Subtle way out: cinematic thought, belief in the world, and four contemporary filmmakers

Abstract

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two regimes of audiovisual thought. In the regime of the movement-image, such thought is constituted by two processes. The first, differentiation/integration, expresses a whole that changes through the intermediary of the shifting relationships between the objects and people on screen. The second, specification, gives images a determinate function in a sensory-motor schema, through which perceptions are linked to actions in rational intervals of movement. With the regime of the time-image, as I understand it, thought instead comes to mean, as Deleuze puts it in Foucault, to experiment and problematize, and “knowledge, power, and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (95). It is my argument in this thesis that Deleuze’s work on cinema is of great utility in carrying out filmic analyses that seek to detect and draw out the consequences of strategies of filmmaking that make knowledge, power, and self problematic. Furthermore, such a mode of analysis is particularly valuable in attending to new films that confront us with novel means of organising problematic audiovisual thought. My arguments are made through consideration of two films each from four directors: Wong Kar-wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While there are many important differences between the works of these filmmakers, their films nevertheless lend themselves to an approach that seeks to determine how thought becomes problematic in specific cases. Similarities and resonances are brought out between these films and those that Deleuze uses himself in making his arguments and shaping his concepts, but I also identify new problems that we encounter in the works of these filmmakers, which extend the range of meaning of some of those concepts. One such concept that is of particular importance in this thesis is “belief in the world”. There is always something in those films that pass into the regime of the time-image that is asystematic, which breaks up and multiplies thought, multiplies the thinkers we are made to inhabit. Our relation to the world of the film is therefore unstable and uncertain, and calls for belief, since films themselves in this regime produce new links between humans and the world, rather than firmly establishing a realistic state of things, a temporal and spatial matrix that accords with that which we experience in everyday existence. Such films thus make us receptive to a thought different from that interiorised thought through which, as Nietzsche writes, the apparatus of knowledge abstracts, simplifies, and takes possession of the world and others (Will, no. 503, 274)