Deleuze on Cinema

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Charles J. Stivale

Deleuze on Cinema, by Ronald Bogue. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 231. $90.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The pleasure of seeing not one but three new works on Deleuze authored by Ronald Bogue is increased by understanding the intelligent manner in which Routledge has edited material that initially was intended for publication in a single volume. Accompanying Deleuze on Cinema (under review here) are also Deleuze on Literature and Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. The first in North America to have concisely articulated an introductory text, Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 1989), Bogue has worked for over a decade to achieve the current threefold examination of the Deleuzian corpus. The strategy for Deleuze on Cinema continues the efficient and thorough approach that Bogue adopts in all of his works. For in his introduction, Bogue explains that his task is not to extend Deleuze's analyses into new studies on film; rather, he proposes to develop further both how Deleuze's analyses are situated in relation to contemporary philosophy and how his dense arguments may be understood through a coherent conceptual framework.

In chapter 1, "Bergson and Cinema," Bogue studies the theoretical bases of Deleuze's reflections on cinema in his successive studies Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). As Bogue emphasizes in the introduction, Deleuze develops philosophical concepts proper to cinema, particularly of the shift in cinema between a logic of the movement-image (roughly pre-World War II) into one of the time-image (following the collapse of the sensor/motor schema). In this light, the opening chapter situates Deleuze's project squarely within his continued elucidation of Bergson's conception of time, with Deleuze drawing heavily, says Bogue, from his earlier studies of Bergson (notably, the 1966 Bergsonism). The specific hinge for this explication is "the most puzzling of Bergsonian propositions--that the things we commonly call space and time are merely extremes of the contraction and dilation of a single duree, or duration ... as a time-space flux of a vibrational whole" (3). Hence the purpose of chapter 1 is to consider how Deleuze applies his conception of Bergsonian principles to time and movement in the cinematic image. Bogue opens the book, then, around the two axes, vertical and horizontal, that Deleuze identifies in the movement-image. Says Bogue: "In the following chapters we will consider the ways in which great directors shape this signaletic matter through the vertical processes of framing, cuts, shots, and montage [chapter 2], and through the horizontal processes of long-shot perception-images, medium-shot action-images, and close-up affection-images [chapter 3]" (39).

The reader will note quickly, however, that Bogue's study reaches far beyond a relatively simple tripartite typology and criss-crossing axes. For, after examining globally the importance of frame, shot, and montage, he closely explicates the elaborate taxonomy of images and signs that Deleuze develops in Cinema 1 inspired by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bogue makes clear that despite this important reference, Deleuze remains chiefly inspired by Bergson, only taking what he needs from Peirce, specifically his three modes of being, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Deleuze then conjoins these to the already posited trio of images as follows: "Rather than tying the perception-image to Thirdness, Deleuze posits the existence of a fourth movement-image corresponding to the category of Thirdness, the relation-image ... and then treats the perception-image as a species of image that lies outside Peirce's classification schema (a Zeroness)" (67-68). To these Deleuze adds two more types (the impulse-image and the reflection-image) and then goes on to differentiate each image three ways: "by its genesis; by its composition as function of the interval; and by its composition as function of the whole" (69).

Fortunately, Bogue tracks this taxonomical expansion with two very crucial tables (70-71), one of the images and corresponding signs of the movement-image (both "signs of composition" and "signs of genesis"), the other comparing the Cinema 1 glossary with a recapitulation of movement-image signs from Cinema 2. After reviewing each of the images/signs as they are manifested within particular directors' works, Bogue concludes by attempting to summarize the proliferation of the Deleuzian semiotics. He indicates that the signs of the movement-image are at least fourteen, at most twenty-three, but also that "for Deleuze, cinematic images constitute the 'signaletic matter' that directors, like sculptors, mold, bend, smooth, scrape, gouge, cut, paste, and weld to form light-and-sound sculptures in time," with his taxonomy serving as a tool "for inventing a language adequate to those sculptures and the creative processes that generate them" (105).

So far, Bogue has only explored how Deleuze accounts for the movement-image, that is, based on the sensorimotor schema, but with its collapse, the time-image emerges, necessitating a whole new set of terms. While montage, according to Deleuze, provides an oblique view of time, he posits a new category of images and signs through which the time-image is directly manifested. As with the movement-image, Deleuze divides the time-image into subgroups: hyalosigns, which include optical and sonic images, memory-images and dream-images, and crystal-images (chapter 4). Moving on to a different order of the time-image, Bogue considers chronosigns (chapter 5), which present "either coexisting relations and simultaneous elements of time (the order of time) or a before-and-after in a single becoming (the series of time)." Then he examines noosigns (chapter 6), which "reveal a new relation between thought and image," and lectosigns, which "manifest a new relation between the visual and the sonic" (107-8). Suffice it to say that to each of these technical and cinematic details, Deleuze (and Bogue) juxtapose new concepts--crystalline states for the hyalosigns; sheets of past, peaks of present, and powers of the false for chronosigns; linked to the latter, the power of the outside and the interstice for noosigns; and also linked to chronosigns, silent and audible lectosigns as well as the modern dimension of the time-image as "archeological, stratigraphic, and tectonic" (189).