1.Deleuze begins by explaining the cause of the need for change in cinema after the war. The war caused, “…unsteadiness of the ‘American Dream’ in all its aspects, the new consciousness of minorities, the rise and inflation of images both in the external world and in peoples’ minds…” (206). “The soul of the cinema” no longer makes ASA and SAS films, “the soul of the cinema demands increasing thought” (206). In my opinion, modern films seem to be a succession of sexy images. Not only in film, but television, advertising, and everywhere. We are certainly an image-based society. Being image-based requires a change to image literacy. A literacy that is able to follow a “dispersive” image that includes several characters, settings, and plots. Deleuze calls for a “new kind of image” to “identify in the post-war American cinema” (207).
2. The answer to Deleuze’s “new kind of image” is neo-realism, which is a “build-up of purely optical situations and sounds…which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism” (2). The difference between neo-realism and realism is the setting. Realism has a sensory-motor setting that presumes an action. But the optical or sound situation of neo-realism takes place in an “any-space-whatever”. Again, Deleuze uses a phrase from Bergson and flips it upside down. Bergson uses the “any-whatever” to describe an instant, and Deleuze takes Bergson’s idea of an insignificant, “whatever” and applies it to space. I imagine this idea of an “any-space-whatever” to be an everyday situation.
3. Deleuze believes that we perceive clichés not the images for what they really are. The viewer does “not perceive everything, so that the cliché hides the image from us…” (21). This brings me back to the idea of not directly viewing the world, but viewing a representation in the mind. It is as if we do not see images for their reality but we see images as our mind represents them. To solve the problem Deleuze thinks it is “…necessary to make a division or make emptiness to find the whole again” (21). He thinks we should “rarify” the image and take away everything that is added on that makes us think we see everything. In general, there are many things happening in a scene, there are background actions and sounds that make it seem like we are seeing the scene in its entirety. But in order to really see each image we would, like Deleuze suggests, have to divide. We would have to take a close look at everything that is happening, then we would see each image for what it is.
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Just to add on to Leesha's explanation of neo-realism, Deleuze talks about the increasing importance of the role of children in cinema. I found this very interesting since I have noticed this myself but did not know why it occurs. Deleuze explains that this happens because even though the children are "motor helpless"(3) in the adult world, that in turn makes them more visually and audibly aware of their surroundings. Thus, they become perfect characters for the new almost purely optical situations and sounds that make up the new action image.
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