Deleuze and film studies

A proposition, rather than a polemical argument; and one composed in the subjunctive or “as if” modality of art, rather than the diagnostic “as such” of descriptive analysis. Beginning as an epistemological inquiry, the point of departure explores the “possibility of thinking in cinema through cinema”— ultimately producing an ontological theorization, with multiple implications.  The notion of “thinking through” films, toward the production of concepts, is not metaphorical or analogical; rather, this serves as a key task, one that Gilles Deleuze has posed for us, through his practice of philosophy as constructivism, functioning to generate possibilities rather than to ossify established views. In this way my experimental and “metacritical” mode of inquiry proceeds, engaging with films that compel reconsideration and catalyze theorizations of new concepts:  Lynch’s latest works, Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)—as well as antecedents such as Lost Highway (1997), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Sunset Boulevard (Dir. Wilder, 1950), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). With sensory logic rather than analysis, the theoretical image-body encountered is understood through film-thought as aesthetic, material, constructed, mediated, temporal, reflexive, and expressive.

Dieser Beitrag zur Filmtheorie geht von Jacques Rancières Schriften zur Politik und zum Film aus. Rancière konzipiert Politik und (Film-)Ästhetik "ineinander" – die Politik im Zeichen der Ästhetik, die Ästhetik im Medium der Politik. Beide betreffen gemeinschaftliche Wahrnehmungsweisen und Platzzuweisungen ebenso wie deren Störung. Im Fokus dieser Theorie stehen dissensuale Akte: Inszenierungen von Streitfällen, durch die sich politische Subjekte bilden, indem sie sich von ihrer Identität und Bodenhaftung im Sozialen absetzen. Es geht um Wortergreifungen, die nicht vorgesehen sind, und um Erscheinen ohne sicheren Grund.
            Film ohne Grund sondiert Rancières Film-Texte – zumal sein Verhältnis zu Gilles Deleuze – im Licht seines Politikbegriffs und wirft einen kritischen Blick auf  aktuelle Mainstreamfilme wie auch auf Theorien, die jeweils beanspruchen, Kino und Politik zusammenzuführen. Daraus resultiert ein Votum für Dissens und Voraussetzungsbruch als Momente einer politischen Filmästhetik.

This essay consists of six chapter, the first two function as an extensive introduction. The first chapter contextualizes Alps as part of the new weird Greek cinema, while it summarizes briefly the film's plot. The next chapter is an account on Alps as a company, it explains in detail how it works and functions. The fourth chapter is a cartography of power which codes  Alps main sources of violence and reveals it as a system of power. The penultimate chapter discuss the obvious gender dissymetry in the distribution of power in Alps company and Alps film in general and engages with core problems about women, power and power relations. The final chapter analysis, or better schizoanalyzes, Anna's condition and actions as a productive example against the micro- violences of power and subjugation. All the chapters of the essay try to explore the nexus of power relations as well as its material effects on bodies through a close investigation of the film's cinematic narratives, forms and affects.

This paper examines Gilles Deleuze’s employment of the concept of the ‘pedagogy of the image’ which was first developed by the film critic Serge Daney in two seminal essays in the mid-1970s in Cahiers du cinema. It will seek to foreground the ‘Daney effect’ (Bellour, Trafic 50: 75–86, 2004) in
the second half of Cinema 2: The Time-Image where the influence of Daney, along with Bonitzer, Bergala and other film theorists is most pronounced. It will examine the ‘traffic’ of the image and of ideas of the image between Deleuze and Daney as each, in the course of the 1980s, sought to address mutations in the scopic regime. Thus the paper proposes the trope ‘pedagogies of the image between Daney and Deleuze’.

Keywords: pedagogy of the image; Gilles Deleuze; Serge Daney; Cahiers du cinema; Straub/Huillet; Godard

This essay explores the flicker or flicker-image as a flash of light that has the potential to disrupt the mechanics of vision. The most elemental of images, the flicker is at the very basis of both vision and mechanical image production; it is the flash of light that makes an image possible, and it is the continuous flickering of light across the eye (or lens) that connects visual perception with time perception through the operation of critical flicker frequency: the speed at which the brain joins those flashes of light together and thus perceives the movement of time. Yet when isolated or disaggregated from continuous movement, the flicker-image disrupts the smooth space of both image production and time perception. The flicker-image therefore refers to a correlation between analogue cinema practice in which a frame of film runs flickering through the projector and the physiological mechanics of image production in which flickering light is perceived by the brain. To think of ima...

This essay explores the flicker or flicker-image as a flash of light that has the potential to disrupt the mechanics of vision. The most elemental of images, the flicker is at the very basis of both vision and mechanical image production; it is the flash of light that makes an image possible, and it is the continuous flickering of light across the eye (or lens) that connects visual perception with time perception through the operation of critical flicker frequency: the speed at which the brain joins those flashes of light together and thus perceives the movement of time. Yet when isolated or disaggregated from continuous movement, the flicker-image disrupts the smooth space of both image production and time perception. The flicker-image therefore refers to a correlation between analogue cinema practice in which a frame of film runs flickering through the projector and the physiological mechanics of image production in which flickering light is perceived by the brain. To think of images in this way is to understand images as single elements, as flashes of light, frames of film, individual pixels – individual units that are joined together. Image. Followed by image. Followed by image. Yet to insist on the flicker-image as a single flash of light – a “cut” or “point cut” as Gilles Deleuze does in his few pages of writing on experimental artists’ film – is to isolate an image from the constant movement of images, and, in doing so, to break into the flow of time: interrupting, disrupting or re-routing time’s movement (Deleuze 2005: 207).