Abstract
This chapter proposes a logos of cinema as an unseeing engagement with time, particularly as conceived through Deleuze’s terms. His writings on visual aspects of cinematic subjectivity, virtual/actual dynamics, and hodological/crystalline mnemonic states are reworked through audible engagements of simultaneity and coexistence, giving rise to independence and inseparability. Unseeing audibility opens to a logos of signs, an availability of relations with which a film’s character may or may not attend. Various logos engagements are explored through the films of Bresson, Tarkovsky, Coppola, and Wenders. Malick’s logos is expressed as a reaching forward from what has become lost, a fragmented audible gathering in memory, and a matrix of audible collisions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I am greatly assisted in my reading here by Daniel W. Smith’s “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence.” See Smith (2012).
- 3.
The HBO series Westworld approached this in an interesting manner by breaking the presumed logos and thereby widening the sphere of its own actuality. Through reverie they come to self-awareness and remake their world because of it. In this, they transcend.
- 4.
For more on this in a noncinematic, metaphysical sense, see Deleuze (2001) and Agamben’s interesting meditation on that essay in his “Absolute Immanence” (1999). For Deleuze, to think “immanent to” is to give life over to something that is not itself. Life does not depend on and is not determined by anything other than or outside of life.
- 5.
See Chap. 2.
- 6.
An example is an implied transcendence , in which a character believes in a deity whose reality remains an open question. To borrow from James , this belief in the unseen may be as real as anything one sees (2002).
- 7.
I will later argue that Tarkovsky’s use of sound is transcendent to its logos; but here it is audible.
- 8.
This is Deleuze’s term (1989), borrowed from Bergson . He writes that this change to attentive recognition is one of “description.” The time-image decouples the thing from its sensory-motor aspect and becomes “pure” optical/sound. It is not description in a narrative explanation or diegetic delivery; description, rather, is a way Deleuze conceives of pulling out that which is more than the thing perceived in an otherwise sensory-motor framework. Description replaces the object to make something new.
- 9.
“In this case, instead of an addition of distinct objects on the same plane, we see the object remaining the same, but passing through different planes” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 44).
- 10.
- 11.
“The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient ” (Bresson, 1977 p. 28).
- 12.
This term, popular in film sound theory, is another example of thinking about sound visually. As Metz correctly noted, there is no such phenomenon as offscreen sound (1985).
- 13.
“Subjectivity, then, takes on a new sense, which is no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘is added’ to matter, not what distends it; recollection-image , not movement-image ” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 47; written in 1985).
- 14.
“Does this mean that there is no inside? …an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world?” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 96; written in 1986).
- 15.
“The most distant point becomes interior, by being converted into the nearest: life within the folds. This is the central chamber, which one need no longer fear is empty since one fills it with oneself” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 123).
- 16.
“We will then think the past against the present and resist the latter, not in favour of a return but ‘in favour, I hope, of a time to come’ (Nietzsche) , that is, by making the past active and present to the outside so that something new will finally come about, so that thinking, always, may reach thought. Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to ‘think otherwise’ (the future)” (Bergson, 1988, p. 119).
- 17.
Either/or. See Kierkegaard (1946, pp. 26–28).
- 18.
Again, for Deleuze the transcendental , unlike the transcendent, has the capacity for change, mutation, etc. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze seeks “an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field, which does not resemble the corresponding empirical fields” but is also not an “undifferentiated depth.” It is not consciousness, but singularities that are non-personal and non-individual. This occurs on an “unconscious surface, and poses a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution” not fixed or sedentary but also not a synthesis of consciousness (1990b, p. 102). The transcendental for him is therefore not subjectivity, but it is what folds to subjectivity.
- 19.
“At one moment it is the obscure emotion of the wish within him which awakens recollections, at another moment he awakens them himself; for he is too proud to be willing that what was the whole content of his life should be the thing of a fleeting moment” (Kierkegaard, 1946, p. 124).
- 20.
“But although the Logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding” (Heraclitus , Fragment 2; see McKirahan [2010, p. 112]).
- 21.
“The question of knowing whether or not the whole range can be attributed to God depends on the separation of whatever is reality in the range from whatever is limitation, that is to say from the order of infinity to which the range can be raised” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 125).
- 22.
“This economy of narration, then, appears both in the concrete shape of the action-image and hodological space and in the abstract figure of the movement-image and Euclidean space” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 128).
- 23.
For more, see Doane (1985).
- 24.
Synchresis is a neologism that comes from Chion’s fusion of Kantian synthesis and cinematic synchronization . It is a dialectical thesis, antithesis, synchresis activity on the part of the audioviewer accomplished through the collision of a nonequivalent image and sound. So: A + B = C, where C is a new idea formed in the disparate audiovisual dialectic.
- 25.
- 26.
Or have we? Perhaps what we see in the images is Stan’s imagination. This is doubtful, however. To give thought and image to what is hodological, we have to turn to Malick. But for now this scene remains an introductory way of conceiving audible simultaneity, one that invites the possibilities of a rupture into thought.
- 27.
“Telephone. His voice makes him visible ” (Bresson, 1977, p. 62).
- 28.
See Plato (2002) for the singing of the cicadas in Phaedrus.
- 29.
See Bachelard, who quotes Pierre Reverdy: “‘The poplars tremble gently in their mother tongue’” (Bachelard, 1960, p. 189).
- 30.
Kierkegaard (2009).
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
Heraclitus , Fragment 123: “Nature loves to hide itself.”
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Batcho, J. (2018). Logos of Cinema. In: Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76421-4_3
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