Angelo Restivo
There is a remarkable moment in “La Monnaie de l’absolu,” the fourth installment of Jean‐Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–1998), which is all the more remarkable for those seeing it with prior episodes freshly in mind. After 2 hours or more of heavily manipulated electronic image and sound montage, Godard suddenly allows a select, highly privileged set of images (relative) autonomy from manipulation—allows them to “be in their Being,” if you will. These privileged images are taken from Italian neorealist and postneorealist films, and as the sublime face of Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (Stromboli, 1950) fades to black, there fades in, on the soundtrack, the opening guitar riffs of Riccardo Cocciante’s song, “La lingua italiana,” which Godard allows to play undistorted, in its entirety, as we witness those iconic images from an extended “Italian Spring”2 unfurl before us, with sometimes ominous shadows threatening the integrity of the images from the edges of the frame.
Now, there is obviously much that could be said about this highly concentrated 6‐minute segment of digital video, but for purposes of this introduction, suffice it to say that what we see here is the fact that for Godard, as for the French New Wave more generally, postwar Italian cinema was a decisive event in the history of cinema, perhaps the most decisive event since the establishment of narrative codes in the early decades of cinema. In this, the French New Wave directors were following in the footsteps of their mentor André Bazin (2005, vol. 2), who argued that Italian neorealism found a way to bear witness to the devastated landscape of postwar Europe without having to package its images in prefabricated sequences that would turn those images—for Bazin, pieces of reality—into predigested truisms. It is this “ethics” of the image that Godard celebrates in his Italian section of Histoire(s) du cinéma.3
Given this history, it should not come as a surprise that when philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1986, 1989) turned his attention to the cinema in the 1980s, Italian cinema played a starring role in his argument: Italian neorealism marked the emergence of “modern” cinema, a cinema in which time was no longer subordinated to movement, as it had been in the classical cinema. While it is certainly beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize Deleuze’s complex categorization of cinematic images in his two‐volume work, it behooves us to present the background against which Deleuze will argue that the emergence of the time‐image—in Italian cinema and elsewhere—was such an important aesthetic event. Over the past 20 years or so, Deleuze’s work on the cinema has gained increasing traction within film studies, and yet it still remains the province of only a small percentage of scholars in the field. There are no doubt a number of reasons for this. In the first place, there is the notorious difficulty of Deleuze’s work, especially in that it challenges the validity of a number of concepts that have been absolutely central to the discipline of film studies (“representation” being, perhaps, the most basic of these). In the second place, his Cinema 1: The Movement‐Image and Cinema 2: The Action‐Image are not the result of a philosopher dabbling in the arts. They must be seen, instead, as fundamental parts of Deleuze’s philosophical trajectory, and as such, primarily as works of philosophy and only secondarily as what we could term film theory. Indeed, a scholar such as Claire Colebrook (2006, 1) can assert that the cinema books provide the perfect entrée for understanding Deleuze’s philosophical work as a whole. Because of his commitment to a philosophy of immanence, Deleuze’s method is not to systematize from a set of first principles, but rather to dive into the middle of things—into the middle of life—in order to discover the unique set of problems from which the given instance will generate thought. The cinema, like the works of Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon, or Nietzsche, becomes the occasion for thinking through the most fundamental philosophical problems.4
At the very end of Cinema 1: The Movement‐Image, Deleuze sets the stage for the emergence of neorealism by describing a crisis that occurs in the cinema of the action‐image (the action‐image being a culmination of the various types of images Deleuze categorizes in the volume). Before detailing what characteristics mark this crisis, we must first understand how Deleuze is periodizing film history, even if he declares that his work is not to be taken as fundamentally historical. The action‐image is a type of movement‐image that is built around what Deleuze calls—from Henri Bergson—sensori‐motor linkages. A certain situation is perceived (or “sensed”) by a character, and the character then acts (i.e., “motorially”) in the situation, resulting in a new overall state of things (or situation). Since this series can obviously be repeated as the film moves forward, it seems clear that the action‐image aligns quite nicely with the canonical view of the system of découpage of classical Hollywood, especially the notion that the classical Hollywood film is structured by strong cause–effect linkages in the narrative. Indeed, in Cinema 1, the sections on the action‐image are largely about American cinema, and while Deleuze does not say so directly, there is a sense that the action‐image becomes a hegemonic form by the postwar period. Again, this is very much in keeping with standard historical accounts regarding the diffusion of classical style globally in the 1930s.
But what clearly presents us with historical issues is Deleuze’s presentation of the crisis in the action‐image, and interestingly, it is this very crisis that “falls in between” the chasm of the two volumes of the cinema books. To begin with, at the end of Cinema 1, Deleuze describes the crisis from the point of view of American cinema. He suggests that, in the American genres, there was a kind of deterioration of belief that decisive actions could fundamentally change historical situations, which might be interpreted as an attenuation of the power of the myth of the American Dream. This is seen most clearly in a genre like the Western: by the 1960s, who could believe that a final shoot‐out between the good guys and the bad guys could address the fundamental questions posed by the idea of “America”? Indeed, a film such as John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) actively deconstructs the cliché of the shoot‐out, by presenting us with two versions of it: one in all its classical purity, and the other—the reality—showing it up to be a sham. Deleuze argues that in the wake of this crisis of belief, five new elements of the action‐image—all highly interconnected—emerge to bring it as well to crisis. First, the situation is no longer “globalizing” or “synthetic” but instead “dispersive.” We can see this, for example, in the work of Robert Altman, where the situations with which the characters are presented do not “add up” to one overarching totality. His sound mixes reflect this, with highly overlapped dialogue and constantly shifting points of audition that truly exemplify the description “dispersive.” Second, linkages between events are weakened; as Deleuze puts it, reality itself has become “lacunary.” Chance now enters the cause–effect chain as narratives unfold. Third, the strong sensori‐motor links that connected characters to spaces are attenuated. We see the emergence of the “bal(l)ade,” by which Deleuze intends both “trip” and “ballad,” and which is often exemplified by a character wandering through nonsituated “any‐spaces‐whatever.” Here we might cite Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as a perfect example of the ballade, with Travis Bickle’s wanderings through disconnected urban spaces reflected stylistically in the incessant circular pans of the camera. Fourth, the now fragmented world is held together only by “a universal regime of clichés.” This has the effect of blurring inside and outside, as the clichés incessantly produced by an image economy insinuate themselves into the minds of everyone. Fifth, the vague sense emerges that some underlying power is orchestrating the clichés; the world is seen as governed by a plot or a conspiracy (Deleuze 1986, 206–11). This last aspect of the action‐image in crisis nicely aligns with Fredric Jameson’s (1991) idea that the conspiracy film allegorizes the failure of the individual to cognitively map the world in late capitalism.
Now it is precisely around this description of the elements of the crisis in the action‐image that a historiographic question emerges. For in Cinema 1, when Deleuze elaborates these five elements of the crisis, he is largely referring to American cinema from the late 1960s through the 1970s. But as soon as we open Cinema 2, we are asked to think that these same elements of crisis are present in Italy, in the years of the emergence of neorealism. Clearly, the nascent postmodernity underwriting the five elements of the crisis in the case of the United States—for example, horizontal and prefabricated suburban spaces as “any‐space‐whatever,” the cliché as connected to advertising and the society of the spectacle, and so forth—would hardly be applicable to Italy in 1943. Thus, in the case of Italy, it is World War II and its aftermath—not only the bombed‐out spaces and traumatized populace, but equally the occupying armies, the subsequent infusion of American capital (and American “ideas”) through the Marshall Plan, and so on—that decades earlier produced a similar crisis in the Italian cinema, there leading to the emergence of the time‐image. We will return to the time‐image shortly; but this historiographic problem can be resolved by understanding that Deleuze’s view of history is not extensive, but intensive (as, more generally, he privileges the intensive over the extensive in his work). For Deleuze, it is inadequate to lay out historical events onto a timeline, and then produce from this a narrative of linear development. Instead, events must be looked at as coming out of an intensive space of forces, potentials, and virtualities, from which any particular actualization of the event is realized. In order to avoid producing a transcendent narrative to explain historical events, and in order to produce a history immanent to the event and its utter contingency, we must look to the genesis of the event. This view of history is particularly suited to explaining uneven development, so that, for example, a set of images can emerge in Italy from one set of contingent circumstances, while a very similar set of images will only emerge in the American cinema decades later, and in relation to a different set of contingencies. Indeed, throughout his discussion of the movement‐image, Deleuze hints that we can see various aspects of the time‐image avant la lettre. This is particularly true when we look at the issue of how the movement‐image handles affect: affect being that which falls “in between” the perception/action circuit of the sensory‐motor schema. Finally, then, we can note how here too Deleuze is reprising an argument earlier made by Bazin (2005, vol. 1, 26–28) when in the “Evolution of the Language of Cinema” he argues that the aesthetic of reality that reaches its full potential with Italian neorealism was anticipated by the work of F. W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, and Robert Flaherty.
To return now to the crisis in the action‐image, Deleuze (1986, 210–11) argues that the American cinema could not use this crisis to produce the new kind of image that the Italian cinema did, because either the directors were invested in a meliorist view of social problems that could “save the remains of the American Dream” or they resorted to parody, which for Deleuze simply distances oneself from the crisis without allowing it to produce something new. In Italian neorealism, in contrast, the time‐image is produced, and in this lies its great originality and achievement. To put it simply, the conditions of the crisis are there, but in Italian neorealism the dispersive situations, the lacunae in reality, the severed sensori‐motor links, are fully embraced, for it is the experience of the war itself that has produced the fragmented situations, devastated spaces, and social actors cut off from sensori‐motor connection to the world. Thus, Italian neorealism produces both “pure optical and sound situations,” and a paralyzed subject who can only see those situations but not effectively act in them. But this then opens up to the “seer”—both within the film and among the spectators—a time no longer hitched to action/reaction, a time of pure duration that opens up the possibility for new thoughts, new actions, to emerge. We can run through these ideas via a selection of canonical early works of neorealism such as Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946), or Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). As I noted earlier, the five conditions for the emergence of the time‐image are all highly interrelated, and in the first episode of Paisà, the very condition of there being two armies, both on the foreign terrain of Sicily, produces a dispersed situation, eruptions of chance (e.g., the casual lighting of a cigarette lighter), and the severed sensori‐motor links manifested in the fact that all are waiting for something to happen in order to clarify a murky situation. And is there a bigger cliché than the American G.I. nicknamed “Joe from Jersey”? Or than, in Roma citta apertà, the lover Pina, carried away by her love, running after her beloved being hauled away in a truck by the Nazis? But when Pina is gunned down in the street, suddenly we witness the virtual becoming actualized, as yet another young ragazzo is orphaned and made homeless, ready to wander the streets and bear witness to the Nazi atrocities. Or when Ricci in Ladri di biciclette is caught himself stealing a bicycle out of desperation, we are suddenly made aware that anyone can become a thief, even us.
With regard to Rossellini, it is in the director’s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman where, arguably, Deleuze’s thinking reaches its zenith. For Deleuze, Europa ’51 (Europe ‘51/The Greatest Love, 1952) is positively tutelary, but before discussing that film, I would like to consider for a moment Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954), a film of critical importance to Cahiers du cinéma and the New Wave—so much so that Bazin (2005, vol. 2, 93–101) defended it against its Italian critics, and Rivette (1985, 192) claimed it represented the birth of modern cinema. One could say that the very condition of the tourists driving from Britain to Naples in itself produces a dispersive situation and loosened sensori‐motor links, while the Neapolitan landscape is itself lacunary. The husband Alex keeps wanting their business there—the settling of Uncle Homer’s estate—to be concluded, as if he were willing a cause–effect chain that the relaxed Neapolitan customs continually thwart. Once again, clichés abound: not only the details of local color but also wife Katherine’s obsessive time management, as she tries to pack in as many museums and sights as she can, and Alex’s only interest being to have sex with one of the “natives.” But when Alex hesitantly picks up the prostitute outside the hotel bar (in a famous sequence that conveys the hesitance through the movement of his car circling back to pick her up), and when she later reveals that she would have killed herself if he hadn’t picked her up, Alex’s earlier hesitance is now seen to have been a matter of life and death for the woman, and we the spectators contemplate the various virtual worlds that are opened up by a single and utterly contingent action. But we had already been introduced to the notion that contingent events can produce unexpected and far‐reaching consequences when Katherine witnesses “the mystery of ionization” at the Campi Flegrei, her cigarette “causing” very distant hot springs to emanate smoke. This is a perfect figuration of the time‐image, showing us not the simple cause–effect connection, but rather holding us at the threshold of an event, when any number of potentials can be realized. By the end of the film, just before the “miracle,” Alex and Katherine are still locked in clichés; Alex’s supercilious comment that the Neapolitans are like children prompts the conversational exchange, “Maybe if we’d had children”; “children make things difficult”; “but children are happy….” But the Neapolitans crowded in the streets appear to us almost as if they were autochthonous: if they are children, they are children born of the earth itself, as indeed, has been already suggested at Pompeii when the plaster casts of the man–woman in the death‐embrace are slowly unearthed. Past, present, and future are no longer laid out on a linear trajectory but coexist in a complex time‐image that shows how we “inhabit time.”
Perceiving the world through clichés is, according to Deleuze, our habitual mode of perception (clichés being simply the lenses of ideology and self‐interest), and the time‐image appears when we are somehow stopped in our tracks, prevented from habitual patterns or connections. In Europa ’51, the moment that Ingrid Bergman wanders from slum to factory and thinks, “I thought I was seeing convicts,” is when a new thought is born. “She sees, she has learnt to see,” Deleuze says (1989, 2), and later elaborates (20),
We … normally perceive only clichés. But, if our sensory‐motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical‐sound image, the horror or beauty …: I thought I was seeing convicts; the factory is a prison, school is a prison, literally, not metaphorically.
But why does Deleuze insist here on a literal equation rather than a metaphor? Given Deleuze’s great intellectual kinship with Michel Foucault, it would seem that what Deleuze is getting at is that Ingrid Bergman is seeing—as are we, the spectators—the “diagram” of power in a disciplinary social organization.
Deleuze always held a strong fascination for crystals, which for him presented us with an image of the kind of nonchronological time that we have seen opened up in Italian neorealism. Thus, in Cinema 2, Deleuze develops the notion of the crystal‐image from the pure optical and sound situations that modern cinema produces. But in order to understand the nature of the crystal‐image, we first need to step back from the cinema and consider the philosophical underpinnings—developed from Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson—of Deleuze’s complex notion of time. If we were asked how memory works, we might initially say that we reach back in our minds to retrieve some impression from the past, to make use of it now in the present. But this is only one of a number of ways memory works. For example, if we are walking down a familiar street, we are not consciously searching our memory banks for information; the street is familiar precisely because the memories are coexisting with our actual, present perception of the street, hence its familiarity. This simple example shows us how past and present coexist at every moment, and from here, Bergson will deduce that any present moment is not an independent point on a timeline, but rather is internally doubled or split. The perception in the present moment is on the one hand “archived” into memory, as the present moves into the past, while on the other hand it is poised toward a future insofar as my sensori‐motor system will react to it. Thus, any moment is infused with both the actual and the virtual, as I hope some of the preceding examples from Viaggio in Italia have made clear. The present moment marks the most contracted “circuit” running between actual and virtual (while the example of our conscious plunge into our memory banks would be a much more “dilated” circuit).
Deleuze argues (1989, 68–78) that the cinema of the time‐image can produce an image that shows us this most contracted circuit between the actual and the virtual, and this image he calls the crystal‐image. How does the cinema produce this image? Deleuze starts by noting the various ways in which a single cinematic image can display both actual and virtual spaces. The most obvious example of this would be a shot that contains a mirror in which the spectator can see the action of the scene reflected: here we clearly see how an actual and a virtual coexist, and if the scene is edited, then it becomes very easy for the spectator to lose the ability to discern whether the image seen is within the mirror or outside it. (This is the source of many startling moments in cinema, when a slight camera movement suddenly reveals to us that we have been looking in a mirror.) Deleuze argues that in the crystal image, the virtual and the actual become indiscernible, so that we reach a kind of limit point in the crystal—we might say a continual and endless division into “facets.” He elaborates a number of other ways in which the cinema can produce a crystal image; when, for example, there is a theater performance or a film‐within‐the‐film, there is always the possibility that actual and virtual will become indiscernible.
Perhaps the best example of a single shot that illustrates how the crystal image works to allow a sense of nonchronological time is the final shot of Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958)—the shot that inspired Godard to cast Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960). Preminger’s film is framed by black‐and‐white sequences set in the film’s present in Paris, where the aimless and already‐world‐weary teenager Cécile (Seberg) wanders from restaurant to club, bored with all the young men who make advances. Set within this frame is the story, in Technicolor, of the previous summer spent on the Riviera, in which an immature (or perhaps self‐centered, or perhaps jealous, or perhaps…) Cécile has a hand in destroying her womanizing father’s impending marriage to Anne, leading ultimately to Anne driving off a cliff and into the sea, a presumed suicide. In the final shot, Cécile sits before her vanity mirror, thinking about the upcoming summer vacation with her father (this time in Italy, for a “change”), rubbing more and more cold cream onto her face as tears begin to fall from her eyes. Here, the past wells up to contaminate any possible future, while the close‐up of Cécile’s face oscillates between disfigurement and authenticity, in a circuit that is ultimately a mise‐en‐abyme.
In relation to Italian cinema, the crystal image connects to the work of two directors in particular, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. Fellini’s cinema shows us the crystal in the process of formation and growth, whereas Visconti’s cinema shows us the crystal in the process of decomposition or decay. Perhaps the easiest way to comprehend Fellini’s cinema as one in which the crystal is in a process of growth is to note how in each scene, the “reality” slowly becomes absorbed into a growing spectacle, with spectacle being that which creates the indiscernibility between actual and virtual. In the final scene of Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), for example—and here, I am deliberately choosing a film that is relatively early, before Fellini’s mature style is in place—we and Cabiria are initially stuck in a despairing repetition of the past, and if at first the appearance of the festive youth might seem an ironic counterpoint, gradually the “neorealist road” is taken up by the spectacle, and Cabiria is restored to “life.” It will be Fellini’s next film, La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita, 1960), that extends this principle of the commingling of life and spectacle through the film. Its opening sequence, in which the helicopter is transporting a statue of Christ to the Vatican, suggests that everyday life and spectacle have formed an indiscernible circuit. Interestingly, it is in the section on Fellini and the crystal where Deleuze (1989, 88–94) presents a rather extended discussion of film music, arguing specifically against the views of Theodore Adorno and Sergei Eisenstein on the subject. Deleuze argues that the scission in time made visible by the crystal—namely, between present‐becoming‐past and present‐becoming‐future—is manifested in film music by the interplay between the ritornello (or refrain) and the rhythmic gallop. In Deleuze’s words, the gallop is “the hastening of the presents which are passing,” while the ritornello is “the raising or falling back of pasts which are preserved” (93). Deleuze argues that in Fellini, the gallop is used to suggest the present racing toward catastrophe, while the ritornello saves something of the past that will in some way be redemptive. Referring to Nino Rota by name, Deleuze (93–94) argues that in Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978), the crystal image is achieved purely via the musical score.
While Deleuze’s assimilation of the work of Fellini to the notion of the crystalline is quite convincing as a reading of the films, the attempt to describe Visconti’s work as that of the crystal in decomposition seems very much forced. Certainly, in the four pages allotted to Visconti, Deleuze manages to give us a dazzling summation of the aesthetic and thematic concerns of Visconti’s work: the aristocratic lineage and the exquisite connoisseurship of art; the grand set pieces and the melodramatic temporality of “too late!”; the inexorability of history and the allure of homosexuality. But when he describes the aristocracy as the “synthetic crystal,” apt as the expression is, it never seems to go beyond the merely metaphorical because we are never told how, formally, in cinematic terms, the actual and the virtual reach their point of indiscernibility. And if the crystal is in the process of decomposition, Deleuze can only give us the rotting teeth of Ludwig II, or incest as a general condition. While the omnipresence of art, or the veiled promise of homosexuality, might have indeed provided us with some image of how the films might divide into actual and virtual, Deleuze withdraws from those possible routes—quite rightly, as he realizes they would insufficiently explain Visconti’s universe (Deleuze 1989, 94–97). So, as filled as these pages are with Deleuze’s characteristically brilliant prose, it remains obscure how the crystal is to be conceived of here.
It is not surprising that Deleuze finds a strong intellectual kinship with the film theories elaborated by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his film theory, and especially in the 1965 essay “The Cinema of Poetry,” Pasolini caused consternation within the academic world of film studies by breaking with the then fashionable structuralist project, focused on trying to develop a “scientific” model of cinematic language based on structural linguistics. Rebuking the structuralists for reducing the cinematic shot to an abstraction, Pasolini argued that the cinematic shot was not only a “social fact” to begin with (i.e., traversed by all sorts of social forces and meanings), but also deeply charged with primal, archaic, or dreamlike forces. The interplay between these two poles produces a kind of “poetry of the real” that will derail any attempt to turn cinema into an ordinary language (Pasolini 1988, 168–75) Pasolini’s “Cinema of Poetry” remained an outlier in film studies for many years, but was taken up by Deleuze, whose work was in its own way also breaking with the dominance of structuralist thought in postwar French philosophy.
Perhaps the most original concept Pasolini develops in the chapter is the concept of “cinematic free indirect discourse.” This occurs when the director, while filming a character, alters the space around the character in such a way that the surrounding space seems to be colored or inflected by the emotional state or the personality of the character filmed. In this way, we have a shot in which the subjective and the objective have been contaminated; the director has entered into the mind of his character, while at the same time the director’s mise‐en‐scène is affectively engaging the character. In Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), for example, the film’s color palette can be seen as existing in a free indirect relation to the protagonist Giuliana’s affective states. In the opening sequences, she walks about with her son in an industrial wasteland of desaturated grays and earth tones, where even her green coat seems muddy and contaminated by her surroundings, while the primary‐yellow gas erupting from the smokestack provides a correspondence to the heightened emotional states that grip her throughout the film. The important thing to notice here is how subjective and objective become indiscernible; the filmmaker is entering into the image not from the point of view of an objective narrator or enunciator but rather by assuming the point of view of the people he is filming.
This concept (and technique) can have profound implications for how we understand political filmmaking, third‐world filmmaking, and what has come to be known as “minor cinemas,” insofar as the free indirect style opens up to collective invention between the filmmaker and the group.5 Ultimately, I would like to trace how this concept works itself out in Pasolini’s work, given his political commitment—strongly critical of neocapitalism and the spectacle—as well as his attraction to the not‐yet‐modernized spaces of the Third World. But first, it would help to understand why this concept of free indirect discourse is so important to Deleuze’s philosophy. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze, along with his collaborator Félix Guattari, develop a theory of language that is at odds with the dominant notions of language and signification among their contemporaries. They argue that, first and foremost, language is fundamentally social, and so to begin by taking as “data” any particular person’s speech act is misguided. Before any individual speech act, there is a “collective murmur of language,” and thus language is seen, in its most fundamental aspect, as indirect speech, not direct speech (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 76–85). Deleuze and Guattari call language a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Thus, there is an immediately social and political dimension to language, which is ultimately what Pasolini is trying to get at for cinema, with his concept of the cinematic free indirect.
How, we may ask? What I would like to argue is that, in his documentaries, and later in the “Trilogy of Life” (Il Decameron/The Decameron, 1971; I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales, 1972; and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte/Arabian Nights, 1974), Pasolini begins to confront both the powers and the limits of the cinematic free indirect, and we can see how closely he comes to achieving an image of the collective assemblage of enunciation. In his “Cinema of Poetry” essay, Pasolini (1988, 179–80) had implicitly criticized the ways in which Antonioni (and Godard and Bertolucci) were using the free indirect; as he put it in a memorable phrase, they selected for their subjects “the exquisite flowers of the bourgeoisie,” and for that reason, they were stuck within a dominant, or majoritarian, language. If we look at Pasolini’s documentary Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964)—filmed somewhat on the fly while he was scouting locations for Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964)—we see a fundamentally different approach. Pasolini is doing a national “inquest on sex,” in which he attempts to understand the paradoxical contradictions in Italians’ sexual mores and customs in 1964. But the first striking difference one notes in Pasolini’s documentary technique is that he, the filmmaker, inserts his own body and voice into the documentary. Instead of having an all‐knowing narrator interpret all the images for us, Pasolini becomes yet one more voice in the cacophony of voices that comprise the film. Secondly, he cuts across all the fault lines of uneven development that exist in Italy at the time, moving easily from privileged urban youth to old farmers working the land in Piedmont. In a scene in which he talks to a group of young men doing their compulsory military service, Pasolini mingles with the soldiers in uniform and asks them the somewhat open‐ended question whether they would rather be a “Don Juan” or a good husband. He singles men out by their physiognomies, calling one “Romano” and another “Abruzzese,” and in their responses, we hear not only the traces of dialect but also the common culture out of which their individual speeches emerge. Ultimately, Pasolini doesn’t give us definitive answers, but rather that “collective murmur of language” from which people’s sexual practices and lives emerge.
Deleuze (1989, 217–24) will later argue that this procedure of free indirect discourse—this mutual contamination of the voice of the filmmaker and the voices of his or her subjects—will enable the film to “invent a people.” Certainly, we can see the ways in which, within a postcolonial space where a dominant language was imposed upon a multiplicity of indigenous languages, where a client class emerges that exists in a limbo between the colonizer and the populace, and so on and so forth, the problem of the invention of the people becomes paramount—and cinematic free indirect discourse is a way to set this invention process into motion. But the problem fundamentally shifts when we move to the developed First World. Thus, in the early 1970s, after filming Il Decameron, Pasolini (1976, 152–58) felt that the Italian youth he cast in the film had been so corrupted by consumer capitalism that it was impossible for him to enter into a free indirect relationship with them. It was impossible to produce a collective enunciation that would be convincing. In our time, perhaps, the problem has become even more exacerbated and pressing, and I think that in an even more urgent sense, the problem facing today’s filmmakers, after the period of identity politics, will be that of how to invent the people.
From the examples presented so far, we can sum up by saying that, whereas time in the movement‐image chronometrically unfurls as the cinematic scenes move forward, in the time‐image, time is “the Outside,” an exteriority that severs the links between images (and image‐sound) so that we are able to see (or to think) the virtual forces that make every contingent event (whether it be the “miracle” that brings the couple together in Viaggio in Italia, or the invention of a people‐to‐come) an event of difference. As D. N. Rodowick notes (1997, 139–43) in his very precise elaboration of the philosophical underpinnings of the notion of time as the Outside, in the movement‐image, the powers of thought are in the end idealist, so that the film resolves itself into some “ideal” from which we can judge life. When time operates as the Outside—when images become delinked from a teleological progression toward finality—the time‐image abandons the quest for identity and totality, “in order to create new values, new subjectivities, and new powers of thought” (143).
To pursue this line of inquiry, we can consider the work of Antonioni in the early to mid‐1960s. Early in La notte (La Notte, 1961), there is a remarkable sequence shot that can serve to summarize the discussions above and point us toward the considerations of becoming that remain to be elucidated. The shot is of a narrow street in Milan. At screen left and far in the distance, we see Lidia walking on a sidewalk toward the camera. At screen right, there is a construction site dominated by a crane from which hang gigantic iron claws used to pick up construction debris. A car enters the frame in the foreground, proceeding along the street beside the construction site, while Lidia is still in the distance but continuing to walk toward the foreground. We hear a grating metallic sound as the iron pincers begin to fall and then are caught again by the metal chains and dangle from the crane, while in reaction to this, the moving car swerves toward the left side of the street and then back to the right, while Lidia continues to walk on the sidewalk and toward the camera. Narratively, nothing really happens in this shot; Lidia is not hit by the car. But what the shot conditions us to see is how bodies in space inhabit a kind of virtual force field that produces events of pure difference as the forces unfold. This is how we can say that time has become severed from its totalizing function in the movement‐image, and instead presents itself as a radical exteriority.
Antonioni’s famous deployment of “temps mort” can thus be seen as fundamentally connected to this notion of time as the Outside. Deleuze (1989, 189) quotes Antonioni’s famous lines, “when everything has been said, there is what comes after,” in order to argue that this deployment of dead time functions precisely to make visible the various unfoldings and becomings latent in the “body‐spaces” that Antonioni films. What gets produced from this technique is a series of bodily “attitudes” or gestures. Now, seriality, or the organization of images into series, is for Deleuze one of the primary formal manifestations of time as “that outside which is infinitely further than the outside world” (183). And the gesture—as a more or less automatic bodily response to external and internal forces arrayed around and within it—can now function to index pure becomings, pure productions of difference in each unfolding moment. We might look then at the bravura opening sequences of L’eclisse (L’Eclisse, 1962), which, from a Deleuzian perspective, presents us with a series of gestures: Vittoria pacing, fingering objects, falling into the sofa and assuming a near fetal position, walking backward, catching herself in the mirror—while Riccardo, the lover she is rejecting in this scene, sits watching her intently, her every move registering upon his body via micromovements of facial expression or sudden shifts of position on his chair. For Deleuze (1989, 189), this type of series presents us with nothing short of a “philosophical reversal” in which the body is no longer that which must be bracketed out for thought to proceed, but rather that which is productive of thought: “[the body] forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life.”
If for Antonioni in the 1960s it was imperative that new thought be achieved—thought commensurate to a forbidding yet sublime technē in the process of reshaping the world—then this would be achieved via the body’s interaction with the new spaces of this world. In L’eclisse, Vittoria—so exquisitely attuned to the forces arrayed around her—continually experiments with ways to inhabit space. She “goes African” against the backdrop of a photomural of the Kenyan savannah; she interacts with wonder with the line of swaying metal poles at EUR (the poles effectively serving as industrial substitutes for the regularly spaced lines of trees one sees throughout the Italian landscape); she kisses Piero through a pane of glass of an old door. A Deleuzian reading would suggest that in this way, Vittoria enacts a continual process of becoming. Unwilling to be boxed in by a fixed identity, she enacts for us the highest potential of the time‐image: the power to produce new subjectivities, ultimately bringing us the power to think otherwise.