'Water Recedes' or 'Temporalization Operating Through Memory'

"The function of depth of field: to explore each time a region of the past, a continuum.

In this freeing of depth which now subordinates all other dimensions we should see not only the conquest of a continuum but the temporal nature of this continuum: it is a continuity of duration which mean that the unbridled depth is of time and no longer of space. It is irreducible to the dimensions of space. As long as depth remained caught in the simple succession of parallel lines, it already represented time, but in an indirect way which kept it subordinate to space and movement. The new depth, in contrast, directly forms a region of time, a region of past which is defined by optical aspects or elements borrowed from interacting planes. It is a set of non-localizable connections, always from one plane to another, which constitutes the region of past or the continuum of duration.

...Our point is that depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that ca be defined by memory, virtual regions of past, the aspects of each region. This would be less a function of reality than a function remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection, but an invitation to recollect...

It is not a case of psychological memory, made up of recollection-images. It is not a case of a succession of presents passing according to chronological time. It is either a case of an attempt to evoke, produced in a an actual present, and preceding the formation of recollection-images, or the exploration of a sheet of past from which these recollection-images will later arise. It is an on-this-side-of and a beyond of psychological memory: the two poles of a metaphysics of memory. These two extremes of memory are presented by Bergson as follows: the extension of sheets of past and the contraction of the actual present. And the two are connected, since to evoke recollection is to jump into a region of past where one assumes that it is lying in a virtual state, all the sheets or regions coexisting in relation to the contracted actual present from which the evocation proceeds (whilst they follow each other psychologically in relation to the presents that they were). Depth of field feeds on these two sources of memory. Not the recollection-image but the actual effort of evocation, to summon this up, and the exploration of virtual zones of past, to find, choose and bring it back."

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, pp. 106, 108-110 (abridged).

'A Proliferation of Reflections' or The 'Things I Tell You Will Not Be Wrong'

"Thus, in Deleuze's analysis, when directors systematically play with the relationship between acting and being, stage world and real world, film and reality, they are not simply questioning art's function as a re-presentation of reality. They are seeing the world as a proliferation of reflections, objective illusions that are coalescences of the actual and the virtual produced by a perpetual scission of time into the Bergsonian actual present and the virtual "memory of the present" that extends into the entirety of the virtual past."

Ronald Bogue, Deleuze On Cinema, p. 122, Routledge 2003

Interlude 4

'To Recap' or 'Some Sort Of Overview' Part 3

How might we recognise a point of indiscernibility? In a first approximation, Deleuze says, "it is if an image in a mirror, a photo, a postcard came to life, became independent and passed in to the actual, even if the actual image went back into the mirror, took up its place in the postcard or the photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture"¹. In what Deleuze calls an "organic" description, such as one finds in nineteenth-century realistic fiction, the object described is presumed to exist independently of the description. A "crystalline" description, by contrast, is one "which counts for its object, which replaces it, creates it and erases it at the same time, as Robbe-Grillet says, and ceaselessly gives way to other descriptions that contradict, displace or modify the preceding ones"². Crystalline descriptions "reflect a purely optical situation detached from [its] motor continuation"². The crystal-image, one might conclude at this juncture, is simply another name for the opsign - the purely optical situation - but Deleuze specifies that if the opsign is detached from the sensori-motor schema, it does not necessarily bring virtual and actual together in a single point of indiscernibility. The crystal-image is the "genetic element", the "'heart' of the opsigns and their compositions," whereas opsigns "are nothing more than the shattered splinters of the crystal image"³.

The crystal-image, then, is the genetic element of opsigns...an image detached from the sensori-motor schema in which there is no means of distinguishing the object from its description. It would seem at this point that Deleuze is confusing two questions, one of "objective illusions", such as mirror-images, and one of "representation", or the relationship between an object in the world and and its semiotic representation, such as that of a photograph, postcard, painting or prop on a stage. But the second question presumes a clear distinction between objective reality and its description, and that distinction is made possible only by the existence of the sensori-motor schema. With its collapse, Deleuze argues, there is no means of differentiating presentation from re-presentation; the object and its appearance are one. No longer are there objects and their mechanical or artistic representations, but simply images.

Bergson says that the "memory of the present" is a virtual reflection of the actual present, and that in the rare moments when we encounter the present's doubling of virtual and actual we are like actors watching ourselves on a stage. Deleuze suggests that in the crystal-image, we are not simply like actors, but we are actors - that all the world is a stage...in the sense that in the absence of a sensori-motor schema the world becomes a theater/spectacle/film of animated reflections/photos/postcards, a play of images in which the virtual and actual are indiscernible because they co-exist in the real (and not just "in our heads"). This rapprochement of optical mirrors and mimetic enactments, we should note, leads Deleuze to treat the elements of crystal-image films as "reflections" in the broadest sense of the term. At times he speaks of actual mirror images in such films, at others or mechanical reproductions of images in photos, films or video clips. But he also treats paintings and theatrical performances as reflections of objects, extending the notion as well to include simulations, mimings, and the enactment of roles as so many mirror images. Finally, he treats resemblances and correspondences between objects, settings characters, and actions as reflections - perhaps prismatically distorted, tinted, bleached or clouded, but reflections nonetheless."⁴

¹ G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 68.
² G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 126.
³ G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 69
⁴Ronald Bogue, Deleuze On Cinema, pp. 118 - 121, Routledge 2003 (abridged)

'To Recap' or 'Some Sort Of Overview' Part 2

"In some images, claims Deleuze, we see the point of indiscernibility itself - in what he calls time crystals, whosr corresponding signs are halyosigns (from Greek hyalos, glass). Bergson once again provides Deleuze with much of the scaffolding for his analysis. Bergson examines the uncanny phenomenon of déjà-vu and concludes that this uneasy and vague sense of having already experienced a present event stems from the fundamental nature of time, perception and memory. Bergson...argues that memories and perceptions must be qualitatively different from each other. He asks, When is a memory formed? And his conclusion is such that such an event must take place in the present - in the future makes no sense, and if at some juncture in the past, there would be a memoryless "dead zone" between the present and the whatever point in the past one should choose as the initial memory formation. There must then, be a "memory of the present",a virtual-image that co-exists with each perception-image in the present, a virtual double that is like a reflection in a mirror.

Deleuze insists, that Bergson's virtual domain, though mental and reflective, is noot that of personal subjectivity. In his first book, Bergson does conceive of memory in terms of an individual consciousness, but in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, he argues that the past preserves itself by and in itself, that the past exists as a single domain and hence as a kind of gigantic memory. The ocean of memory is the virtual past, which gushes forth at each present moment in a perpetual foundation of time.

In Bergson's schema of attentive recollection, the smallest circuit is labeled AO, and the absence of an A' is explained by the fact that perception, when seized in this marrowest instant if the present, allows no clear separation of A from O. The present is immediately double, an actual present perception and a virtual memory of the present, a mobile mirror that is the ongoing splitting and coexistence or actual and virtual, physical and mental, present and past. Though expressed as two terms, AO is a two-in-one, a point of indiscernibility. Like a mirror image that joins actual object and virtual reflection, the point of indiscernibility is an "objective illusion", not something simply "in our heads"; it is a real doubling in which virtual and actual are distinct but unassignable, in a relation of "mutual presupposition" or "reversibility"".

Ronald Bogue, Deleuze On Cinema, pp. 117 - 118, Routledge 2003 (abridged)



Fig. 1: www.arch.columbia.edu/file/52657/

Interlude 3

'To Recap' or 'Some Sort Of Overview' Part 1

"Deleuze's first goal is to indicate how the opsign may "open itself" to the time-image. If the opsign is dissociated from the sensori-motor schema - how might one opsign be linked to another? Memory provides a convenient starting point for such an investigation.

Deleuze's treatment of memory images is framed in the terms Bergson uses to analyze the phenomena or recognition and attention. To recognise an object is to revive a past memory of it and note its resemblance to the present object. Such recognition is most often automatic and unconscious, unlike the recognition that occurs when we consciously pay attention to an object and its various characteristics.

Attentive recognition does not differ qualitatively from automatic recognition. In both cases, we summon up a memory-image and project it on to the object. In attentive recognition, the object and each memory-image form a circuit. As we pay closer attention to the object, we summon up memory-images from broader and more distant past contexts, each wider context encompassing the narrower.

Deleuze uses Bergson's analysis of automatic and attentive recognition as a means of approaching opsigns. In attentive recognition, the sensori-motor schema is relaxed. The habitual linkage of memory and perception within action ceases for a moment and a present object forms circuits with memory-images which are then projected onto the object. Similarly, Deleuze argues, in the pure optical situation the sensori-motor schema is suspended, and an object gives rise to a virtual image - often, a memory, a dream, or a thought."

Ronald Bogue, Deleuze On Cinema, pp. 111-114, Routledge 2003 (abridged)

The Inverse Cone Representing Sheets of Past

"Bergson gave an assured status to the first image. This is model of the inverse cone. The past in not to be confused with the mental existence of recollection-images which actualize it in us. It is preserved in time: it is the virtual element which we penetrate to look for the 'pure recollection' which will become actual in a 'recollection-image'. Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory. The present exists only as an infinitely contracted past which is constituted at the extreme point of the already-there. The present would not pass on without this condition.

Between the past as pre-existence in general and the present as infinitely contracted past, there are, therefore, all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunk regions, strata, and sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its 'tones', its 'aspects', its 'singularities', its 'shining points' and its 'dominant themes'. We have to put ourselves into the past in general, then we have to choose between the regions: in which one do we think that the recollection is hidden, huddled up waiting for us and evading us?"

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 98. 99 (abridged).



Fig. 5: H. Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 7th printing, Zone Books, 2002, p. 162.

Blue Notez or Ideational Apraxia

"This spontaneous recollection, which is masked by the acquired recollection, may flash out at intervals, but it disappears at the least movement of the voluntary memory.

The faculty of mental photography...belongs rather to subconsciousness than to consciousness; it answers with difficulty the summons of the will. In order to exercise it, we should accustom ourselves to reatining, for instance, several arrangements of points at once, without even thinking of counting them: we must imitate in some sort the instantaneity of this memory in order to attain its mastery.

Even so it remains capricious in its manifestations; as the recollections which it brings are akin to dreams, its more regular intrusion into the life of the mind may seriously disturb intellectual equillibrium."

H. Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 7th printing, Zone Books, 2002, pp. 87-88.

Spontaneous Recollection

"What the crystal reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved. There are, therefore, already, two possible time-images, one grounded in the past, the other in the present. Each is complex and is valid for time as a whole."

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 98.

"The past indeed appears to be stored up, as we had surmised, under two extreme forms: on the one hand, motor mechanisms which make use of it; on the other, personal memory-images which picture all pst events with their outline, their colour and their place in time. Of these two memories the first follows the direction of nature; the second left to itself would rather got the contrary way. The first, conquered by effort, remains dependent on our will; the second, entirely spontaneous, is as capricious in reproducing as it is faithful in preserving."

H. Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 7th printing, Zone Books, 2002, p. 88

Interlude 2

'Also Extraordinary Things. Revel In Your Time.' Or, 'Mirrors Or Seeds Of Time'

"What constitutes the crystal is the most fundamental operation of time. Time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past...one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time consists of this split and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.

Bergson adds...the crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct yet indiscernible.

The crystal lives at the limit, it is itself 'the vanishing limit between the immediate past which is no longer and the immediate future which is not yet...[a] mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection'.

The crystal-image is then, the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in a pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself."

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, pp. 81,82, 274 (abridged), italics mine.

Interlude

A Shaving Of The Horn That Speared You

"Certain confused recollections, unrelated to the present circumstances, may overflow the usefully associated images, making around these a less illuminated fringe which fades away into an immense zone of obscurity."

H. Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 7th printing, Zone Books, 2002, p. 85

The Heart of the Opsign - Sodium Illumination as A Crystal Image

"The purely optical...situation is an actual image, but one which, instead of extending into movement, links up with a virtual image and forms a circuit with it. What is capable of playing the role of the virtual image? What Bergson calls 'the recollection image' seems to have the requisite qualities...Recollection images...intervene in automatic recognition; they insert themselves between stimulation and response, and contribute to the better adjustment to the motor mechanism by reinforcing it with a psychological causality.

When we cannot remember...the present optical perception does not link up with a motor image or a recollection image which would re-establish contact. It rather enters into relation with genuinely virtual elements, feelings of deja vu...dream-images, fantasies or theatre scenes. In short it is not the recollection image...which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition.

We gave the name 'opsign'...to the actual image cut off from its motor extension: it...entered into communication with what could appear as recollection images, dream-images and world-images. Here we see that the opsign finds its true genetic element when the actual optical image crystallizes with it's own virtual image...This is the crystal image, which gives us the key, or rather the 'heart', of opsigns and their compositions."

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, pp. 47, 54, 55, 69 (abridged).

The Use of Chiaro Scuro In Early Expressionist Filmmaking

You dare not say it since the pictures of life will fade in to dark shadow.

Nosferatu 1922, F.W.Murnau

Time Crystals

The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the mind, it is the objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double.

G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: L'Image Temps, 7th ed. University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 69