Abstract
The reader is dropped into cinema as a continuation, in the midst of time. Setting aside distances of gaze and textuality, the introduction moves inside cinema to the thinking within that becomes a philosophical form of expression. This chapter proposes new terms for Malick’s unseeing cinema: audibility, unseeing, logos, hearing/listening, virtuality/actuality, simultaneity/coexistence, independence without inseparability, etc. The metaphysical limit of unseeing cinema is an immanent, audible, Heraclitean logos. Major literature is addressed, particularly the joining of Deleuze and Kierkegaard and how they are brought together in Malick. Questions of faith and spirit are raised, and unseeing audibility is introduced as another epistemology, the unfolding of new paths of thinking. Malick’s unseeing cinema is a coexistence of memory, time, and audibility that unfolds as an ethics of repetition.
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- 1.
See, for example, Elsaesser & Hagener, who, even though they place experience in the past tense, recognize that cinema lives, haunts, and influences us “in much the same manner as past memories or actual experiences. Neither fully external nor entirely ‘in the mind’s eye,’ films are complexly woven into time, consciousness and self” (2010, p. 151).
- 2.
Cognitive film theory often refers to a “paradox of fiction” regarding the emotional bond of audioviewer and character. (See Sinnerbrink, 2011.) But I agree with Sinnerbrink that any such stance cannot cope with ineffable layers of involvement one has in a film. Cognitive and reception theories tend to place the emphasis of experience on a divided audience’s visual perception, while unseeing offers a different mode.
- 3.
This aligns, at least somewhat, with Jerry Goodenough’s fourth distinction of film philosophy (2005). For more on this, see as well S. Mulhall (2008) and R. Sinnerbrink (2011). Mulhall has his own categories on the relationship between film and philosophy: film as philosophizing, the philosophy of film, and film in the condition of philosophy. A welcome argument is his prioritizing of the particular (see 2008, Chap. 5.), a concept Sinnerbrink extends into his concept of “romantic” film philosophy, often played out through writings on Malick.
- 4.
Goodenough is also working here through notions proposed by Bernard Williams and Julian Baggini.
- 5.
Sinnerbrink writes of the importance of considering how a Malick’s films “thinks,” as itself, although he couches it in visual and narrative terms (2006).
- 6.
We may consider William James here (2002), that the thought of a religious experience is actual because it is experienced. Similarly, a duration of thinking given rise in unseeing, its poetry and divinity, is made actual through the cinematic image.
- 7.
“World” is a contentious term in philosophy, often finding some division, such as the totality of appearances, perspectival aspects such as Weltanschauung and Weltbild, language, or narrowing into an emergence born of some action or gesture. I mean it here and throughout in its most colloquial connotation, which is also most appropriate for cinema: the entirety of what is and may be.
- 8.
See Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs (2009) in which he writes that belief comes ultimately in a decision. “The conclusion of belief is not an inference but a decision, thus doubt is excluded” (p. 150). I am modifying his process to suggest that the inference shapes the belief that gives rise to action.
- 9.
For another perspective on this, see Teresa Rizzo’s Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction (2012). She provides a different argument from what I offer here, one based on the body of the spectator. For Rizzo, Deleuze and Guattari offer a conceptual means to overcome binary distinctions that otherwise render women as the other to male perspectives.
- 10.
See Deleuze & Guattari (1991).
- 11.
“Audioviewer” is an admittedly cumbersome noun, but I require a noun for when “audience” and “viewer” presume too little or too much. “Audioviewer” has gained some traction in film theory, so I am employing it here as well.
- 12.
Yet there are distinctions to address. Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s notions of logos evolved over time. Heidegger’s “laying that gathers” is concentrated in his mid-period Early Greek Thinking (1984) and is an effective conception of logos on those terms. However, his wider use is not advocated here because it relies too much on an Aristotelian conception of a logos that reveals the image of existing truth (aletheia) in a statement. For Deleuze’s part, his development and critique of logos is also based in Aristotelian/Heideggerian terms. He conceives logos as a priori and preconditional to thinking, and he often thinks of thinking itself as lying between statements and visualities, not so distant from how Heidegger thinks of logos as between the statement and its image. To reiterate, briefly: logos as used here is an engagement with unseeing and its signs—logos through immanence , which, perhaps, carries the idea of transcendence . This brings it to a pre-Aristotelian, Heraclitean, nonlexical relation, but one that does not discount language or images. As will be repeated later, logos is itself but only because it is made in its making.
- 13.
Heteronym comes from Fernando Pessoa but applies to Kierkegaard and is mentioned as well by Deleuze and Guattari . This word has another, more common, meaning, which will be explored in the conclusion.
- 14.
The distinction between these terms intercessor and conceptual persona are not always consistent in Deleuze. In some writings he seems to make them synonymous, while in others the persona is one through whom the philosopher becomes while the intercessor is the character or other entity that acts out the philosophy. It seems that an intercessor is one type of persona and a persona is one type of intercessor.
- 15.
Roger Munier also conceived of cinema as a logos, writing that its “‘world, in its own terms and in the immanent expression of itself, puts itself at the service of a logos’” (Mitry, 1997, p. 374) . Yet he also places logos in structuralist terms as a “discourse” through which consciousness structures objects. Mitry , commenting on Munier, comes closer to a logos as offered here, in that “reality organizes itself into a logos” (p. 375, emphasis added).
- 16.
To be clear: The fold is Deleuze; but again, his adoption of logos is different from that offered here.
- 17.
He adds that this is Plato’s concept, not Socrates’s. Socrates, Kierkegaard writes, was more interested in the moment. In Plato’s Meno, “Recollection” ( anamnesis ) is described by Socrates as learning and inquiry that emerges through the truth that resides already within due to the immortality of the soul, and is for him proof of its immortality. This, Kierkegaard notes, makes recollection a “backward reference.”
- 18.
For more commentary on this by Deleuze, see Deleuze (2015).
- 19.
- 20.
See Deleuze’s monograph on Spinoza and the Scripture and its Word concept of God, which Spinoza sets aside in favor of immanent expression. As Deleuze writes, for Spinoza “The concept of expression, at once speech and manifestation, light and sound, seems to have a logic of its own” (1990, p. 53).
- 21.
In Proust and Signs, Deleuze claims that “there is no Logos that gathers up all the pieces, hence no law attaches them to a whole to be regained or even formed” (2000, p. 131). As with this passage, his use of the term often presumes an intelligence that is prior. However, this is not logos but more aligned with what the Greeks referred to as nous : divine thought, the mind of God. Deleuze’s thinking on logos evolved somewhat through the course of his writing. In Difference and Repetition, logos takes on a distinction from nomos as that which allows for a rupture of thought. And in his final work with Guattari , the two write that the “sieve” along the plane of immanence is a pre-Socratic logos that is not aligned with reason. “If we call such a plane-sieve Logos, the logos is far from being like simple ‘reason’ (as when one says the world is rational)” (1994, p. 43). They imply that logos in the ancient Greek sense, which is advocated here as well, was the means of taking from the flux of chaos in its immanence . Logos is now the other to a transcendence of the sages that is imposed from beyond. While maintaining an entity status as itself—a sieve as a thing that gathers rather than the activity of gathering—it at least moves Deleuze toward a kind of relation that engages in potentialities not reduced to the rational and analytical, nor the visual and stated.
- 22.
For context, see Deleuze, 2000 (apprenticeship) and 1988 and 1993 (the fold and the outside).
- 23.
Indeed, Kierkegaard is radically opposed to attempts of the church to ossify faith.
- 24.
The following quote from Deleuze reads to me more of a Kierkegaard than Nietzsche influence, and it illustrates the complexity of his metaphysics and his movement on matters of subjectivity: “The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it. For that matter, repetition is itself in essence imaginary, since the imagination alone here forms the ‘moment’ of the vis repetitiva from the point of view of constitution: it makes that which it contracts appear as elements or cases of repetition. Imaginary repetition is not a false repetition which stands in for the absent true repetition: true repetition takes place in imagination” (1994, p. 76).
- 25.
With Guattari , he wrote of Kafka’s audible characters, who hear not a “systematized music” nor “a composed and semiotically shaped music …rather a pure sonorous material” (1986, p. 5). This concept of sound reflects writings at the time about musique concrète, fluxus and experimental music. And in A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), they write of the deterritorializing effect of ambiguity in the audible relation: “sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die” (1987, p. 348). Yet even here, as elsewhere in ATP, the context of their writing is the de/reterritorialization of music and the refrain.
- 26.
See Deleuze’s book on Leibniz : The Fold (1993).
- 27.
Sound theory is often consumed by this phenomenological, empirical or empiricist “sound of.” From the secondary qualities of Locke to the “aural objects” of Metz and continuing into more contemporary scholarship.
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Batcho, J. (2018). Introduction. In: Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76421-4_1
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