Deleuze And Cinema

From Matter to Memory to Time

By:Mahsa Foroughi

The reason that the two books of Cinema 1: The movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image are important is Deleuze’s contribution to create a revolutionary argument by inter-cutting between cinema and philosophy. These books show a genuine method of how Deleuze established a creative connection between examples of historical movies such as that of Cecil B. de Mille’s and Nietzsche’s essay on nineteenth-century German historiography (Deleuze, 1983).

In the following, I put into words Deleuze’s theory on cinema, and its value in my own research. In his analysis of images, Deleuze explores a chain starting from an image and ending to the time-image. According to him, immediate images are immobile part of movement, movement- images are immobile part of duration, and there are, finally, "time-image, that is duration-images, change-images, relation-images, volume-images which are beyond movement itself...”(Deleuze, 1986: 11). The above quote clearly shows why Deleuze investigates Cinema not as an element of mere image, but as an idiom to depict time as an inseparable part of cinematic image. In his claim, cinema has the potential to create or reveal any kinds of different images, which can eventually combine and manipulate through montage (Deleuze, 1983: 46).

It seems that Deleuze’s theory on cinema, argue Narboni and Bonitzer, aims at changing a sort of injustice done to it by philosophy. What one can conceive from modern philosophical debates is that they all neglect the importance of cinema. They either concentrate on movement without the image, or the image without movement. It is strange that Sartre, in The Psychology of Imagination, investigated every type of images, except cinema...

... middle of paper ...

...es is to complete the space of the ruin in the mind. So, like a crystal, the Stalker’s set of space is conceived in a different formation.

These types of image explore the concept of actual and virtual, past and memory, and they represent the interaction of mental and physical time. By the practical examples of Tarkovsky’s movies in this highly theoretical context, architecture must question its aesthetic principle to go beyond the level of materiality, and to “touch the deeper level of consciousness, dream and feeling…” (Pallasmaa, 2001: 91).

Comprehending this fact that cinema is an assemblage of images and signs can result in analytic approach to find out how each scene of Stalker corresponds to each type of Deleuze’s definition of movement, and from that how architecture can manipulate real time; and create particular perception of space in dimension of time.