The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Cultural Memory in the Present)

leondumoulin.nl: The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory ( Cultural Memory in the Present) (): Patricia Pisters: Books.
Table of contents

Emotion and id are the topic of bankruptcy 6, within which Gaut explains the medium-specific ways in which cinema fosters emotional engagement, and defends the thought of "identification" from those that think about the concept that to be too obscure or ill-defined. Gaut reveals it curious that almost all cognitive and analytic theorists and philosophers have rejected the proposal of id altogether as both burdened or too wide and ambiguous. Gaut notes that the etymological root of "identification" is of "making identical," yet claims that the that means of a time period "is a question of its use within the language" , now not in its etymology.

The matrix of visual culture : working with Deleuze in film theory

Fair sufficient, yet one wonders if Gaut's definition of id succeeds in making a choice on using the be aware in usual language, otherwise stipulates a definition that Gaut claims to be extra specific. Gaut defines identity as "imagining oneself in a character's situation" , and is going directly to distinguish among extensive kinds of id, ingenious and empathic id.

Empathic id, nevertheless, happens whilst one stocks a number of of the character's fictional feelings simply because one has projected oneself into the character's scenario. One may well ask why we must always take empathy to be identity in any respect, instead of an emotional reaction to id, if identity is outlined as an act of the mind's eye instead of a type of emotional reaction. He distinguishes among a medium and paintings shape, describes how media may be nested inside one another, and says that medium specificity has much less to do with distinctiveness than it does with what he calls differential houses.

This bankruptcy additionally serves as an invaluable precis of the details of the ebook, during which Gaut illustrates every one of his 3 medium-specificity claims via reminding us of the conclusions he got here to previous within the booklet, and of the way they illustrate particular features of the medium of relocating pictures. Berys Gaut's total fulfillment in A Philosophy of Cinematic artwork is sizeable, between different issues, for his persuasive argument for medium specificity, and for his recognition to new sorts of cinema.

This complete booklet is vital within the library of an individual drawn to the philosophy of cinema. From bleak expressionist works to the edgy political works of the recent German Cinema to the feel-good Heimat movies of the postwar period, listing of worldwide Cinema: Germany goals to supply a much broader movie and cultural context for the movies that experience emerged from Germany—including the various East German motion pictures lately made to be had to Western audiences for the 1st time. Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The - download pdf or read online.

From actor Cary Elwes, who performed the enduring function of Westley within the Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes examine the making of the cult vintage movie full of never-before-told tales, unique photos, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher visitor, and Mandy Patinkin, in addition to writer and screenwriter William Goldman, manufacturer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner. Psychosocial Explorations of Film and Television Viewing: Most folk have, at some point soon, skilled robust, frequently unusual and disconcerting, responses to movies and tv programmes of which they can not constantly make feel.

Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this booklet argues that the likely mundane and daily task of movie and tv viewing in the house is actually awesome. Although Strange Days has much in com- mon with Hitchcocks Vertigo , it more often has been compared with Peeping Tom. Both Peeping Tom and Strange Days deal with the darker implications of our cinematographic voyeurism. Nevertheless, I argue that by comparing Strange Days with Peeping Tom , one misses some essential differences between the two films, especially the way in which a new kind of camera consciousness has entered our perception, our experi- ence of the world, and ourselves.

I therefore return to Hitchcock, especially Vertigo , to explore the ambiguous status of this film: Contemporary cinema, for which Strange Days is para- digmatic, demonstrates that both Bergsons futuristic insights and Hitch- cocks premonition have indeed come true: In this comparative way, I try to relate Hitchcocks films both to the psychoanalytic model of the eye and to the rhizomatic model of the brain. This allows me to specify a few of the main differences and similari- ties between the two models of thought. My aim is not to judge one model over the other.

Rather, I try to determine what the different models make possible or impossible to see, think, and feel. I concentrate in this section on the idea of the subject and its relation to images and to the world. A few remarks about Hitchcock made by Zizek and Deleuze make their respective presup positions quite clear. Here is the first big difference: According to Zizek, both in Jansenism and in Hitchcock, all human subjects are sinful, and for that reason their salvation cannot depend on themselves as persons; it can come only from an outside force, from God, who has decided in advance who will be saved and who will be damned.

On the contrary, Hitchcock has a sound conception of theoretic and practical relations, which have noth- ing to do with a guilty subject or a terrible and impossible God. This subject on screen the character represents the subject off screen the spectator. Deleuze, however, sees the tapestry as a network of relations, carefully set up by Hitchcock to im- plicate the viewer in the mental actions. It is not a matter of the look and the eye.

The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film by Patricia Pisters PDF

The spectator is not look- ing for representations of his own life but is participating in the game of relations set up by Hitchcock. A third and final difference in the approaches of Zizek and Deleuze concerns Hitchcocks previously quoted remark about directly influencing the brain. In his expressed wish to reach spectators directly, without medi- ation, Zizek emphasizes the symptomatic aspect of Hitchcocks fantasy: Again, it is obvious that Deleuze has a completely different philosophy.

Going back to Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze does not believe in the all-encompassing force of the concept of representation and hence the concept of identification as a means of modeling subjectivity. According to Deleuze, the brain, which is both an intellectual and an emotional entity and functions parallel not hi- erarchically to the body, can give more insights about how we perceive ourselves as subject.

So for Deleuze, Hitchcocks remark about the elec- trodes in the brain is not symptomatic in leaving out the most important 18 The Universe as Metacinema thing; rather, it is a philosophic reflection about how images work and about the direct effects of images in themselves. Therefore, even without taking the electrodes in the brain literally, it might be useful to think about images in terms of the effects and affects that are set in motion by a com- plex interplay between body and brain, perception and memory.

Transcendental or Immanent Desire Having established these basic presuppositions of the psychoanalytic and rhizomatic models concerning the relationship between the cine- matographic image, the subject, and the world, it is now necessary to look more closely at the subject and at one of the most important aspects that constitute the subject: Therefore, before returning to Hitchcock, let me briefly recall the concept of the subject in relation to desire in both models. First is the psychoanalytic subject: The subject, marked by this lack, desires an object to find original wholeness, which is always impossible.

Needless to say, sexual difference is the crucial difference in this respect lack is based on castration anxiety, feared by the male subject. Sometimes the Gaze refers to a more abstract no- tion of the other as such. The look, on the other hand, is related to the em- bodied subject in the diegetic world. Slavoj Zizek, however, and with him some feminist psychoanalysts like Joan Copjec, 10 puts the Gaze not in the powerful position of the Sym- bolic order but in what Lacan calls the Real. The Imaginary and the long- ing for the lost object of desire no longer haunt the late-Lacanian subject; instead, it is increasingly haunted by the Real.

The Real is that which the subject cannot understand, cannot see, and cannot be represented in the Symbolic but nevertheless imposes its traces on the subject. It is a third term that goes beyond the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Zizek relates the Gaze to the Real. The Gaze, according to Zizek, is not an instrument of The Universe as Metacinema 19 mastery and control; on the contrary, it is that which the subject never can know. It can be defined in several ways: Sexual difference is still crucial: So desire still is based on lack and absence, but now it has become a transcen- dental notion.

Because the subject cannot know the Real, it defines its de- sire as the desire of the other the subject desires what it thinks the other desires in the illusion of thinking that the other possesses the Real. Here we see what Zizek meant by Jansenism based on guilt and God. In- creasingly, the stain of the Real has entered the Hitchcockian image. The hand with a knife in Psycho , the birds in The Birds , the plane in North by Northwest are, according to Zizek, not perceived simply as part of diegetic reality: In short, the Lacanian subject, which according to Zizek is a Hitchcockian subject, is philosophically subjected to an a-historical tran- scendental principle that is always mediated by representations the um- bilical cord.

Its guilty Jansenist desire is based on a fundamental lack re- lated not so much to the Imaginary but to the impossible and horrible Real, which imposes its gaze like a dangerous imprisoning web the tapes- try, according to Zizek. Desire, first of all, is an important notion; but, according to Deleuze, it is not 20 The Universe as Metacinema based on lack and the absence of an original perfect but on an impossible whole or dangerous void-like negativity.

Moreover, desire never is related to an object that obscure object of desire. This does not mean there is no sadness or hatred or fear, but they are all reactions to this fundamental drive to preserve life: Joy should not be confused with jouissance , the Lacanian enjoyment, which, as we saw, is a guilty pleasure related to fearful death and the negativity of the Real.

As is well known, Deleuze is in this respect much influenced by Spinoza. According to Spinoza, joy is related to the power to form adequate thoughts and to act. The subject is not by definition a guilty subject controlled by a transcendental notion, although of course the sub- ject can do bad things and become guilty.

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The subject in this perspective is not so much challenged by the Real, or God as an external force, or Das-Ding-an-Sich , but rather by time and memory. Genevieve Lloyd explains in her work on Spinoza how this influences the idea of the subject or the self: The mind strug- gles to make itself a unity — a well-functioning temporal as well as spatial whole. In the context of this view of the self as a constant effort to articulate itself, and to maintain itself in being amidst the wider wholes on which it depends, borders be- come unstable.

Deleuze is very Spinozian and Bergsonian when he talks about con- cepts of becoming in time and duration and unstable selfhood. In any case, according to Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed and transcendentally con- trolled entity but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood or subjectivity are challenged in time and by time. The indetermination and The Universe as Metacinema 21 insecurity that time brings to the subject are not the negative limits of de- sire and knowledge but are precisely that which brings about ongoing movements of thought: Looking at Hitchcock, then, Deleuze sees the hero of Rear Window not as someone possessing the Symbolic Gaze, but as someone who, forced into immobility by his accident, becomes a seer, someone who starts making mental relations mental relations start when the action — tem- porarily — stops and the subject opens up to time.

On the contrary, they have a natural relation with the rest of the im- age. The birds must be ordinary birds, the plane is an ordinary plane, the key in Dial M for Murder is an ordinary key; it belongs to the world of the image, and it becomes a sign a relational indication when it does not fit the lock. Hitchcock plays with all minds in different ways. In short, Deleuze sees the Hitchcock universe as a network of relations the tapestry. There is no a priori guilt no Catholicism or Jansenism ; there is only an attempt to reason and to establish adequate re- lations that could improve life and increase the power to act.

The image is not seen as a representation, an umbilical cord, but as a thought-provoking encounter. Hence the subject finds itself before and beyond perception and experience; it is a transcendental subject. De- sire, as one of the most constituting elements according to both psycho- analysis and rhizomatics, is equally conceived as either a transcendental im- posing category or an immanent constructing force.

From theZizekian and Deleuzian analyses of Hitchcocks work, the implications for the subject become clear if we conceive images, subjects, and the world according to these different traditions. A transcendental philosophy gives a stable con- cept of the world, the subject, and images: In an immanent philosophy, the subject is in constant formation, al- ways changing through multiple encounters.

It is a concept of the subject that is much less sure that can create unwanted uncertainties but perhaps also unexpected possibilities. In subsequent chapters, the implications of such an immanent model for truth, ethics, and politics are elaborated more extensively in relation to specific audiovisual encounters. Here I focus on the metalevel of the audiovisual universe, on the status of the cinemato- graphic apparatus, and on the cinematographic image.

Metacinema and the Cinematographic Apparatus: Displaying the Cinematographic Apparatus In the s, the critics of Cahiers du Cinema considered Hitchocks Rear Window the prototype of a film about film: James Stewarts immobile position, voyeuristically directed toward the scenes in front of him, spying on his neighbors, was considered the position of the film viewer. Bigelows film was more often com- pared with yet another metafilm, Peeping Tom.

More explicitly than Rear Window and like Strange Days , Peeping Tom shows the negative implica- tions of cinematographic voyeurism. Before returning to Hitchcock and other aspects of transcendental and immanent conceptions of the Hitch- cockian universe and finally the new camera consciousness, it is necessary The Universe as Metacinema 23 to take a closer look at the different conceptions of the cinematographic apparatus.

I do this by investigating the ways these are displayed in Peeping Tom and Strange Days. The story form of content of Strange Days takes place in Los Ange- les at the eve of the third millennium. Lenny Nero is an ex-cop who deals in digital recordings of real-life experiences for vicarious adventures. When he receives a digital clip of the real murder of Iris, a prostitute who delivers recordings for him, Lenny is drawn into a dangerous world of crime, racism, power, and paranoia.

Still in love with his ex-girlfriend, Faith, he tries to protect her from a fate similar to that of his murdered associate. He is assisted by his two friends, personal security expert Mace and ex-cop and former colleague Max. Let me first men- tion something of the critical reception of the film and the apparent links with Peeping Tom.

When Strange Days first came out, it received strong critiques. In particular, the scene of the brutal killing of a prostitute in both films was taken as an example. Are the voyeurism and subjectivity in the two films really that similar? Peeping Tom is the story of a psychopathic murderer, Mark Lewis, who films his victims when he kills them. He also films the police investigations of the murders he has committed. His neighbor, Helen, and her blind mother unmask him.

Except for the scene where a prostitute is killed, the two films have few similari- ties in terms of content, mainly because the points of view from which the stories are told and the kinds of subjectivity they aim to establish seem 24 The Universe as Metacinema very different: Also on the level of the form of expression, Peeping Tom differs from Strange Days: Peeping Tom follows a much more chrono- logic and spatially coherent logic than the out-of-joint nature of the world of Strange Days.

Comparison of the opening sequences of the two films, however, shows some striking similarities. In both films, the first image is an extreme close-up of an eye, clearly an indication of the voyeuristic inclinations of the protagonists. This close-up is followed in both films by subjective cam- era images, presumably from the point of view of the beholder of the eye in close-up, who at that point is still unknown to the audience. In Peeping Tom , we follow a prostitute through the viewfinder of a film camera until she has a frightened expression on her face and stares in agony into the camera, and we understand that she is being murdered by the man filming her.

We also see a hand throwing away a Kodak film box, and we constantly see the crosshairs of the viewfinder in front of the images. Then the credits come up. So in this way the whole cinematic apparatus is staged before the actual film starts: In the opening sequence of Strange Days , the only clue we get that the images following the close-up of the eye are technically mediated is the fact that the first image after this close-up is obviously digitized it takes some time before the pixels constitute a sharp, clear image.

Then we are immediately, again via subjective camera movement, in the middle of a robbery; the robbery goes wrong, there is a flight to a rooftop to escape from the police, and finally we experience that the person via whose senses we have lived through all the previous events falls from the roof: He had his The Universe as Metacinema 2 5 brain connected to a SQUID Superconducting QUantum Interference Device , a futuristic device that can record experiences and play them back immediately other peoples experiences or personal experiences from the past.

How can we account for this difference on a theoretic level? Philosophy of representation is based on the idea of a model and a copy the original and the image, the essence and its reflection. Furthermore, Peeping Tom demonstrates that in representation there is also a clear distinction between the one who is looking the subject, Mark, the photographer, the peeping Tom and that being looked at the object, the prostitute, the object of desire. Related to the mobility of the camera, the subject in the cinematographic apparatus is conceived as a transcendental subject: Baudry is a phenomenologist when he argues that this consciousness is a consciousness of something, which then he relates to the status and the op- eration of the cinematographic image: As I explained in the Introduction, this model of thinking is based on a prin- cipium comparationis of a conceived identity, judged analogy, imagined op- position, or perceived similitude.

In Peeping Tom , we are always aware of the distance between the model that which is filmed and the copy the represented image. We also notice a distance between the subject who per- ceives and the object that is perceived. On the laser disc edition of Peeping Tom , Laura Mulvey, who gave her comments on the film on a separate soundtrack, demonstrates how Peep- ing Tom is not only a film about film and filmic representation, but it also refers to the history of the cinematic apparatus at least to the origins of the cinematic apparatus as it has been conceived traditionally.

At the end of the film, we see that Mark Lewis has rebuilt a sort of Muybridgean instal- lation of photo cameras that, in quick succession, take pictures of him while he commits suicide by throwing himself onto a spear that is hidden in the tripod of his camera. According to Mulvey, by relating the tragic end of the films hero to the origins of the cinematic apparatus, Peeping Tom also makes a statement about the death of this apparatus.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in Strange Days , we do not find the same kind of apparatus: There is also no longer a dis- tance between perceiver and perceived there is no distancing camera. The virtual experience is a real experience: It is through diminished distance between who is seeing and what is seen, through the physical and intensive implication of the spectator, that we have an encounter with another world that at the same time forces us to think differently about images that are no longer representation. The cinematographic apparatus that is displayed in Strange Days is a Bergsonian one, where matter, body, and brain are the image: An atom is an image, which extends to the point to which its actions and reactions extend.

My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions. My eyes, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it The Universe as Metacinema 27 is one image amongst others?

The matrix of visual culture : working with Deleuze in film theory (Book, ) [leondumoulin.nl]

External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: This infinite set of images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: All consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light.

Differently Voyeuristic Apart from the fact that the cinematographic apparatus in Peeping Tom is related to the idea of images as representations in a transcendental logic, the film also relates the cinematic apparatus explicitly to a Freudian discourse.

Of course, in her commentary on Peeping Tom , Laura Mulvey, who was one of the initiators of these fem- inist critiques, comes back to this question. Peeping Tom presents a classic oedipal anxiety drama in which a young man suffers from childhood trau- mas inspired by his father, which are displaced onto the women he en- counters. The women he films and kills are all sexually active prostitutes because they represent the greatest threat.

It is not for nothing that only Helen, the innocent, decent, and nonsexual girl next door who refuses to be filmed, can reach him but, of course, too late to offer any cure.

In psychoan- alytic terms, voyeurism is related to sadistic distance and the pleasure of 28 The Universe as Metacinema imposing punishment on the woman because she inspires castration anx- iety ; subjectivity is related to identification and appropriation of the other to gain fullness; and difference is based on gender opposition between male and female. Desire, the key word of psychoanalysis, is also negatively de- fined on the basis of a lack and the longing for an object that can be ap- propriated to be integrated into the self-same system.

Peeping Tom exposes the relationship between the cinematographic apparatus as theorized in the apparatus theory, psychoanalysis, and gender binaries, all of which follow the logic of representational philosophy that underlies these paradigms in film theory. Strange Days also has been read following this representational model of the voyeuristic eye: Laura Rascaroli, for instance, considers Bigelows film paradigmatic for the cinematographic apparatus and the Lacanian mirror. Although this view of the film is certainly defendable, I would argue that things are in fact more complicated.

Already in the opening sequence, it is clear that we are deal- ing with a similar yet also different scopic regime, perhaps even a different philosophic model. During the film, gender relations are equally presented differently. The difference is due not solely to the fact that in Strange Days , there are no more oedipal families, although that certainly has some significance.

More importantly, in this film, the look is connected to all other senses and is completely embodied. A real virtual experience is presented that in- volves the protagonist and the spectator both physically and mentally. The relation between subject and object becomes a two-way process, an en- counter between different forces different in all its variations, not only in terms of opposition.

On the basis of this idea of encounters, the nature of desire also needs to be redefined. Here we can see a more Deleuzian con- ception of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is just as unconscious and just as important as it is in psychoanalysis; but, as indicated in the previous section, it is conceived positively as a connection with something or somebody else.

This positive definition of desire, then, again has great The Universe as Metacinema 29 implications for gender theory. Would you like to make love with a girl, with two girls may? Would you like to do it with a boy? Or would you like to be a girl maybe? Nevertheless, it indicates a different and posi- tive attitude toward gender relations, one of multiplicities and becoming a becoming other instead of having and possessing the other , one of un- stable identities and changing relations, in short one of differences and rep- etitions in many encounters.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that all the abuses have disap- peared. In Peeping Tom and many other similar scenes in the his- tory of cinema, such as in Hitchcocks Frenzy , the voyeurism and sadism of these rape scenes are related to the distance between the subject of the crime and his object, the female victim, who is literally appropriated in death.

In Peeping Tom , however, there is also a sort of identification of the murderer with his victims. While he murders the women with a knife from the tripod of his camera, he also holds a mirror before their faces; so the victims can see the terror of their own death in their eyes, which he again films. It is with this terror that Mark ultimately identifies; however, the identification takes place after the fact, when Mark watches again at a safe distance the representations on the screen.

It is through this distance that he can continue to be a subject. Nevertheless, in the end, identification with the psychoanalytic female position is complete, and the only possible solution for the man who identifies too much with his victims is death. He comes to his tragic end by killing himself while being photographed. This does not challenge the basic opposition between object and subject, however, because Mark now becomes his own object. Although a shift is possible between subject position and object position, there is no solution for the full subject except in death.

One must choose either the distance voyeurism, power or the proximity masochism, death. Peeping Tom is a strong but sad film that demonstrates in a critical way the hidden implications of psychoanalysis and the cinematographic apparatus. In Strange Days , there is also a shift between subject and object, but in a different way and with different implications. Both the victim and the murderer are wired to the same SQUID, and both experiences are trans- mitted simultaneously, which implies that the one who puts on this play- back and receives the images also experiences both perspectives at the same time.

There is no longer a distance between having the image and being the image. As I said, this does not make the event less harmful or painful, but because of the degree of involvement in voyeuristic experiences, Strange Days gives us another critical perspective on voyeurism and the hunger for images, a perspective that implicates the audience to the point where we ourselves become the rapist and the victim. Lenny goes to pieces as the tape rolls. He literally gets sick and throws up. Joan Smith also refers to the violent reactions of mainly male critics to this film and explains why they are so furious.

What is different about Strange Days is that Iris, although her character is coded in exactly this way — tight, low-cut dresses, wildly unstable behavior — becomes a real person for Lenny Nero and, for the audience, at the moment of her death. Male viewers are not permitted to maintain the customary safe distance from which they observe the process, which turns these women into corpses: It is hardly a coincidence that [the film] has prompted furious reactions, specifically the accusation that women should not be dirtying their hands like this.

There is some- thing illogical about this response, for it is precisely these women — the victims of serial rapists and killers — whose voices are silenced first in real life and second by the authors and directors who find their attackers endlessly fascinating. Men, it seems, can bump off as many women as they like in novels and on screen. What will not be tolerated is women speaking up for corpses. Of course, one also could argue that it is again the Lacanian Real that enters the picture here.

Whereas the subject in Peeping Tom seems to tell us like psychoanalysis that actually men are just as much tragic victims as women and cannot help being sadistic voyeurs, the message in Strange Days seems different. In creating an experience of becoming both rapist and victim, a critique is given on the whole traditional subject-object op- position.

Strange Days cannot be judged on the basis of only this one scene. Unlike in Peeping Tom , this scene is not paradigmatic for the whole film. One of the other 3 2 The Universe as Metacinema most important aspects raised in Strange Days is the execution of a black rapper, Jerrico One , by Los Angeles police officers. Of course, this reminds us of Rodney King and other dramas caused by ethnic and racial differ- ences.

At least to the same extent as any gender problematic, the film presents questions of race and ethnicity as basic problems that we must face as we enter the third millen- nium. It is therefore also significant that the strongest character in the film is a black woman, Mace, played by Angela Bassett. Because of its overwhelming visual style and catchy soundtrack, Strange Days can be seen as pure, even excessive entertainment.

Through its intensity both in images and sound and physical involvement both of the protagonists and the spectators , the film implicitly also calls for new strategies of analyzing and understanding contemporary cinema and soci- ety. Explicitly, Strange Days scrutinizes voyeurism and subjectivity, both of which can no more be conceived in terms of subject, object, and distance; the Gaze has become embodied and intimately connected to an energetic way of experiencing the world.

All these questions can no longer be dealt with in terms of representation; rather, they must be conceived in terms of multiple differences and repetition and in terms of encounters that agitate both our bodies and our minds. By looking at the cinematographic apparatus that is displayed in Peeping Tom and Strange Days , it is possible to conclude that a different type of camera consciousness is implied as well. In the psychoanalytic ap- paratus theory, the camera gives the spectator the illusion of transcen- dental control and the ability to distinguish between what is objective and what is subjective, which according to Zizek is in fact always an imprison- ing illusion.

In a rhizomatic model, this distinction cannot be made clearly. The shot would then stop be- ing a spatial category and has become a temporal one. Camera Consciousness and Temporal Confusion: Strange Days and Vertigo Indiscernibility of Subjective and Objective , Virtual and Actual Vertigo is the Hitchcock film that most clearly permits both a tran- scendental and an immanent reading of the subject. Ver- tigo's story is well known: When an old friend asks him to shadow his wife, Madeleine, Scottie fol- lows her, saves her from drowning, and falls in love with her.

Nevertheless, Scottie cannot prevent her suicide. Believing Madeleine is dead, he meets Judy, the living image of Madeleine, and he becomes obsessed by the idea of recreating the image of the dead woman. If we look at Vertigo in a psychoanalytic way, obviously a lot of femi- nist criticism comes to mind. In early psychoanalytic critiques, Hitchcocks male protagonists are seen as sadistic bearers of the Gaze, trying to appro- priate their object of desire: Clearly, the scene in Ernies Restaurant, when Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time, could be read in this way: When he does not succeed in this, he becomes obsessed with bringing his ideal object back to life at the cost of female subjectivity: Other feminist psychoanalytic positions present a more complex structure of male and female subject positions.

In Vertigo, Scottie identifies with Madeleine. According to Modleski, woman thus becomes the identifica- tion for all the films spectators as well. In this light, Scotties acrophobia could be seen as fear of an encounter with the Real. This is the Gaze of the Thing of the Real , which is the most frightening encounter one can have.

After this dream, Scottie becomes mad, but when he recovers, he starts searching for his de- sired but fearsome object. Whatever the differences may be in a psychoan- alytic explanation of the film, the questions always center on subject posi- tioning and identification strategies through desire.

Increasingly, it becomes clear that none of the subjects in the film is in control, either be- cause there is an overall identification with the fragile feminine position or because of a common encounter with the Real. What happens when we consider the image not as a representation but as an expression of mental relations?

What happens when we consider The Universe as Metacinema 35 the dimension of time that is clearly present in Vertigo? What happens to the subject on screen? What happens to the spectators? Deleuze already stated that Hitchcock brings the spectator into an active relation to the film. This remark becomes clearer when we consider Hitchcocks answer to the question of why he revealed so early in Vertigo that Judy is actually Madeleine: Everyone around me was against this change [in respect to the original novel]; they all felt that the rev- elation should be saved for the end of the picture.

I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. What will he do when he finds out? I would say that Hitchcocks strategy undermines processes of identification: Instead, Hitchcock gives the spectator a special place. Knowing more than the protagonist involves a different kind of relation and subjectivity for which to aim. As I try to demonstrate, this is entirely be- cause of the experience of time.

Bergsons major thesis about time is known: The past co-exists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general non-chronological ; at each moment time splits itself into pre- sent and past, present that passes and past which is preserved. The only sub- jectivity is in time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way around.

That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, [time is] the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and change. In his film Sunless , Chris Marker emphasizes the complex lay- ers of time in Vertigo. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, in his work Une idee du 3 6 The Universe as Metacinema cinema , elaborates this point in a Deleuzian perspective.

In Vertigo , there are three women: Carlotta, Madeleine, and Judy. These three women are the same, but they do not inhabit the same time. It is up to Scottie to distinguish between the different levels of time, which is sometimes impossible because they conflate. Scottie is confused by experiencing several layers of time the virtuality of the past, the actual- ity of the present at the same moment. In a detailed and beautiful analy- sis, Esquenazi demonstrates how Madeleines face in profile in the restau- rant scene is a crystal image: It is quite possible to relate Scotties look to Madeleine s profile, and hence to identify with Scottie, as psychoanalytic readings have done.

Before Madeleine enters the bar, Scottie has turned his back.


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He even looks in the same direction as Madeleine and therefore cannot see her in the same way as we, the spectators, see her breathtaking profile, which means we have to conclude that the image of Madeleine is a virtual image actually presented. Because it is some- times unclear whether what the spectator sees is an actual or virtual image Madeleines profile could be actual to the spectator but virtual to Scottie , the question of the point of view is raised: The confusion, and at the same time the beauty of this scene, is due to the fact that this question becomes difficult to answer.

We can un- derstand now when Deleuze says that a camera consciousness starts to make mental connections in time: The camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the characters movement, sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are merely the object, but in every case it subordinates descriptions of a space to the functions of thought. This is not a simple distinction between the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, it is on the contrary their indiscernibility which will endow the camera with a rich array of functions. Hitchcocks premonition will come true: From this crystal image, Madeleine will multiply Carlotta, Madeleine, Judy , occu- pying each time a different layer in time.

Deleuze stresses the importance of Scottie s real ordinary vertigo: Rather, Scottie s inability to climb stairs and to master spatial relations puts him in a state of contemplation. It is useful to recall here some of the characteristics that Deleuze establishes for the time-image: In Vertigo, both Scottie and Madeleine are wan- derers. In that capacity, they become visionary, capable of seeing the crys- tals of time. Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. The matrix of visual culture: Stanford University Press, Cultural memory in the present.

English View all editions and formats Summary:. Find a copy online Links to this item Table of contents. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Internet resource Document Type: Patricia Pisters Find more information about: User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.

Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Similar Items Related Subjects: Motion pictures -- Philosophy. Culture in motion pictures. Deleuze, Gilles -- Filmtheorie.


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