Deleuze – Cinema

Cinema 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Movement-Image)

p169:
« espaces deconnectés ou vidés »
« situation de l’après-guerre avec ses villes démolies ou en reconstruction, ses terrains vagues, ses bidonvilles »
« crise de l’image-action: les personnages se trouvaient de moins en moins dans des situations sensori-motrices « motivantes », mais plutôt dans un état de promenade, de balade ou d’errance qui définissait des situations optiques et sonores pures. L’image-action tendait alors à éclater, tandis que les lieux déterminés s’estompaient, laissant monter des espaces quelconques où se développaient les affects modernes de peur, de détachement, mais aussi de fraîcheur, de vitesse extrême et d’attente interminable. »

p170:
« L’école allemande de la peur, notamment avec Fassbinder et Daniel Schmid, élaborait ses extérieurs comme des villes-déserts, ses intérieurs dédoublés dans des miroirs, avec un minimum de repères et une multiplication de points de vue sans raccord. »

p280:
« Ce qui a remplacé l’action ou la situation sensori-motrice, c’est la promenade, la balade et l’aller-retour continuel. La balade avait trouvé en Amérique les conditions formelles et matérielles d’un renouvellement. Elle se fait par nécessité, intérieure ou extérieure, par besoin de fuite. Mais maintenant elle perd l’aspect initiatique qu’elle avait encore dans le voyage allemand (encore dans les films de Wenders), et qu’elle conservait malgré tout dans le voyage beat (« Easy Rider » […]). elle est devenue balade urbaine, et s’est détachée de la structure active et affective qui la soutenait, la dirigeait, lui donnait des directions même vagues. […] C’est en effet le plus clair de la balade moderne, elle se fait dans un espace quelconque, gare de triage, entrepôt désaffecté, tissu dédifférencié de la ville, par opposition à l’action qui se déroulait le plus souvent dans les espaces-temps qualifiés de l’ancien réalisme. »

p281:

« la réalité dispersive et lacunaire, le fourmillement de personnages à interférence faible, leur capacité de devenir principaux et de redevenir secondaires, les évènements qui se posent sur les personnages et qui n’appartiennent pas à ceux qui les subissent ou les provoquent. »
« Ce sont ces images flottantes,ces clichés anonymes, qui circulent dans le monde extérieur, mais aussi qui pénètrent chacun et constituent son monde intérieur, si bien que chacun ne possède en soi que des clichés psychiques par lesquels il pense et il sent, se pense et se sent, étant lui-même un cliché parmi les autres dans le monde qui l’entoure. Clichés physiques, optiques et sonores, et clichés psychiques se nourissent mutuellement. Pour que les gens se supportent, eux-mêmes et le monde, il faut que la misère ait gagné l’intérieur des consciences, et que le dedans soit comme le dehors. »

p282:
« L’idée d’une seule et même misère, intérieure et extérieure, dans le monde et dans la conscience, c’était déjà l’idée du romantisme anglais sous sa forme la plus noire, notamment chez Blake ou Coleridge: les gens n’accepteraient pas l’intolérable si les mêmes « raisons » qui le leur imposaient du dehors ne s’insinuaient en eux pour les faire adhérer du dedans. »

p286:
« Dans la ville en démolition ou en reconstruction, le néo-réalisme fait proliférer les espaces quelconques, cancer urbain, tissu indidéfférencié, terrains vagues, qui s’opposent aux espaces déterminés de l’ancien réalisme. Et ce qui monte à l’horizon, ce qui se profile dans ce monde, ce qui va s’imposer dans un troisième moment, ce n’est même pas la réalité crue, mais sa doublure, le règne des clichés, tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur, dans la tête et le cœur des gens autant que dans l’espace tout entier. »

Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps (Time-Image)

p15:
« Quant à la distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, elle tend aussi à perdre de son importance, à mesure que la situation optique ou la description visuelle remplacent l’action motrice. On tombe en effet dans un principe d’indéterminabilité, d’indiscernabilité: on ne sait plus ce qui est imaginaire ou réel, physique ou mental dans la situation, non pas qu’on les confonde, mais parce qu’on n’a pas à le savoir et qu’il n’y a même plus lieu de le demander. C’est comme si le réel et l’imaginaire couraient l’un derrière l’autre, se réfléchissaient l’un dans l’autre autour d’un point d’indiscernabilité. »
« une description réaliste traditionnelle: c’est celle qui suppose l’indépendance de son objet, et pose donc une discernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire (on peut les confondre, ils n’en restent pas moins distincts en droit). Tout autre est la description néo-réaliste du nouveau roman: comme elle remplace son propre objet, pour une part elle en gomme ou en détruit la réalité qui passe dans l’imaginaire, mais d’autre part elle en fait surgir toute la réalité que l’imaginaire ou le mental créent par la parole et la vision. L’imaginaire et le réel deviennent indiscernables. »

p16:

« Chez Fellini déjà, telle ou telle image est évidemment subjective, mentale, souvenir ou fantasme, mais elle ne s’organise pas en spectacle sans devenir objective, sans passer dans les coulisses, dans « la réalité du spectacle, de ceux qui le font, qui en vivent, qui s’y prennent »: le monde mental d’un personnage se peuple si bien d’autres personnages proliférant qu’il devient inter-mental, et aboutit par aplatissement des perspectives « à une vision neutre, impersonelle (…), notre monde à tous. » »
« Le regard imaginaire fait du réel quelque chose d’imaginaire, en même temps qu’il devient réel à son tour et nous redonne de la réalité. »
« les situations optiques et sonores pures peuvent avoir deux pôles, objectif et subjectif, réel et imaginaire, physique et mental. Mais elles donnent lieu à des opsignes et sonsignes, qui ne cessent de faire communiquer les pôles, et qui, dans un sens ou dans l’autre, assurent les passages et les conversions, tendant vers un point d’indiscernabilité (et non pas de confusion).

P35: conscience-camera
« elle [la caméra] subordonne la description d’un espace à des fonctions de la pensée. Ce n’est plus la simple distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, du réel et de l’imaginaire, c’est au contraire leur indiscernabilité qui va doter la caméra d’un riche ensemble de fonctions, et entraîner une nouvelle conception du cadre et des recadrages. S’accomplira le pressentiment d’Hitchcock: une conscience-caméra qui ne se définirait plus par les mouvements qu’elle est capable de suivre ou d’accomplir, mais par les relations mentales dans lesquelles elle est capable d’entrer; Et elle devient questionnante, répondante, objectante, provocante, théorématisante, hypothétisante, expérimentante. »

p58: « le cinéma dit moderne »
« Des personnages, pris dans des situations optiques et sonores pures, se trouvent condamnés à l’errance ou à la balade. Ce sont de purs voyants, qui n’existent plus que dans l’intervalle de mouvement, et n’ont même pas la consolation du sublime, qui leur ferait rejoindre la matière ou conquérir l’esprit. Ils sont plutôt livrés à quelque chose d’intolérable, qui est leur quotidienneté même. »
« Les images-rêve à leur tour semblent bien avoir deux pôles, qu’on peut distinguer d’après leur production technique. L’un procède par des moyens riches et surchargés, fondus, surimpressions, décadrages, mouvements complexes d’appareil, effets spéciaux, manipulations de laboratoire, allant jusqu’à l’abstrait, tendant à l’abstraction. L’autre au contraire est très sobre, opérant par franches coupures ou montage-cut, procédant seulement à un perpétuel décrochage qui « fait » rêve, mais entre objets demeurant concrets. La technique de l’image renvoie toujours à une métaphysique de l’imagination: c’est comme deux manières de concevoir le passage d’une image à l’autre. A cet égard, les états oniriques sont par rapport au réel un peu comme les états « anormaux » d’une langue par rapport à la langue courante: tantôt surcharge, complexification, sursaturation, tantôt au contraire élimination, ellipse, rupture, coupure, décrochage. »

p94: Image-cristal
« L’image-cristal, ou la description cristalline, a bien deux faces qui ne se confondent pas. C’est que la confusion du réel et de l’imaginaire est une simple erreur de fait, et n’affecte pas leur discernabilité: la confusion se fait seulement « dans la tête » de quelqu’un. Tandis que l’indiscernabilité constitueune illusion objective; elle ne supprime pas la distinction des deux faces, mais la rend inassignable, chaque face prenant le rôle de l’autre dans une relation qu’il faut qualifier de présupposition réciproque, ou de réversibilité. […] L’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, ou du présent et du passé, de l’actuel et du virtuel, ne se produit donc nullement dans la tête ou dans l’esprit, mais est le caractère objectif de certaines images existantes, doubles par nature. »

p135: Bunuel
« une pluralité de mondes simultanés, à une simultanéité de présents dans différents mondes. Ce ne sont pas des points de vue subjectifs (imaginaires) dans un même monde, mais un même événement dans des mondes objectifs différents, tous impliqués dans l’évènement, univers inexplicable. »

p136: L’année dernière à Marienbad
« Le second niveau serait celui du réel et de l’imaginaire: on a remarqué que, pour Resnais, il y a toujours du réel qui subsiste, et notamment des coordonnées spatio-temporelles qui maintiennent leur réalité, quitte à entrer en conflit avec l’imaginaire. C’est ainsi que Resnais […] établit une topographie et une chronologie d’autant plus rigoureuses que ce qui s’y passe est imaginaire ou mental. Tandis que chez Robbe-Grillet, tout se passe « dans la tête » des personnages, ou, mieux, du spectateur lui-même. »
« La dissolution de l’image-action, et l’indiscernabilité qui s’ensuit, se feraient tantôt au profit d’une « architecture du temps » ([Resnais]), tantôt au profit d’un « présent perpétuel » coupé de sa temporalité, c’est à dire d’une structure privée de temps ([Robbe-Grillet]). »
« C’est que Resnais conçoit « L’année dernière », comme ses autres films, sous la forme de nappes ou régions de passé, tandis que Robbe-Grillet voit le temps sous la forme de pointes de présent. »
« De toute façon, les deux auteurs ne sont plus dans le domaine du réel et de l’imaginaire, mais dans le temps, nous le verrons, dans le domaine encore plus redoutable du vrai et du faux. Certes, le réel et l’imaginaire continuent leur circuit, mais seulement comme la base d’une plus haute figure. Ce n’est plus, ou ce n’est plus seulement le devenir indiscernable d’images distinctes, ce sont des alternatives indécidables entre des cercles de passé, des différences inextricables entre des pointes de présent. »
p157:
« Il y a probabilisme statistique chez Resnais, très différent de l’indéterminisme de type « quantique » chez Robbe-Grillet. »
p159:
« Resnais conçoit le cinéma non comme un instrument de représentation de la réalité, mais comme le meilleur moyen pour approcher le fonctionnement psychique. »
p161:
« la distinction bergsonienne entre le « souvenir pur », toujours virtuel, et « l’image-souvenir », qui ne fait que l’actualiser par rapport au présent. […] le souvenir pur ne doit surtout pas être confondu avec l’image-souvenir qui en découle, mais se tient comme un « magnétiseur » derrière les hallucinations qu’il suggère. »

p169:
« espaces quantiques chez Robbe-Grillet, espaces probabilitaires et topologiques chez Resnais, espaces cristallisés chez Herzog et Tarkovsky »
« les espaces cristallisés, quand les paysages deviennent hallucinatoires dans un milieu qui ne retient plus que des germes cristallins et des matières cristallisables. »

p170:
« si l’on considère l’histoire de la pensée, on constate que le temps a toujours été la mise en crise de la notion de vérité. »

p171: Puissance du Faux
« présents incompossibles »
« passés non-nécessairement vrais »
« la narration cesse d’être véridique, c’est à dire de prétendre au vrai, pour se faire essentiellement falsifiante. Ce n’est pas du « chacun sa vérité », une variabilité concernant le contenu. C’est une puissance du faux qui remplace et détrône la forme du vrai, parce qu’elle pose la simultanéité de présents incompossibles, ou la coexistence de passés non-nécessairement vrais. La description cristalline atteignait déjà à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, mais la narration falsifiante qui lui correspond fait un pas de plus, et pose au présent des différences inexplicables, au passé des alternatives indécidables entre le vrai et le faux. L’homme véridique meurt, tout modèle de vérité s’écroule, au profit de la nouvelle narration. Nous n’avons pas parlé de l’auteur essentiel à cet égard: c’est Nietzsche, qui, sous le nom de « volonté de puissance », substitue la puissance du faux à la forme du vrai, et résout la crise de la vérité, veut la régler une fois pour toutes, mais, à l’opposé de Leibniz, au profit du faux et de sa puissance artiste, créatrice… »

p174:
« La narration véridique se développe organiquement, suivant des connexions légales dans l’espace et des rapports chronologiques dans le temps […] la narration implique une enquête ou des témoignages qui la rapportent au vrai […] c’est toujours à un système du jugement que la narration se rapporte. […] La narration falsifiante, au contraire, échappe à ce système, elle brise le système du jugement, parce que la puissance du faux (non pas l’erreur ou le doute) affecte l’enquêteur et le témoin tout autant que le présumé coupable. […] Les évènements eux-m^mes ne cessent de changer avec les rapports de temps das lesquels ils entrent, etles termes, avec leurs connexions. La narration ne cesse de se modifier toute entière, à chacun de ses épisodes, non pas d’après des variations subjectives, mais suivant des lieux déconnectés et des moments dechronologisés. Il y a une raison profonde de cette nouvelle situation: contrairement à la forme du vrai qui est unifianteet tend à l’identification d’un personnage (sa découverte ou simplement sa cohérence), la puissance du faux n’est pas séparable d’une irréductible multiplicité. « Je est un autre » a remplacé Moi = Moi. »

p177:
« S’il y a unité du nouveau cinéma allemand, Wenders, Fassbinder, Schmid, Schroeter ou Schlöndorff, elle est là aussi, comme résultat de la guerre, dans le lien toujours variable entre ces éléments: les espaces réduits à leurs propres descriptions (villes-déserts ou lieux qui ne cessent de se détruire); les présentations directes d’un temps lourd, inutile et inévocable, qui hantent les personnages; et, d’un pôle à l’autre, les puissances du faux qui tissent une narration, pour autant qu’elles s’effectuent dans de « faux mouvements ». La passion allemande est devenue la peur, mais la peur est aussi bien la dernière raison de l’homme, sa noblesse annonçant quelque chose de nouveau, la création qui sort de la peur comme passion noble. »

p192:
« ce que sont l’objet et le sujet dans les conditions de cinéma. Par convention, on appelle objectif ce que « voit » la caméra, et subjectif ce que voit le personnage. »
« le récit [traditionnel/véridique] est le développement des deux sortes d’images, objectives et subjectives, leur rapport complexe qui peut aller jusqu’à l’antagonisme, mais qui doit se résoudre dans une identité du type Moi = Moi: identité du personnage vu et qui voit, mais aussi bien identité du cinéaste-caméra, qui voit le personnage et ce que le personnage voit. […] C’est la distinction de l’objectif et du subjectif, mais aussi bien leur identification, qui se trouvent mises en question dans un autre mode de récit. »

p194: Pasolini « « cinéma de poésie » par opposition au cinéma dit de prose »
« Dans le cinéma de poésie, la distinction s’évanouissait entre ce que voyait subjectivement le personnage et ce que voyait objectivement la caméra, non pas au profit de l’un ou de l’autre, mais parce que la caméra prenait une présence subjective, acquérait une vision intérieure, qui entrait dans un rapport de simulation (« mimesis »)avec la manière de voir du personnage. […] S’établissait une contamination des deux sortes d’images, telle que les visions insolites de la caméra (l’alternance de différents objectifs, le zoom, les angles extraordinaires, les mouvements anormaux, les arrêts…) exprimaient les visions singulières du personnage, et que celles-ci s’exprimaient dans celles-là, mais en portant l’ensemble à la puissance du faux. »

p195:
« Ce que Nietzsche avait montré: que l’idéal du vrai était la plus profonde fiction, au coeur du réel, le cinéma ne l’avait pas encore trouvé. »

p208:
« Même quand le cinéma européen se contente du rêve, du fantasme ou de la rêverie, il a pour ambition de porter à la conscience les mécanismes inconscients de la pensée. »

p210:
« S’élabore un circuit qui comprend à la fois l’auteur, le film et le spectateur. Le circuit complet comprend donc le choc sensoriel qui nous élève des images à la pensée consciente, puis la pensée par figures qui nous ramène aux images et nous redonne un choc affectif. Faire coexister les deux, joindre le plus haut degré de conscience au niveau le plus profond d’inconscient: l’automate dialectique. »

p215: Antonin Artaud
« Artaud croit davantage en une adéquation entre le cinéma et l’écriture automatique, à condition de comprendre que l’écriture automatique n’est pas du tout une absence de composition, mais un contrôle supérieur unissant la pensée critique et consciente à l’inconscient de la pensée: l’automate spirituel. »
« Artaud cessera de croire au cinéma quand il estimera que le cinéma passe à côté, et ne peut faire que de l’abstrait, du figuratif ou du rêve. Mais il croit au cinéma tant qu’il estime que le cinéma est apte essentiellement à révéler cette impuissance à penser au cœur de la pensée. »
« Ce n’est plus la pensée qui se confronte au refoulement, à l’inconscient, au rêve, à la sexualité ou à la mort, comme dans l’expressionnisme (et aussi dans le surréalisme), ce sont toutes ces déterminations qui se confrontent à la pensée comme plus haut « problème », ou qui entrent en rapport avec l’indéterminable, l’inévocable. »
« « rejoindre le cinéma avec la réalité intime du cerveau », mais cette réalité intime n’est pas le Tout, c’est au contraire une fissure, une fêlure. Tant qu’il croit au cinéma, il le crédite, non pasde pouvoir faire penser le tout, mais au contraire d’une « force dissociatrice » qui introduirait une « figure de néant », un « trou dans les apparences ». »

p266:
« [Antonioni] explique que notre connaissance n’hésite pas à se renouveler, à affronter de grandes mutations, tandis que notre morale et nos sentiments restent prisonniers de valeurs inadaptées, de mythes auxquels plus personne ne croit, et ne trouvent pour se libérer que de pauvres expédients, cyniques, érotiques ou névrotiques. Antonioni ne critique pas le monde moderne aux possibilités duquel in « croit » profondément: il critique dans le monde la coexistence d’un cerveau moderne et d’un corps fatigué, usé, névrosé. »
« Le monde attend ses habitants, qui sont encore perdus dans la névrose. »

p268: Resnais and memory
« Cette membrane qui rend le dehors et le dedans présents l’un à l’autre s’appelle Mémoire. […] Car la mémoire n’est certes plus la faculté d’avoir des souvenirs: elle est la membrane qui, sur les modes les plus divers (continuité, mais aussi discontinuité, enveloppement, etc.), fait correspondre les nappes de passé et les couches de réalité, les une émanant d’un dedans toujours déjà là, les autres advenant d’un dehors toujours à venir, toutes deux rongeant le présent qui n’est plus que leur rencontre. »

p276:
« Nous ne croyons plus à un tout comme intériorité de la pensée, même ouvert, nous croyons à une force du dehors qui se creuse, nous happe et attire le dedans. Nous ne croyons plus à une association des images, même franchissant des vides, nous croyons à des coupures qui prennent une valeur absolue et se subordonnent toute association. Ce n’est pas l’abstraction, ce sont ces deux aspects qui définissent le nouveau cinéma « intellectuel ». […] Le cerveau coupe ou fait fuir toutes les associations intérieures, il appelle un dehors au delà de tout monde extérieur. […] C’est un cinéma d’inspiration néo-psychanalytique: donnez-moi un lapsus, un acte manqué, et je reconstruitai le cerveau. C’est une structure topologique du dehors et du dedans, et c’est un caractère fortuit à chaque stade des enchaînements ou médiations, qui définit la nouvelle image cérébrale. »

p278: « cinéma moderne »
« un renversement tel que l’image est désenchaînée, et que la coupure, ou l’interstice entre deux séries d’images, ne fait plus partie ni de l’une ni de l’autre des séries: c’est l’équivalent d’une coupure irrationnelle, qui détermine les rapports non-commensurables entre images. […] Au lieu d’une image après l’autre, il y a une image plus une autre, et chaque plan est décadré par rapport au cadrage du plan suivant. »

p356: Conclusion of the book!!!
« Ce qui met en question ce cinéma d’action après la guerre, c’est la rupture même du schéma sensori-moteur: la montée de situations auxquelles on ne peut plus réagir, de milieux avec lesquels il n’y a plus que des relations aléatoires, d’espaces quelconques, vides ou déconnectés qui remplacent les étendues qualifiées. Voilà que les situations ne se prolongent plus en action ou réaction, conformément aux exigences de l’image-mouvement. Ce sont de pures situations optiques et sonores, dans lesquelles le personnage ne sait comment répondre, des espaces désaffectés dans lesquels il cesse d’éprouver et d’agir, pour entrer en fuite, en balade, en va-et-vient, vaguement indifférent à ce qui lui arrive, indécis sur ce qu’il faut faire. Mais il a gagné en voaynce ce qu’il a perdu en action ou réaction: il VOIT, si bien que le problème du spectateur devient « qu’est-ce qu’il y a à voir dans l’image? » (et non plus « qu’est ce qu’on va voir dans l’image suivante ? »). »

p357: Different types of time-images:

1)opsignes (vision-images), sonsignes (sound-images): purely audio visual situations, the very first types of time-images (described in previous quote)

2)image-rêve/onirosigne (dream-image) and image-souvenir/mnémosigne (memory-image)

3)image-cristal/hyalosigne (cristal-image): « la situation d’une image actuelle et de sa propre image virtuelle, si bien qu’il n’y a plus d’enchaînement du réel et de l’imaginaire mais indiscernabilité des deux dans un perpétuel échange. »« en s’élevant à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, les signes de cristal dépassent toute psychologie du souvenir et du rêve, autant que toute physique de l’action. » « C’est le temps en personne qui surgit dans le cristal, et que ne cesse de recommencer son dédoublement, sans aboutissement, puisque l’échange indiscernable est toujours reconduit et reproduit. L’image temps directe ou la forme transcendantale du temps, c’est ce qu’on voit dans le cristal; aussi bien les hyalosignes, les signes cristallins, doivent-ils être dits miroirs ou germes du temps. »

4)chronosignes (time-image): « les rapports intérieurs de temps sous forme topologique ou quantique » « Nous ne sommes plus dans une distinction indiscernable du réel et de l’imaginaire, qui caractérisait l’image-cristal, mais dans des alternatives indécidables entre nappes de passé, ou des différences « inexplicables » entre pointes de présent, qui concernent maintenant l’image-temps directe. Ce qui est en jeu, ce n’est plus le réel et l’imaginaire, mais le vrai et le faux. Et de même que le réel et l’imaginaire devenaient indiscernablesdans des conditions très précises de l’image, le vrai et le faux deviennent maintenant indécidables ou inextricables: l’impossible procède du possible, et la passé n’est pas nécessairement vrai. C’est une nouvelle logique qu’il faut inventer, non moins que tout à l’heure une nouvelle psychologie. »

5)génésignes: images à la puissance du faux (images to the power of false): « Tantôt […] ce sont les personnages qui forment les séries comme autant de degrés d’une « volonté de puissance » par laquelle le monde devient une fable. Tantôt c’est un personnage qui franchit lui-même la limite, et qui devient un autre, sous un acte de fabulation. »

p361: Consequences of time-image on framing and editing:
« L’image dite classique devait être considérée suivant deux axes. Ces deux axes étaient les coordonnées du cerveau: d’une part les images s’enchaînaient ou se prolongeaient, suivant des lois d’association, de contiguïté, de ressemblance, de contraste ou d’opposition; d’autre part les images associées s’intériorisaient dans un tout comme concept (intégration), qui ne cessait à son tour de s’extérioriser dans des images associables ou prolongeables (différenciation). […]C’était le double aspect de l’image-mouvement,définissant le hors-champ: d’une part elle communiquait avec u extérieur, d’autre part elle exprimait un tout qui change. Le mouvement dans son prolongement était la donnée immédiate, et le tout qui change, c’est à dire le temps, était la représentation indirect ou médiate. Mais il ne cessait d’y avoir circulation des deux, intériorisation dans le tout, extériorisation dans l’image, cercle ou spirale qui constituait pour le cinéma, non moins que pour la philosophie, le modèle du Vrai comme totalisation. »

image moderne:
« les images ne s’enchaînent plus par coupures rationnelles, mais se ré-enchaînent sur coupures irrationnelles. […] Il n’y a plus lieu de parler d’un prolongement réel ou possible capable de constituer un monde extérieur: nous avons cessé d’y croire, et l’image est coupée du monde extérieur. Mais l’intériorisation ou l’intégration dans un tout comme conscience de soi n’a pas moins disparu. […] La pensée, comme puissance qui n’a pas toujours existé, naît d’un dehors plus lointain que tout monde extérieur, et, comme puissance qui n’existe pas encore, s’affronte à un dedans, un impensable ou un impensé plus profond que tout monde intérieur. En second lieu, il n’y a donc plus mouvement d’intériorisation ni d’extériorisation, intégration ni différenciation, mais affrontement d’un dehors et d’un dedans indépendamment de la distance, cette pensée hors d’elle-même et cet impensé dans la pensée.»

p363: Consequences on sound design:
« Il faut que le sonore devienne lui même image au lieu d’être une composante de l’image visuelle; il faut donc la création d’un cadrage sonore, tel que la coupure passe entre les deux cadrages, sonore et visuel; dès lors, même si le hors-champ subsiste en fait, il faut qu’il perde toute puissance de droit, puisque l’image visuelle cesse de se prolonger au delà de son propre cadre, pour entrer dans un rapport spécifique avec l’image sonore elle même cadrée (c’est l’interstice entre les deux cadrages qui remplace le hors-champ). »

p364:
« le cinéma moderne a tué le flash-back, autant que la voix off et le hors champ. »

Critical essays on David Lynch’s movies

This post reviews of lots of critical essays on David Lynch’s movies. David Lynch is one my key influences, I love the look and ambiguous atmosphere of his films, and share his concern with producing work that does not come with a ready-made explanation, that requires the audience to come up with their own explanation.

WARNING !!! THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS TO Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive/Inland Empire/Blue Velvet/TwinPeaks !!!

The Heart of The Cavern, Sean French, 1987

Sean French on the films of David Lynch
Sight and Sound, Spring 1987

‘To me a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something that’s unknown, it has a pull to it. For instance, if you were in a room and there was a doorway open and stairs going down and the light just fell away, you didn’t even see the bottom, where the stairs ended; you’d be very much tempted to go down there.’ David Lynch, on Blue Velvet

Denis Diderot about 18th century novelist Samuel: ‘He carries the torch right into the heart of the cavern; he teaches us to recognise the subtle, twisted motives which disguise themselves with motives that are more respectable. He blows away the gentle spirit who appears at the cavern entrance and reveals the dreadful monster behind.’

Good to know for later: “scripts usually work out at about a page per minute”

“David Lynch has adapted Shelley’s injunction to make the familiar unfamiliar into a vision that makes the familiar weird”

The Lynch Film, Rebecca Paiva,1997

“Bizarre camera angles are a favorite of Lynch. He will position the camera in a far, overhead corner of the room; shoot the scene from under a table; or even through a crystal ball (as in Wild at Heart.)”

“Fadeouts and slow motion are also prevalent; they both contribute to the abstract, under-the-surface mood Lynch strives for […]There are many more slow motion sequences, too numerous to mention, that create similar moods of dreamlike confusion, horror, or primal drives. “

“Lighting techniques are also very similar in Lynch’s films; he has an affinity for dark vs. light settings. Sometimes, this can resemble film noir techniques (as in Blue Velvet and Lost Highway), or it can suggest an unyielding world of darkness and confusion (Eraserhead, Industrial Symphony #1, Wild at Heart), or it can even hint at a dark underbelly of an idyllic setting (Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, Blue Velvet.) But whatever the metaphor behind the lights, a Lynch buff quickly gets accustomed to oddly-shaped shadows, dark rooms, slats of sunshine, and strobe lights. “

Useless for essay but cool to know: “In the film Fire Walk With Me, the letters “IS 432” appear on a license plate; this is a reference to Isaiah 43:2, which reads:

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
And through the rivers,
They shall not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire,
You shall not be burned,
Nor shall the flame scorch you.”
“In Hollywood … they’re making … stories that are understood by people … and they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way, that you can’t put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say “Did you understand that?” but they come out with a strange fantastic feeling … “(Lynch)

MORE DEEPLY LOST: LOST HIGHWAY AND THE TRADITION OF ALIENATION IN FILM NOIR

An examination of the contemporary noir phenomenon and its wider cultural significance
Simon McKenzie, 2003

“Let’s say you don’t want to be yourself anymore. Something happens to you, and you just show up in Seattle, living under the name Joe Smith, with a whole different reality. It means that you’re trying to escape something, and that’s basically what Fred Madison does. He gets into a fugue state, which in this case means that he can’t go anywhere – he’s in a prison cell, so it’s happening internally, within his own mind. But things don’t work out any better in the fugue state than they do in real life. He can’t control the woman any more than he could in real life. You might say this is an explanation for what happens. However, this is not a complete explanation for the film. Things happen in this film that are not – and should not be – easily explained.”
– (Gifford B 1997a in Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997)

“What is happening to Fred seems closely related to the psychological dynamics Freud (cited by Cowie 1993, p123) describes in the behaviour and suffering of both psychotics and neurotics:

“whereas the new, imaginary external world of psychosis attempts to put itself in the place of external reality that of neurosis, on the contrary, is apt, like the play of children, to attach itself to a piece of reality – a different piece from the one against which it has to defend itself”
-(Freud S, cited in Cowie 1993, p 123)
Cowie E 1993, ‘Film Noir and Women’, in Copjek, J., (ed), Shades of Noir: a reader, Verso, London.

The universe of Lost Highway can be seen to exist as a space whereby this psychosis and neurosis (both are present) play themselves out.”

“The repressed will return to haunt Fred in a number of ways (like videotape of the murder being dropped off on his doorstep, to give an example).”

“It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘This is what it means.’ When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.”
– (Lynch 1997, in Cinefantastique, April 1997)

“Barry may have his idea of what the film means, and I may have my idea, and they may be two different things. The beauty of an abstract film is it’s open to interpretation.”
– Lynch in Cinefantastique, April 1997

As a final note on narrative structure, it is useful to consider Barry Gifford’s allusion to his Lost Highway as a moebius strip in Film Threat magazine:

“We realized we didn’t want to make something that was linear, and that’s why the Moebius strip [as the film’s structure]. A Moebius strip is a long strip of paper curved initially into a circle, but with one end flipped over. The strip now has only one side that flips both inside and outside the shape. It made it easier to explain things to ourselves and keeping it straightforward. The story folds back underneath itself and continues.”
–(Gifford 1997b, interviewed in Film Threat, 1997)

Moebius strip image comes from Lacan:

“Lacan’s use of the moebius strip as a way to illustrate his conceptualization of the return of the repressed. This geometric form can be described as a two sided strip (say of paper) that is given one half twist along its length and then sutured together to create a loop which appears to be two sided on first examination but proves to now only have one (Herzogenrath, 1997 pp5-6). If Fred has repressed the murder of his wife, and gone into a fugue state creating alternate realities, he is doomed to circle around on a moebius strip of illusory reality.”
Herzogenrath B 1999, “On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology”, in Other Voices the (e)journal of Cultural Criticism, v.1, n.3 (January 1999), University of Pennsylvania, web site, viewed 08 August 1999,

Naremore cites an exchange between Andre Bazin and Roger Leenhardt where it is described as film noir’s “vocation” to reverse the conventional norms which creates a “specific tension which results from the disruption of order and “the disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts”” (Naremore, 1995, p19).
Naremore J 1995, ‘American Film Noir: The History of an Idea’, Film Quarterly, 49(2), Berkely, CA.

Borde and Chaumerton show their influence here, having stated in their seminal Panorama du Film Noir Americain that the removal of these psychological reference holds the key to the aim of film noir, again to create “a specific alienation.” (Borde & Chaumerton 1955, p25).
Borde R & Chaumeton E 1955, ‘Towards a definition of film noir’, trans. A. Silver in Silver A & Ursini J (eds), 1996, Film noir reader, Limelight Editions, New York.

Kaplan’s description of film noir as something that offers the space for the playing out of identity struggles (Kaplan, p.9).

“The main difference between Lost Highway and Double Indemnity, Out of The Past, The Killers is not due to any lack in noir sensibility, nor a lack of desire on behalf of the film-maker to create this sensibility but in the lack of desire in the audience. I am here talking of popularity of 1940s noir versus the relative obscurity those rare examples of a true film noir sensibility remain locked in now. A personal rip in the fabric of identity does not generate a widespread yearning to share what Sharrett refers to as a desire to share in fears for the future (Sharrett, 1998, p4). Pre-millennium angst did not disrupt all segments of the community, World War II did. Add to this the fact that the film-going public also has greater choice, and if ticket sales for Pulp Fiction (1994) are anything to go by, they prefer to spend their dollars on fare that speaks to their post modern malaise not by reminding them of their alienation but glossing over it and enjoying the surprises it may bring.”

I really like this conclusion. Most people today are scared of their own social alienation, and find it something shameful that should be repressed. I wonder whether this is due to post 1989, where there is only one social model left, the “end of history”. Therefore individuals today feel that their own alienation is their own fault, some kind of mental illness that must be hidden in order to survive in the outside world. Because the outside world today is perceived as omnipotent and unchangeable, contrary to the 40’s/50’s where alternatives, however flawed, were still available, the individual today considers that he is the one that needs to adapt to the outside world.

On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology

Bernd Herzogenrath, 1999
Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)

“the beauty of a film that is more abstract is everybody has a different take. … When you are spoon-fed a film, people instantly know what it is … I love things that leave room to dream …”

Christian Metz, in The Imaginary Signifier (9):
in the cinema, the spectator and the spectacle do not share the same space, since not only the diegetic reality of film is an illusion, “the unfolding itself is fictive: the actor, the ‘décor,’ the words one hears are all absent, everything is recorded” (The Imaginary Signifier 43). Thus, “[t]he unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree … it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present” (The Imaginary Signifier 45).
Christian Metz. The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. C. Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster and A Guzzetti. Bloomington, 1982. Subsequently quoted as (The Imaginary Signifier).

“With Lacan, the term suture denotes the “conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic.” (14) With respect to the Lacanian registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, suture thus refers to the stitching of the representational registers, with the seam closing off the real from reality, closing off the unconscious from conscious discourse. Suture thus prevents the subject from losing its status as a subject, prevents it from falling into the void of the real, from falling into psychosis. Thus, the subject’s identification with the movie fundamentally relies on this “conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic” levels within the cinematic discourse itself.”
14 Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York, London, 1978, 118. Subsequently quoted as (Fundamental Concepts).

“Fred meets the Mystery Man for the first time. In fact, the Mystery Man – simultaneously being inside and outside – can be read at the place where these (and in fact: all) opposites meet, he is – so to speak – the twist in the Moebius strip. In Lacan’s use of the Moebius Strip, the place denoting the suture of the imaginary and symbolic in a way “hides” the primordial cut that instigated this topological figure in the first place, the cut that is the unconscious (or, in Lacanian terminology: the real). It is by suturing off the real that reality for the subject remains a coherent illusion, that prevents the subject from falling prey to the real, that is, falling into psychosis. It is no wonder, then, that the Mystery Man always appears when a change in personality is close. “

The movie has been dubbed by Lynch and Gifford (e.g., in the published version of the screenplay) as “A 21st Century Noir Horror Film. A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises. A world where time is dangerously out of control. A terrifying ride down the lost highway.”

Lost Highway Sound design:
The first part of Lost Highway presents a marital scenario of uncertainty, anxiety, and unspoken suspicion. It takes place in a house which more resembles a fortress than a cosy home. From the film’s beginning, we have the feeling of tension and fear: home, the family unit is the place of trouble and terror. This feeling is emphasized by Lynch’s masterly employment of the soundtrack. For Lynch, “[h]alf of [a] film is picture … the other half is sound. They’ve got to work together” (Press Kit). So, in Lynch’s work, the soundtrack is a most important factor to enhance the mood of a scene. For example, during the dialogues between Fred and Renee there is no resonance to their voices. It is as if the works are spoken in a sound-absorbing environment, the whole spectrum of overtones, all those features that make a human voice seem alive, seems to have been cut. In its dryness, the voices of Renee and Fred almost seem to enact an absence of sound, or better – an absence of room, of the acoustics of space: it’s as if they are living in a recording studio covered in acoustic tile.

“the general feeling of being observed, a feeling that takes shape in the fact that they live close to the “observatory.” The outside literally starts to intrude the inside, and the threat is emphasized by the deep droning sounds (in a cinema with a good sound system, the spectators actually can feel this threat as a uncomfortable feeling in their stomachs …”

Confusing terminology of schizophrenia/multiple personalities and such:
“It is the phrase parallel identity crises that interests me the most here. It is usually read in terms of ‘double identity,’ mostly using the term schizophrenia. There has been quite some misunderstanding about this very term. In 1911, the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler replaced Kraepelin’s term for a group of psychoses, dementia praecox, with the term schizophrenia. Dementia praecox meant a psychosis of early onset, which Bleuler wanted to capture with the term schizophrenia, meaning literally “split mind,” since he thought the splitting of psychic functions to be the structuring element of these psychoses. Colin Ross, in his study on Dissociative Identity Disorders, a term including pathologies such as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and the Borderline Syndrome, states that, “dementia praecox is actually a better name for this group of disorders [described by Kraeplin] than schizophrenia, while schizophrenia is a better name for [Dissociative Identity Disorder] than multiple persona disorder.” (31) Hence the popular notion of schizophrenia as “split personality,” a misconception that does not account for the fact that schizophrenia is an organic disorder of the brain, and not actually a personality disorder.”

Apart from the Mystery Man, scenes that link the 2 sides of the Moebius strip:
“These two scenes of Fred in the dark hallway (Renee calling “Fred!”) and Pete in front of his parents’ house (Sheila calling “Pete!”), viewed in parallel, function like a kind of worm-hole which traverses the different event-levels of the movie”
+ the transformation of Fred into Pete in the prison cell

“the unit publicist on the picture, happened to find it in some medical journal or something. She showed it to us, and it was like Lost Highway. Not literally, but an interior thing can happen that’s very similar. A certain mental disturbance. But it sounds like such a beautiful thing – ‘psychogenic fugue.’ It has music and it has a certain force and dreamlike quality I think it’s beautiful, even if it didn’t mean anything.” (Lynch on Lynch 239)

Image of the Highway for Lacan:
“In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan explores the factors that trigger off a psychosis. And again, he takes recourse to the metaphor of the road. In a chapter appropriately named “The highway and the signifier ‘being a father,'” he writes:

a succession of minor roads and a highway are not at all the same thing. … The highway isn’t something that extends from one road to another, it’s a dimension spread out in space, the presencing of an original reality. If I take the highway as an example, it’s because … it’s a path of communication. … the highway is an undeniable signifier in human experience. (34)
Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-56. Transl. by R. Grigg. New York, 1993, 290-1. Subsequently quoted as (Seminar III).

What Lacan is alluding here to is his notion of the point de capiton, the quilting point, which is that point which makes sure that some temporary notion of meaning can be created in language. […]So a point de capiton is a place where signified and signifier are literally stitched together – this is suture in the register of the symbolic. Like a highway with respect to a system of smaller streets, the quilting point holds that system of discourse together, and a minimal number of these points are “necessary for a human being to be called normal, and which, when they are not established, or when they give way, make a psychotic” (Seminar III 268-9)”

Lacanian interpretation of Fred turning into Pete:
Fred Madison tries to escape the threat of castration, but he experiences a “return of the repressed” in the real instead of in the symbolic, in his hallucinations (that is, in his second identity as Pete), because he does not accept the name of the father, the agency that might disturb his symbiotic relationship with Renee and/or Alice: Dick Laurent is dead! So, the “Highway” of the title is exactly this quilting point, this suture, that would be necessary for the subject to be inscribed into “reality,” into a state of “normality.” Once this point is lost, once this seam is undone, the subject falls prey to the real, becomes psychotic.”

Lacan and drone sound in sound design:
“With respect to the delusional aspects of psychosis, Lacan comments on “this buzzing that people who are hallucinating so often depict … this continuous murmur … is nothing other than the infinity of these minor paths” (Seminar III 294), these minor paths that have lost their central highway. What is the deep droning sound underlying most of the movie but this “continuous murmur?””

The policeman investigating the videotapes asks Fred if he makes video/photographs himself and he says no and explains why;
“I like to remember things my own way. … How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

“Seen in this light, the videos might represent the truth “the way it happened,” that is: the repressed truth of Fred”

Definition of “psychogenic fugue:
“involves a sudden, unexpected travel away from one’s home or customary place of work, with an inability to recall the past, that occurs in the absence of an organic mental disorder … There is often the assumption of a new identity. … Typically, individuals in a fugue state have no memory of their primary identity. When they recover their primary identity, they often have a reciprocal amnesia for the events of the fugue state. (39) “
Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Persona Disorder. New York, 1989. 13-4. Subsequently quoted as (Putnam).

Fred’s murder of his wife Renee is referred throughout the film by the euphemism “that night”.

The article states that multiple personality disorder (MPD) is almost exclusively American, and suggests links to playing social roles for success, the Hollywood system, the culture of sitcom, zapping and characterisation of typical consumer profiles. It is unclear how much of this is theoretical hypothesis from media studies, and how is from actual psychological surveys … Also, creating a second personality to escape a traumatic event is linked to USA ideals of limitless possibilities/ myth of the endless road.

“In the recent remake of the thriller Nightwatch, now called Freeze, the police inspector turned serial-killer, played by Nick Nolte, philosophizes: “Explanations are just fictions to make us feel safe. Otherwise, we would have to admit the unexplained, and that would leave us prey to the chaos around us. Which is exactly what it is.””

Lost in Darkness and Confusion: Lost Highway, Lacan, and film noir

Thomas Caldwell, 1997
Originally appeared Apocalypse Whenever (The University of Melbourne, 1997) and was later published in Metro Magazine, No. 118, 1999

Lacan’s 3 orders (however the exact identification in LH seems dubious to me):
“To understand Fred’s condition, and the complex non-lineal narrative of Lost Highway, Lynch’s film can be de-coded by using the psychoanalytic methods developed by Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s mirror stage theory developed the idea of three distinct but overlapping orders of human identity – the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. They influence each other and work together simultaneously to give most individuals a stable relationship with reality. However Fred Madison has come unstuck and the three orders have become quite distinctly separate, leading to the creation of three versions of the same story with Fred represented by three different persona. The start of the film features Fred in the symbolic order, the middle part of the film has Fred transformed into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) during the imaginary order, and the final part of the film has Fred possessed by the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), representing the real order.”

“Lacan’s notion of the three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real are a development of his mirror phase theory. None of the three orders are necessarily more true than the other, but they need to be properly aligned in order for the individual to be present in the stable human world (Bowie 1991: 111-112). The imaginary is the order of mirror-images. It is the dimension of experience where the individual seeks to dissolve their otherness by becoming their counterpart. Through the imaginary, the individual repeats their relationships with the external world of people and things, to desperately create an imaginary ideal self, what Freud called the ego. The imaginary links inner and outer mental acts, having the effect of resisting the development of the self (Bowie 1991: 92). The middle section of Lost Highway exists in the imaginary order, where Fred relives his life through the ideal identity of Pete Dayton.
The symbolic order is where the subject, distinct from the ego, comes into being. The symbolic exists in the realm of language, the unconscious and an otherness that remains other. Their is no concrete existence in the symbolic order, since it is constantly moving and gives meaning that is inter-subjective and social. The symbolic order does not allow the subject to keep to themselves since everything depends on the subject finding meaning in what is around them (Bowie 1991: 92-93). The first part of Lost Highway takes place with Fred still in the symbolic order, since he appears to interpret the world around him with more cohesion than later in the film.
The order of the real is a constant threat during both the symbolic and imaginary sections of Lost Highway and comes into full effect during the final section of the film when Pete has transformed back to Fred, but now aligned with the Mystery Man. The real lies outside the symbolic process and can be found in the mental and material world. The real is that which cannot fall into the signifying dimension (Bowie 1991: 94). The real presents itself as that which does not cohere to the symbolic order. It manifests in the form of the trauma and determines all that follows despite appearing to be accidental (Lacan1977b: 55). The real is what seems impossible to the individual. The real cannot be coded and hence fall in the symbolic, and therefore it cannot be mirrored to fall into the imaginary.
Lacan, Jacques, 1977, “Tuche And Automaton” The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psycho-Analysis, The Hogarth Press, London, pp53-64

[…]Although the symbolic has priority over the imaginary, the imaginary does aid the symbolic in its process of understanding the external world (Bowie 1991: 99). However in Fred’s case the imaginary has taken over the real to such a dangerous extent that he imagines himself to literally be another person. This collapse of identity is due to the intrusion of the real. In the real, “the network of signifiers, that our being exists in, is not all that there is, and the rest of what is may chance to break in upon us at any moment” (Bowie 1991: 103).
Bowie, Malcolm, 1991, “Symbolic, Imaginary, Real …and True”, Lacan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp88-121
[…]The real in Lost Highway is represented by the Mystery Man who is an “essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence“(Lacan 1988: 164). When Pete is making love to Alice and she says to him “You’ll never have me”, the imaginary world of him possessing her and Fred is thrust back into the symbolic. The imaginary has been torn away, exposing Fred in his isolation to the rest of the world, exposed the world as something “originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded” (Lacan 1988: 167). Fred is left in the real order that falls outside of the imaginary, but cannot be labelled or nominated either and therefore falls outside the symbolic order.
The Mystery Man represents the real because he is the violence and inspiration for the murders that Fred will commit.”

Irony: “The things that Fred suspected Renee of are actually done by Alice.”
“In the scene preceding the discovery of her [Rene’s] death, Fred disappears into the darkness of their house, but emerges as two shadows that move towards her bedroom, one shadow belonging to Fred, the other belonging to the Mystery Man as the embodiment of Fred’s violence.”

Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Alanna Thain, 2004

The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. According to [Henri] Bergson, paramnesia (the illusion of déjà vu or already having been there) simply makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a
recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor. .Our actual existence, then whilst it is unrolled in time,
duplicates itself alongside a virtual existence, a mirror image.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 79

Hitchcock had begun the inversion of this point of view by including the viewer in the film. But it is now that the identification is actually inverted: the character has
become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear
what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3

In the Madison home, the space is unremarkable, rooms are quite barren, there is no obvious visual sense of things being hidden or concealed, but the very familiarity and exposure itself becomes uncanny through compression and repetition. The spaces
are all decorated in earth tones, and are shot in such a way that they are overly intimate.hallways seem to lead nowhere, entrances are compressed into the space, the geography of the house is uncertain, the lack of doors makes it all the more claustrophobic. Hallways are treated as either dead spaces, lit so that they are merely black gaps between rooms, with no sense of transition, or singular spaces that are unconnected from the rest of the house.

Chris Rodley describes Patricia Arquette.s understanding of the film:
Arquette.s own rationale for Lost Highway goes something like this: a man murders his wife because he thinks she.s being unfaithful. He can.t deal with the consequences of his actions and has a kind of breakdown. In this breakdown he tries to imagine a
better life for himself, but he.s so fucked up that even this imaginary life goes wrong. The mistrust and madness in him are so deep that even his fantasies end in a nightmare.
Lynch on Lynch 232

David Lynch Keeps His Head, David Foster Wallace, 1996

US Premiere magazine, September 1996.

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

City of Quartz (anonymous comment from crew) check this

British critic Paul Taylor says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.”

This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We’re defenseless in our dreams too.)
This may in fact be Lynch’s true and only agenda – just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this good art? It’s hard to say. It seems – once again – either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway.

The Making of “Lost Highway” , Steve Biodrowski • April 1, 1997

“There is a key in the film as to its meaning,” Lynch continued, “but keys are weird. There are surface keys, and there are deeper keys. Intellectual thinking leaves you high and dry sometimes. Intuitive thinking where you get a marriage of feelings and intellect lets you feel the answers where you may not be able to articulate them. Those kinds of things are used in life a lot, but we don’t use them too much in cinema. There are films that stay more on the surface, and there’s no problem interpreting their meaning.”

To realize his noirish world, Lynch let Deming shoot LOST HIGHWAY in varying levels of darkness. The film is a little creepier than something that has contrast, with few exteriors or daylight scenes. Whenever he could, Deming consciously used hardly any light at all to keep contrast down. “There are many places in the movie where I would normally use a back light, but didn’t,” Deming laughed. “So you have people kind of melding into the background. It’s kind of an extension of when Fred walks down the hallway and disappears; it’s keeping that feeling through the rest of the movie. In another film, a director would say, `What about a back light?’ and 90-percent of the time I’d put it there, but not for this movie.
Cinematographer Deming about using underexposure:
“The thing I wanted to achieve was giving the feeling that anything could come out of the background, and to leave a certain question about what you’re looking at. The film is working under the surface while you’re watching it.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR IN THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH, Valtteri Kokko – Wider Screen 1/2004

“Making films is a subconscious thing. Words get in the way. Rational thinking gets in the way. It can really stop you cold. But when it comes out in a pure sort of stream, from some other place, film has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious. It’s just a great language for that.”
David Lynch in Lynch on Lynch (Rodley 1997, p.140)

“Commonplace objects or ideas can assume such powerful psychic significance in a dream that we may awake seriously disturbed, in spite of having dreamed of nothing worse than a locked room or a missed train” (Jung, published 1979, p.43)

“The double does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development.” (Freud in The ‘Uncanny’ 1990, p.357).
Freud states that Otto Rank “has gone into connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death.” (Freud, The ‘Uncanny’ 1990, p.356).
“As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.” (Jung, published 1979, p.23)
Jung, Carl G. (ed.) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books Ltd. 1979

“there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully understand.” (Jung, published 1964, p.21)

Sigmund Freud rejects the method of dream interpretation based on assigning particular and fixed meanings for specific dream images. He calls this the “decoding” method, which “treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key.” (Ferguson 1996, p.77)

Ron Garcia, the director of photography on FWWM says in an interview that the camera angles carry a lot of meaning in the film as well. In the film, we have a consistent high camera angle. “The high-angled shots reflect an angelic presence that continues throughout the film, with an unseen angel looking down on the evil events below.” (Garcia 1992, p.60).

Ron Garcia argues that “David (Lynch) creates an emotion in everybody by tapping into the subconscious. From a Jungian perspective, the subconscious is real: you’re there until you wake up, and some people don’t wake up from those nightmares.” (Garcia 1992, p.62).

Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film, Adam C. Walter

This is by far the most useful David Lynch essay I’ve ever read! Very insightful, yet concise, clear and free of jargon!
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, 1891, Ambrose Bierce (escape fantasy of a condemned man at the moment of his death)

“In the work of Jungian writer Marie-Louise von Franz, for example, one encounters the concept of the fairy tale as a single, sealed psyche in which every character, setting, and object corresponds to some aspect of the psyche’s function. If we interpret a particular Lynch film largely as a fantasy, then many of the events and characters can be viewed as aspects of a dream that is playing inside the “consciousness” that is the film—inside the psyche that is Fred Madison, Diane Selwyn, or Nikki Grace. Because of this, certain recognizable, and psychologically-significant, character types will be seen to intrude from time to time:”

1)“the liars/unreliable narrators”: try to escape their repressed content into an idealised version of self
2)“shadow selves and detectives”: In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche”: The shadow id Frank in Blue Velvet, Bob in Twin Peaks. The detective engineers the confrontation of the conscious with the shadow (the psychotic character with their repressed content). When this happen in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey incorporates a part of the shadow into himself. In Lost Highway, “the Mystery Man shadow-character has taken on the role of detective in rebellion against the controlling ego-character, Fred, who is in complete denial.” The Cowboy in Mullholand Drive = less aggressive detective.
3) “Oracles”: sometimes doubling as shadows and detective but often separate. Grace Zabriskie in Inland Empire, Dwarf/Giant/Log lady in Twin Peaks. The Old Woman and the little boy in twin peaks ?
4) “Openings, Corridors, and Taking Directions”: “In a Lynch film, it is worthwhile to note any talk of doors, openings, windows, alleys, or corridors—or even the physical representation of them onscreen. These motifs are often loaded with suggestion, symbolism, and double meaning. The same holds true for any directions that a character is given or any descriptions of a “path” to take.”

Lost Highway: Unveiling Cinema’s Yellow Brick Road, Reni Celeste, 1997

“And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end… enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary… blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness… this, my Dionysian world, the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying… without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal. “
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Will to Power”

Various philosophical interpretations of the Mystery Man:
“Three primary fissures are foregrounded in this film: that which exists between one discrete individual and another, that which exists between the individual and itself, and that which exists between the thing and its representation. […]This Nameless Man [Mystery Man] will play a leading role in the film as that which stands between doubles, between passages from one realm to the next, and between each individual and itself. He exceeds the constraints of temporality and spatiality, moving from past to present, from subject to subject, and occupying two spaces simultaneously. […]It is perhaps tempting to interpret him as the unconscious, especially in the light of Fred’s apparent forgetfulness of his wife’s murder. [5] One might also be inclined to understand him as the figure of death as symbol, like the ghoul who comes to call in Bergman’s _Seventh Seal_. But I will do neither. I also want to insist that I am not understanding this figure in terms of a Hegelian negativity that serves as a resource in the dialectical process. Rather I want to understand him in the Bataillian sense as that excess which undoes and exceeds *any* system of signification–a dark tear that is revealed through heterogenous matter, excess, obscenity, sacrifice, and eroticism. [6] This is also close to Derrida’s concept of Otherness, which he insists is not a lack or void but a ‘negativity without negativity.’ [7] This is not the reverse side of positivity, but rather something that transgresses signification. To even name this figure is problematic because he is precisely what is nameless. He both is and is not. He is the downfall of Aristotelian logic and Hegelian dialectics. He is what breaks apart all construction and yet serves as its groundless ground. He is beautiful and terrifying. He is in everything and yet he is nowhere and nothing. He is glimpsed at the threshold of the paradox, the aporia. And he is everyone’s double.”
6. Cf. Georges Bataille, Eroticism (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).
7. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Harvard University Press, 1986) p. 103, quoting Derrida from The Truth in Painting.

“The classic American road narrative actually leads not to California but to a shattering moment of consciousness somewhere across the barren desert of adversity and solitude where a terrible truth emerges: that this is the road to nowhere. What lies ahead is only more of the same, what lies behind is a receding history that cannot be regained, and destination is impossible. This double bind leaves only one exit to glory: temporal death, whereby one enters the American metaphysical kingdom like James Dean, by dying and becoming an absence that is present as an afterimage in the dreams of the surviving: to be an American myth. To pass this exit is to meet either failure or farce.”

“The mirror has been a source of mystical transversion and a point of passage in narratives for so long as to have become cliche. It has signaled the divided self, the marker between dream and waking, fantasy and reality.”

The mirror not as something that gives a sense of self, “reflection” not as something that encourages rational thinking. Derrida, “ On Grammatology”:
“There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split *in itself* and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.”
12. Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, p. 36.

“Critiques which read texts in order to delineate the politically ‘progressive’ from the ‘regressive’ remain ensconced in the stability of metaphysics, fixed in a modern conception of static justice. Lynch’s cinema has never fallen under the good graces of such readings. His vision of America has been neither condemning nor embracing, and his pastiche never simply playful nor nihilistic. Ultimately Lynch’s primary interest has been in dissecting the cat, following along its strange corridors, peering into its pink folds and red tunnels. [22] If we come closer, the inner organs begin to emerge. Lynch is interested in coming closer. Exaggeration, the seeing ‘too much’ of obscenity, has always been an important part of Lynch’s language. Even a florescent diner sign can be obscene if we look at it long enough; and especially if we listen to it. Such visions unconceal something beneath form, something naked in its neutrality, the horrible thing that Emmanuel Levinas called the ‘there is’ and described as

…something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that ‘there is’ is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is.’ “[23]
22. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Translated by Robert Julian. London: British Film Institute, 1995.Michel Chion speaks of Lynch’s childhood fascination with dissecting and then rebuilding animals.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985) p. 45. Also discussed in length in Existence and Existents.

Various Quotes

http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/quotes.html

“It’s about a couple who feel that somewhere, just on the border of consciousness – or on the other side of that border – are bad, bad problems. But they can’t bring them into the real world and deal with them. So this bad feeling is just hovering there, and the problems abstract themselves and become other things. It just becomes like a bad dream. There are unfortunate things that happen to people, and this story is about that. It depicts an unfortunate occurrence, and gives you the feeling of a man in trouble. A thinking man in trouble.”
– Lynch on Lynch, Faber and Faber publishing.

“You can say that a lot of Lost Highway is internal. It’s Fred’s story. It’s not a dream: It’s realistic, though according to Fred’s logic. But I don’t want to say too much. The reason is: I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger … everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there’s got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going.”
– Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997

Barry Gifford on Lost Highway:

“Let’s say you don’t want to be yourself anymore. Something happens to you, and you just show up in Seattle, living under the name Joe Smith, with a whole different reality. It means that you’re trying to escape something, and that’s basically what Fred Madison does. He gets into a fugue state, which in this case means that he can’t go anywhere – he’s in a prison cell, so it’s happening internally, within his own mind. But things don’t work out any better in the fugue state than they do in real life. He can’t control the woman any more than he could in real life. You might say this is an explanation for what happens. However, this is not a complete explanation for the film. Things happen in this film that are not – and should not be – easily explained.”
– Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997

“We realized we didn’t want to make something that was linear, and that’s why the Moebius strip [as the film’s structure]. A Moebius strip is a long strip of paper curved initially into a circle, but with one end flipped over. The strip now has only one side that flips both inside and outside the shape. It made it easier to explain things to ourselves and keeping it straightforward. The story folds back underneath itself and continues.”
-Film Threat, 1997

http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/losthighway/lhabout.html

Lynch:

“Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist was reading up on different types of mental illness, and she hit upon this thing called “psychogenic fugue.” The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything – they forget their past identity. This has reverberations with Lost Highway, and it’s also a musical term. A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film.

“The unit publicist was reading up on certain mental disorders during production, and she came upon this true condition called ‘psychogenic fugue,’ which is where a person gives up himself, his world, his family – everything about himself – and takes on another identity. That’s Fred Madison completely. I love the term psychogenic fugue. In a way, the musical term fugue fits perfectly, because the film has one theme, and then another theme takes over. To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.”

“There is a key in the film as to its meaning. But keys are weird. There are surface keys, and there are deeper keys. Intellectual thinking leaves you high and dry sometimes. Intuitive thinking where you get a marriage of feelings and intellect lets you feel the answers where you may not be able to articulate them. Those kinds of things are used in life a lot, but we don’t use them too much in cinema. There are films that stay more on the surface, and there’s no problem interpreting their meaning.”

Gifford:

“This story is really about a man who creates a situation, finds himself in a dire situation and has a kind of panic attack. And that he really has a difficult time in dealing with the consequences of his action. And this action fractures him, in a way.”

Lynch on Blue Velvet:
“A film that deals with things that are hidden within a small town called Lumberton and things that are hidden within people.”

“[the ear is] a ticket to another world.”

Lynch on various things:

“In my dream, I see these fantastic paintings that were done by somebody else. And I wish that I had painted them. And I wake up, and after a while the impression wears off. I say, wait a minute, those are my paintings. I dreamt them; they’re mine. Then I can’t remember what they were.”
I’ve had exactly the same frustrating dream!!!

“I like the feel of film noir a lot and it – to me it’s all about a mood that comes about when people’ s desires lead them into areas where they’re doing something against their conscience and, you know, then suffering the results. So it’s about fear, and it’s a nighttime feeling and that – that thing creeps into my work, you know, quite a bit.”

“It’s a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.”

“Everything sort of follows my initial ideas. As soon as I get an idea, I get a picture and a feeling, and I can even hear sounds. The mood and the visuals are very strong. Every single idea I have comes with these things. One moment they’re outside of my consciousness, and the next moment they come in with all of this power.”

Documentary, fiction and the problem of truth

The documentary chronotope, Michael Chanan

from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 56-61
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 2000, 2006

“When Bakhtin speaks of how “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history,” he is advancing a notion which becomes more concrete in Henri Lefebvre’s work on representational space. In Lefebvre, a representational space is a system of symbolic representations, constituted by artistic and other media and forms, each with its own material characteristics, comprising a culturally and historically specific system which in some way maps the elements and relations of the physical, the social and the mental worlds. In doing so, the medium incorporates or signifies the physical space of the actually existing world, and makes symbolic use of it. Representational spaces thus tend towards a more or less coherent system of nonverbal symbols and signs. The products of representational spaces (to follow Lefebvre) are symbolic works, in this case, films, either fiction or documentary, or some admixture of the two. Does this also mean we can distinguish different types of representational space which correspond to different modes of filmic utterance? Is documentary perhaps a different screen world from fiction?”

“the almost universal prohibition in fiction (with certain notable exceptions) against actors looking directly at the camera, so as not to be seen by the spectator as staring directly at them. […] The rule functioned to maintain the illusion of the camera as an unseen observer, always in the right position to show the unfolding action, the appropriate scene; thus transporting the disembodied viewer into the space of the screen world. This ban does not have the same force in documentary, even in the most conventional examples. In documentary, the illusion the camera seeks to maintain is unnecessary. Indeed, it may well go against a stronger imperative — to present a sense of actuality, of testimony, and of the presence of the camera as a witness in the same space as the events unfolding. […] the acknowledgment of the camera serves to reinforce the reality effect, whereas later, in fiction, it will break it.”

“Fiction is the work of pro-filmic construction, even, one might add, when it is constructed in order to imitate documentary. Documentary, however, even when it imitates fiction, is a form of selection from the actually existing world. Although it runs the gamut from the filmographic interpretation of what is already there, to a constructed or reconstructed rendering of selected elements, the incursion of noise and accident provides evidence that the image is taken from the space of lived experience. Therefore it has a quality or degree of veracity which is not greater than that of fiction, but different. In short, the representational space produced by documentary has different co-ordinates from those of fiction.”

“If documentary depends on a disposition to believe, then fiction evokes what is traditionally spoken of as “the suspension of disbelief””

“Fictional screen space creates the unities of the scene and the plot. Through the ubiquitous camera and altering frame, the spectator becomes a vicarious unseen observer, transported into an imaginary space which is very similar to real space but behaves according to its own generic rules. These rules are different in the case of documentary from those of fiction. Where the space of the fictional narrative produces continuity, documentary space is composed of discontinuities, both spatial and temporal, produced by dialectical (and dialogical) associations across time and space. Neither of these modes of articulation is absolute or totalizing, but fictional screen space, ever since the ban was first raised against the actor gazing at the camera, has an ineluctable tendency towards closure and abstraction from lived experience. In contrast, in the space of documentary the represented world is not separated from the viewer by reason of narrative principle. On the contrary, the social reality portrayed here is one in which a viewer could in principle find themselves present, putatively, or as a potential historical subject, and sometimes palpably. It is a world, in other words, which is continuous with the space in which the viewer lives their own life, not separate from it.”

Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory, Paula Rabinowitz, 1993

“The sense of immediacy-as-truth/truth-as-immediacy was central to the earliest scientific and modernist uses of the cinema”

“History is where pain and death occur but it is in representation that the facts and events gain meaning.” As “star” of the documentary, the presence of the body, especially the body in pain, signifies a truth and realness which seems to defy contextualization.”
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 265.
“the purely psychosexual manifestations of lack and plenitude, differentiation and identification, which characterize the fetishistic forms of narrative desire”
“The spectator of documentary, this subject of agency, also desires, but desires to remember and to remake history. But how is this spectator hailed by the documentary if the psychosexual processes of identification and disavowal central to narrative address are routed away from interiority and located in evidence? Primarily through an appeal to feeling over thinking.”

“the fragmentary quality of truth”

Jill Godmilow, director of Far from Poland (1984) calls for “deconstructing the documentary . . . to reformulate language -not just verbal language but visual language as well. To poke holes in the existing language, to make spaces, so that there is a possibility for imagination and action to work through it.”
Jill Godmilow, “Far from Finished: Deconstructing the Documentary, An Interview by Brooke Jacobson,” in Reimagining America: The Arts of Social Change, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Philadelphia, 1990), 181.

“This desire to dream, to provoke imagination, seems to lead the documentary away from the realm of history and truth into the realm of art and artifice. How are we to judge historical documentaries if they call themselves dreams? In documentary the viewer is asked to participate in a series of contracts -between film and its object, between filmmaker and audience, between reality and representation. In the traditional documentary- including its use for historians -the response to the film is usually confined to whether the viewer agrees or disagrees with the content. On rare occasions the “protagonist” of the film succeeds in convincing the viewer to follow its position- save the dolphins by boycotting tuna, for example- but the construction of the cinematic argument is left unexamined. In the deconstructionist documentary like Shoah and Far From Poland, the object of the film is to produce a new and disturbing knowledge of history and of its rhetoric-of both its content and its form. Like the Angel of History, we are asked to become complicit in the process of making meaning, of making history. We are made uncomfortable, not by images of cute dolphins bleeding on the deck of the tuna boat or by the emaciated limbs and swollen bellies of hungry children in Somalia, but by the codes which allow the images to make us say “Oh, how awful” and go on about our lives.”

The Concept of Chronotope (and its relevance to cinema)

The concept of Chronotope has been invented by Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (who actually borrowed it from Einstein’s theory of relativity) and literally means “time-space”.

“almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space).” p 84
‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84).
‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space
becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (p. 84).
Bakhtin, M (1981): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, University of
Texas Press.

Memory and Exile: Time and Place in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Dr. Peter King

“Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope: the singular linkage of time and place – how place is always a place in time – and how this creates the significance of memories of a particular place.”

“As Natasha Synessios (2001) has suggested, this concept was influential on Tarkovsky’s thinking for this particular film [Mirror]. Speaking generally, we might suggest that film is particularly suitable for this fusing of space and time, with its attempt, as Tarkovsky himself saw it, to stop time (Tarkovsky, 1986). Film is an artistic medium specifically intended to hold up time and to create impressions using time and space.”

The symbolism of the mirror in Tarkovsky’s films:
“According to Green (1993), it is used as ‘the metaphorical looking-glass that provides man with a reflection of himself. In its surface, time is refracted; and it is a transitional device through which one may pass to other worlds, other states of consciousness’ (p. 80).”

Green (1993):
“the view Tarkovsky seeks is that of the child, with which we glimpse Utopia or paradise. The point in man’s history where he takes the wrong path is where the child loses its innocence and begins to comprehend the world in documentary form. (p. 85)”
“marks an attempt to recover the vision of childhood as well, not just the memories, but the unexplained mysteries, with all their discontinuities and distortions of time; a child’seye view of the world and history, which accounts in part for the elusive fascination and haunting quality of the film. (p. 85)”
Green, P (1993): Andrei Tarkovsky: the Winding Quest, Basingstoke, Macmillan

“We do not remember our lives in a linear manner, viewing one incident following another, but rather as a mix of the actual and the hoped-for, of promise and regret.”

Bakhtin’s Chronotope on the Road: Space, Time, and Place in Road Movies Since the 1970s, Alexandra Ganser, Julia Pühringer, Markus Rheindorf, 2006

“the relation between images of time and space in the text, out of which any representation of history must be constructed. The chronotope of a particular text thus functions as an ideological index, but can also be used to discuss a whole genre. In some chronotopes, mainly those of travel and uprooted modern life, time takes precedence over space; in the more idyllic, pastoral chronotopes, space dominates
time.”

“of special importance is the close link between the motif of meeting and the chronotope of the road (‘the open road’), and of various types of meeting on the road. In the chronotope of the road, the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity. (Bakhtin p98)”

“While Bakhtin was primarily concerned with chronotopes of the novel, critics such as Robert Stam have recently suggested that the chronotope seems in some ways even more appropriate to film as a medium in which “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete” (Bakhtin 11)”
Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

“the suspension of movement and its corresponding space-time relation entails the hopelessness and dreariness of film noir”

Surrealism, Photography, Cinema

Notes from “Explosante fixe”, Exhibition Catalogue at Centre Pompidou

Some notes are in French, I do not fully translate everything, only the most important bits. I’ll translate later what will actually be used in the essay.

André Breton, L’entrée des mediums (1922)
Definition of Surrealism
“un certain automatisme psychique qui correspond assez bien à l’état de rêve, état qu’il est aujourd’hui fort difficile de délimiter.”

Breton “hasard objectif”

George Bataille “L’informe” “Bassesse”-> chûte

Salvador Dali
“Photographie, pure création de l’esprit” (1927)
in Dawn Ades, “Salvador Dali”, Thames and Hudson 1982
“Ils trouvent vulgaire et normal tout ce qu’ils ont l’habitude de voir tous les jours, si merveilleux et miraculeux que ce soit”

Dali, “Film Art, Fil Antiartistico”, Gazeta Literacia (1927), in Dawn Ades
“Le monde du cinema et de la peinture sont très différents: les possibilités de la photographie et du cinéma résident precisement dans cet imaginaire illimité qui nait des choses elles-mêmes. Un morceau de sucre sur l’écran peut devenir plus grand que la perspective infinie d’édifices gigantesques.”

Dali, “Psychologie non euclidienne d’une photographie”, Minotaure 7.
“La donnée photographique est toujours et essentiellement le plus sûr moyen d’expression poétique et le procédé le plus agile pour saisir les plus délicates osmoses qui existent entre la réalité et la surréalité. Le simple fait de la transposition photographique implique une invention totale: la capture d’une réalité secrète.”

Salvador Dali – Realité Secrète
The image reflects reality but forces people to see the world without prejudice/preconception. Therefore the representation of the world presented by the image (i.e. By Art) is truer than the world directly gazed at.
-> the reflection of the world in the mirror (=Art) is truer than the direct image.
-> Alice Through the looking glass

Benjamin Péret, Minotaure 12-13
“Ruine des ruines”

Dawn ades, “La photographie et le texte surréaliste” in Explosante fixe
“ces visions litteraires ou photographiques de produits de la civilisation engloutis par une nature triomphante et vorace traduisent symboliquement l’opposition des surréalistes à leur propre culture. Et celà, chose curieuse, se situe dans le prolongement du culte romantique de la nature, propre à l’esthétique de la fin du 18ème siècle, qui prend le parti de l’état sauvage contre la domestiqué, et celui de la nature contre la civilisation.”

Notes from La subversion des images: Surréalisme, Photographie, Film, Exhibition Catalogue at Centre Pompidou

I saw this show in December 2009.

Les images du dehors, Michel Poivert

“definition de la photographie comme empreinte”
“une odieuse laideur dont le pouvoir de fascination révèle la jouissance inavouable que procure le mauvais gout” George Bataille

Un photogramme, à l’instar d’une photographie documentaire, exemplifie une relation interiorisée au monde

Le fantastique moderne, Quentin Bajac

techniques d’enregistrement indicielles

Louis Aragon
“ne conçoit pas de merveilleux en dehors du réel”
“un fantastique, un merveilleux moderne autrement riche et divers”
“La réalité est l’absence apparente de contradiction. Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparait dans le réel. Le fantastique, l’au delà, le rêve, la survie, le paradis, l’enfer, la poésie, autant de mots pour signifier le concret” La révolution surréaliste 3
“sentiment du merveilleux quotidien”

About Eugène Atget, self taught photographer of Paris whom the Surrealist admired:
Waldemar George: « un quart de siècle avant Aragon, il a écrit Le Paysan de Paris en sondant, en dépouillant de sa gangue et en mettant à nu cet immanent mystère qui a pour nom: banalité. »
Albert Valentin: « tout à l’air de se passer au delà, dans la marge, dans le filigrane, dans l’esprit »
« une même poésie spectrale et populaire de la ville. Eloignés des utopies modernistes urbaines contemporaines, ils prennent leur source dans un Paris où seuls les lieux banals et surannés peuvent faire surgir un merveilleux moderne. »
« une nouvelle mythologie moderne urbaine dont les clichés d’Atget, dans leur brutalité primitive, fourniraient une des clefs d’accès. »
« autant de contenus manifestes, d’apparences trompeuses qu’il convient de déchiffrer »
« mettre au jour un contenu latent, souvent chargé de mystère et de percer littéralement l’ombre, lieu de tous les fantasmes »

Below some pictures by Atget:

Atget - Hell Mouth

Atget - librairie

atget - vitrine

atget - mannequins

atget - stairs

atget - appartment

atget - cabaret

atget - foggy street

atget - stairs

atget - cabaret

Dali, « Le témoignage photographique »
« la nature intrinsèquement fantastique du médium photographique »

Pierre Mac Orlan, « Masquer sur mesure », 1928
« révélateur d’une puissance merceilleuse »

About the photographs illustrating André Breton’s Nadja:
« hallucinations simples »

André Breton about night in « Les vases Communicants »:
« la grande nuit qui sait ne faire qu’un de l’ordure et la merveille »
This may refer to Brassai’s photographs of Paris by night.

Below some photographs by Brassaï:

brassai - foggy paris

brassai - gutter

brassai - house

brassai - foggy

brassai - broken windows

brassai - marechal ney

Random quotations:

Henri Cartier Bresson p152:
« laisser l’objectif photographique fouiller dans les gravats de l’inconscient et du hasard »

Dali, « Mes toiles au salon d’automne », 1927 p219
voir le monde « d’une manière spirituelle, dans sa plus grande réalité objective »

Freud:
Schaulust = pulsion scopique p220

André Breton, « Le Surréalisme et la peinture » p274
« L’oeil existe à l’état sauvage » = the eye exists in a savage state (he means that people see things instinctively, the sense of sight does not need to be educated, tamed.)

about strange perspectives in Dora Maar’s collages p275:
« les décors sont sombres et composés de perspectives dépravées: une fenêtre disparaît derrière une colonne pour ne jamais reparaître; un couloir penche vers la gauche jusqu’à se tordre; une voûte s’avère à la fois concave et convexe selon le point de vue qu’on adopte. Ainsi les personnages chimériques ont-ils l’air d’errer dans des espaces qui, par leur contiguïté et leur hétérogénéité, ne peuvent qu’être mentaux. »

Warped spaces in Dora Maar collages:

dora maar

dora maar

dora maar

dora maar

Original Surrealist published material, reprinted

Louis Aragon, « Du décor », 1918, p417
« Doter d’une valeur poétique ce qui n’en possédait pas encore »

Robert Desnos, « Puissance des fantômes », 1928, p418: a poetic ode to cinema and the power of imagination
« Nés pour nous, par la grâce de la lumière et du celluloïd, des fantômes autoritaires s’assoient à notre côté, dans la nuit des salles de cinéma »
« le cinéma ne saurait être que le domaine du fantastique. En vain le réalisme croit-il régner sur les films ».
« Le merveilleux se manifeste où il veut et, quand il veut, il paraît au cinéma à l’insu peut être de ceux qui l’introduisent. »

« Heureux l’homme soumis à ses fantômes. Certes, il connaîtra des nuits désertes, d’inexplicables nostalgies, des mélancolies infinies, le désir sans raison, le spleen, l’implacable spleen. Mais il remettra la terre à sa place parmi les astres et l’homme parmi les créatures. Jamais l’or ne le détournera de son chemin. Jamais un boulet d’esclave n’entravera sa marche. Mieux, tout ce qu’il désirera, il l’obtiendra par la magie même de son imagination et les visites mystérieuses charmeront sa solitude. Libre, il agira librement en toute chose et sorti du dédale terrible de ses rêves, est-il quelque chose sur terre qui pourrait l’épouvanter? […] Initié au fantastique par la seule puissance de la surprise, son esprit connaîtra bientôt la sérénité, née du conflit de son orgueil et de son inquiétude. »

I translate this particular bit because it is very poetic and I like it:
« Fortunate is the man who submits to his ghosts. Sure, he will be prey to deserted nights, unexplainable nostalgies, infinite melancholies, mindless desire and spleen, the merciless spleen. But he will put the Earth back in its place among the stars, and man among the creatures. Never will gold sway him from his path. Never will he be hindered by a slave’s ball and chain. Better, all that he may desire, he will get it by the mere magic of his imagination, and mysterious visits will charm his solitude. Free, he will act freely in all things and, out of the terrible labyrinth of his dreams, is there anything on Earth that could terrify him? […] Initiated into the Fantastic by the mere power of surprise, his mind will soon know serenity, born out of the conflict of his pride and anxiety. »

Note: « ghost » = « fantôme » in French = « fantasma » in Italian (learnt from watching too many Dario Argento subtitled movies 🙂 and also spanish
« Fantasme » in French = « a fantasy » in English
« Fortunate is the man who submits to his ghosts. » I’m wondering whether there is some kind of pun here about fantôme (ghost) -> fantasma → fantasme → « Fortunate is the man who submits to his fantasies. » May be worth looking into the latin root of « fantasme » and « fantôme »

Antonin Artaud, « Sorcellerie et cinéma », 1927, p419
« cette espèce de griserie physique que communique directement au cerveau la rotation des images »
« cette sorte de puissance virtuelle des images va chercher dans le fond de l’esprit des possibilités à ce jour inutilisées.  Le cinéma est essentiellement révélateur de toute une vie occulte avec laquelle il nous met directement en relation. Mais cette vie occulte, il faut savoir la deviner. »
« le cinéma […] dégage un peu de cette atmosphère de transe éminement favorable à certaines révélations. »
« un certain domaine profond tend à affleurer à la surface »

« Le cinéma me semble surtout fait pour exprimer les choses de la pensée, l’intérieur de la conscience, et pas tellement par le jeu des images que par quelque chose de plus impondérable qui nous les restitue avec leur nature directe, sans interpositions, sans representations. Le cinéma arrive à un tournant de la pensée humaine, à ce moment précis où le langage usé perd son pouvoir de symbole, où l’esprit est las du jeu des representations. La pensée claire ne nous suffit pas. Elle situe un monde usé jusqu’à l’écoeurement. Ce qui est clair est ce qui est immédiatement accessible, mais l’immédiatement accessible est ce qui sert d’écorce à la vie. Cette vie trop connue et qui a perdu tous ses symboles, on commence à s’apercevoir qu’elle n’est pas toute la vie. »

I translate this bit because it is crucial:
« To me, cinema seems to be made to express thoughts, the inside of the consciousness, and not so much through the play of images than through something more fleeting that communicates them to us with their direct nature, without interpositions, without representations. Cinema was discovered at a turning point of human thought, at this very moment when overused language has lost all of its symbolic power, when the mind is weary of the game of representations. Clear thought is not enough. It paints a word overused to nausea. What is clear is what is immediately accessible, but what is immediately accessible is nothing but the mere surface of life. This life that we know too well, that has lost all its symbols, we start to realise that it is not the whole of life. »

Benjamin Fondane « Du muet au parlant: grandeur et décadence du cinéma » 1930
« un nouveau moyen d’expression qui non seulement remplacerait la parole mais la mettrait en échec, soulignerait son creux; exiger d’autre part du spectateur une sorte de collaboration, ce minimum de sommeil, d’engourdissement nécessaire, pour que fût balayé le décor du signe et que prît forme à sa place le réel du rêve.
Que le spectateur perdit pied, c’est tout ce que le cinéma voulait. »

Albert Valentin « Eugène Atget, 1856-1927 » 1928
« tout a l’air de se passer au-delà »
« Le reste est au-delà, vous dis-je, dans la marge, dans le filigrane, dans l’esprit, à la portée du moins perspicace ».

Brassaï « Images latentes » 1932
juste cette expression « images latentes »

Dali « le témoignage photographique » 1929
« essentiellement le véhicule le plus sûr de la poésie »
« percevoir les plus délicates osmoses qui s’établissent entre la réalité et la surréalité »
« l’enregistrement d’une réalité inédite »

Raoul Ubac « L’envers de la face » 1942
« Une image, et surtout une image photographique, ne donne du réel qu’un instant de son apparence. Derrière cette mince pellicule qui moule un aspect des choses, à l’intérieur de cette image il en existe à l’état latent une autre, ou plusieurs autres superposées dans le temps et que des opérations le plus souvent dues au hasard décèlent brusquement. »

Jean Goudal « Surréalisme et cinéma » 1925
« Au cinéma comme dans le rêve, le fait règne en maître absolu. L’abstraction perd ses droits. Aucune explication ne vient légitimer les gestes des héros. Les actes succèdent aux actes, portent en eux mêmes leur justification. Et ils se succèdent avec une telle rapidité que nous avons à peine le temps d’évoquer le commentaire logique qui pourrait les expliquer, ou tout au moins les relier. »
« hallucination consciente »
« cette fusion du rêve et de l’état conscient »
« ces images mouvantes nous hallucinent, mais en nous laissant une conscience confuse de notre personnalité et en nous permettant d’évoquer, si c’est nécessaire, les disponibilités de notre mémoire. »
« Dans le langage, la donnée première est toujours la trame logique. L’image naît à propos de cette trame et s’y ajoute pour l’orner, pour l’éclairer. Au cinéma, la donnée première est l’image, qui, à l’occasion, et point nécessairement, entraîne à sa suite des lambeaux rationnels. »

A filmmaker’s guide to freaking out your audience – Part 2: camera placement and editing

Gilles Deleuze believes that our brain has two modes of functionning: action and reflexion, and that these 2 modes are mirrored in cinema. He calls them “movement image” and “time image”.

“Movement image” is the most traditional in cinema: the camera follows a character and the point of view changes in response the character’s actions. “Movement image” follows the principle of action-reaction and abides to rationality: the camera reacts to the character’s action in a way that is predictable, so that the audience knows what to expect. For example, somebody walks out of a room. When this person crosses the door threshold, the camera stops filming towards the inside of the room (now empty) and instead films the character now walking outside.

In “time image”, the length of the shots is not determined by the action taking place. Deleuze calls this “a purely optical and sonorous situation”. For example, a long shot on 2 characters fishing and not talking. Since nothing is said, the only information to be gathered by the viewer is that the characters are fishing, and this would require only a very short sequence to be communicated. The time after which the shot ends is arbitrary since no specific action by the characters cause the shot to end, and, if the shot had continued longer, nothing more would have happened (the characters would still be fishing in silent). In “image time”, the next shot is also unrelated to the previous one. For example, a shot of one of the characters going on an undescript errand in town. The new action the character is doing is not caused by the previous action (fishing) and therefore the viewer is unable to determine when it is taking place compared to the first one. The errand could take place just after, long after or even in the past compared to the fishing.

Deleuze place the apparition of the “time image” in cinema after the second world war. He thinks that the war was such a complex and unprecedented events that is escaped people’s understanding, and therefore shattered their ability to plan rational actions responding to events. The traumatic event, too big for human understanding, broke the chain of action-reaction. Unsettled, the characters of a time image find themselves unable or unwilling to act. Instead, they become witnesses of “a pure moment of time”.

Because the logical chronology of actions is broken by the “time image”, Deleuze believes that “the cinema image is not in the present”. Rather, cinema images show different layers of memories whose meanings sometimes converge towards the present.

Just as human beings constantly alternate between action and reflexion, it is possible to mix “movement images” and “time images”. Let’s take the same example of a man going out of a room. The camera shows him walking out but rather than cutting just after he crosses the threshold, it keeps showing the empty room for a bit before switching to the man outside. This confuses the viewer: why is the camera still showing the empty room ? The viewer starts wondering whether there is something in the room that he is not noticing or understanding. Is there a hidden threat in the room ? The camera follows follows the man going out and cut shortly after he is gone so there is action-reaction, but is perverted by the unexplained pause to look at the empty room: the timing of the reaction is not correct. Additionally, when the camera stops showing the empty room, it may not show the man now outside, but switch to something completely different. In that case, not only is the timing of the reaction wrong, but the reaction itself is not logical. The presence of action reaction but the absence of correct timing and/or logical sequences of events unsettle the viewer: it gives them the feeling that they are confronted with a sequence of events whose logic they cannot understand. Therefore, this sequence of events is perceived as threatening however ordinary each individual event might be. This process is often used by David Lynch: a noise or flash suggesting sudden action is shown, then an empty room is shown so that the viewer wonders “could the sudden event be happening right now behind my back ?” Often also, a phone is shown ringing and nobody picks it up. Later in the film, someone may be shown picking up the same phone up, so that the chronology of all events shown in between the 2 shots involving the phone become unclear. Or, if someone picks the phone up straight away, the camera stays on the phone and does not show the person apart from a glimpse of their hand.

A filmmaker’s guide to freaking out your audience – Part 1: sound design

During research, I randomly found out theories concerned with creating a sense of disquiet in the viewer of moving image.

At Cambridge Film Festival, I saw the film Cuckoo about a young woman, Polly, suffering from auditory hallucinations (or not ?) in her flat, a film which reminded me a lot of Polanski’s Repulsion. The director commented on how the sound design was made to cause the viewer to physically experience the same hallucinations as Polly, and share the ensuing distress. The key to that was to disconnect the sound from the visual, so as to cause sensory and space confusion in the viewer. In traditional film sound design, foley effects are made to match what is being shown on the images. The two sources of information (visual and auditory) are coherent and support each other, so that the viewer can feel confident about understanding the information. One could almost say that the information is “surdetermined” since the same concept is presented in several ways (i.e. the image of somebody putting a glass on a table and the sound the glass makes when it touches the surface). If you drop the surdetermination, the viewer starts to be confused, feels unable to trust their senses and starts experimenting anxiety. The Cuckoo team did that in different ways. Polly hears sounds that are coming from out of the image field and not easily identifiable, for example because they are muffled or intermittent. Although they come from outside her flat, these sounds are quite loud so as to suggest an invisible presence in her flat. Comparatively, the sounds from her flat seem low, which cause a feeling of space distortion: one does not know anymore what is far or near, foreign or familiar. These sounds have no obvious directionality, so Polly feels lost. Some of the sounds from her flat are also too loud, for example a dripping tap. The director explained that the idea came from a real life experience of his wife, who started hearing specific sounds much louder when she was pregnant. Some of these sounds were imperceptible to other people.

I thought of it and it reminded me of a family dinner scene in “Las Meninas” (Ihor Podolchak, 2008) where the sound of a fork on a plate gets more and more intrusive as the family atmosphere gets more and more oppressing. In Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky also extensively used the disconnection between sound and images in order to blur the line between reality and illusion. The sound could be either completely disconnected to the images (one hears things without ever seeing the visual equivalent, like in Polly’s hallucinations) or, more perversely, the sound could be related to the images but wrongly synchronised in time (a very slow visual transition accompanied by a harsh sound transition). This last technique gives the illusion of time-space distortion, which may or may not be due to the mysterious events that created the Zone.