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Essays (book reviews) |
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Hacia una imagen no-tiempo. Deleuze y el cine contemporáneo |
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I Am a Passenger
Criticism
is the art of passing from one film to another. Not in the banal, professional,
purely contingent sense of having to see one film, and then the next one …
films that are, often, not of our choosing. Rather, criticism tries to take
that contingency – the external requirement to constantly view a string of
films in sequence – and turn it into an art. An art of comparison, association, networking … using one film as a stepping stone to the next, and the next as a way of reframing
the last, over and over, and in ever-widening rings …
One
of the beauties of this splendid book by Sergi Sánchez is the way it gracefully connects one film to the
next, and keeps looping them together. Film books, as a general rule, like to
keep things neat and clean: they take one film at a time, one per chapter; or a
clearly defined group of films (remakes, sequels, a sub-genre, or films that
all happened to appear at the same moment around a similar theme). Not this
book. It passes from Jorge Luis Borges to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake (1998); from Alain
Robbe-Grillet to Brian De Palma and then to Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98); from Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard to
Tsai Ming-liang; from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956) to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001). The ride is
captivating, always surprising and informative.
Sánchez is a man of both
criticism and theory. The critic in him is fond of (and very good at) sharp,
vivid analysis of each film that comes before him – and he is also full of that
restless spirit to then move on, move ahead to another film that can offer a
mutually enriching illumination in comparison with the first. The theorist in
him is a close, avid reader of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: both his celebrated Cinema books (two volumes) and the wider set of philosophical
writings from the 1950s until his death from suicide in 1995 – as well as the
commentaries of many who have recycled or taken issue with their Master.
So
the films come with ideas embedded in them. Like many Deleuzeans, Sánchez has probably wondered: what would Deleuze have said about the films he never saw (or ignored,
as is the case with Raúl Ruiz), or the films that
came after him? What would he make of the Newest American Cinema, or the
digital revolution? Hacia una imagen no-tiempo is not
(thank god) a simple extension, application or illustration of Deleuze’s cinema theories, using newer examples – as so
many academic commentaries on this philosopher tend to be. It is not the kind
of study that is content to tell us that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004),
or countless other comparable, contemporary examples, is yet another
confirmation of the idea of a crystal-image (past, present and future times, actual and virtual realities, horizontal and vertical
experiences, layered into one block – as in Deleuze’s favourite example of Alain Resnais).
Sánchez has enormous respect
for the venerable, vitalist philosopher named in his book’s subtitle – and his summaries
of difficult concepts are enviably lucid and accessible. But he dares the one step beyond (the Madness motto) of
taking Deleuze past Deleuze – and into the challenging realm of the contemporary. To really, effectively
use Deleuze-on-cinema, we have to transform Deleuze from within (as others, such as Patricia Pisters, are also doing
at the moment), causing the Cinema books to mutate in response to a changing audiovisual landscape.
There’s
not just one kind of time-image anymore. Sánchez takes us through the many, mind-boggling varieties on display in films of the
past decade or so: time reincarnated, restored, duplicated; cyclical time, dead
time, time of interruption, feminine time … And there is also something radically
new: the non-time image, which is
properly the digital image. And this new type of image is not only something we
find in experimental media works, or special pieces of video art; its presence
and tone, its influence and action are felt everywhere, from the rapid-fire
delivery of dialogue in David Fincher’s The
Social Network (2010) to the multiplication of screens in De Palma (Femme Fatale, 2002) or twin/mirror
characters in Van Sant (Gerry, 2002) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, 2001) … In the realm of non-time, traditional notions of depth,
causality, individual psychology (and so on) are in pieces, left far behind; Sánchez delves into the new kinds of aesthetic experiences,
possibilities and subjectivities that are blossoming in the wake of this over-melodramatised ‘death’.
It
is commonplace, these days, to dramatically oppose the cinematographic index
(as trace or impression of reality) to the digital pixel (as coded abstraction ex nihilo) – but the transition is more
gradual and complex than that, passing through the electronic-signal phase of
TV and video. Sánchez rests at the significant
pit-stops in this varied development, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Oberwald Mystery (Il mistero di Oberwald, 1980) and
Godard’s TV series of the ‘70s, through Dogme and Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003) and Ten (2002), and coming to
recent fictions by Fincher and Michael Mann, the documentaries of Wang Bing,
and the work of Pedro Costa.
No
grand statement about the digital (whether from the mouth of Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek or the more recent
editors of Cahiers du cinéma)
is taken as absolute or defining – but each tendency produces intriguing
aesthetic and narrative possibilities that are noted and appreciated. If Nobuhiro Suwa’s A Perfect Couple (Un couple parfait, 2005), for instance, uses the open frames, actorly improvisations and long takes allowed by digital
filming, it also offers a new definition of André Bazin’s cherished substance of reality – because now this reality that has to be
rendered is itself discontinuous, depthless, full of holes and strange, obscure
zones of action and inaction. Sánchez is as
interested in digital death as he is in digital life – because he searches for
the keys to wisdom as much in George Romero as in Giorgio Agamben.
And he is also alert to both the attraction and the trap of “nostalgia for the movement-image” that
forms another strand of present-day digital production.
The
book, in the closing pages of its proposition/argument, winds back to the
productivity of Deleuze’s suggestive formulations. Sánchez evokes the contemporary spectator as someone in “a
state of dissolution, abandoning his condition as subject in order to transform
himself into a flux of consciousness, into a Body Without Organs where it is
difficult to discern the limit-point between the gaze and the screen” – and
thus in a state of “becoming-woman”, of the kind we see embodied by Laura Dern in Lynch’s Inland
Empire (2006). And cinema itself, as a medium and a means of expression, is
grasped in the moment of its current transition, riding a “vectorial desire” into
the future. Sánchez is refreshingly non-moralistic
and non-pessimistic about these developments.
Gilles Deleuze is, in truth, a congenial theorist for film
critics – far more so than Lacan, Badiou, Latour, or countless others in his philosophical,
cultural or historical proximity. His ideas (and those he coined in
collaboration with Félix Guattari)
are free, inventive, generous, inviting – systematic, but not dogmatic. When I
was 20 years old, I dreamt of writing a long Deleuzean manifesto titled Desires, Machines, Cinemas. I ended up writing a short Deleuzean review of Godard’s Sauve qui peut (1980) instead – the working critic in me won out over the budding theorist. No
problem: Sergi Sánchez has
finally written the book I dreamt of writing. He has turned the virtual into
the actual: Deleuze-and-cinema not merely updated,
but transformed. We can all learn a lot from Hacia una imagen no-tiempo.
© Adrian Martin January 2014 |
