#movement-image

Just a string of (possibly) incoherent thoughts. I finished reading Gilles Deleuze's Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image, both for the second time. While I'm fascinated by Deleuze's theories, I'm not sure if they hold up under scrutiny.

My concerns came from reading over random blog posts on David Bordwell's site. Mainly, it's difficult to say whether a film is capturing a cultural zeitgeist because they're in development so many years before they actually hit screens. Furthermore, that it's more important to analyze what's on the screen VS. any sort of theoretical interpretation (psychoanalysis, semiology [both of which Deleuze agrees with forgoing, I think], post-modernism, etc.). The reason being, that if you go in to analyze something with a theory in mind, then you can stretch almost any meaning to fit that theory.

One of Bordwell's biggest studies, conducted alongside Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, was studying if there was a coherent style to classical Hollywood cinema (1930 - 1960) and how that style communicated ideas to the audience, how it evolved, etc. For this study, they made a list of 100 randomly chosen films that were lesser known in status at the time (mid-80s) rather than a canonical masterpiece (this meant no Citizen Kane) to gauge what an average film was doing. This also helps cement what an innovative technique truly is and why certain films are considered landmarks.

Reading this along with Bordwell's On the History of Film Style, it becomes clear that Deleuze is repurposing (and sometimes misinterpreting) what has already been written about specific eras of film history, but in a less than coherent manner. Instead he's warping ideas about montage found in a nation's cinema – yes, Soviet montage was a thing, but not all Soviet directors were adhering to this style.

So then what does one make of Deleuze's work?

I have no idea. And I'm trying to grasp what this means. Perhaps it means taking some of Deleuze's concepts of what a Movement and Time image are, putting them under scrutiny under a vast array of films from his selected eras, and trying to come up with a more coherent dialogue to present his ideas.

On Deleuze, Evolution, the Culture Industry, and the End of Capital

1. Our evolutionary heritage hinged on sensory-motor mechanisms for survival.  The ability to receive percepts and generate effective actions from them distinguished the living from the dead.

2. The appearance of the time-image re-christens the possibility that humans may be able to rise above sensory-motor linkages to predicate their life upon fully-freed thought and boundless philosophical abstraction.  Whereas the movement-image hinders access to non-teleological thought, the time-image opens routes to any-thought-whatever.  The time-image unblocks consciousness not for revolutionary action, but for evolutionary actualization.

3. But our present socio-economic structures do not grant equal access to the liberating potential of the time-image.  Taste and interest in the art cinema tends to break along class lines, not solely for the kinds of reasons Bourdieu outlines, but because the oppression of capitalism locks the poor in an intractible struggle which withholds from them the instruments of escape.

4. Until day-to-day struggle is no longer an issue, the mind cannot devote itself to thoughts outside the realm of struggle.  In those people whose economic conditions require them to live their lives scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck, the time-image has little resonance or practical value.

5. Thus, in popular cinema, economically disenfranchised spectators rehearse the sensory-motor processes of their own survival, while at the same time seeking momentary escape from their particular form of suffering.

6. While rehearsals of sensory-motor operations may be of mild practical value for the poor, the ruling classes also use sensory-motor films to ideologically confirm and lock the lower and middle classes within their positions of struggle.

(7. It bears pointing out that the elite do not much avail themselves of the time-image either, which perhaps makes it easier for them to continue to reproduce and re-entrench capitalism, which, though it materially benefits them, restricts their access to liberated consciousness just the same.)

8. At the historical moment that humanity has achieved the technological and aesthetic prerequisites to free the mind and take a qualitative step beyond our evolutionary heritage, the culture industry persists in choking media with sensory-motor images, restricting our consciousness to the lamentable fiction that struggle cannot be superseded.

9. The dialectical confrontation of the movement-image and the time-image mirrors the dialectical confrontation of capitalism and its abolition (whatever name we call it by).  Wisely, Deleuze does not narrativize the time-image as struggling against the movement-image, for if it struggled, it would be a movement-image.  Similarly, capital engulfs and commodifies all forms of struggle, especially including struggles against capital.  That's why we cannot abolish capital by fighting against it.