Philosophy

4. Discuss the perception-image. What is the difference between a centered perception-image and an a-centered perception image? What is the difference between the two kinds of a-centered perception-images discussed by Deleuze: those of liquid perception and gaseous perception. Discuss with reference to Jean Vigo’s L’Atlante and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera.
5. How does Deleuze put to cinematic use the logical concepts of Charles Sanders Pierce: firstness, secondness, and thirdness? Illustrate with reference to Picking Peaches (Langdon), A Chump at Oxford (Laurel and Hardy), and the clips on our website from Marx Brothers’ films. How does a focus on relations emerge in Marx Brothers’ films? Explain the roles played in this by Harpo, Chico, and Groucho.
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Phillosophy_of_Cinema/Firstness,_Secondness,_Thirdness.html

notes:22. The crisis of the action-image is going to pivot on the paralysis of the ability to act (which is something quite different than an act that fails to achieve its goal). But this is only a negative way of characterizing the situation. For the paralysis of the ability to act has as its positive correlate the emergence of a new kind of image, which Deleuze calls the mental image, or the thought-image. The emergence of the mental image in cinema prepares the way for a major transition, that from pre-war American Realist Cinema to post-war European Modernist Cinema.

23. Mentality, or thought in the sense that Deleuze uses the word, need not involve heady or deep conversation. In fact the finest cinematic forms of the thought-image do not put thought into words at all, but rather express thoughts through the work of the camera. The key property of the thought-image in this sense is therefore not that it is something conceptual or linguistic, but rather that it reveals a relation or set of relations. Relations, even purely visual or cinematic ones, serve as the contents of thought in that they are more or less abstract. A relation is different than the terms that are connected to one another in that relation. The terms may be concrete, but the relation that connects them is not. Take the simple spatial relation of being to the left of something. When I say that the pen is to the left of the pad, I am dealing with two concrete objects: the pen and the pad. But being-to-the-left-of is not a third concrete object in addition to the other two. Instead it is something “intellectual” or “abstract,” the content, not of a perception, affection, or action, but rather of a thought. As the preceding example indicates, the movie camera is able to explore relations without using words or concepts, but instead through processes of visual probing. Cinematic intellectuality need not have anything to do with words.

24. Deleuze applies Pierce’s philosophy of symbols to the discussion up to this point. The American Pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce claims that the three most basic logical properties of signs and symbols are Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, while he associates these properties with affect, action, and thought respectively. Affect is an example of Firstness in that it concerns only a single term, namely the living body that experiences the affect in its own flesh. Action is an example of Secondness because it always unfolds between two terms, the actor and the milieu, the force and the counterforce. Thought is an example of Thirdness because it concerns not the concrete terms that are the themes of affection (living body) or action (actor-milieu, force-counterforce), but rather the relations that hold between terms. The relation is always a Third, something in addition to the terms it connects, though not something concrete. It belongs to the realm of thought. In essence, according to Deleuze, the crisis of the cinematic action-image is a crisis of Secondness, and the emergence of Thirdness from that crisis. This is merely a way of saying in logical terms that the crisis is marked by the transition from action to thought.

25.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Phillosophy_of_Cinema/Perception-Image_1__Liquid_Perception.html

notes:1. The universe is the open totality of images. It is open because there is no end to the process of change, or the emergence of novelty through this process.

2. Images are objects of ordinary experience, including their qualitative characteristics – color, texture, tone, and so on – all of which exist independently of observers. In this they differ from images as interpreted by subjectivist philosophies – i.e. images as purely mental phenomena, since they exist independently of observing minds; and they differ equally from matter as interpreted by objectivist philosophies – i.e. substances without any qualitative characteristics, since the qualitative characteristics of images are just as real as their material properties of spatial extension, impenetrability, momentum, and so on.

3. The human body, including the brain is an image, and therefore cannot serve as a repository of images. Thus the search for memory images in the brain is futile, though the condition of the brain may affect our ability to call up memory images. (Thus Leonard Shelbyʼs brain injury in the film,Momento, prevents him from calling up memory images of the recent past, though it does not abolish what Bergson calls the “pure past,” which is indeed what he seeks to access through his archive of tattoos, snapshots, notes, and cultivated habits.)

4. The brain, like the rest of the body, is an instrument of action, not representation. The specific function of the brain is to introduce a gap betweensensory message and motor response, and thereby to replace simple, externally determined motor response with freely decided action. The brain isthus a “zone or center of indetermination,” through which freedom is exercised. Memory images are called up from the pure past when they are relevant to these free actions. Thus we can see why brain injuries would affect our ability to call up memory images by altering our ability to act, even though those images do not reside in the brain.

5. Memory images are located, not “in the brain” but rather “in the past,” which is a spiritual, not a material “location.” Memory belongs to thespiritual phenomenon of the durée, the living flow of duration. In fact without memory there would be no flow of time at all, since it is memory that binds the moment that has passed to the moment that is in the act of passing. Without it, instead of a flow, we would have a disjointed succession of disconnected instants.
6. There are two systems of images that comprise the universe: an acentered system and a centered system.

7. The acentered system is that of matter. In it every image equally influences and is influenced by every other image on all of its faces and in all of itsaspects. Each indiscriminately passes on every influence it receives to other images, in a chain that reaches to the most extreme regions of the universe.

8. The centered system of images is that of perception. When a living body emerges, it takes on the function of a central image. As a “center of indetermination” that must act within the world in order to perpetuate its own existence, the living body must filter the world of images in such a way that only those facets of external images relevant to action are able to influence it. Thus perception is always limiting and selective. Contrary to a widespread philosophical prejudice, there is less, not more in the perceptual world than in the world of matter. Deleuze calls the process of selective limitation “framing,” thereby indicating that the framing performed by ordinary perception anticipates cinematic framing.

(The preceding eight points are the position of Bergson, which Deleuze shares. They form the starting point of Deleuzeʼs treatment of film in the two volumes of Cinema. What follows is no longer Bergson, but rather the use Deleuze makes of Bergsonʼs framework in his treatment of film as a medium of art and thoughtful interpretation of the world.)

9. Cinema is uniquely suited to move between the two systems of images. By filming from a stable position, or from the perspective of one of the film’scharacters, the camera can adopt the attitude of the living body as a central image. However by going into motion, especially the free motion that dollyshots, elevation shots, and tracking shots permit, the camera is able to adopt the perspective of any image whatsoever, and thereby approximate to theuniverse as an acentered system.

10. There are two main historical expressions of the camera as a mobile perspective tending to identify itself with the non-centered universe: the “liquid perception” of pre-World War II French cinema (Renoir, Epstein, Bresson, Vigo), and the early Soviet cinema of DzigaVertov.

11. The great pre-War French filmmakers had a fascination with water (see Renoir’s Ubu Saved From Drowning, Epstein’s Le Tempestaire, and Vigo’sL’Atlante.) In the fluid medium of water they were able to extract pure forms of movement, each homogeneous with all of the others, and all collectively tending toward an absolute maximum of movement, expressing the “open whole as immensity of future and past.” Though the liquid image expresses thesimultaneous vibrations and interactions of matter, its purpose for the French directors is to evoke a more important spiritual element, that of the qualitatively changing whole of time. This they often try to accomplish by focusing on the unusual race of human beings – sailors, fishermen, lighthouse keepers – who make their home in this sublime liquid element, and must adapt to its simultaneously overwhelming and graceful pulsations. (Imagine yourself floating on the surface of the ocean when a wave breaks above your head, tossing you about under water until the wave subsides.)

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Phillosophy_of_Cinema/Perception-Image_2__Gaseous_Perception.html

notes:12. It was Vertov, though, who went to the furthest extremity in pursuit of an image of acentered motion. He did this by creating images that were not meant to evoke the spirit, but rather the flux of matter as it exists prior to a human presence. The machines of a newly industrializing Soviet Union provided Vertov with an image of movement in which different material parts respond to one another, communicating what has impacted them to yetother parts. But it was the camera-machine that enabled Vertov to formulate his conception of the Kino-Eye, a cinematic perspective that is perfectly mobile and therefore capable of embedding itself at any point in the material world. Think of the accelerating motion of the machines and people in Man With a Movie Camera, and of the dizzying shifts in cinematic point-of-view that keep pace with this acceleration. By taking the accelerating motion of industrial and cinematic machines to the absolute limit, Vertov goes beyond the liquid image to a “gaseous image,” in which everything melts right down to the ultimate level of vibratory material particles. This is the pre-human world of matter that Vertov believed human beings were in the process of mastering while creating a communist society, though as the revolutionary period gave way to Stalinism, the Soviet authorities became progressively lesssympathetic to Vertovʼs “formalist” experiments. Those experiments however have led a productive afterlife in the avant-garde films of such late twentieth-century American artists as Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow.

13. The cinema of an acentered universe may persist in some contemporary experimental film, but the far more common form of cinematic art concernsthe centered universe, reality as it is filtered through an active human presence. In this second, more typical case, the motion-image splits into three fundamental varieties: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-image.

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