What to Talk about Audiovisual Images?: An Essay concerning Gilles Deleuze's Cinéma

投稿日: 2012/04/21 12:15:39

We sit back in front of the screen : the image appears and invites us to travel through other places, to live an unknown world. This may be what we expect of audiovisual images, but actually the experience tends to be reduced to a tour through what we may call pseudo-reality, that is, a kind of audiovisual amusement park in which what there is to see and live is neatly programmed from the beginning. And the problem is that this occurs not only in movies, telefilms and computer games, but also, in a subtler manner, in newscasts and other "non-fiction" images, so much so that we confuse increasingly our reality with this pseudo-reality of images. And I should add that this "pseudo-reality" is also real in that it has its own functions in the actual global political and economic system, although it is certainly not fully real in itself.-it is precisely for this reason the matter should be carefully examined.

In this context, the two books: Cinéma 1: l'image-mouvement and Cinéma 2: l'image-temps that French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published in the 1980s seem particularly relevant: in a philosophical perspective opened up by Kant and developed by Bergson and Nietzsche, he elucidates logical structures of diverse audiovisual images and offers us valuable tools to analyze the situation described above.

Concretely, we can learn from his analysis, on the one hand, how what he calls "action-images" tends to form a pseudo-reality and to make us live in it almost without our knowledge. And on the other hand, we can also learn how films by Dreyer, Ozu, Rossellini, Welles, Resnais or Perrault -to cite just a few directors- propose us a sort of transcendental exploration about the conditions of our experience and thus help us to recover, in a tangible way, our relationship with the surrounding world. Inmanence, collective fabulation, ritornello and territory would be some of the key notions to explicate this process.

I hasten to add that this essay, as it might be seen from above, is not a faithful summary of Cinéma but an attempt to clarify its philosophical background as well as to reinvent its basic ideas, on that background, for our epoch of digital reproduction. Thus, I study on my own account the meaning of "Kantianism" in cinema (especially, the notion of the audiovisual cogito) and the status of the image as simulacrum; I also make, on my own account and rather separating from Deleuze's own words, a distinction between the sensory-motor tie as vital process and the sensory-motor scheme as intellectualized process. Thus, I propose here a set of ideas that may serve to speak about audiovisual images in an immanent way, that is, in a way that help us free ourselves from the pseudo-reality of images, and create a lively relationship between images, our body and our earth.