{"id":227,"date":"2016-04-11T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/?page_id=227"},"modified":"2016-04-11T08:25:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:25:59","slug":"2-4-sanchez","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/2-4-sanchez\/","title":{"rendered":"2.4 Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BY SERGI S\u00c1NCHEZ [1]<\/a><\/h6>\n

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  1. Squint your eyes and you\u2019ll spot the very instant when, according to Gilles Deleuze, the movement-image gives way to the time-image: the suicide of Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) in Germany Year Zero<\/em> (Germania Anno Zero<\/em>, Roberto Rossellini, 1947). Edmund, a twelve-year-old boy in the ruins of postwar Berlin, has just poisoned his sick father, following the advice (as he understands it) of his former schoolteacher, a Nazi and possibly a pedophile, who counsels the boy that the weak should perish so that the strong can flourish. All that Edmund can do now is stare at a reality that has become overwhelming for him, a reality he is no longer able to understand: the war has forever changed human values, and people face an uncertain future. Humankind has just regained the freedom it has fought so hard for, but it still doesn\u2019t know what to do with it. Germany Year Zero<\/em> represents the cinema of the seer: the seer can only see, he cannot not<\/em> see; the seer who sees can no longer act. The seeing are like sleepwalkers, like ghosts. That\u2019s how Rossellini\u2019s Edmund goes with the flow of what he can\u2019t change anymore, like a shipwreck adrift. Edmund is not a character for us to identify with, but a black hole of centripetal forces. The crack of the Holocaust, the war that revealed to us the shame of being human, permanently separates people from things and probably also words from things and concepts from their meaning.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Rossellini\u2019s year zero is also a year zero for images: the year when the cinema depicts a teenager committing suicide is the year when the innocence of the movement-image seems insufficient to understand a world ripped apart. Its steaming guts remain on the floor, but this image\u2014\u201cconceived of as being but one element in a natural arrangement with other images within a logic of the set [ensemble<\/em>] analogous to that of the finalized coordination of our perceptions and actions\u201d (Ranci\u00e8re 107)\u2014is not enough anymore. Jacques Ranci\u00e8re calls into question the relationship established by Deleuze between his taxonomy of the film image and the unfolding of History. Deleuze warns us that he is not writing a history of cinema but a classification of signs, and Ranci\u00e8re shows that Deleuze, like Bresson, aims to draw a map of the things of the world, some kind of natural philosophy where \u201cthe image need not be constituted at all\u201d because, following Henri Bergson, \u201c[i]t exists in itself. It is not a mental representation but matter-light in movement. . . . Matter is the eye, the image is light, light is consciousness\u201d (Ranci\u00e8re 109).<\/p>\n

    We know that one of the most controversial points of the Deleuzian theory lies in how he separates the two ages of cinema, in relation to the historical caesura of the Second World War. Ranci\u00e8re refutes that division through common sense: if the two kinds of images belong to two different stages of its evolution, how, for instance, could they equally be exemplified by Bresson\u2019s films (112)? Actually, then, we are not talking of two kinds of images, but of an image with two different voices or, according to Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s metaphor, of the passage from one shore to the other of the same images (113). The sudden and emphatic connection between the time-image and the postwar period may seem to contradict Deleuze\u2019s assertion that he doesn\u2019t want to write a history of images, but in fact it does not. Deleuze is definitely indebted to Andr\u00e9 Bazin, the first theorist to admit Neorealism looks into the inside of human beings when forcing them to look to the outside. But Deleuze takes the Bazinian idea beyond realism and into the field of thought\u2014if we once had nice, organic representations, then due to the crisis of faith in human actions, all we have now is a clich\u00e9 we tirelessly come back to in order not to forget how worn out it is. That is why Ranci\u00e8re thinks of the movement-image as a philosophy of nature\u2014much closer to Bazin\u2019s theory about realism\u2014and of the time-image as a philosophy of spirit (113). \u201cThe thought and spirit that cinema needs (and that we, too, need),\u201d writes Paola Marrati, \u201care immanent powers of life which hold the hope and pose the challenge of creating new links between humans and this<\/em> world\u201d (Marrati 63-64). It might seem puzzling that Deleuze finds some features of the time-image, emerging from the ruins of movement, in filmmakers like Vincente Minnelli or Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who are so familiar with the cause-and-effect manners of Hollywood\u2019s classical cinema. But the French philosopher circles around many different centers and enjoys intersecting zones and past areas to which time endlessly refers in its constant course.<\/p>\n

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    1. Another suicide, also of a child, marks the reincarnation of the time-image in contemporary cinema. Significantly, that suicide is conceived by Steven Spielberg, accused by Godard of turning the Holocaust into a Hollywood tale in Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> (1993) and openly criticized in the French director\u2019s In Praise of Love <\/em>(\u00c9loge de l\u2019amour<\/em>, 2001). Godard summoned Spielberg to a face-off in the framework of the Locarno Film Festival; the American director refused, but his A.I.: Artificial Intelligence<\/em> (2001) could be the answer of a seer-filmmaker. Two and a half months before the Twin Towers attack, Spielberg\u2019s premiere flooded Manhattan: feet dangling over an aquatic abyss, David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot with the capacity for unlimited love, discovers that he is nothing but a circuit of cables programmed for affection. His silent wandering through a ruined city is not so different from Edmund\u2019s in Germany Year Zero<\/em>: the only difference\u2014a big difference\u2014between them is that David, raised in the infinite innocence of Carlo Collodi\u2019s Pinocchio<\/em>, cannot die. Sunk into a huge womb, into the quiet waters of femininity, David is rescued by the sunlight that his protector Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) emanates. He falls again into the ocean of neglected childhood, and the rusty Ferris wheel of Coney Island traps him before the sublimate image of his adoptive mother: an icon of the Virgin.[2]<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman insisted after the premiere that A.I.: Artificial Intelligence<\/em> was the product of the union of two seemingly opposite sensitivities: Stanley Kubrick\u2019s, who promoted the project, and Steven Spielberg\u2019s, an inspired replicant.[3]<\/a> We must agree with Deleuze that \u201cfor Kubrick, the world itself is a brain\u201d (Cinema 2<\/em> 205), and \u201cthe identity of world and brain, the automaton, does not form a whole, but rather a limit, a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact, makes them present to each other, confronts them or makes them clash\u201d (206). That membrane is what Deleuze calls \u201cmemory\u201d\u2014not in the sense of the ability to remember, but of making \u201csheets of past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always already there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter\u201d (207).[4]<\/a> David is Deleuze\u2019s automaton, literally\u2014he is the consciousness of an extinguished world, the only container of the universe\u2019s memory of the aliens who visit the Earth two thousand years after the end of everything.[5]<\/a> He is the only hope for a human race that explored the vast space-time continuum and was unable to recreate the life flow for longer than twenty-four hours. What if David was the materialization of the hopes that Kubrick placed in Spielberg, defender of the movement-image, to perpetuate the time-image into an indefinite future with no expiry date? When talking of Resnais and Kubrick, Deleuze emphasizes the idea of a cerebral cinema\u2014which it would be mistaken to identify with an intellectual cinema (Cinema 2 <\/em>204-15). Although the latter\u2014an \u201cintellectual\u201d cinema in its classical form (which Deleuze associates with Eisenstein)\u2014is not devoid of emotion or feeling, it has much more to do with the movement-image, which depends on the reactions caused by sensori-motor situations in the external world. David, on the other hand, is a repository for the pure, Bergsonian memory, one characterized by eternal life. The beautiful coda where Spielberg\u2019s aliens grant David his wish and let him spend one more day with his revived mother doesn\u2019t play into Spielberg\u2019s presumed sentimental vein, but rather opens the door to a reversible time, to a possible resurrection that Spielberg rather mysteriously entertains. So happiness goes through death and reincarnation, and the joining of the spirits of movement-image (Spielberg) and time-image (Kubrick) makes possible the renaissance of time as an emotional vector of contemporary cinema.<\/p>\n

      It doesn\u2019t seem odd that Spielberg himself was reborn from his creative ashes following A.I.<\/em> Nor does it seem fantastic to suggest that the heroes played by Tom Cruise in two of Spielberg\u2019s later films help us to understand what happens to David, that memory-world that can\u2019t survive in a drowned world. Analyzing Cruise\u2019s character not in Spielberg\u2019s films but in Brian de Palma\u2019s Mission: Impossible<\/em> (1996), and comparing it to the shining Douglas Fairbanks of the silent era, N\u00faria Bou and Xavier P\u00e9rez write that the unconscious, happy jumping without a safety net, and the endless chases have been replaced by a bottomless void that turns the new male hero into a puppet that doesn\u2019t even know its demiurge (104)\u2014an opinion we find ratified in Minority Report<\/em> (Steven Spielberg, 2000). Here, Cruise plays Chief John Anderton, head of the \u201cPre-Crime\u201d special law enforcement division, which anticipates and thwarts crime with the help of three \u201cPre-Cogs,\u201d specially gifted beings who are able to see the future. When we see Anderton editing the future memories of the seers on a virtual multiscreen console in order to avert a murder, when we see him heading towards entrapment by that same net of images which will bring him guilt and doom him to a perilous steeplechase, we are reminded of Rossellini\u2019s Edmund and of A.I.<\/em>\u2019s David sinking into the amniotic fluid, forever on the verge of oblivion. Likewise, Cruise in the role of single father Ray Ferrier running away from a relentless alien invasion in War of the Worlds<\/em> (Steven Spielberg, 2005) signifies for us the memory-world developing through an era of void, a void that is able to neutralize time unless our hero struggles to reconquer it. To some extent, 21st-century cinema has gone through a transit space while trying to report on this reconquest: it studied the perseverance of the time-image, it watched the gestures of its body free-falling before surviving and transforming into something else. And it did so to confirm the emergence of that \u201csomething else\u201d to which it naturally tends, materializing partly thanks to electronic and digital media images, made of pixels or non-time particles<\/em> (or particles of eternal time, unable to die, like Spielberg\u2019s David).<\/p>\n

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      1. We should consider once more what an image is. That is what Godard has been wondering ever since those \u201cthree thousand hours of cinema\u201d that drove him to take up film criticism and filmmaking.[6]<\/a> The more he wonders about it, the less he finds a calming conclusion: over the last years, his aesthetic project, disillusioned but lively, has been tinged with a certain amount of longing. That longing used to find relief in his enthusiasm for quoting and his active involvement in a cinema of resonances, but now it has turned into full consciousness of loss. That\u2019s why, in the master class depicted in his Notre musique<\/em> (2004)\u2014where Godard plays himself delivering a lecture at the European Literary Encounters in Sarajevo (on the same topic as a lecture he really gave there in 2002)\u2014he confronts two symmetrical images of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant speaking on the telephone in His Girl Friday<\/em> (Howard Hawks, 1940), and says: \u201cAs you see, it\u2019s the same image repeated twice. That\u2019s because the director is not able to see the difference between a man and a woman.\u201d This, he tells his audience (or us), is a common mistake in cinema, and things only get worse when images refer to historical events, \u201cbecause that\u2019s when we see that the truth has two faces.\u201d It is therefore mandatory to deal with differences.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Referring to the dichotomy Israelis\/Palestinians, Godard concludes that \u201cIsraelis came to fiction and Palestinians came to documentaries.\u201d The imaginary belongs to the realm of certitude and the real belongs to the realm of uncertainty. Godard\u2019s famous nostalgia for Howard Hawks\u2019s movement-image becomes a nihilistic, political reflection on the shot-reverse shot relation of a dreaming nation (which has the power) and a sleepless nation (which is oppressed). At the beginning of his master class, he asks: \u201cWhere do you think this picture was taken?\u201d \u201cStalingrad,\u201d \u201cBeirut,\u201d \u201cWarsaw,\u201d \u201cHiroshima\u201d are the answers. He says: \u201cRichmond, Virginia, 1865. American Civil War.\u201d Godard shows that Deleuze was right when he believed that repetition is a condition of History itself, that it\u2019s not possible to talk of History without repetition. So Godard goes back to the ruins of Sarajevo in Notre musique<\/em>, because he now feels morally compelled to become Rossellini\u2019s Edmund, to feel his helplessness at a later stage. In Allemagne 90 Neuf Z\u00e9ro<\/em> (1991), Lemmy Caution, a character from Godard\u2019s Alphaville<\/em> (1965), gets out of his grave to walk around through some other ruins, those of reunified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Caution was another of Godard\u2019s alter egos, a ghost, walking on the pavement of a city that had been a huge cemetery. Godard has been drawing the map of that cemetery for many years. At the time of Je vous salue Marie<\/em> (1983), Godard defined cinema as a depository of suffering (Bergala Godard par Godard 2<\/em>, 608). One of the image\u2019s duties is not to bear witness to the present anymore, but to let the past come back in multiple ways, like the waves we create when we throw a stone into the water: they are alike but different, too, and they are all destined to lap the earth and make it change with every each wave. There is no dialectics of time, for the present\u2019s relationship with the past is not linear: the present includes past, absorbs it, lets it leak to create a sediment. The past is not like the cream in the coffee, but like the sugar dissolved in the liquid to become a part of its nature (in Bergson\u2019s famous image). We could say then that Godard in Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> (1988-98) is like David in A.I.<\/em>: anchored to his experience as a spectator, he reenacted cinema\u2019s history as a \u2018memory-world\u2019 disintegrating and overlapping itself.<\/p>\n

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        1. When, in France Tour D\u00e9tour Deux Enfants<\/em> (1977), Godard asks a little girl if night is space or time, and she answers \u201cboth\u201d without hesitating, an image is taking shape off-camera, where space and time melt and superimpose to give birth to a darkness. It\u2019s the darkness of truth, the truth of the image that thinks of itself, that struggles to make its way through the abyss of existence. Godard goes on asking: \u201cWhen you look at yourself in the mirror, does your image exist? Do you exist only as yourself or, quite the opposite, do you have more than one existence? When your mother thinks of you and has an image of you, don\u2019t you exist although she cannot see you?\u201d The girl hesitates: she is a slave to the senses and doesn\u2019t allow herself to accept that her image can exist regardless of her presence. \u201cYou, reflected in the mirror \u2012 is it an image of you or is it your image?\u201d Godard asks her. \u201cYour image on television, is it less real than you, doesn\u2019t it exist as much as you?\u201d During the interview, in a stolen moment, the girl\u2019s uncertainty reveals itself in an image of her hair over her face, the electronic freezing of a truth that doesn\u2019t lie in the inquisitive off-screen words of Godard or in C\u00e9cile\u2019s childish hesitations. It\u2019s a secret that remains inside the transparent walls of the image.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          So that image embodies a certain kind of hope\u2014the hope of the image and of what we can expect from it. Walter Benjamin\u2019s \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History\u201d considers the significance of the image as a promise of presence; that is, as a kind of prediction that ontologically carries an unresolved past, the only temporality that may open a crack in the present from which the future may emerge. It is the same image that Godard sets in motion in his Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, turning his arduous endeavor into a manifesto that is less pessimistic than its gloomy gravity makes it seem. The pregnant image embraces its own finitude as well as its own celebration, so when Benjamin talks of the \u201cend of History,\u201d we must not take it literally. It\u2019s not about the end of occurrence, it\u2019s about thinking History as if we were thinking its boundary. It\u2019s a good lesson following all those apocalyptic warnings that have foretold cinema\u2019s death for years: realizing that, when we think cinema\u2019s history from an ahistorical\u00a0view, we think it from an awareness of the boundary \u2012 a boundary that we quite possibly don\u2019t know, of course. So there is no sense looking for a cause or a guilty party for the death of cinema as we know it, as Benjamin would say, especially because such a death is inherent to the intelligibility of cinema to begin with. And, in the second place, because the end is not an event in any positivistic sense:<\/p>\n

          The end of history is not immediately present in history, that is, it\u2019s not available <\/em>[disponible<\/em>] in each one of the present moments of history or in any of them. This non-presence of the end within history can be conceived of in this first way: the end of history transcends history itself; the end cancels history, abolishing its specific temporality. Knowledge<\/em> of the transcendent end of history is therefore apocalyptic<\/em>: it offers itself in a glimpse, by virtue of which the end is ecstatically present in the present as its image. (Oyarz\u00fan 26, emphasis in original, my translation).<\/p>\n

          Thinking the cinema is thinking its death, and thinking its death is thinking of it as a mutable, Heraclitean entity. That\u2019s why the advent of digitization does not mean the end of cinematographic occurrence: the digital image is like a seed, a fertilized ovule waiting to become a zygote and a living being, just as the time-image was inscribed within the movement-image.<\/p>\n

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          1. \u201cIn the dot, space becomes a metaphor through time and time becomes a metaphor through space\u201d (Engell 483, my translation). Here Lorenz Engell insightfully reads the television image as the utmost expression of Deleuze\u2019s time-image. Engell says that the TV screen\u2019s image is not defined by a square\u2014that is, by a grid of spatial coordinates\u2014but by the intervals and the reproduction of the minimal units of meaning that make them up\u2014that is, by its temporality.[7]<\/a> The phonemes of the television image are the dot-images that constitute the screen\u2019s lines and columns, but also the intervals between them. Those dot-images, both absent and present, are never visible at the same time, but they manifest themselves in a temporal sequence. To our perception, the image consists of those intervals between the dot-images, which, according to Engell, are time in addition to space.[8]<\/a> Because the pixel or point is the metaphor of what cannot be stretched out nor represented, that is, because the point is the representation of non-representation, the electronic image is not determined by the presence of the pixel-image, but by its lack of dimension. When the point becomes visible, it has lost what gives it its sense: if it exists, if we can see it, if it\u2019s microscopically measurable, it\u2019s not just a point anymore. The television image is doomed to the time and space of an intersection, that of an image which comes and one which is already leaving. It is an image that is permanently in transit, so it is also a double image: in it we can see how the actual and the virtual coexist, to the point that it\u2019s almost impossible to distinguish them. Engell explains beautifully and precisely how the television image takes shape according to these parameters: on the screen, the image we perceive is never present, but it\u2019s there where it splits up as two images, outlined by the cathode ray, one in<\/em> the other and over<\/em> the other: an image cannot be perceived as actual if it needs to be completed by its virtual image. Simultaneity of past and present is inherent to the ontology of the television image, so it would not be mistaken to think that \u201ctelevision is nothing but time turned into image\u201d (485, my translation).[9]<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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            1. It\u2019s hard to believe that the visionary intuition of Deleuze\u2019s words in the conclusion to The Time-Image<\/em> didn\u2019t extend to an aesthetic assessment of the TV image. Deleuze considered that his two volumes about cinema dealt with the subject of an art threatened by a will to change, and by a new format that was going to modify forever not just its ontological dimension, but the way we think of it:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death. . . . The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they internalized in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favor of an omni-directional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed \u2018data,\u2019 information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. (Cinema 2<\/em> 265)<\/p>\n

              Historically, the postwar period marks the moment when both the time-image appeared and TV became established as a mass medium. As we have seen, the TV image perfectly meets the requirements of the time-image: cinema depends on montage, staging, framing, and sound (four of its main ingredients) for time to emerge as a pure optical and sound sensation; on the other hand, time is in television\u2019s DNA, time belongs to it in an ontological sense. Why, if Deleuze realizes the secrets of the electronic image, does he reject television? Just because he blames it for failing to take advantage of its aesthetic specificity, for becoming a thoroughly commercialized communication machine, only able to send back superfluous shapes and contents. Television lacks what Deleuze calls the \u201csupplement\u201d or aesthetic function, which lost ground to \u201ca social function, a function of control and power, the dominance of the medium shot, which denies any exploration of perception, in the name of the professional eye\u201d (Negotiations<\/em> 72). Thus did television replace its natural aesthetic function with a social-technical one.<\/p>\n

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              1. Lorenz Engell comes to the conclusion that the electronic image, established as a distillation of time\u2019s essence, prepares us for an image beyond the image. Not by chance, the Godard of the mid-seventies, the one who left militant cinema behind after the post-1968 disenchantment and a serious motorcycle crash that kept him away from the world for almost three years, was the first to notice the new expressive abilities of the electronic image. In his work for television he devotes himself to a different sort of militancy: the act of wondering about the image\u2019s nature, about that \u201cbeyond\u201d that runs away and brings up the rear but remains unaffected as a time cell that surrenders to his study. It\u2019s a hopeful recommencement that evolves not only according to the rules of the interplay of opposites but also to the firm intention of conducting an experiment which, in the medium of celluloid, Godard considered to be exhausted. His avant-garde TV projects sought to reach a mass audience (\u201cIt\u2019s sending 25 postcards per second to millions of people\u201d [Bergala 385, my translation]), a dream he shared with Rossellini\u2019s didactic television. It\u2019s surprising to see how na\u00efve Godard is when he overrates the media effects of Rossellini\u2019s TV experiments, especially since he was aware of the disastrous audience response to films like Socrates<\/em> (1971) or Cartesius<\/em> (1974). However, the most important thing is what Godard discovers in these video experiments: the ontological basis of an electronic image that enlarges the Deleuzian concept of the time-image, and that will result in the birth of a non-time image<\/em>, which is linked to the development of digital media. We have already encountered the notion of a double image; all of these video-period films suggest or show this duplicity (as in the national-cultural as well as medial polarities in Ici et Ailleurs<\/em> [1974]), or else duality plays an important role (the collaborative duos and two-part structures of Six fois deux\/Sur et sous la communication\u00a0<\/em>[1976] or the structural, conceptual, and gendered symmetries of France\/tour\/d\u00e9tour\/deux\/enfants <\/em>[1978]), or the number two signifies a new beginning (as in Num\u00e9ro deux<\/em> [1975], which Godard calls a \u201cremake\u201d of \u00c0 bout de souffle<\/em>, his first film). All of them illustrate a dialectics, a system of opposites that is always wondering about what comes after a shot and before another one, lastly asking itself about what there is between two shots. Assuming that this interval establishes duplicity, Godard brings closer the possibility of defining a new image that is already beyond the time-image: in editing, it is impossible to draw a sharp line between images because one of them splits up into another before reorganizing as a third one. Godard uses text as an image, a layer that lodges itself into another one, or forces one image to penetrate another, or disintegrates into it in slow motion. Millions of image-dots spread in millions of image-dots: amateur editing equipment is enough for the miracle to occur, and for the image to prefer intensities to trajectories, random dissolution to a time-scheduled trip. A \u201cthird image\u201d emanates from the meeting of the first two, sparkling or solarized or superimposed: from the communion or collision between dot and interval, new images will be born, those of the monumental Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>. What if that \u201cthird image\u201d was born from the crash between the suicides in Germany Year Zero <\/em>and A.I.<\/em>?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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                1. Both versions of The Ring<\/em>, Hideo Nakata\u2019s from 1998 and Gore Verbinski\u2019s from 2002, revolve around the topic of a videotape that causes the death of anyone who watches the film it contains. This occurs seven days after watching it, unless the ill-fated spectator makes a copy for someone else to watch. Salvation comes from accepting the viral dimension of electronic images, and understanding that those bewitching images propagate death as they are reproduced. According to Nicholas Rombes, The Ring<\/em> raises a question which is essential to understanding the state of affairs of cinema in the digital era: \u201cdoes the mass reproduction of the same images threaten to exterminate diversity, in the same way that the mass reproduction of a single virus might threaten to exterminate the diversity of life on earth?\u201d (4). The videotape\u2019s images look like those of an avant-garde film. They are disturbing because it\u2019s as if they lacked an \u201coriginal.\u201d They are a virus that replicates from nothingness, for there is no genesis. So they call reality into question: there is no reality from whence to be reproduced. \u201cReality is today\u2019s special effect\u201d (Rombes 5).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  What is the place of the human in this context? If Deleuze were alive, he would undoubtedly raise this question, since his two volumes about cinema try to answer it on page after page. What would the relationship be between humankind and those images that lack an \u201coriginal\u201d? If reality is a special effect, where is human consciousness? What models do people count on to form identities? These are questions that also run through the present chapter like subterranean waters that a spelunker tries to chart. An image-spelunker who wishes to stop the image, to press the pause button and analyze the dissimilarities between the time-image and the non-time image\u2014which is far from being the denial of image. In the first case, the time-image, the freezing of the image shows to us its imperfections, almost highlighting the deformity of men, who need to believe in the world because they know that it is there, though shattered. In the second case, the non-time image, the digital freeze-frame emulates the sharpness of still photography, the pristine texture of a photo stuck to the window, a landscape so realistic that it seems unreal. We know the time-image embraces time even though it doesn\u2019t trust it, holding desperately onto something that hurts it, but makes it exist. We know, by contrast, that the non-time image rejects age, hates erosions, turns away from time to be the epitome of an untouched perfection, which it relates to the intensity of an instant that lasts forever\u2014or won\u2019t last for an instant. It is the pause of the VHS image and it is the pause of the DVD image. From the interval between the two pauses comes a new age of the image which tries to create a space for the human that despises reality\u2019s duration, or rather, that defies reality itself.<\/p>\n

                  Television represents the time-image in its purest form. Its morphologic structure itself\u2014the dots and the interval between\u2014favors the mingling of the real and the virtual. Deleuze notices this feature in the conclusion to The Time-Image<\/em>, but, like film and TV critic Serge Daney, he also blames television for not taking advantage of its aesthetic possibilities, which are drowned by its social function. Only the video can grow the seed planted by the TV image and search for a \u201cbeyond the image\u201d that leaves behind the idea of time. The expressive possibilities of electronic images develop as a precedent for a digital image that will show itself to be immortal and eternal, timeless. As we have said, one of the more outstanding features of the digital image is its indifference to the effects of time: its volatile nature, the indifference to its erosions, the immateriality of its ontological condition. The digital image tends to reinterpret the depth of field, to underline the frame\u2019s autarchy, to reinterpret what No\u00ebl Burch called the \u201cPrimitive Mode of Representation\u201d (186-201) according to the criteria of a medium able to fulfill our gaze with its experience of length alone (witness the mesmerizing effect of the static shot in Abbas Kiarostami\u2019s Five Dedicated to Ozu <\/em>[2003], so similar to the Lumi\u00e8res\u2019 actualit\u00e9s). This attention to primitive cinema also turns into a great interest in restoring past images, as if the real meaning of the digital was to save celluloid from the unavoidable deterioration of its chemical nature. Just the way some silent films will always seem perennially new, allergic too to the effects of time.<\/p>\n

                  There is, however, a non-time image that longs for its ancestors, for the movement-image that Deleuze defines as an action-reaction chain. It is the three-dimensional non-time image, which, from the denial of time, wants to create a thorough copy of reality. It is the most publicized form of non-time image, the popular digital cinema that fills the multiplex cinemas, wishing to expand like a \u201cbig bang\u201d and turn its show into an immersive experience, a new version of the primitive \u201ccinema of attractions.\u201d It is a non-time image that can hardly coexist with its contradictions, thrown towards the mercurial flexibility of its nature but finding its boundaries in the real representation of what is impossible, as if claiming a narrative logic which is not its own. It is the digital image that tries its best to contribute to the movement-image\u2019s survival in contemporary blockbusters, without realizing that is blowing it up, attracting attention to its own excesses.<\/p>\n

                  From an ontological perspective, the non-time image is total interiority. Its bi-dimensionality opens the possibility that everything happens inside the shot: ghosts appear, emotions assume color, different levels of a singular reality are shown together, focused, in the foreground. Faces are flattened, distances are removed, landscapes are painted, and light is overexposed. This reinterpretation of reality has nothing to do with the mimesis that digital effects, obsessed with being more real than reality, used to look for. Image reveals its skin, is proud of its own texture, from the dirtiness of DV to the sharp perfection of HD. The poor DV quality\u2014which David Lynch compared to that of early celluloid times, when neither the frame nor the emulsion contained so much information\u2014creates a new relationship between image and spectator: I agree with Rombes when he says that there has been a resurgence of humanism in return for the morphological characteristics of the digital image. Something like a poetics of mistakes or unfinished things tries to compensate the unifying action of that no-image time, as if we needed the human factor to become visible, as if we wanted it to show itself only through failure and inaccuracy.[10]<\/a> That new humanism doesn\u2019t only lie in the impossible post-realism of Dogma 95 (a false return to reality that shows what a deceit digital realism is), but also in the evolution of home movies, in the possibility of making a filmed autobiography where the self is in front and behind the camera at the same time, as well as in the manifestation of death in the present progressive, where the non-time image let us immortalize a verb tense. What is human comes back to stay: as an antidote but also as a force that pierces a wall to escape in endless directions. Humanity becomes rhizome, taking on a new molecular dimension.[11]<\/a> What is human turns into hypertext, into split screen, into mosaic and multiplicity. It is the spectator in a state of dissolution, leaving behind its individual condition and becoming a stream of consciousness, a Body without Organs where is difficult to distinguish the breaking point between gaze and screen. It is the spectator plunged into that \u201cbecoming-woman\u201d that specifies the feminine dimension\u2014as lunar, liquid, and hard to grasp\u2014of that non-time image which (let\u2019s take two meaningful examples from the same filmmaker) plants Mulholland Drive<\/em> and harvests Inland Empire<\/em>. It is the spectator-author, demiurge of a little world that he shares with the whole universe, a universe made of time endlessly replicating until it loses itself in a limbo made of background noise and supportive or aggressive comments.<\/p>\n

                   <\/p>\n

                  \n

                  Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

                  Bergala, Alain, ed. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard. Tome 1, 1950-1984 <\/em>and Tome 2, 1984-1998. Paris: \u00c9ditions de l\u2019\u00c9toile-Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma, 1998. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Benjamin, Walter. \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History.\u201d Illuminations<\/em>. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253-64. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Bou, N\u00faria, and Xavier P\u00e9rez. El temps de l\u2019heroi<\/em>. Barcelona: Paid\u00f3s, 2000. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Burch, No\u00ebl. Life to those Shadows<\/em>. Trans. Ben Brewster. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print.<\/p>\n

                  —. Negotiations, 1972-90.<\/em> New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Dhake, A.M. Television and Video Engineering<\/em>. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1979. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Engell, Lorenz. \u201cRegarder la t\u00e9l\u00e9vision avec Gilles Deleuze.\u201d Le cin\u00e9ma selon Deleuze<\/em>. Eds. Lorenz Engell and Oliver Fahle. Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universit\u00e4t Weimar\/Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Fargier, Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul Cassangnac, and Sylvia van der Stegen. \u201cEntretien avec Nam June Paik.\u201d Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em> 299 (1979): 10-15. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Godard, Jean-Luc. \u201cThree Thousand Hours of Cinema.\u201d Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em> in English<\/em> 10 (1967): 10-15. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Hoberman, J. \u201cThe Dreamlife of Androids.\u201d Sight and Sound<\/em> 11.9 (2001): 16-18. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Marrati, Paola. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy<\/em>. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n

                  McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/em>. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Oyarz\u00fan, Pablo. \u201cCuatro se\u00f1as sobre experiencia, historia y facticidad. A modo de introducci\u00f3n.\u201d Introduction. La dial\u00e9ctica en suspenso. Fragmentos sobre la historia<\/em>. By Walter Benjamin. Santiago de Chile: Universidad ARCIS, LOM Ediciones, 1996. 7-44. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Ranci\u00e8re, Jacques. \u201cFrom One Image to Another? Deleuze and the Ages of Cinema.\u201d Film Fables<\/em>. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg, 2006. 107-23. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Roman, Shari. Digital Babylon: Hollywood, Indiewood, and Dogme 95.<\/em> Hollywood: IFILM, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Rombes, Nicholas. Cinema in the Digital Age<\/em>. New York: Wallflower-Columbia UP, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n

                  Rosenbaum, Jonathan. \u201cThe Best of Both Worlds.\u201d Chicago Reader<\/em>, 13 July 2001. Web. <http:\/\/www.jonathanrosenbaum.net\/2001\/07\/the-best-of-both-worlds\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

                   <\/p>\n

                  \n

                  Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

                  [1]<\/a> Chapter translated by Isabel Margel\u00ed.<\/p>\n

                  [2]<\/a> Unintentionally, as it were, Godard seems to agree with his scorned Spielberg when, in Notre musique<\/em> (2004), he tells the story of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, a young peasant who saw the Virgin eighteen times. When the local nuns and priests showed her canonical pictures of the Virgin created by Raphael or Murillo, Bernadette could not find any resemblance. But when she saw a Byzantine icon, the Virgin of Cambrai, Bernadette identified her at last. Godard says: \u201cWithout movement or depth, without the affected side: the sacred,\u201d as if he was referring to the maternal Virgin in A.I.<\/em><\/p>\n

                  [3]<\/a> Rosenbaum writes:<\/p>\n

                  If A.I. Artificial Intelligence<\/em>\u2014a film whose split personality is apparent even in its two-part title\u2014is as much a Kubrick movie as a Spielberg one, this is in large part because it defamiliarizes Spielberg, makes him strange. Yet it also defamiliarizes Kubrick, with equally ambiguous results\u2014making his unfamiliarity familiar.<\/p>\n

                  Hoberman asks: \u201cDoes the artifice belong to Spielberg and the intelligence to Kubrick?\u201d (17).<\/p>\n

                  [4]<\/a> For more on this Deleuzian conception and its relation to film and post-cinema, see also Patricia Pisters\u2019s contribution to this volume<\/a>.<\/p>\n

                  [5]<\/a> The aliens are imaged in strict accordance with the typical Spielberg iconography. Strictly speaking, these aliens are nothing but the result of the evolution of the \u201csupermechas,\u201d David\u2019s cyborg race.<\/p>\n

                  [6]<\/a> \u201cThree Thousand Hours of Cinema\u201d is the title of one of Godard\u2019s most famous articles, resembling something of a diary written in response to Truffaut\u2019s diary of the shooting of Fahrenheit 451<\/em>.<\/p>\n

                  [7]<\/a> We must remember the transformation process of the image in an analog television:<\/p>\n

                  The first set of 312 \u00bd odd number lines in the 625 lines, called the first field or the odd field<\/em>, are first scanned sequentially. Halfway through the 313th<\/sup> line, the spot is returned to the top of the screen and the remaining 312 \u00bd even number lines, called the second field or the even field<\/em> are then traced interleaved between the lines of the first set. This is done by operating the vertical field scan at 50 Hz so that the two successive interlaced scans, each at a 25 Hz rate, make up the complete picture frame. This keeps the line scanning speed down, as only 312 \u00bd lines are scanned in 1\/50 second. The 625 lines of the full picture are scanned in 1\/25 second. (Dhake 24)<\/p>\n

                  [8]<\/a> According to Engell, the most important theory of television, conceived by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media<\/em>, is based on a misunderstanding, a wrong hypothesis: McLuhan\u2019s theory starts from a premise that considers the intervals between dots only in spatial terms.<\/p>\n

                  [9]<\/a> \u201cThe difference between cinema and television lies in the fact that cinema is image and space, whereas there\u2019s no space in television, there\u2019s no image, there\u2019s only lines, electronic lines. The essential notion in television is time\u201d (Fargier, Cassagnac, and Van der Stegen 10).<\/p>\n

                  [10]<\/a> After the Dogme manifesto, Harmony Korine published the \u201cMistakist Manifesto\u201d with only three rules: \u201c1. no plots. Only images. Stories are fine. 2. all edits effects in camera only. 3. 600 cameras\/a wall of images\/the Phil Spector of cine\u201d (Roman viii).<\/p>\n

                  [11]<\/a> Further:<\/p>\n

                  A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 9)<\/p>\n

                  \n

                  Sergi S\u00e1nchez<\/strong> holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where he teaches digital cinema and television history. He is also the head of the Film Studies department at ESCAC (Escola de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya). He is the author of Hacia una imagen no-tiempo:<\/em> Deleuze y el cine contempor\u00e1neo<\/em> (Ediciones de la Universidad de Oviedo). He worked as a Programming Manager for TCM Spain between 2000 and 2003, and he contributes to various Spanish newspapers as a film and literary critic. He has published several books on cinema (on Akira Kurosawa, Terry Gilliam, Michael Winterbottom, Hal Hartley, and cinema and electronic music) and articles in collections (on Abel Ferrara, Dario Argento, Jacques Demy, Robert Rossen, Don Siegel, Georges Franju, Alain Resnais, Nagisa Oshima, and Australian SF, among others).<\/p>\n

                   <\/p>\n

                  \n

                  Sergi S\u00e1nchez,\u00a0\u201cTowards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era,\u201d in Denson and Leyda (eds),\u00a0Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Web. <http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/2-4-sanchez\/<\/a>>. ISBN 978-0-9931996-2-2\u00a0(online)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                  BY SERGI S\u00c1NCHEZ [1]     Squint your eyes and you\u2019ll spot the very instant when, according to Gilles Deleuze, … Continue reading 2.4 Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-227","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7eBQu-3F","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1189,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227\/revisions\/1189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}