Deleuze on Cinema

by Ronald Bogue

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

200515: this is the best of several recent books read on deleuze. this does not mean it is an easier read, as once again this rating reflects how this encourages me through conceptual difficulties of deleuze's work, how inspiring, interesting, remarkable and important. there are others whose interests are more professional, more analytic perhaps- who have found deleuze essentially impenetrable, opaque, meaningless, with far too many terms and far too little logical clarity. this must be why i like him so much. this is not math, not science, though he does make the point at how significant was the innovation of calculus, how this is the only way science can express itself...

i am much more engaged with his vivid, exact, multifaceted images of the the 'time-crystal', but this is getting ahead of his thought. first you have his intense delineation of eighteen to twenty-four signs, his radical interpretation of pierce's semiology- representam, object, interpretant- that he combines not with the familiar signifier-signified of linguistic structuralism, but with bergson's conception, and this is important- of duree'. in fact, of the many, many works this inspires me to read or reread, it is the work of bergson before all else. this is not 'film theory', not referring to much film, but thinking through film, through shot, montage, sequence, through reading the pattern of 'classical films', particularly how generated and different are the films from Russia, France, Germany, and Hollywood, and the changes from 'classic' to 'modern' film, from dialectical to invisible editing, organization and ideal forms, of everything from westerns to inverted as farce. this is all great stuff. certainly encourages me to read deleuze and literature, which is the second of this series...

bogue's critical work makes deleuze much more coherent, shows more and more the importance of bergson, which always engages me- do i like more deleuze or bergson? who knows- but it is more the conceptual tools, the 'images', offered by deleuze, that most fascinates, and film seems to most clearly visualize some aspects of bergson' thought, particularly the apex of senses to the plane of the world, the cone of past interpreting, the sheets of time past... my favorite is deleuze's image of the 'time-crystal'- as mentioned you might need to know everything leading up to it, though even by itself it strikes me as a resonant and beautiful way of thinking of time, of experience, in each our worlds and in that world we all share... is this idealism? not exactly, though as usual deleuze does not address such metaphysical concepts, only the questions, only the thinking, so what is this 'time-crystal', well it is variously mirror, transparent, opaque, refracting, distorting, reflecting, reversing, and so on...

did i mention deleuze has so many 'signs', according to which menu you taste, either eighteen or twenty-four... and then there is the conflict between 'virtual' and 'actual', followed by the 'indescernability' between 'true' and 'false'... and how all this is seen through everyone from Gance, Eisenstein, Griffith, Murnau, Renoir, Resnais... well there are several films i have to see again, indeed this book might not work unless you have seen a lot of films of some great artistic and not just box-office value... but this is more than 'film x demonstrates philosophical idea y', this is how the film itself, as memory, as sensation, thinks philosophically... could go on and on about this book, but mostly i want to go watch some films...

more
010220: Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction
Deleuze
What Is Philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts
Bergsonism
Henri Bergson: Key Writings
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Matter and Memory
Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy
Deleuze on Cinema
now read about 57 on or by or invoking bergson 220301..
Bergson’s Philosophy of Self-Overcoming: Thinking without Negativity or Time as Striving

[Joseph M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Each film, we might say, is like an astronaut film crew's exploration of a multifaceted, gemlike planet. The crew members orbit the planet, taking various shots of its surfaces. They land, traverse different planes, then penetrate the planet's outer surfaces and film shimmering and shifting prismatic reflections from within the planet, the facets changing tines growing foggy, opalescent, silvery or transparent. They follow the process of crystallization as a seed crystal spreads into a milieu; they record the shattering of a facet, the powdery disintegration of another, the liquid dissolution of a third. And the record of this journey (creatively edited to problematize spatio-temporal continuities of course) is the completed film, a set of images that as a whole comprise a giant crystal image." (P. 124)


Bogue wrote a great book. Before this, I didn't really take movies that seriously. Due to a lack of attention span among other factors, I was never a movie person, preferring videogames, books, painting (really any other media form) to movies, honestly. Just my personal preference.
However, lately things have changed.
Reading this book made me see cinema as an expression of thought. Taking significant influence from Bergson (who also wrote some on cinema) Deleuze proposes in his "Cinema" books, that cinema proposes different ways of perceiving ourselves, and is thus a philosophical process.

It was a lot of concepts to go over in about 200 pages, but I found that the most important ones to me were the concepts of "powers of the false", and the Bergsonian ideas,.

1. Powers of the false: It's important to know off the bat that when Deleuze is talking about "powers of the false", he does not mean falsity in the typical sense as "untrue." He takes the term from Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "the great falsifier", the artist. In my terms, using the crystallographical images Deleuze likes to use, is the one who extracts the seed of the crystal (the burning inherent in the world) and sees that it is an overwhelming flow. In such a case, whether it's with trauma, art or philosophy, one "falsifies", which isn't to say that they "make up" information; what it means is to make a 'cut', almost a capture of affects, an easel where one leaves a skeleton-trap to capture cosmo-political forces.

2. The Bergsonian ideas: These are essential for understanding Deleuze's ideas of cinema. For Deleuze, cinema is not a contained thing. In my previous paragraph, I said "cosmopolitical" not to sound extremely grandiose and pretentious (even though it probably came across that way), but as a nod to Deleuze's mentioning of the process of 'everything' being in a way a "metacinema". Deleuze does not pursue cinema as a closed field of interest, but of interest to us who have been disconnected from the human world, giving it a political significance. Bergson's theory of duration was that everything, space and times, are but mere categories of duration. Duration as intensive experience of time. In short, this means that everything is intensive, "vibrational" difference as Bogue states. From rocks, spiders, the eyes of whales, and more:

"Bergson makes this point in Creative Evolution when he reflects on the time it takes for sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. If he wants a drink of sugar water, he must wait for the sugar to dissolve. In his impatience he experiences duration, but this sense of time's onward thrust is not simply psychological; the time of the sugar's dissolution also partakes in duration."(P. 24)

Even the cube of sugar "partakes", but what it does is not partake in the human world. We don't take a sugar cube as it 'really is' insofar as such a thing exists: we take it as the intensive quality of relations between us and the world, which it's also a part of. However, and here Bergson likes the metaphor of a mirror, we only have our "subtractions of quantities of light, selection or filtering of light" (p. 31) The spiritual aspect of Bergson's thought is that being human is the coming-to-be of the entirety of things, even non-living things, which isn't to say humans are at the top, but that they manifest the being of every single 'thing' in the world. And Deleuze would say later, owing partly to his admiration of Bergson, that everything enters into a "machinic" assemblage: bee, flower, cosmos. Everything reflects everything else, only operating by the beautiful will-to-power, a.k.a the colors we find most sustaining in the world. At the same time, everything also breathes, "dilates and contracts" Bergson says and Deleuze says. They might have meant this to bring up the image of an eye, but to me I also take it as the image of the irregular heart beat of everything that simultaneously happens, and the contraction or dilation of our breath as we go through more or less intensive phases (to use a term from my diagnosis). You are not becoming human, you are becoming-other, and you can destroy in creative and life-giving ways. How much of politics is destroying? (Although I know that's not a very specific praxis)

So how does this connect to cinema? Cinema is the nonhuman eye of the camera, at base. The camera captures the bodily mysticism of movement, light, and space and time itself, that we can't normally take hold of. Here, perception is made strange. Perception, finally, is able to become other than itself and connects to other forces when it thought it disconnected from every one. The derealization, alienation that comes before a politics, a people, is the process of 'cinema'. It's the process of becoming a million little destructive animals. That in short, is my interpretation of the book.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far the best book on Deleuze's cinema books.

[Pejman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I advise to every body, who wants to undersatnd both Deleuze's books on cinema, to read this book. At the end of this book you will find yourself familiar with the most comlexes concepts of Delueze's philosophy of cinema.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review published in Criticism 45.4 (2004): 529-532. I read this (and its two other volumes) in manuscript form in Jan 2002 and was knocked out. I still (in 2021) use this text as reference for understanding not only Deleuze's cinema books, but especially his seminars (see deleuze.cla.purdue.edu)

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could read Delueze til the terrorists win and never understand him. Thank God for this commentary, then, which acts as a necessary go-between for a non-philosophy student like myself.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could hardly make heads or tails of Deleuze's maddeningly evocative writing on cinema until I read this. Invaluable.