hello! today in class we talked a lot about that crisis of the action-image. everybody talked about films and directors i'd barely heard of, so i'll have to run to videobusters real soon. maybe i can rent out some extra weekends to watch these films in too...
anyways, just reminding myself that for next class (not next thursday - it's anzac day - blah) i will have read two of Allan Thomas' essays, (adrian has sent the first one today) and the first two chapters of cinema 2, by deleuze. whilst looking into those two chapters, i should find a particular problem or interest, that will then centralise my further reading!!! i might find what i can about d.lynch!!! yay!

For my annotated biblio last week, i found this essay/thesis thing from a monash uni student - stephen o'connell - Detective Deleuze and the Case of Slippery Signs. its about Twin Peaks, and what deleuze has to say about it (or would say about it, if he were a lynch fan - maybe he was - adrian could you please let me know!) i don't know about quality or not, but it was good to read!

Chapter 12 reading/writing notes : The crisis of the action-image
Mental image - an image which takes as objects of thought, objects which have their own existence outside thought, just as the objects of perception have their own existence outside perception. (p198)
Ok, Peirce finds the Thridness to be a kind of mental image. It seems there is nothing beyond thirdness, because beyond that everything reduces into combinations between 1, 2, 3. Thirdness can be adequately represented in relation. Could this be like a link, or the 'in-between' of the other two? Deleuze talks about the Marx Brothers, and Groucho being the 'man of interpretations, of symbolic acts and abstract relations' (p199). The other guys are each a form (of humour?) but require Groucho's reasoning, interpretation. So perhaps, this thirdness, the mental - is the understanding?
Describing Hitchcock as a tapestry maker, Deleuze says that it was 'Hitchcock's task to introduce the mental image into the cinema and to make it the completion of the cinema, the perfection of all the other images' (p200). This part where Deleuze relates to us of Hitchcock's mental-image, the reasoning and interpretation is all great - because it's all very obvious in Hitchcock films. Many of these elements that Deleuze describes, I've thought about before, but would not have known why I was thinking about them.
I think it is because we are part of the films, we become involved like a character, camera or plot. I found with Dial M for Murder, I was dying to find out how everyone else finds out about it, and felt myself going for the husband, feeling excited when the possibility that he may get away with it, arises. Like how Deleuze says of Rear Window, 'the camera, and not a dialogue, which explains why the hero has broken his leg', we are involved - to make that part of the story reasoned.
On pg 202, Deleuze talks about us - the public - 'whose reactions must form an integrating part of the film'. The spectator is the first to 'know' the relations. What is interesting (and much easier to follow) is that Hitchcock introduces the mental image into the cinema. 'That is, he makes relation itself the object of an image, which is not merely added to the perception, action and affection images, but frames and transforms them.'
Figures of thought are revealed, and the mental image had particular signs called demarks and symbols. Demarks are like marks which are things that seem contradictory to a situation; the ordinary to detach itself from the series. And the symbol is a concrete object which is bearer of various relations, or of variations of a single relation. (p204) Demarks and symbols can converge, and (Deleuze's summary) demarks are clashes of natural relations (series) and symbols are nodes of abstract relations (set).
As we head into the origin of the crisis, (so from above - would the action-image crisis be the appearance of this thirdness? The mental image?) we find the cliché and that SAS & ASA structure is cliché, formulaic in producing successful commercial films. This is the part that Jess spoke of last week, with 'Breathless' being a Gangsta-type cliché film, but subverted.
Deleuze mentions the internal and external misery - in the world and consciousness. He mentions internal and external quite frequently, but not sure about this misery stuff.
And then he summarises the apparent characteristics of the new image:
1. the dispersive situation, 2. the deliberately weak links, 3. the voyage form, 4. The consciousness of cliches 5. The condemnation of the plot.
Deleuze goes on to talk about what happened in Italian neo-realism cinema, post-war. So, is the crisis of the action-image the implications of a cliché image? Or is the crisis all the characteristics of the mental image above?
So! I think that here we will go beyond the movement-image and find out all about time-image, because Deleuze has exhausted (or exhausted me?) the topic for the time being.

I'm reading chapter 9: the action-image - the large form. I'll write notes, as I re-read the chapter…yes I think (or hope) that'll be best. (!)
The subheading here is called: From situation to action: 'secondness'.
Deleuze describes 'Realism': 'Qualities and powers are no longer displayed in any-space-whatevers, no longer inhabit originary worlds, but are actualised directly in determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times. Affects and impulses now only appear as embodied in behaviour, in the form of emotions or passions which order and disorder it." (p141) He says milieux and modes of behaviour constitutes realism, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody. Here Deleuze mentions that the 'action-image is the relation between the two and all the varieties of this relation.' (p141) Catching my breath here for a moment, milieu is called 'element, environment, habitat, and medium' on my computer's thesaurus. Apparently the milieu always have several qualities and powers, actualising. "The character reacts in his turn (action properly speaking) so as to respond to the situation, to modify the milieu, or his relation with the milieu, with the situation, with other characters" (p141). So perhaps this means that there is a certain situation, and with character actions, this turns into a new situation. A situation formed from the previous situation, by the action-image. I think this is what he calls the set [ensemble] of the action-image, or at least its first form. (p142)
This set can be formulated by SAS' (from the situation to the transformed situation via the intermediary action) and Deleuze says this takes a form rather like an hour-glass, or an egg-timer. And it's this formular (SAS') that Burch (?) called 'the large form'.
Deleuze has mentioned the 'duel' of the action-image previously, and here (p142) he says that the action in itself is a duel of forces, or a series of duels… and I am slightly confused here, as he goes on to say that the two poles of this formula (SAS') are called synsign, and binomial. "the synsign is a set of power-qualities as actualised in the milieu, in a state of things or a determinate space-time" and the other pole is called binomial, "in order to designate every duel, that is to say, what is properly active in the action-image." I'm not sure if this bit makes sense, and for the next few paragraphs, Deleuze mentions film scenes and whilst I can see a lot of the 'duel' he describes, I'm not sure about that 'synsign' and 'binomial' stuff. He says (still on p142) 'In a Western, the moment of the duel - when the street empties, when the hero comes out, walking with a very distinctive step, trying to guess where the other is and what he's going to do - is a binomial par excellence.'
Some examples of SAS' formula is when S = the situation (a character, community, country) A = a challenge, action, or experience and S' = what is revealed, undermined, challenged. Maybe? Cause and effect?
The examples Deleuze uses are quite varied, and maybe I'll talk about them in class, because the more I look through the reading now, and try to write about it, the more confused I am….. anyways, I'll sign off with a little bit here (p158) in which I'll use 'Blue Velvet' as my example….. Deleuze writes about the 'Actors Studio' which offers a method. 'On one hand a sensory contact must be established with the objects adjacent to the situation: even an imaginary contact with a material, with a glass'… etc. 'On the other hand the object must, in this way, awaken an affective memory, reactualise an emotion which is not necessarily identical'….. 'Handling a nearby object, awakening an emotion corresponding to the situation - it is by this internal link between the object and the emotion that the external linking of the fictitious situation and the sham action will take place.'
I'm not sure if he's talking about acting workshops or what, but it was reading this that made me think of Blue Velvet, nonetheless…. But hey, maybe I think about Blue Velvet all the time….

oh, and for the symposium: here's a link, haven't seen the page yet, i got the address in an email from oscar

i'm reading chapter 9 : the action-image in detail at the moment ( i have photocopied it ! ) and will blog as soon as poss. erica reminded me today that she noticed in her text book notes that we can bring examples of our avatar in on thursday! i have a nice collection of vids at home.... can they be examples from my collection, i wonder? james, i hope you are feeling better now, i'm not sure when you'll read this, but i hope that at any-instant-whatever when you do read this, you are feeling fine!

In short, the action-image is one of three varieties of the movement-image and the combination of the three varieties make up montage. A film is never made up of a single kind of image, but always has one type of image that is dominant.
In Deleuze's final paragraph of the chapter, he says that three kind of spatially determining shots can be made to correspond to the three kinds of varieties of movement-image, with action-image being the medium shot.
Back on pg 66, Deleuze mentions that 'movement-images divide into three sorts of images when they are related to a centre of indetermination as to a special image: perception-images, action-images and affection-images. And each one of us, the special image or the contingent centre, is nothing but an assemblage of three images, a consolidate'. The affection brings the perception and action together; it's the channel between the two, which makes up the movement-image.
Once again, sorry that this is late Jess and everybody…. See you in the morning.

First of all, I want to say sorry that this blog entry is so late - my computer was not connecting to the net last week, and whilst I'm blogging here in word, I shall find out if the connection has fixed itself…(not sure if a server prob or my computie prob).
So here are my notes on the action-image:
The Chapter is called the movement-image & its three varieties - second commentary on Bergson. Deleuze asks us 'how is it possible to explain that movements, all of a sudden, produce an image - as in perception - or that the image produces a movement - as in voluntary action?' Bergson found the cinema a false ally. Merleau-Ponty sees the cinema as an ambiguous ally.
Deleuze is talking in philosophical terms about consciousness and perception to understand movement-image and thus 'the cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world.' (p57) Is he saying that cinema creates something that IS us, or IS something that we belong to?
'It substitutes an implicit knowledge and second intentionality for the condition of natural perception' - the world (that cinema creates?) is something in itself, attuned to our world, and 'with the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world'.
He then talks about the cinema (without anchorage & horizon centre) and the way to go here is back up the path that natural perception flows. He finds image = movement and (with Bergson) says every image acts on others and reacts to others, on 'all their facets at once' and by all their elements (p58). We follow the path of natural perception through images, body, eye, brain (which is an image itself - and seems to simultaneously contain images). 'The identity of the image and movement leads us to conclude immediately that the movement-image and matter are identical.'(p59) Deleuze says this is not mechanism but machinism, and the material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machine assemblage of movement-images. And he continues with Bergson saying it is the universe as cinema in itself, a meta-cinema.
Now, these images in themselves have possibility for an Appearing through at least two reasons: 1. The first reason is in order to distinguish them from things conceived of as bodies - our perception & our language distinguish bodies, qualities and actions. And through this reason we see that such images are formed in the universe (action-images, affection-images, perception-images).
2. The second reason (it seems) is that the plane of immanence is entirely made up of Light. For this second 'positive' reason, it seems that Deleuze understands that is is a set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter.
We now move on to these varities, and as I'm looking into the 'action-image', I will TRY to make sense of what Deleuze says about that, and in relation to the other varieties of movement-image.
Firstly, he mentions the interval, which appears at any point whatever of the plane - he says 'a gap between the action and the reaction'. With the gap, you can understand one type of image among others. It seems that Deleuze has the movement-image and within that there are varieties, and within those varieties there are further definitions and so on. It appears to me like a pyramid - with movement-image on the top - and then the structure (building) or definition holding it up. But coming back to the reading, these external influences which help us make difference between image types becomes 'perception'. Deleuze says that it is an operation which is exactly described as a framing: certain actions undergone are isolated by the frame and hence, as we will see, they are forestalled, antcipated. (this writing reminds me of what I've read recently about Lynch's film Dune - where (in the last scene) the 'old priestess reacts to Paul's words in an exaggerated, almost theatrical way, so that it is not cleat if she is reacting to his actual words or to the distorted, overblown way she perceives his words.' (Slavoj Zizek's 'the Lamella of David Lynch') Zizek suggests that the normal relationship between cause (paul's words) and effect (the woman's reaction) is perturbed here.)
Anyways, Deleuze says that such delayed reactions which present something unpredictable or new will be called 'action' strictly speaking. With this interval - a gap between an action and a reaction - could this also encompass cause and effect?
Deleuze continues here with the perception of the thing & the thing itself - we perceive the thing minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs. Here, we could think about n - 1, in terms of link possibilities in hypertext - who thought about that Adrian - and is it a comparision?
Back on track with Deleuze, however, by need or interest (the lines & points that we retain from the thing as a function of our receptive facet) and our actions that we select as a function of the delayed reactions of which we are capable (p63).
(p64) The first avatar of the movement-image: when it is related to a centre of indetermination, it becomes perception-image - on one side of the gap - the other side is action-image, when action is the delayed reaction of the centre of indetermination.
From page 65, 'perception is master of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time' therefore, the second avatar of movement-image is action-image: in which the incurring of the universe - simultaneously causes the virtual action of things on us & our possible action on things. And then Deleuze finds the in-between of these two avatars: affection.
Action in movement, action through perception, action with affection. Are these some things that I'm getting here… an update soon….
(yay, computie is working with the net)