Chapter Three: Entering the Chiasm, revealing the Haecceity
“A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema”
Gilles Deleuze 1986
In Chapter Two, the internal notion of embodiment was discussed in relation to neuroscience’s developments and discoveries, in this chapter, the second aspect of embodied architecture: the manifestation of a sense of space that allows expression and reflection on its nature will be discussed. Once again quoting Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic:
“The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”
Pallasmaa furthers this point by asking what the closest art form is to architecture and hich is the one we can learn most from. He believes it to be film:
“The ground of both artforms is lived space, in which the inner space of the mind and the external space of the world fuse into each other forming a chiasmatic bind. The lived space of cinema offers a great lesson for us architects, who tend to see our craft through a formal bias.”
I wish to push this statement further and to put film forward as another form of architecture, one which is more suited to representational architectural expression of modern thought and space than its static counterpart.
Why film?
While acknowledging that conventional, constructed architecture still plays a representational role in revealing the world back to ourselves as it did in the past, I argue that the massive upheaval in how we now understand space through neuroscience’s developments demands a new expression. Plasticity and mirror cells redefine our spatial landscape, they describe new complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose the blending of the chiasm. They describe a new möbius like topology of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally.
To represent this as a static building (conventional, constructed architecture) or image (painting) or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation (the sciences) or as words (philosophy) is to lose the essence of these new truths. The palimpsest of time and memory suggested by brain plasticity as well as the altered intersubjective perspectives suggested by mirror cells, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.
The immersive embodied sense of perception which is now so clear is excellently transmitted and explored using the external embodied architecture offered by the medium of film. The parameters and constraints imposed by conventional, built architecture cannot make the imaginative departure from concrete, physical reality in the manner that a film can, which by its nature is fluid and sensory, fuses sound, movement and image through time creating an immersive version of reality, that can be engaged with.
The complex space that we now understand and thus inhabit is one of dynamic relationships between the self and the world . Our active and subjective position within the world as sensory biological organisms is well described by the filmic medium. It transcends the normal constraints of physical architecture by its multi sensory and time based qualities, through these it gains a ‘body’ of its own and emulates the experience of space we sense from the complex world around us, thereby letting us both reflect upon the nature of this space as well as becoming active participants in the medium ourselves, feeding as we do from the world around us in a loop of perception. We are changed by and change the film by experiencing it.
Vivian Sobchack elaborates upon this reciprocal relationship in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,
“More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”
In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.
Defining Filmic Space:
For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel comprise contemporary current filmic space they are:
Hypercinema which defines the ‘formal aspects of a cinema and is equipped by:
1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs),
2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine.
She describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:
“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such an extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”
Cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”
1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)
2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.
Using this contemporary definition of film I hope to analyse the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that filmic space can decipher, illuminate and extend phenomenological and existential notions of embodiment through its liminality and its use of a set of non verbal and transcendental techniques.
Deleuze, methodology, key techniques
By using Deleuze’s theories in particular that of the Crystal-Image I will explore ways to invoke experimentation in film that allow us to speculate more deeply about the self in contemporary space. Cinema like the body can be seen as a mediator of experience and change and the space between the screen and viewer becomes the place of excitement and discovery. The space in which the chiasmic duality merges through reflection and interaction with the spectacle.
“In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.”
By using a hybrid approach to deciphering embodied space (through the mergence of philosophy, science and film) creative and new avenues of understanding can be forged.
“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”
The ability of cinema to go beyond conventional philosophical or scientific techniques lies in its immediacy and as Deleuze's describes 'preverbal’, pre-linguistic content:
“The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)”
Likewise, Merleau-Ponty’s beliefs in the oeuvre as a valid philosophical discourse are pertinent to the medium of film.
The Crystal Image
The Crystal-Image is a notion that is comprised by a number of theories. It describes the dynamic, folded, symbiotic space between self and world and subject and object and the body that is the link for each of these chiasms, that neuroscience has heavily defined and influenced in the last forty years.
To summarise the key difference between Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (an analysis of pre WW2) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (post WW2):
“The former cinema, which finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, is dependent on movement and action. Characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them. The movement-image is a form of spatialised cinema: time determined and measured by movement.”
In Cinema 2, Deleuze deals with the time-image which is the context to the crystal image. The time-image is one of fracture and non rational narrative:
“In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a breakdown in the sensor-motor system. The image cut off from sensory-motor links becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"”
It is characterised by the difference in the techniques it uses in comparison to that of the movement-image:
“In the time-image, rational or measurable temporal links between shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives way to "incommensurable," non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear ("any-space-whatevers"). As a consequence, the journey becomes a privileged narrative form, with characters in a more passive role, and themes centered on inner mental imagery, flights of fancy, and emotional and psychic breakdown. The result of this pure optical and sound image is, according to Deleuze, a direct image of time (a time-image or crystal-image).”
The topology of the time-image is useful in describing the chiasmic nature of existence described by neurophenomenology:
“The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”
It's necessary to understand the Mneosign or Recollection image in order to understand the crystal image. It is defined as:“a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and changes it.” whereas the Crystal or Hyalosign image, previously discussed in Chapter’s one and two is the next step in this process defined as: "the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image t the point where they can no longer be distinguished."
This can be read as a very pertinent method of understanding the notion of the brain’s plasticity. Although we experience reality directly through our bodies, the mediation of our mind in forming the experience is based on previous readings of other situations onto which the new experience is formed and is formed by. Thus the virtual image of a memory (a previous experience) is always part of the equation in perception of space and reality.
Its use as a method to decipher or create film, that in turn deciphers and reflects upon space is vital. Deleuze’s crystal-image chiasmic properties of memory allow for the mergence of time frames or sheets as he describes them and allows an infinite reflective process on meaning and significance. The crystal image defines the process of image making in cinema, from actual image memory to the cinematographic image / virtual image to a mirror image.
“Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character…with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples… And the crystal turns over on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment”
Through the medium of film one sees a reflection and can reflect upon that reflection. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting. It has the ability through visual and sonic techniques to both immerse the viewer sensually so that they can engage in deep reflection.
Techniques of the Crystal-Image
The Time-Image and Crystal-Image as described by Deleuze offer both an explanation of techniques of cinema used as well as potential creative points of departure for new experimental film makers. Their presence acting as a powerful philosophical tools.
Virtual Reality and Digital Simulation:
The use of virtual actors, virtual landscapes and virtual special effects through Computer Generated Images brings the medium closer to the realm of the “pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"
The removal in some cases of an actual human being as a central character or a naturally recognisable landscape creates a stylisation of the form which allow for greater allegorical interpretation and reflection.
“Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world”
CGI’s chronokinetic ability (controlling time , creating time distortion), remove gravity and alter the colour scape and form of the events taking place breaks down the natural sensor-motor system allowing for transformed reflection of reality and of modern space as it truly is. The contraints of naturally occurring laws of physics that dominate live footage are easily overcome, allowing the film to enter a new level of communication with the viewer, one which replicates the imaginary spaces of the mind and the invisible complex spaces of contemporary life. One which immerses the viewer with a new haptic sense; the fusion of carefully designed and constructed sound, image and motion.
Although Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before the invention of CGI as we know it today, the ability of film to leave the inhibitions of the world and to express the world of the mind and the modern age was prescient:
“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”
Artificial Intelligence:
The Replacement of the human eye behind the camera with a machine has massive implications for the representation of the altered relationships between self and world through the body. As was earlier discussed in Chapter One, the use of perspective throughout the ages has always acted as a representation of the eras sense of itself and its place collectively within the world. From the God's eye view: a disembodied, single, omniscient, perfect perspective applicable it to all events, that was used in pre-Renaissance art, to the strict scientific rigour of a one point perspective, placing the subject at the centre of the world and yet immobile and static with one great unblinking eye, to the fractured multiple perspectives of cubism in art and deconstructivsm in architecture in the 20th century (and today).
But the artificial eye both within CGI and network controlled systems of cameras on a set, once again, like the God’s eye view removes the eyes of the individual and gains its own omnipresence. However, the distinction being that where God’s eye view proposed a divine, single point of all knowing perspective, the artificial eye allows an infinite mergence of perspectives. The subject to world relationship mirroring the complexities of modern thought in this medium, being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The added dimension of time allowing for motion perspective, one which extends the possibilities of multi point perspective techniques of cubism and modern art.
The artificial eye combined with the other techniques of CGI such as the compositing of discrete elements into a single shot allows for the montage of experience, the linking of disparate time lines and narratives and the cut and splice of assemblage first described by Eisenstein and now more fully capable of fulfilling itself through the new techniques.
“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”
Deleuze describes the components required for the creation of transcendental film which allows the greatest reflection of the sense of self both individually and collectively, the one which emphasises the intersubjectivity suggested by neurophenomenology earlier discussed.
“In short the, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, relinkage and the black and white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And if it grows larger and absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application or black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a cirulation: the noosphere.”
Modern cinema both arthouse and blockbuster Hollywood incorporates these elements to mesmeric, oneiric effects, ones which reveal, transform and change our perception of ourselves and the world around us.
The following case study seeks to dissect two films which depict subjective realities through the structure of memory. Both would be classified under the time-image defined by Deleuze, one was made in the 1968, pre CGI and artificial intelligence, the other more recently in 2004 with the plethora of additional elements that now comprises filmic space.
The 2004 film I argue surpasses the first in creating a dynamic reflective process on existence due to these elements.
Analysis of two time-image films:
1968: Je t’aime, je t’aime
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Jacques Sternberg
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind
Director: : Michel Gondry
Writers:Charlie Kaufmam, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth
The two films I have chosen I feel describe and explore embodiment to an extent that conventional architecture cannot.
They deal with very similar plot and storylines but have been made nearly forty years apart, in which time the technology of film has advanced to include the techniques described in the previous section Hypercinema and Cybercinema. In fact it is highly probable that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is influenced to a very large extent by Resnais’ earlier incarnation.
The earlier film’s plot centres on a time travel experiment carried out on a man who has just left hospital after attempting suicide. The scientists try to send him back exactly one year in time to relive a single minute. The experiment works to a certain extent – he goes back in time but is trapped adrift in his memories, past and present leaking back and forth maddeningly. The focus of his memories centre on his failed relationship with woman whose death he feels guilty about.
Much in the same way as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he traverses his past in a non sequential manner being driven by his core memory of Catrine. It is unclear at points as to whether his memories are pure memories or whether he is creating them. Indeed as the film continues it becomes unclear as to whether the start of the film is in fact the start of the time fracturing process, his suicide attempt, could be interpreted as a way of ending the nightmarish flicker of his experiences between past and present.
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind focuses on the lives of a young couple Joel and Clementine whose tempestuous relationship results in them both opting for a (science)fictional brain operation which removes all of their memories of the relationship.
After a two year relationship, one night the couple have a particularly bad fight after which Clementine visits Lacuna, Inc, a clinic where painful relationships can be eradicated from memory. On discovering this, Joel himself decides to do the same.
The real interest begins when the procedure starts to take effect upon Joel and he realises he wants to reject it, thus causing glitches in the program. As he lies unconscious in his bed with electrodes attached to his head and wired up to a computer which starts to delete his memories, we the viewer experience the process from his point of view. Trapped inside his body, he moves through scene after scene of his life with Clementine, in each they disintegrate and seamlessly he finds himself transported between them in the blink of an eye, the turn of a back, the shutting of a door. Unable to stop the experiment (to wake up) he and Clementine (or rather the version of her that lives in his mind) hatch a plan to hide in areas of his memory that she was never a part of so that the deletor technician won’t find them and thus she will remain alive in his memory.
The ensuing scenes are breathtaking in their skill and craft. They run through his childhood, changing scales and ages, from bathing in a sink as a baby to lying in his teenage bedroom as they try to evade the inevitable deletion.
It displays a depth of understanding of the neurological basis of memory with incredible subtlety, using CGI as an invisible weapon in producing the seamless transitions that create the dizzying journey through Joel’s labyrinth of memory. Deleuze’s cerebral components are all present in abundance in the editing of the film: the, point-cut of the shots, their relinkage and the transitions. The decoupage of the various elements of his past , present and potential futures merge through the delicate use of CGI and the editors hand.
The detailed and painstaking nature of some of the shots which create the rich oneiric tapestry is unseen in the film but for a two second shot the level of post-production is frightening. Like the ballerina on a stage, gracefully pirouetting on her bleeding toes unknown to the audience watching her, likewise to achieve the gritty, real to life, emblematic, Gondry style of the film, months of sleepless nights must have gone into the special effects and post production of this film.
The company who provided the post-production have a behind the scenes video which documents the iterations that took place in producing some of the films. I’ve included one below:
The shop road scene 38:11
The house collapsing:
While both films extend the notion of the embodied self in space and allow a level of reflection impossible by any other discipline, the techniques available to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allow it to depart from conventional reality to the place of the pure optical and sound image that Deleuze discusses in the Time-Image. In it we sense to a much greater extent than je t’aime je t’aime the unity of cystal-image, the mergence of the virtual and actual, in neurophenomenological terms the sense of constant feedback between the outside world and the self through the memories experienced.
The role of CGI within E.S.O.T.S.M.
The shop road scene 38:11
Pattern Completion: Cross-disciplinary project between two artists and a neuroscientist (
“A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema”
Gilles Deleuze 1986
In Chapter Two, the internal notion of embodiment was discussed in relation to neuroscience’s developments and discoveries, in this chapter, the second aspect of embodied architecture: the manifestation of a sense of space that allows expression and reflection on its nature will be discussed. Once again quoting Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic:
“The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”
Pallasmaa furthers this point by asking what the closest art form is to architecture and hich is the one we can learn most from. He believes it to be film:
“The ground of both artforms is lived space, in which the inner space of the mind and the external space of the world fuse into each other forming a chiasmatic bind. The lived space of cinema offers a great lesson for us architects, who tend to see our craft through a formal bias.”
I wish to push this statement further and to put film forward as another form of architecture, one which is more suited to representational architectural expression of modern thought and space than its static counterpart.
Why film?
While acknowledging that conventional, constructed architecture still plays a representational role in revealing the world back to ourselves as it did in the past, I argue that the massive upheaval in how we now understand space through neuroscience’s developments demands a new expression. Plasticity and mirror cells redefine our spatial landscape, they describe new complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose the blending of the chiasm. They describe a new möbius like topology of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally.
To represent this as a static building (conventional, constructed architecture) or image (painting) or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation (the sciences) or as words (philosophy) is to lose the essence of these new truths. The palimpsest of time and memory suggested by brain plasticity as well as the altered intersubjective perspectives suggested by mirror cells, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.
The immersive embodied sense of perception which is now so clear is excellently transmitted and explored using the external embodied architecture offered by the medium of film. The parameters and constraints imposed by conventional, built architecture cannot make the imaginative departure from concrete, physical reality in the manner that a film can, which by its nature is fluid and sensory, fuses sound, movement and image through time creating an immersive version of reality, that can be engaged with.
The complex space that we now understand and thus inhabit is one of dynamic relationships between the self and the world . Our active and subjective position within the world as sensory biological organisms is well described by the filmic medium. It transcends the normal constraints of physical architecture by its multi sensory and time based qualities, through these it gains a ‘body’ of its own and emulates the experience of space we sense from the complex world around us, thereby letting us both reflect upon the nature of this space as well as becoming active participants in the medium ourselves, feeding as we do from the world around us in a loop of perception. We are changed by and change the film by experiencing it.
Vivian Sobchack elaborates upon this reciprocal relationship in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,
“More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”
In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.
Defining Filmic Space:
For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel comprise contemporary current filmic space they are:
Hypercinema which defines the ‘formal aspects of a cinema and is equipped by:
1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs),
2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine.
She describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:
“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such an extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”
Cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”
1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)
2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.
Using this contemporary definition of film I hope to analyse the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that filmic space can decipher, illuminate and extend phenomenological and existential notions of embodiment through its liminality and its use of a set of non verbal and transcendental techniques.
Deleuze, methodology, key techniques
By using Deleuze’s theories in particular that of the Crystal-Image I will explore ways to invoke experimentation in film that allow us to speculate more deeply about the self in contemporary space. Cinema like the body can be seen as a mediator of experience and change and the space between the screen and viewer becomes the place of excitement and discovery. The space in which the chiasmic duality merges through reflection and interaction with the spectacle.
“In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.”
By using a hybrid approach to deciphering embodied space (through the mergence of philosophy, science and film) creative and new avenues of understanding can be forged.
“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”
The ability of cinema to go beyond conventional philosophical or scientific techniques lies in its immediacy and as Deleuze's describes 'preverbal’, pre-linguistic content:
“The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)”
Likewise, Merleau-Ponty’s beliefs in the oeuvre as a valid philosophical discourse are pertinent to the medium of film.
The Crystal Image
The Crystal-Image is a notion that is comprised by a number of theories. It describes the dynamic, folded, symbiotic space between self and world and subject and object and the body that is the link for each of these chiasms, that neuroscience has heavily defined and influenced in the last forty years.
To summarise the key difference between Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (an analysis of pre WW2) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (post WW2):
“The former cinema, which finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, is dependent on movement and action. Characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them. The movement-image is a form of spatialised cinema: time determined and measured by movement.”
In Cinema 2, Deleuze deals with the time-image which is the context to the crystal image. The time-image is one of fracture and non rational narrative:
“In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a breakdown in the sensor-motor system. The image cut off from sensory-motor links becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"”
It is characterised by the difference in the techniques it uses in comparison to that of the movement-image:
“In the time-image, rational or measurable temporal links between shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives way to "incommensurable," non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear ("any-space-whatevers"). As a consequence, the journey becomes a privileged narrative form, with characters in a more passive role, and themes centered on inner mental imagery, flights of fancy, and emotional and psychic breakdown. The result of this pure optical and sound image is, according to Deleuze, a direct image of time (a time-image or crystal-image).”
The topology of the time-image is useful in describing the chiasmic nature of existence described by neurophenomenology:
“The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”
It's necessary to understand the Mneosign or Recollection image in order to understand the crystal image. It is defined as:“a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and changes it.” whereas the Crystal or Hyalosign image, previously discussed in Chapter’s one and two is the next step in this process defined as: "the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image t the point where they can no longer be distinguished."
This can be read as a very pertinent method of understanding the notion of the brain’s plasticity. Although we experience reality directly through our bodies, the mediation of our mind in forming the experience is based on previous readings of other situations onto which the new experience is formed and is formed by. Thus the virtual image of a memory (a previous experience) is always part of the equation in perception of space and reality.
Its use as a method to decipher or create film, that in turn deciphers and reflects upon space is vital. Deleuze’s crystal-image chiasmic properties of memory allow for the mergence of time frames or sheets as he describes them and allows an infinite reflective process on meaning and significance. The crystal image defines the process of image making in cinema, from actual image memory to the cinematographic image / virtual image to a mirror image.
“Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character…with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples… And the crystal turns over on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment”
Through the medium of film one sees a reflection and can reflect upon that reflection. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting. It has the ability through visual and sonic techniques to both immerse the viewer sensually so that they can engage in deep reflection.
Techniques of the Crystal-Image
The Time-Image and Crystal-Image as described by Deleuze offer both an explanation of techniques of cinema used as well as potential creative points of departure for new experimental film makers. Their presence acting as a powerful philosophical tools.
Virtual Reality and Digital Simulation:
The use of virtual actors, virtual landscapes and virtual special effects through Computer Generated Images brings the medium closer to the realm of the “pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"
The removal in some cases of an actual human being as a central character or a naturally recognisable landscape creates a stylisation of the form which allow for greater allegorical interpretation and reflection.
“Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world”
CGI’s chronokinetic ability (controlling time , creating time distortion), remove gravity and alter the colour scape and form of the events taking place breaks down the natural sensor-motor system allowing for transformed reflection of reality and of modern space as it truly is. The contraints of naturally occurring laws of physics that dominate live footage are easily overcome, allowing the film to enter a new level of communication with the viewer, one which replicates the imaginary spaces of the mind and the invisible complex spaces of contemporary life. One which immerses the viewer with a new haptic sense; the fusion of carefully designed and constructed sound, image and motion.
Although Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before the invention of CGI as we know it today, the ability of film to leave the inhibitions of the world and to express the world of the mind and the modern age was prescient:
“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”
Artificial Intelligence:
The Replacement of the human eye behind the camera with a machine has massive implications for the representation of the altered relationships between self and world through the body. As was earlier discussed in Chapter One, the use of perspective throughout the ages has always acted as a representation of the eras sense of itself and its place collectively within the world. From the God's eye view: a disembodied, single, omniscient, perfect perspective applicable it to all events, that was used in pre-Renaissance art, to the strict scientific rigour of a one point perspective, placing the subject at the centre of the world and yet immobile and static with one great unblinking eye, to the fractured multiple perspectives of cubism in art and deconstructivsm in architecture in the 20th century (and today).
But the artificial eye both within CGI and network controlled systems of cameras on a set, once again, like the God’s eye view removes the eyes of the individual and gains its own omnipresence. However, the distinction being that where God’s eye view proposed a divine, single point of all knowing perspective, the artificial eye allows an infinite mergence of perspectives. The subject to world relationship mirroring the complexities of modern thought in this medium, being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The added dimension of time allowing for motion perspective, one which extends the possibilities of multi point perspective techniques of cubism and modern art.
The artificial eye combined with the other techniques of CGI such as the compositing of discrete elements into a single shot allows for the montage of experience, the linking of disparate time lines and narratives and the cut and splice of assemblage first described by Eisenstein and now more fully capable of fulfilling itself through the new techniques.
“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”
Deleuze describes the components required for the creation of transcendental film which allows the greatest reflection of the sense of self both individually and collectively, the one which emphasises the intersubjectivity suggested by neurophenomenology earlier discussed.
“In short the, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, relinkage and the black and white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And if it grows larger and absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application or black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a cirulation: the noosphere.”
Modern cinema both arthouse and blockbuster Hollywood incorporates these elements to mesmeric, oneiric effects, ones which reveal, transform and change our perception of ourselves and the world around us.
The following case study seeks to dissect two films which depict subjective realities through the structure of memory. Both would be classified under the time-image defined by Deleuze, one was made in the 1968, pre CGI and artificial intelligence, the other more recently in 2004 with the plethora of additional elements that now comprises filmic space.
The 2004 film I argue surpasses the first in creating a dynamic reflective process on existence due to these elements.
Analysis of two time-image films:
1968: Je t’aime, je t’aime
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Jacques Sternberg
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind
Director: : Michel Gondry
Writers:Charlie Kaufmam, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth
The two films I have chosen I feel describe and explore embodiment to an extent that conventional architecture cannot.
They deal with very similar plot and storylines but have been made nearly forty years apart, in which time the technology of film has advanced to include the techniques described in the previous section Hypercinema and Cybercinema. In fact it is highly probable that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is influenced to a very large extent by Resnais’ earlier incarnation.
The earlier film’s plot centres on a time travel experiment carried out on a man who has just left hospital after attempting suicide. The scientists try to send him back exactly one year in time to relive a single minute. The experiment works to a certain extent – he goes back in time but is trapped adrift in his memories, past and present leaking back and forth maddeningly. The focus of his memories centre on his failed relationship with woman whose death he feels guilty about.
Much in the same way as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he traverses his past in a non sequential manner being driven by his core memory of Catrine. It is unclear at points as to whether his memories are pure memories or whether he is creating them. Indeed as the film continues it becomes unclear as to whether the start of the film is in fact the start of the time fracturing process, his suicide attempt, could be interpreted as a way of ending the nightmarish flicker of his experiences between past and present.
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind focuses on the lives of a young couple Joel and Clementine whose tempestuous relationship results in them both opting for a (science)fictional brain operation which removes all of their memories of the relationship.
After a two year relationship, one night the couple have a particularly bad fight after which Clementine visits Lacuna, Inc, a clinic where painful relationships can be eradicated from memory. On discovering this, Joel himself decides to do the same.
The real interest begins when the procedure starts to take effect upon Joel and he realises he wants to reject it, thus causing glitches in the program. As he lies unconscious in his bed with electrodes attached to his head and wired up to a computer which starts to delete his memories, we the viewer experience the process from his point of view. Trapped inside his body, he moves through scene after scene of his life with Clementine, in each they disintegrate and seamlessly he finds himself transported between them in the blink of an eye, the turn of a back, the shutting of a door. Unable to stop the experiment (to wake up) he and Clementine (or rather the version of her that lives in his mind) hatch a plan to hide in areas of his memory that she was never a part of so that the deletor technician won’t find them and thus she will remain alive in his memory.
The ensuing scenes are breathtaking in their skill and craft. They run through his childhood, changing scales and ages, from bathing in a sink as a baby to lying in his teenage bedroom as they try to evade the inevitable deletion.
It displays a depth of understanding of the neurological basis of memory with incredible subtlety, using CGI as an invisible weapon in producing the seamless transitions that create the dizzying journey through Joel’s labyrinth of memory. Deleuze’s cerebral components are all present in abundance in the editing of the film: the, point-cut of the shots, their relinkage and the transitions. The decoupage of the various elements of his past , present and potential futures merge through the delicate use of CGI and the editors hand.
The detailed and painstaking nature of some of the shots which create the rich oneiric tapestry is unseen in the film but for a two second shot the level of post-production is frightening. Like the ballerina on a stage, gracefully pirouetting on her bleeding toes unknown to the audience watching her, likewise to achieve the gritty, real to life, emblematic, Gondry style of the film, months of sleepless nights must have gone into the special effects and post production of this film.
The company who provided the post-production have a behind the scenes video which documents the iterations that took place in producing some of the films. I’ve included one below:
The shop road scene 38:11
The house collapsing:
While both films extend the notion of the embodied self in space and allow a level of reflection impossible by any other discipline, the techniques available to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allow it to depart from conventional reality to the place of the pure optical and sound image that Deleuze discusses in the Time-Image. In it we sense to a much greater extent than je t’aime je t’aime the unity of cystal-image, the mergence of the virtual and actual, in neurophenomenological terms the sense of constant feedback between the outside world and the self through the memories experienced.
The role of CGI within E.S.O.T.S.M.
The shop road scene 38:11
Pattern Completion: Cross-disciplinary project between two artists and a neuroscientist (
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