comparison with Deleuze's analysis. The parameter of a national cinema is not one that I have imposed on Deleuze's work from the outside. As we shall see, nation is an important category in Deleuze's attempt to think the thoughts of the cinema. I will begin by giving an extended rehearsal of Deleuze's account of the cinema and the place of French cinema within that account. After a comparison of Deleuze's account of that cinema with those of other scholars I will briefly summarize Deleuze's argument about post-war cinema and conclude with an assessment of Deleuze's contribution to film studies. Deleuze relies on three forms of organization traditional to film study: chronological, national and auteurist. He considers films more or less in the order they were made, he sometimes groups films according to what country they were made in, and he sometimes considers the work of a particular film-maker as a whole. These modes of organization are also familiar to philosophical exegesis - one can study the history of philosophy, German philosophy, or the philosophy of Kant, for example. The use of these categories facilitates the project of comparing film to philosophy by organizing them both within a common taxonomy. The comparison between film and thought is made through the comparison of philosophers to cineastes. Deleuze writes that film makers must be compared "not merely with painters, architects, and musicians, but also with thinkers." [Deleuze, 1986 #2]. To these fairly traditional categories Deleuze adds others adapted from the philosophies of Bergson and Peirce to organize the over-all structure of his study. From Peirce he adopts a general taxonomy of signs that allows him to divide filmed images according to the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness is "the mode of being which consists in its subject being positively such as it is regardless of all else." [Peirce, 1955 #1] It is greenness, for example, regardless of whether anything in the universe is actually green. Secondness is "a mode of being of one thing that consists in how a second thing is." [Peirce, 1955 #1] The relations between qualities and their embodiments are of the order of secondness. A traffic light's being green is a relation of secondness. Thirdness is "the mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinant general character."[Peirce, 1955 #1] Judgments and rules are examples of thirdness; such as the function of the green light as a sign that cars should proceed is a relation of thirdness. These three modes of being structure three types of signs: firstness structures the icon, secondness structures the index, and thirdness structures the symbol. In each of these signs that which is represented is related to that which represents it by the mode of being that structures it. Because these categories structure all mental activity as well as all signification, because they are the "three modes of being" in Peirce's phenomenology, they provide Deleuze with a conduit between thought and the cinema, a common denominator that allows a comparison between them. [Peirce, 1955 #1] As beings, both thought and cinema can be categorized under these three rubrics. By using categories that apply to all signs to set up this comparison, Deleuze avoids reducing cinema to a language and differentiates his approach from that of mainstream cinema semiotics. From Bergson, Deleuze takes the three theses on movement from Creative Evolution. This also establishes a common ground between cinema and thought, because for Bergson the mind is an image that moves and hence interacts immediately with other moving images. The first of Bergson's theses is that movement is distinct from the space in which it occurs. Space is homogeneous and infinitely divisible, while movement cannot be divided with out changing qualitatively with each division. It follows that movement cannot be reconstituted as a series of instants - movement occurs in the interval between instants. Bergson calls the mistaken notion that movement can be reconstituted as a series of immobile segments of abstract time "the cinematic illusion." [Deleuze, 1986 #2] For Bergson movement is an illusion in the cinema because film represents movement by stopping it at instants that are evenly timed. Deleuze points out that Bergson's view of the cinema is based on the structure of the apparatus, rather than on the viewers experience. What Bergson does not realize is that the audience of a film is unaware of the frames on the strip of celluloid and their arrested instants of motion, they experience only an integral, continuous movement that is of the same order as any other motion. Deleuze archly inverts Bergson's very critique of the cinema as proof of the realness of cinematic movement. Bergson's second thesis is used by Deleuze to parallel the of cinema development to that of modern science. This thesis states that modern man differs from the ancients because he divides movement into immanent sections rather than according to a teleos. This is the difference between measuring a distance as "half way to a tree", where the unit of measurement is defined by something outside the distance itself, and measuring that distance as "one centimeter," where the distance is defined without reference to anything external. "One centimeter" refers to any space whatever, while "half way to the tree" refers to one particular space. This same distinction can be made with regard to temporal measurement: a modern speaks of "six hours," where an ancient spoke of a quarter day." This epochal break in measurement subtends all of modern science in so far as it allows the measurement of forces in isomorphic space and time. In the pre-history of cinema any instants whatever and any spaces whatever can been found in the serial photography of Muybridge and Marey. By recording human and animal movement in evenly spaced and timed snap shots Marey and Muybridge divided motion into any instants whatever, rather than a series of privileged instants. Though some of the photographs do seem to be of privileged instants (the moment when the horse has just put its hoof down, for example), these are moments of immanent transformation rather than poses that actualize transcendent forms. Bergson's third thesis relates movement to duration, allowing Deleuze to consider how the thoughts of the cinema are articulated to the temporal structures of whole films. The third thesis states that while an instant is an immobile section of a movement, movement is a mobile section of duration. For Bergson, duration is the whole. If I imagine place abstractly, for example, I cannot understand a movement from place A to place B. But if I imagine that my home is at place A and my examination is being administered at place B what has changed with the movement is not only my position, but the qualities of the situation. When I displace myself from A to B I have become an examined student, and the examination has been administered. The relation of my movement to the duration of the whole situation has changes all of its elements. If I put a lump of sugar into a glass of water the whole situation will eventually be changed in sugar water. In both of these examples duration and movement transform a concrete mental reality as a whole. Both situations undergo not a transformation of their components, rather, they become new situations. Continuing to draw on Bergson, Deleuze defines the set of images as including everything that appears. One of the consequences of this definition is that there is no difference between motion and the thing moved: thus the movement of the cinema happens on the plane of immanence along which everything else happens. This plane of immanence on which the every image appears is made of flowing matter, that is, of movement images. Hence cinematic movement is of the same order as all other movement. Another consequence of this notion is that the mind is an image like the cinema and thus able to have a direct relation to it. Deleuze has no need of a psychoanalytic description of cinematic identification because he understands the operation of the cinema on the psyche as a relation of one image to another. All images interact along their facets. The mind for Bergson and Deleuze is merely an image that has an interval between action and reaction. In that interval lies the free will as indetermination, and the heart of the cinema. For Deleuze, the cinema does not take subjective perception as its model. Unlike subjective perception, the variability of cinematic framing pulls cinema towards acentered and deframed images. Cinema oscillates between the world and the perception of the world. Cinema is always moving in the direction of a diffuse perception because the very variability of its framing undermines the distinction between the subjective and the objective. This can be understood in the fact that the same shot can appear as an objective shot or as a point of view shot, depending on where in the film it is. The most important effect of account of cinema has on Deleuze's argument is to transform the notion of the cinematic auteur from that of an artist who imposes his vision on the world to that of an artist who discovers characteristics immanent in the world. That transformation allows the cinema to be studied as a mode of expression rather than a mode of thought. Deleuze relies Bergson's theses to mark two distinct types of cinematic image: the movement-image and the time-image. These two overarching concepts are used by Deleuze to define an epochal break in cinematic thought, what he calls the two "regimes" of the cinema to each which he devotes a volume. The movement image that characterizes the cinema's initial regime is a mobile section of duration, while the time image is a direct impression of duration. The time-image characterizes cinema's modern regime that takes hold after the second world war, (although examples of it can be found in the prewar - World War II cinema.) This paper will concentrate on the time-image because it is in his consideration of this first cinematic regime that Deleuze uses the national categories that I wish to situate within the discourse of film studies. The movement-image has three forms. The three avatars of the movement image are not defined as individual images but as relations between images. The first consists of the relation of a movement image to the image of a center of indetermination, the second consists of the relation of an image of center of indetermination to a set of movement images; and the third consists in the absorption of a movement image by a center of indetermination. The first of which is the movement image when it is related to a special image that forms a center of indetermination in it. The most obvious example of this what is usually called the point of view shot. The shot that represents what is seen becomes a point of view because it is linked to a shot of a seer and that seer is a center of indetermination in so far as it is not known how it will react to the sight seen. The second avatar of the movement image is the action image. It arises when the center of indetermination receives excitation along a privileged facet and that center sees the world as a curve of virtual actions on the subject. The subject may organize its possible actions along this curve. Action images organize the shots in westerns where a hero is confronted with a situation that forces him to act in order to change it. When excitations are retained in the interval rather than reflect or reacted to the third avatar of the movement image arises: the affection image. The affection image is the way the interval -- the perceiver in the film -- feels from the inside. In the case of human beings, we receive images through specialized organs that are restricted in their movement, like the eyes. When our organs of reception absorb exiting movement instead of reflecting it, our activity becomes temporarily impossible. The effort to overcome the temporary impossibility of reaction produces in us the state of being overwhelmed which the cinema of the movement-image embodies with the close-up of the organs of reception frozen by over-stimulation. The relations of one image to another are determined by montage and for Deleuze montage is the organization of the whole and thus, according to Bergson's third thesis, produces the image of duration. Deleuze divides the development of montage strategies into national schools. This is not a completely original taxonomic structure: Russian montage is a term familiar to any student of film, as is the association of continuity editing with American film practices that emerge after Griffith. Deleuze divides up his national schools of montage among film-makers circa World War I, although he includes film-makers separated by as much time as a decade, e.g. Epstein and Renoir. Deleuze writes that "four trends can be distinguished: the organic trend of the American school; the dialectical trend of the soviet school; the quantitative trend of the French school; and the intensive trend of the German Expressionist school." [Deleuze, 1986 #2] The montage of the American school is that from which narrative flows, the montage of the Soviet school allows the film maker to formulate the laws along which a narrative develops, and the German Expressionist school brings forth an image of the formless sublime which determines the affect produced by narrative. The French school of montage is concerned with the quantity of movement and the metrical relations that allow that quantity to be defined. In defining the French school in these terms Deleuze means to point out their scientific interest in how much or how little movement can be put in an image, and in the forms of rhythmic organization possible among units of motion. Deleuze calls this a form of Cartesianism. By calling attention to the French predilection for quantification under the name of Descartes, Deleuze opens up the possibility of a cultural analysis of cinema that takes into account a cultural form hitherto generally marginalized in the study of national cinemas: philosophy. Deleuze argues that French directors of this period such as Gance wanted to supersede the empirical images of movement produce by Griffith by finding inner principles. For Deleuze, something "empirical" gives data without analyzing it, while a science analyzes and reveals the principals by which the data is produced. Descartes' transformation of geometry into a quantitative science provides a clear example of such a overcoming of the empirical. By providing equations that can generate any shape, Descartes exposed the generative principles of geometry rather than merely analyzing the relations between shapes as such. French directors of this period were indebted to Griffith but wanted to be more scientific than him. They wanted to analyze the movements across which narratives flow as well as to illustrate these movements. Deleuze extends this Cartesianism to the arts in general in France by arguing that the same concern for principles was shown in contemporaneous French Painting. He says that French directors were interested in extracting the whole of a particular movement from all its various forms in same the way that "Monet never stops painting the water-lily."[Deleuze, 1986 #2] Deleuze characterizes the French school's interest in motion as mechanical. To exemplify what he means by this he cites dance scenes in Gremillion and Clair. In these scenes the whole of the dance is taken together rather than the composition of the dancers or the dialectical composition of their movements. The structure of the all the possible variations of the dance is made visible in these scenes. Deleuze sees these dances as machines with dancers as their components. Deleuze asserts that the French school constructed two types of machines. The first is a simple automaton, like a clock, that combines movements within a homogeneous space. As an example of this sort of machine he cites the brides flight in L'Atlante. The second type of machine is the engine that runs on steam or fire. This contraption produces movement out of something else and constantly affirms a heterogeny whose terms it links. This sort of machine is exemplified in Gance's The Wheel. The second type of machine is associated with the epic or tragic whereas the first is linked to comedy or drama. Here it must be noted that Deleuze's taxonomy has usefully subdivided the conventional national category into strikingly original typologies of film. These typologies are based on Deleuze's original readings of films based on their specific mode of thought. Much of the great energy that readers feel in this work comes form Deleuze's unique groupings of films that burgeon out of traditional groupings. Another original category of films that Deleuze isolates points out the remarkable number of French films concerned with water. Deleuze links the French cinema's fascination with water to its fascination with mechanical motion. The theme of water is an extension of the mechanics that Deleuze finds in films with dances. Those films think the mechanics of solids, while the aqueous films think mechanics of fluids. Water facilitates the abstraction of movement. Such abstraction was always part of the project of French cinema, visible even in films without water such as Ballet Mechanique. For the French, unlike the Americans and Soviets, water becomes inorganic in so far as its movement becomes an end in itself. This notion of how mechanics and the abstraction of motion (as something that can be applied to one material or another) leads Deleuze to see French cinematography as an attempt to extract movement from light itself. For Deleuze, in the French school illumination itself is a form of movement, as is the alternation between night and day. Deleuze's analysis of the French school extends to the film-maker's writings. Deleuze understands Jean Epstein's concept of photogenie as part of the French interest in abstracting movement from the image. He defines photogenie as "the image majored by movement"[Deleuze, 1986 #2](43) Thus photogenie is an interval of time present that is always in the present, but always variable. That interval of time is a numerical unit which produces a maximum quantity of movement in the image in relation to other factors. The relation between these units and the other factors is the rhythm of a film. An example of this relation can be found in L'Inhumaine, film in which the heavy geometric designs of Fernand Leger's cubist sets provide space with a sort of coordinate system against which the movement produced by the forces of photogenie can be measured. Deleuze's reading of the French cinema circa World War I as an attempt derive the principals of movement, to set up a Cartesian science of movement, has some clear advantages. It brings out a unity between certain texts that might not seem comparable intuitively. Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher and Gance's Napoleon, for example, have very different surfaces and seem to be different types of cinema. Using fantastic sets, unusual camera angels and altered motion effects. Epstein's film could be sited as an example of the formative tendency in film-making. Gance's Napoleon, in contrast, could stand as an example of the realist tendency because it uses locations and attempts to stretch the screen beyond its limits with the use of triptych projection. By avoiding these rather hackneyed categories Deleuze's taxonomy brings out a commonalty between the two films which in turn reveals itself to be a central project of the French cinema: the discovery of the fundamental principal of movements. We learn something new not only about Deleuze's thesis, but about the films themselves. Epstein seeks to understand the principals by which movement can be slowed down and hence stretched out to the maximum point while Gance tries to understand the principals by which the movements of a battle are organized. The ease with which Deleuze subsumes this project to Cartesianism, however is justly disturbing. The label of Cartesianism creates a neat fit between the project that Deleuze describes and the country in which it was carried out. What could be more natural than French directors trying to establish the science of movement in its various forms according to a Cartesian model of science? But the very naturalness of this discovery hides the contested nature of French film culture at the time before and during the first world war. It is from this atmosphere of contestation that the culture derived its most vital energies. Deleuze is able to give a monological account of French film culture as a Cartesian project because he relies on a combination of his own readings of films and the writings of their directors. Deleuze does not consider writings by directors that do not fit with the theme that he describes, nor does he pay much attention to the writings of theorists and critics who were not themselves film-makers. This exclusion is authorized by Deleuze's comparison between film-makers and thinkers, yet such authority seems rather arbitrary in this period when film-makers were imbedded in a sprawling cinematic culture that included all kinds of other artist and thinkers. While it is true that Deleuze is only writing about the French school of montage, his first volume on cinema reduces the French contribution to film's development to that form of montage. By narrowing the context in which he considers French cinema to the philosophical interpretation of one aspect of the film text, Deleuze creates illusion of a cinema that is altogether too unified and all together too unproblematically national. Richard Abel's anthology French Film Theory and Criticism doe an exemplary job of bringing out the contested state of French cinematic culture at this time. The period between 1914 and 1920 saw intense debates about the nature of cinema. Far from having reached the conclusion that cinema was an instrument whereby the principals of movement could be determined, arguments were held over whether anything could be learned from cinema at all. Was it qualified as an art; if it was an art was it was a high art or a low art; and should cinema be informed by the characteristics of the French nation? Included in Abel's anthology is an essay by a figure Deleuze doesn't deal with Jacques De Baroncelli's "Pantomime, Music, Cinema" (1915). It is typical of a tendency during this period. Baroncelli adumbrates the history of cinema, paying special attention to the cinema's evolution from spectacle to a more fully realized art, in order to call for a specific development in that evolution. For Baroncelli, himself a director, the last impediment to the perfection of the cinema is the handling of dialogue in silent films. The movement of Baroncelli's argument through several stages of the early history of cinema suggest that the validity of the cinema as anything more than a vulgar entertainment and a welcome seat for the price of a few sous still needed to be established. The uncertain position of cinema within French culture is all the more clear when one realizes that Baroncelli's argument is being published in Cine-journal, a magazine for movie enthusiasts. This implies that the artistic potential of cinema still had to be confirmed for even those who took an active interest in it. Indeed, in this period the cinema was still being derided as "the last resortx of those who lack imagination" [Souday, 1988 #4] The direction in which Baroncelli asserts he would like to push the cinema further complicates Deleuze's notion of what is at steak for French film in this period. He writes that when actors speak in silent films the audience sees "an air bubble escape, the kind that sometimes rises from the mouth of carp." [Baroncelli, 1988 #3] This moment gives rise to a feeling of "incomplete creation" that can only be rendered whole by music.[Baroncelli, 1988 #3] Baroncelli criticizes the use of popular love songs during love scenes and other instances of culturally loaded music and calls for a new form of musical description specific to the cinema. Baroncelli calls for melodies that will delineate a gesture, follow the contour and rhythm of a feeling, clarify and define it, and in its turns and motifs harmoniously enclose a human soul. With that the cinema will create moments that are unique pure, thrilling, ideal. [Baroncelli, 1988 #3] Baroncelli is calling for movie music that will make clear and enhance affects rather than expose its metrical principals. As Able points out Baroncelli is representative of a classical movement in French film culture. The aesthetic ideals of this movement, those of harmony and the beautiful lie, separate them from the positivist and Cartesian notion of French cinematic culture that Deleuze lays out. In so far as film did qualify as art in France at this time, a fierce debate raged between those who saw it as a form of high culture and those who saw it as a form of popular culture. Baroncelli's position as a neo-classicist has him call for the development of cinema as a high art. He writes that musicians will soon realize that the art of the cinematic music "is superior to that of concert music." [Baroncelli, 1988 #3]. This call for cinema as form of high culture can also be read in Colette's review of De Mille's The Cheat. Colette praises the film because "every evening writers, painters, composers, and dramatists come and come again to sit, contemplate and comment, in low voices like pupils." [Colette, 1988 #5] Colette applauds the film because it functions as an art school for the purveyors of high culture. That French Artists and intellectuals should be instructed by an American film only renders the idea that French cinema at this time was organized around a set of Gaelic Cartesian principals more problematic. On the other side of this debate was the film critic Louis Delluc. Delluc wrote in praise of lower class audiences of the faubours. These audiences were made up of "mechanics, pimps, laborers and women warehouse packers." [Delluc, 1988 #6]. Delluc preferred these audiences because of the awe they experienced in front of the film. Unlike the more sophisticated audiences of the Paris boulevards, these audiences did not chatter throughout the film. Delluc argued that for these audiences, who were normally indifferent to art, the cinema awakened a new interest. Entitled "The Crowd" Delluc's article reports on his travels to various theaters in different class zones of the Paris area and his experiences watching films in these various locations. Such a geographic and demographic approach points to a concern of French film culture at the time that Deleuze leaves entirely aside: the audience. For Deleuze, the ideas of the cinema are immanent in films themselves. In order to extract these thoughts from French films of this period Deleuze sets them off against two contexts, the writings of their directors, and a national philosophical tradition in the form of Cartesianism. The issue of reception is simply not raised by this methodology. Deleuze's complete elision of audience is problematic in two different ways. First, he does not account for a very real concern of French film culture in the period that he is talking about -- and one which affects the inventors of montage in so far as they wanted their montage to be comprehensible. Second by ignoring the audience, Deleuze is allowed to construct a cinema that no one before him has ever seen. The final problem with Deleuze's treatment of the French school of montage that is brought out by a reading of Abel's anthology is his very assumption that a national school can be assumed to exist. As Able states in an introductory essay, writings on French film in this period around the issue of whether cinema was a national art were filled with "a welter of cracks and contradictions." [Able, 1988 #7] Much of this debate centered on the issue of whether the government should censor unpatriotic films, but it also extended to questions such as whether or not there is a national form of beauty. The complexity of these arguments leads one to wonder to what extent the directors that Deleuze subsumes under the rubric of the French school saw themselves as involved in a national project, let alone a specifically Cartesian project. If the question of whether beauty has a fatherland was at issue in this period of French film culture, Deleuze's reader might do well to wonder whether thought has a fatherland, and whether the alignment of France with Cartesianism is as simple as it Deleuze makes it seem. The smooth fit between France and Cartesianism covers over the question of how the cinematic investigation of particular questions about movement can come to characterize a national school of film-making. This alignment is somewhat undermined in Deleuze's book itself by the contrast between Bergson, whose thought is used to understand cinema at large, --though he too is French-- while Descartes' thought is used as model for the French school in particular. This question of nationality is not limited to writings about films but can be extended to the French mode of production itself. An industrial study of the French cinema in the period between the wars makes the issue of the nationality of films even more complex. Deleuze does not offer us an industrial study, nor does he remain in France for very long. After his consideration of international developments in the early silent cinema, Deleuze turns his attention to America. Though he considers examples from around the world, and from diverse periods of film history, for Deleuze of the development of cinema as thought from the begging of sound to the second World War happens in America. Tracing of the development cinema as thought leads Deleuze away from a consideration of the industrial context in which films are made. This lack of context allows him to ignore certain images. For Deleuze thought is outside determination, thought that is determined is simply a series of watch-words or doxa. By not considering the doxic cinema carefully, Deleuze leaves thought in the cinema free floating. Sometimes he wants to refer to industrial conditions in order to make a point about directors who thematize them, (e. g. Wenders and the monetary image,) but his attention to these conditions is sketchy at best. An interesting relation between industrial context and the meanings of films produced within it is posited by Ginette Vincendeau's reading Marcell Pangnol's Le Shpontz. Vincendeau's argument about Le Shpontz can be used to define a nationalist image. Vincendeau begins by noting that the late 20s and early 30s were a time of intense emigration to France. The French film industry employed vast numbers of workers who were born outside the country, as well as employing international capital to accomplish its projects. Directors and technicians form Germany worked in the French industry. According to Vincendeau in 1934 26 foreign technicians worked in Paris while 47 of their French colleagues went unemployed. Such statistics complicate the notion of the Frenchness of the French film industry by showing that its workers were German. All of the lenses used in French films were made in Germany by Zeiss Ikon. Films that are widely thought of as exemplary of French cinema, and that were made by French film workers in France, were none the less funded by German capital. The German film company Tobis, for example, funded the three sound films that established Deleuze favorite Rene Clair as one of the "Frenchest" of directors: Sous les toits de Paris (1930,) Le million (1931,) and A Nous la liberte (1931.) It is interesting to note that these films are seen as exemplary of the French school by Deleuze whose national argument does not note the complexities introduced by the structure of capital behind these films. Since Deleuze is widely known as a philosopher of becomings it might benefit his project to see how German capital can flow into a becoming French Cinema. Further accelerating the internationalization of the film industry was the advent of sound. French production companies entered the sound era unable to meet the demands on capital imposed by the conversion to sound. Sound equipment was mostly imported from the United States and Germany. Because sound films depended on international markets to recover the heavy investments that they required, distribution became a multinational affair. Films were often made in multiple versions, each in a different language so that the "same" film could be distributed in many countries. These international developments in the infrastructure of the film industry incited attempts at organizing the film industry on an international basis. According to Paul Leglise at the Berlin Film conference of 1935, the German delegation led by Goebels attempted to establish regulations which would facilitate international film trade. [Leglise, 1970 #9] The failed proposal included plans for a centralized European film council, rules against block booking (both of these would seem to be directed at protecting a trans-European film market against Hollywood), a ban on film tariffs, and proposals to regulate the number of theater seats according to local demographics. This German interest in the industrial structure of the European cinema could serve to bolster Deleuze's argument that the movement-image will culminate in Nazi Germany, but he does not cite it. This litany of international features of the French film industry of the 1930s shows that there were powerful forces at work pushing film past the borders of any given country. These forces need to be accounted for in any work that attempts to understand film as the thought of a nation. (It might also behoove Deleuze to clarify whether film has a homeland, or what makes a particular thought belong to a nation besides the nationality of the thinker.) These forces provoked a strong nationalist reaction in France. According to Vincendeau, even the leftist entertainment newspaper Pour Vous complained about the number of foreigners in the French industry. Her reading of Pangol's Le Shpontz underlines the inscription of a foreign, specifically Jewish, presence in the French film industry. The film producers in Le Shpontz have Jewish names and the yokel that comes to Paris, only to be at first mocked by the film-makers, is of pure French stock. Vincendeau's reading of Le Shpontz suggests that it presents the French industry as a native structure which has been infiltrated by outsiders rather than seeing internationalization as characteristic of a development of in the cinematic infrastructure in the 1930s. This covering over of the international character of film capital with a nationalist discourse is surely important to the kinds of thought engendered by film on the eve of the second world war. Vincendeau's reading of Le Schpontz shows that a foreign presence in the French film industry could be thematized by products of that industry, and she reads Le Shpontz as a nationalist film. However the very images produced by the French film industry between the wars were also not inherently French. The importation of German images into the French cinema by German emigre film makers has been discussed by Thomas Elsaesser in his essay on German Emigre film makers "Pathos and Leave Taking". Elsaesser's article brings out the complexities involved in defining cinematic characteristics of one nation against those of another in an age of heavy migration. He argues that "the German technicians who emigrated to France left a more lasting mark on the industry's infrastructure than the directors."[Elsaesser, 1984 #10] Thus those most directly responsible for the material production of the image blurred the distinctions of national cinema the most. (It is worth noting in passing that such a distinction between directors and technicians is never made by Deleuze because of his reliance on the figure of the director as cinematic thinker.) The difficulty of reading images as part of a national school surfaces in Elsaesser's argument. He defines the mise-en-scene of late Weimar films as one of "mute objects or overcharged images," [Elsaesser, 1984 #10] but this same phrase could easily describe the mise-en-scene of American film noir or French poetic realism (think of the first mate's jar containing his friends pickled hands in L'Atalant). It is true that these films have been said to have been influenced by Weimar Cinema, but the question here is not the source of these images. What is at stake is how these images come to signify a national psychological characteristic. If "mute objects and overcharged images" characterize the German-ness of German film in a given period, it becomes mysterious that they are so easily grafted into films that are shot in other countries during other times. Surely there must be some additional determinations that allow the film scholar to say that these are marks of a particular cultural identity within Weimar cinema while in film noir they are marks of a different identity. These determinations in a space between text and context; they are the determinations that mediate reception. It is precisely those determinations that are passed over by Deleuze. Elsaesser writes that the emigres' films were the subject of "several, perhaps contradictory determinations." [Elsaesser, 1984 #10] The difficulty in categorizing cinematic practices by nation lies in keeping those contradictory determinations in play at all times. Though Elsaesser occasionally slides into a somewhat simpler view of national cinema, unlike Deleuze he at least gestures towards the complexity of such a taxonomy. This complexity is often over looked because the tradition of categorizing films -- or philosophies -- by country is so powerful that such a division seems utterly obvious. It is in fact not at all obvious that the western film industries should be cut up by nation. Elsaesser argues that the production methods German technicians brought with them to France were developed in Berlin, and that the German industry was at a more advanced stage of economic development than the French. In the light of Vincendeau's findings on the international character of the film industry between the wars, such an argument could lead one to construe the contributions of the emigre technicians as transfers from a more developed sector of a general cinematic economy rather than imports from one national industry to another. In other words, the film industry could be conceived of as an international economy within which there were uneven regions of development. This model relates the determinations of national film styles to the development of the local sector of a an international industry. Dudley Andrew's Poetic Realism gives another model for the treatment of multiple and multinational determinations of a national film style. In his manuscript, Andrew works with the notion of "cinematic ecriture," which he describes as "larger than an individual authors style but more restricted than the general French 'language' of cinema." [Andrew, 1990 #11] This restriction implicitly acknowledges the stratifications within a national cinema and hence constructs it a site of performed contestation, so that it enables Andrew to avoid constructing a monological French cinema as Deleuze does. In his chapter on emigres Andrew traces the ways in which the "cinematic ecriture" of poetic realism was informed by the German film-makers. Andrew stresses the process of signification within which cinematic tropes are transferred from one national context to another. By relating this process to the French "cinematic mentality" Andrew de-emphasizes individual tropes as signifiers and turns to a consideration of the context within which those signifiers are deployed. [Andrew, 1990 #11] This is a step beyond Elsaesser because cinematic texts are not only "the products of multiple, perhaps contradictory determinations" they are also the products of an international context and its vicissitudes.(Elsaesser) That international context is precisely the set of cinematic flows between nations. Tracing the influence of foreign directors and set designers on poetic realism Andrew shows that a film style which is widely conceived of as particularly French is a product of cross-cultural pollination. Andrew's manuscript also points out that the products of this cross pollination also have international effects. Those effects can be seen in the influence of Jean Gabin's acting style in poetic realist films on the acting style of Humphry Bogart in early film noir. In the transfer between Gabin and Bogart we can see that an actor whose gestures are commonly read as the quintessence of Frenchness informs an actor whose gestures are commonly read as the quintessence of Americanness. These American detective films are of great interest to Deleuze in his chapters on narrative structure. But he assumes that they emerge out of the "soul of the cinema" suis generis, and that during the 1930s the "soul of the cinema" resided in the United States. [Deleuze, 1986 #2] Thus these images are not seen as involved in trans-national cinematic flow. In Deleuzian terms, Andrew is describing a becoming French of the German cinema and a becoming American of the French cinema. Given the interest in flow and transformative becoming that runs throughout his philosophical writings, it seems that the transfer of cinematic traits from one country to another would be eminently analyzable in his terms. If that process were studied by Deleuze as a becoming, his transparent notion of national cinema would have to be altered. Ultimately, these problems of determining the national character of thought and cinema are not Deleuze's focus. Although, as we have seen in our discussion of the French cinema, many of his smaller arguments seem uncertain in light of these problems, and although their consideration would support Deleuze's conclusions, he is more interested in another problem. Deleuze's attempt is to trace the development of the moving image across huge blocks of space and time. Deleuze's interest in the epochal structures of the cinema can only be seen if a certain amount of detail is left behind. If the problem of the nation is underdeveloped in Deleuze's book, this is surely more than compensated for by his other observations about the two regimes of the cinematic image. For Deleuze the cinema of the movement-image is a spiritual automaton, a mechanical being without birth, a thought-form that has become independent of its thinker, a machine that goes through the motions of the human mind. The problem with this automaton is that it does not have its own thought, but obeys a rudimentary impression of pure information which develops solely in visions and primitive actions. This cinema is incapable of providing an ethical structure to its thought-forms. Cinema of the first regime then is a kind of thinking monster, or a monstrous thought for Deleuze. The cinema both thinks automatically and has the potential to automate the thought of it spectators. According to the Bergsonian theses as deployed by Deleuze, the cinematic image acts directly on the image of the interval, the human mind. Although Deleuze explicitly says that his project is not to give a history of the cinema, he does give a narrative of the development of film, a kind of biography of this monster. That narrative of the cinema is then the story of the development of an automatism into a spiritual art. The great event in that historical narrative is the second World War. Deleuze argues that the German Masses where subjected to the Nazi's in particularly cinematic way. He claims that Hitler was a film-maker and the German people were his apparatus and the image that he produced. For Deleuze the ultimate movement-image was that produced by Riefinstahl on film and by Hitler in the world itself. Under the Nazi's writes Deleuze the revolutionary courtship of the moment-image and an art of the masses as become subject was broken off, giving way to the masses subjected, as psychological automaton, and their leader as great spiritual automaton. [Deleuze, 1989 #15] After the War, writes Deleuze psychological and spiritual automatons were replaced by a race of computer and cybernetic automata with controls and feedback. The society of central control was replaced by the society of local control.[Deleuze, 1992 #13] Instead of being concentrated in a single leader, power was distributed over a network. Deleuze relates this epochal change of the emergence to new media of the moving image, television being the prime example. Instead of being projected on one screen like the cinema it is projected on many. Instead of the audience abandoning control when they walk into the theater the controls are right on the box or in the viewers hand. More importantly, Deleuze relates these new post-war social structures to new forms of cinema. Not only do the cybernetic automatons become a theme in the cinema, e.g. in 2001: A Space Odessy, but movement-image itself becomes useless. The sensory motor link that the movement-image depended on is broken by the overwhelming facts of Aushewitz, the atomic bomb, and saturation bombing. Those facts are sensory stimuli to which the world has not yet been able to react to. This radical suspension of temporality resulted in the emergence of a new reality in postwar Europe and hence a new cinema. This new reality was reflected in the cinemas of Italian Neo-realism and the French New Wave. Empty, disconnected any space whatevers become qualified extended spaces. Within these spaces pure duration transpires. The situations enacted in these spaces no longer extend into action or reaction: they are lived as pure optical sings (opsigns) or sonic signs (sonsigns). Such signs are cut off from all extension and absorb all of their own affective intensities. Instead of acting, characters see. They no longer experience the world within a motivated narrative, they wander through it. Thus the narrative form of the ballade or amotivated stroll emerged in the cinema. The viewer's problem becomes not "what will happen next," but what is there to see in this image? [Deleuze, 1989 #15] In the cinema of Alain Resnais, for example, the flashback disappears, as the section of time that it represents is no longer related to a central temporal organization. Instead, it is juxtaposed with other incommensurate sections of time. In a film like Last Year At Marienbad there is no way to reconstruct a linear temporality form the films plot. The sheets of past presented by the films sequences do not fit together in any possible order. The chronological recalcitrance of Last Year At Marienbad is not simply the function of different characters in the having different memories of a single event as in Kurosawa's Rashomon. In the Resnais film the "objective camera" presents segments of a past that are simply incommensurate with each other. For Deleuze, the modern-cinema is defined by movement away from information towards the time-image, towards pure duration. Pure duration is brought out in each image by virtue of its incommensurability with the other images of the film. Each image becomes a whole unto itself, a complete situation determined by duration. Deleuze's grand narrative of the cinema brings out a key structure that has hitherto been overlooked: the way in which the cinema thinks time. His morphological taxonomy of the cinema also isolates striking groups of film whose power is most evident to the reader who feels that they are natural constellations that he has never before noticed. His study is also filled with voluminous examples and energetic readings of films that are as valuable as the argument he forms from them. With respect to the films that Deleuze chooses as they key texts in the development of the cinema his argument has an undeniable power. That power comes both form the history of cinematic thought within which Deleuze places the films that he chooses to analyze, and from his rigorous readings of film in the context of philosophy. Yet it is important for his readers to realize that the films he chooses to attend to are only a small section of the cinema, and that his choices sustain taxonomic categories that might otherwise be troubled by recent work in film studies. These potentially problematic categories are generally not the ones that Deleuze invents or discovers, but the traditional ones that he takes whole from cinema studies and philosophical exegesis. In the same way that Deleuze's use of national categories in the development he charts for the time image can be questioned, his use of individual directors as film authors might be complicated by recent work on the importance of the notion of authorship in focusing a medium whose materials are as heterogeneous as film's. Clearly for Deleuze the focalization that is subtended by authorship plays a crucial role in his ability to extract thought from the cinema. Such an investigation lies beyond the scope of this paper. My criticisms of Deleuze are not meant to diminish the very real achievement of these volumes, nor to qualify the very real pleasure that they bring to readers who feel constrained by more traditional approaches to film. Rather, by explicating Deleuze's key ideas and contextualizing them with other film scholarship by way of comparisons with various treatments of French national cinema, my aim is to suggest that Deleuze's investigation might be furthered by a closer consideration of the taxonomic categories that he inherits from other approaches. List of Works Citied Able, Richard. "Photogenie and Company." French Film Theory and Critcism. Ed. Richard Able. Princeton NJ: Princeton U, 1988. 1: Andrew, Dudley. Poetic Realism. 1990. Baroncelli, Jacques De. "Pantomime, Music, Cinema." French Film Theory And Criticism 1907-1939. Ed. Richard Able. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U., 1988. 1: Colette. "Cinema: The Cheat." French Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Richard Able. Princeton NJ: Princeton U., 1988. 1: Deleuze, Giles. Cinema I: The movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986. Deleuze, Giles. Cinema II: The Time Image. Vol. II of Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989. Deleuze, Giles. "Postscript to the Societies of Controll." October 59 (1992): Delluc, Louis. "The Crowd." French Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Richard Able. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U., 1988. 1: Elsaesser, Thomas. "Pathos and Leave Taking." Sight and Sound .Autum (1984): Leglise, Paul. Histoire de la politique du cinmea Francias: Le Cinema et la IIIe Republique. 1970. Peirce, Charles Saunders. "The Principals of Phenomenology." Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover, 1955. Souday, Paul. "On The Cinema." French Film Theory And Criticism 1907-1929. Ed. Able. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U., 1988. 1: Vincendeau, Ginette. "French Cinema in the 1930s: Social Texts and Contexts of a Popular Medium." PhD disseration. University of East Anglia, 1985.

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