Category Archives: Henri Bergson

DeleuzeCinema.com Needs You!

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By Tom McDonald (2010): a reading and discussion of the concepts of movement-image and time-image as developed in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to be able to introduce its readers to DeleuzeCinema.com, a valuable, new, free, online resource for students, scholars and researchers run by those wonderful Film Studies folk at the University of St Andrews.

It is a database designed to facilitate ease of access to international networking and collaboration amongst people interested in Gilles Deleuze and cinema. The site contains a database of people and resources related to Deleuze and cinema (including TV, new media and visual culture). It enables discussion of topics of interest to its members, and disseminates announcements and news items.

The site is open access and its content available to everyone. Registered users can contribute content, build a profile for themselves, enter discussion, or post news items. We welcome participation from people all over the world in any language.

The updating of content relies on registered contributors adding information about ongoing work on Deleuze and cinema (their own work, or the work of others). We hope that those who are interested will join us! [site co-editor, David Martin-Jones]

So, Deleuzians (and Deleuzo-Guattarians) please join the fabulous, scholarly Crowd Sourcerors at DeleuzeCinema.com! And also please feel free to enter, or revisit, all of the manifold Deleuze links that FSFF has gathered over the ages: one dedicated list of resources, numerous other Deleuze-filled postings, and even its latest link to philosopher Tom McDonald‘s brilliant video above.

Merci!

>Deleuzian film studies in memory of David Vilaseca

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Image of Ingrid Bergman as Karin in Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Read ‘Eruptions of God. Roberto Rossellini. Stromboli’ by Corry Shores

For [French philosopher Henri] Bergson, the brain does not produce a representation of what it perceives. Perception is the mutual influence of images upon one another, of which the brain is only another image—it does not “produce” anything, but filters impulses into actions or non-actions. The implications for film are two-fold. By addressing the perceiving subject as one image among the world of images, Bergson steps outside models that locate perception and memory within the mind of the subject. I would further suggest, following [Gilles] Deleuze, that Bergson’s theory of matter allows us to see film not as a fixed representation, a concrete image of a “real” object, but as an image in its own right, with its own duration and axes of movement. What we might call the film-image thus occurs in the gap between subject and object, through the collision of affective images.

Deleuze’s formulation of the film-image as a mobile assemblage (sometimes a frame, sometimes a shot, a sound, or the film as a whole) lends itself to this reading. It refuses to reduce the physical image on the screen to a mere reproduction of an assumed “real” object it represents. Such a formulation similarly reevaluates the relationship between the concrete optical and sonic images that comprise the film. Rather than conceiving of each component as a “building block,” it allows for the shifting conglomerations of elements which are themselves dynamic and mobile. A film cannot be distilled to a structure that originates from outside itself. Instead, each film-image is contingent, particular, and evolving.

The distinction between the time- and movement-images becomes more clear in this context. Rather than a question of either content or form, the difference lies in their affective power, whether they are bent toward action, in the case of the movement image, or if they open into different temporal modalities. It is in this second case that the time-image falls, and it is here that Deleuze locates the creative potential of film. This potential does not exist solely within the physical image itself, however, but is contained as well in the modes of perception and thinking that it triggers. Much like the time-image, the mental faculty most attuned to the openness of time, according to Bergson, is that of intuition.

Amy Herzog, ‘Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory’, in Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, No. 49

Film Studies For Free lovingly presents its long list of links to online and openly accessible film-studies resources of note pertaining to the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like lots of continental theorists invoked in Film Studies, ‘Deleuze’ has been somewhat of a moveable feast, but, as the links below testify, in recent years this particular feast has been a highly nourishing one for a variety of approaches to this discipline.
This FSFF entry is one of two posts to be dedicated to the fond memory of David Vilaseca, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010. His achievements in life were many, as this touching obituary written by his good friend and mentor Professor Paul Julian Smith eloquently sets out. Both in person and in his writing he was an inspiration. He will be much missed.
FSFF‘s author had met David Vilaseca on a number of occasions over the years and is a keen follower of his brilliant work on queer, Catalan, and Hispanic culture. She wishes to express her sincere condolences to David’s family, friends, and colleagues.
David Vilaseca had a particular interest in Deleuzian philosophy as well as in the critique of Deleuze’s work by fellow French philosopher Alain Badiou. Three of his related essays are linked to below, and interested FSFF readers should also look out for his third book Negotiating the Event: Post-deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Literature and Film, to be published this Autumn, which will undoubtedly explore further the pertinence of Deleuze and Badiou’s work for film studies.
Good Film and Cultural Studies-related Deleuzian websites:
          Deleuzian film studies:
          • Kara Keeling, ‘Deleuze and Cinema’, Critical Commons, 2010 (“The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling’s Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California”)