A shortish thesis thingie about pychoanalysis of Lacan and Lost Highway. it seems this is very common, like adriano said last week, there a shelves and shelves of lacan stuff and cinema.... is this because it's good? or important? i don't know, because i've not read Lacan, and i don't think i'd like to, because he's very creepy looking. and i only like nice philosophers. cutie ones like jacques derrida.
erica just google whacked 'verdant subluxation' and it got the Home Office Records - the Online Store!!! yay! wow whack . yay! and just before i remembered that on tuesday night at the builders arms i met this geeky computer guy who had met ted nelson two times. yikes. he was very eager to tell me everything that he thinks about david lynch hypertext rhizome (he didn't care for any of it) but we talked about google whacking, and of course how he'd been in the industry for 20 years... weird because i think he was like 30, anyways, he didn't care about theory. he was excited about how many websites there are now (although he didn't care for blogger).

Chapter two is some person's thesis - but i don't know on what - this is chapter two, any how, with a quote from deleuze and david lynch!

most of my research (around deleuze & david lynch) has brought up quite important essays, or writings, but not really relevant. mostly, if there is any of deleuze's theory used to understand lynch's work, it is from a thousand plateaus, or even (as i'll write in a minnie) from the deleuze reader - (assumingly one of those books that describe bit by bit) and then mentions the movement-image briefly. i'll have another look (this time requesting time-image and movement-image in the search) and see what happens. because i have thought a lot this week about the texts (melb uni bookshop can't get cinema 2 until AUGUST, but cin1 should be here in a little bit - you were thinking ahead Jess.) and why they haven't been used, and if they are too precious or something. i'm worried, because they seem to be going out of print fast...

I'm looking around for some deleuzey stuff, here's an essay on multiple personalities, and abused people. the interesting part is down the page, when he mentions subject and deleuze. Doom Patrols from the text But I am forced to think when I am confronted with some absurdity, some pain, when things no longer fit together on their own. Deleuze (following Bergson) and Morse Peckham (following the American pragmatists) both suggest that subjectivity is located in the gap between stimulus and response: it is the indeterminacy, the space of randomization, the temporal delay in the sensorimotor apparatus by virtue of which the latter is no longer a linear function and predictable consequence of the former. Every "self" is a singularity or a wound: a bifurcation threshold in the language of chaos theory. Selfhood is a violent rent in the fabric of my being; every quirk of my personality is a point on the catastrophe curve, the trace of a discontinuity in the course of my life.

i can't seem to find some of my archives... hmmm, maybe i didn't re-publish them when i changed the settings?

Here is an example on how to make links Jess' site

phew! (and weirdly enough, i was just about to spell phew - few!) oh dear. see you guys tomorrow!

Well, I did some huge blogging before, and my computer then decided to freak out, explorer was not responding etc. so I lost my notes, because I didn't get to publish them in time. Oh dear!
Anyways, here is what I think I wrote.
Went and saw Blue Velvet at the Astor! Yeah! Something that I may have mentioned earlier (at some time) is that I'm really interested in how fragmented lynch films are. When Sandy drives Jeffrey to the church (with organ music in the background), and tells him about her robin dream - I'd totally forgotten about that! And I even watched that scene about 20 times, because I used Sandy's speech as a monologue mock audition in my acting class!! Ha ha! 'and the robins represented love. But in our world, there was no robins'. Hahahahaha! Anyways, I'm keen on the trip/ballad, as part of the crisis of this action-image, and therefore how lynch fits into the time-image. Jeffrey goes with Frank to Ben's house (This-is-it) and Ben 'sings' roy orbison's 'In Dreams'. Then they go into the car, 'for a ride' to meadow lane, where Jeffrey upsets Frank by punching him in the nose, and Frank promises to give Jeffrey a 'love letter', or otherwise a bullet in the head. This sequence has an element of the 'trip', with no destination, no one has a purpose, the guys in the Frank's charger are loons, and giggle, and repeat themselves 'I'm Paul!', 'I said I'm Paul!' (Gotta love Jack Nance) Frank's unpredictable, ridiculous, on drugs, and downright angry about his obvious impotence.
Here is a long quote from Deleuze (p3) : but seemingly relevant.
"…if everyday banality is so important, it is because, being subject to sensory-motor schemata which are automatic and pre-established, it is all the more liable, on the least disturbance of equilibrium between stimulus and response…, suddenly to free itself from the laws of the schema and reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable, giving it the pace of a dream or a nightmare." This sequence in BV is of a dream, or nightmare, pace. Especially when we are still in Ben's house, and Frank yells "lets f**k" (!) and suddenly disappears, with the frame left only with nothing but the same room, with nobody in it (except a huge clown doll - I think that's a different story). We have lingered, whilst they (characters - Frank - larger than life) have gone. Deleuze continues with "There is, therefore, a necessary passage from the crisis of the image-action to the pure optical-sound image. Sometimes it is an evolution from one aspect to the other: beginning with trip/ballad films with the sensory-motor connections slackened, and then reaching purely optical and sound situations." (pp3-4). The 'ballad' in Blue Velvet is sung a few times, but the most interesting is when beautiful ben (Dean Stockwell - love the make up) sings 'in dreams'. Frank is so upset & happy, he mimes along too (to the recording), but then gets annoyed and stops the tape. This illusion of a 'club', and the spotlight (an actual set light Stockwell picked up to sing into - any-instant-whatever - it happens all the time in lynchorama - oh jess - you know jeffrey's chicken walk? At the start he does that weird walk - apparently kyle maclachlan was mucking around showing it off to crew members, and d.lynch went 'hey that's so cool, do it in the film' dur.), plays with our sensory-motor schemata. We are in a purely optical-sound situation. It plays with us again - in the 'Silencio' theatre scene in mulholland dr. I mentioned earlier. Not only can images trick us, sound can too. Eeek. Ok, too much talk. Better go.

here is an excerpt from that link i just published -


Lynch is most eager to speak about this quality. It's well-known that the project was originally intended to be a weekly television series, and there are hints that its current incarnation as a feature film is more of a salvage job than a grand design. (Some salvage job: Lynch shared the Best Director trophy at Cannes for his work.) But Lynch insists that Mulholland Drive is a fully realized film -- "it is what it wants to be," he says -- but does admit that he's thinking beyond the multiplex for further projects.

"A continuing story is the only good thing, in my opinion, about television," Lynch says. "Even with all the commercial interruptions, and the bad picture and sound all in a little box, it's a chance for a beautiful thing. Now, I'm thinking the Internet can do that for me also."

His idea is for an exclusive, Web-only series that would facilitate an ongoing story without standard considerations of beginning, middle or ending. "I've been working for two years on a site that can afford these possibilities, because for me, the Net is the future. It's more accessible, which means freedom for everybody. But," he says, smiling mischievously, "I am going to charge for it."

Cheeky monkey!!! (oh, i'm already paying for it!) go to GGGGG

when i got home from school on friday, my flatmate hugh was watching mulholland drive. it was near the end, so watched a little, and it was scary so i made a cup of tea. and then it finished and he said 'what's it all about, i didn't like it much, what was the point amelia?'. i felt hot under the collar, because lately i have felt that i should know the answers, but know that there's no way i can explain to people what lynch films are about. i said to hugh, 'there's probably no point, it might be there just for you to think about it.' and then i thought about it more, and especially with mulholland drive, lynch has given us so many fragments of narrative to work with. this film coincided with a lot of my reading over the weekend too, i was looking at basic literary theories on hypertext (Landow) and also mitchell's picture theory - and with mulholland drive there are multi-sequential narratives, people are involved and not involved, they are someone and then not someone. hmmmm, maybe this doesn't make any sense. then, in picture theory, mitchell describes wilder's sunset boulavard, and whilst i have not seen it, he was very descriptive in particular scenes. and it sounded like mulholland drive. lynch has said himself that he loves wilder, especially s-boul. and blue velvet has been compared with a wilder film (in style - esp. 50s era) this is the intertextuality (jess) of cinema, and can be compared with hypertext in the same way. (gordon cole - lynch's character in twin peaks - was apparently a billy wilder's characters name - anyone with the details?)

Anyways, i too have thought about the hollywood/hitler Deleuze stuff. i thought about lynch becoming web-based in production... why is he doing this? there's not huge financial gain (US$9 a month is not really that much, because i don't think that there are that many members - must find out), and whilst i don't think lynch's films are huge money makers, there must be something going on. did i mention this earlier? i feel like i'm talking and talking and talking, but not much writing or perhaps (dare i mention) thinking? oh dear boo hoo

There's so much to think about, nonetheless.

An interesting thing: in mulholland dr. the girls get dressed up (rita in a wig - the same hair colour as betty) and go to this creepy theatre. (i'm trying to think of think of this in terms of time). there's a man who says from the beginning 'this is all recorded sound, it is not real' or something or another, he does something zany (because he's the film composer - angelo badalamenti) and then this woman comes and sings crying - with all her heart, a cappella, and so so sorrowful, then she passes out, and the music keeps going. the girls are crying, and like them, we had forgotten (or moved on from) that the 'composer' or 'conductor' of the theatre told us that everything was pre-recorded. weird, and typical though of cinema - prerecorded sound track - not so typical of theatre. earlier (or later - grrrrr to multilinear narratives) melissa george sings to a director in an audition, we are on set and it appears as though she is actually singing... what i'm concerned about here, is that we are caught up in elements of time - to some degree - of what is real, and actual, we know we are watching a recorded sound, but believe it to be real. anyways, enough of that, because i found a cutie little picture of david lynch

ok, then, maybe i'll go.
i should, mention that jess sent me the best textie ever after star wars finished on thursday. "amelia = yoda! small yet powerful!" thanks jessica!!!
I'm going to see blue velvet at the astor tonight! yay! i've never seen it in the cinema before, so maybe everything will make sense! yeah right! ok dudies, bye.
(as you probably can tell, i had a stab of paranoia recently, i don't think i'm doing any work. grrr.)

Episode two: send in the clones.
Today in class we talked about so much, and it was great because of how our meeting with ajt earlier in the week brought different perspective to this class. We talked about what we liked/got out of talking with ajt, and I've just realised now that I really enjoyed talking about david lynch & also today. It's interesting what people have to say about his work. I think what I liked most about the ajt comment about cinema that 'expressed something that's not expressable', is that I find that all over the place. When I read critical analysis of lynch's work, I find it somewhat too obvious, and I feel that something's missing. Anyways. We went through all the actual and virtual image - in actors, like robert de niro and his character in raging bull. That was really exciting actually. Lynch de-centres the sms, into fragments. We have fragments of narrative, fragments of characters, fragments of dialogue - that's quite interesting, fragments of time, space and so on. There is quite a lot of everything. In terms of time, and that time is money, lynch spent 6years making eraserhead, with not a lot of money, but a lot of pressure to finish. They did stop in between somewhere, because there was no money…. Anyways, I'm going to transcribe some of the second discussion now!

A (very) brief summary of ajt: the two books are like the actual 'edit', they are the two parts. they are literally the pre-war and post-war bits, the movement and time bits. these two parts are written differently, apparantly constructed differently (although i haven't read the t-i in entirity ?). the m-i is whole, totality, unified and through the t-i this disappears, and it decentres perception.
another thing that ajt said was that he was interested in the 'impossibility of thought' and how cinema has 'expressed something that's not expressable'. here the gap being central to everything. there is some sort of impossible relationship. situations where you can't react to.
so in terms of deleuze-y and his writing, ajt reminds us that 'it's not so much what it is, it's what you can do with it.' which is a relief! and apparantly this is how we should use all books by deleuze (and guattari), take parts that make sense (to you) and see what you can do with it...
about the crystal-image, they are virtual and actual onscreen, and outside the cinema. both have actual and virtual.
hypermedia forms a rhizome, t-i is fragmented, and the m-i is more about action, reaction and the SMS (sensory-motor schemata)
more on this later.... bye for now.

The time-image ch4
It's interesting on pg 72 when the characters 'move into the explicit role'. the character as actual, moves into a virtual of theirselves to experience/progress/be challenged & it seems in doing so, becomes the actual, bright side of their virtual. they seem to find themselves through this process or exchange.
the expression of the crystal-image, the seed, the environment. could this be evident in the opening scene of BlueVelvet, as it starts with the environment (actual) and shows us its seed (virtual) in the twistybugs/insects underground.
oh, but coming back to the actor's actual and virtual. Jeffrey (BV) was actual-image with Sandy and actual-image with Dorothy. but he was more actual with Frank, who was, in a sense, a virtual Jeffrey. ( or could jeffrey be the virtual frank ? ) Anyways, Jerffrey behaves virtually with dorothy when she asks him 'slap/hit me, Daddy'. or whatever. he's not himself in this roleplaying, he's acting out frank's sexual role with dorothy, and is not very comfortable doing so. THEN, we have Frank, and his virtual sex/mind games. we don't really know his actual image or behaviour. he's just so zany. he's obviously impotent, there's not physical sexual penetration b/n him and dorothy - it's all virtual sex. oh dear too crazy now. it's practically virtual computer sex, or whatever people do for fun these days.

i realised, as i was almost sleeping, that whilst i looked at chapter 4, i hadn't done ANY blogging about it at all! yikes! so the blogs that follow are notes i made yesterday, but had forgotten to blog!!!

Mostly Lost Highway, 'beyond the face', this theorist looks at, and calls it automatic | writing ||| black screen, white noise. Here is her introduction: Black screen. A sense of murky, unfathomable depths hidden by its surface. This is where we seem to end up with American director David Lynch’s neo-noir mystery film Lost Highway.[1] It is certainly a difficult movie: its narrative has a number of incoherent elements (one of the main characters turns into another person while in prison cell, two different roles are played by same actress…); its timeline seems circular (the movie’s narrative ends with a scene that took place in the beginning of the movie); there simply cannot be a way to hold every element of the movie together in a rational coherence. Something is always missing, there are overlaps, too many things, displacements. The viewer is left with a feeling of a mystery at the film’s core, of something hidden by the varying images and narrative functions.

This site has a collection (very big) on available David Lynch Books, and appears to be quite helpful.

ok! yeah! blogging ahoy. i'm here with james (who is indeed blogging ahoy!) in the bonza lab. i'm looking for blue velvet film theory and deleuze stuff. i also just did a google on 'the american dream', and discovered more than 260, 000 nodes of information contain that saying. yay!
just found this out, a course reading for somewhere where they have thanksgiving:
Laura Mulvey, "Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet", Fetishism and Curiousity (London: BFI, 1996), 137-154.

ok, just found a journal article on the 'journal for cult media' website that talks about aspects of becoming human, deleuze & the 3rd rock from the sun! Go here now and look for it!

well, today we talked about reading, writing (in blogs and essays) and for next week it'll be ch4, the crystals of time...! on tuesday we will meet allan, and talk to him about his two essays, which were very good. (adrian told us that allan has read our blogs!) so allan's essays were extreeeeeeeeemly good.
so, another week finished... there's not that many to go now, unfortunately. although i am soooo tired (as all my peers are) golly gosh -as d.lynch would say.

quick note: i am interested in the fact that if i spend the day blogging in my word document, and consciously make notes as to when each entry ends and begins (see below), when i actually come round to blog, all entries will have similiar times of publishing, whereas it has taken me throughout the day to write. usually how blogging works, is that there is the time of publishing entries involved, as it happens, as the written is written, it is published. this delayed writing is making me feel not as 'valid', or looks like i've forgotten stuff and kept blogging/publishing. oh well. pizza for dinner!

2nd stuff. Chapter 4. This I will write notes on as I read - an experiment of mine! Let's see how to make sense and the actual time of reading. Within the space and time of the act of reading, can we make writing a process of understanding?
Blah blah blah.
In cinema we don't just see images, we see images surrounded by a world. Recollection, as flashback, what is the directional flow? To the limit, the circuits of recollection, the direction is that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection. (p68) Here we have the image with two sides, the actual and the virtual. With the genre of description, more circuits will be able to develop, with deeper layers of reality and memory and thought. We have the umbrella of 'opsign' given to the actual image - which is communication through (?) recollection-images, dream-images and world-images. (p69) The actual crystallises with its own virtual, and behold we have the crystal-image! We have the real and the imaginary with this image, and must keep in mind 'fact' so as not to become confused. Ok. There seems to be a very obvious (not to me) process or equation taking place within this crystal-image - with the actual and virtual. But over the page… "The most familiar case is the mirror" so let's see how this goes. The circuit is an exchange, because "the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field". So the actual image and its virtual "constitute the smallest internal circuit". The expression of their exchange is 'opaque-limpid', this exchange is continual. Cool! What I think about the film example - can be compared to the female characters in BV, Sandy and Dorothy. Good and Evil!!! Dorothy comes from a dark world, Sandy is still in high school. Jeffery (the intermediate) says to Sandy "you're a mystery" when he should be saying it to Dorothy, the one who deserves it. Cool. And Deleuze-y says on page 71, "between the two distinct sides, a doubt will always remain, preventing us from knowing which is limpid and which is dark, considering the conditions". This exchange seems to occur on different levels. The ship is a track, a circuit, and is caught between its two crystalline faces. There's the seed and the mirror.
We find (pg76) that it was inevitable that the crisis of the action-image gave the cinema no more stories to tell…. Could this be the 'death of cinema'? it seems that Deleuze says this is in fact, the mode of the crystal-image. "the work in the mirror and the work in the seed have always accompanied art without ever exhausting it, because art found in them a means of creation for certain special images. By the same token, the film within the film does not signal and end of history, and is no more self-sufficient than is the flashback or the dream: it is just a method of working, which must be justified from elsewhere."

So! Just read pg 42 again and found something worthy here about montage - it makes sense! In modern cinema - montage was already in the image - and it occurs in the depth of shot, or sometime is flat - it no longer asks "how images are linked, but 'what does the image show?' This identity of montage with the image itself can appear only in conditions of the direct time-image." For, I suppose, with the time-image, montage is through movement, flow, sequence - it "works and lives in time" and with this flow, time becomes it's own boss. So, therefore, the time-image was already around with classic cinema movement-image stuff, but evolved through the modern cinema to exist by itself.

Quick note: Deleuze talks about the impulse-image (as part of the movement-image) as the "intermediate between affection and action," and "is composed of fetishes, fetishes of Good and Evil: these are fragments torn from a derived setting, but which refer genetically to the symptom of an originary world operating below the surface." (p33) the reason I wrote this out, was because yesterday I was looking at some aspects of picture theory on the net and iconology came up, especially fetishes… so! There you have it.
Onwards with lovely Deleuze - oh dear. I'm so confused! But I think I'll look at the second chapter - write some notes. And then I'll write a bit about Allan's 2nd essay - because - it's worth writing about! There were interesting references to 'the sheltering sky' that makes some sense of Deleuze-y stuff.
(emotional stuff here) I feel really tired, confused, angry, sad and um, that's all. I have tried to feel excited about this stuff today - but I haven't got the heart this week. The good things are: it's sunny, and I got a pay rise from abc. My assesment was succesful and I'm now in salary band 9 point 2 instead of band 8 point 2. Yay. (ok, that's enough now)

Hello! As I always do, today I'll work through the reading, and make sense of it as I go. Having now (kind of) read a lot of Deleuze's writing, I feel more confident in what I read now. I think I am understanding a wee bit more than before (we have a scottish girl staying with us for a couple of weeks - tha's noo how you make porridge.)
Ok! Here we go!
We start off with 'reality' and that neo-realism aimed at different kind of real. It didn't represent an already real, it created a new real, invented a new kind of image, according to Bazin - and who is he? I don't know. "Neo-realism produced a formal or material 'additional reality'." (p1) Could this be that cinema in representing the real, created a different or heightened real? There a lot here about the 'optical' or the "pure optical situation" (p2), and Deleuze mentions a lot of films, with image sequences or movement or montage (?) and finishes this with "this is the cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent" (p2). Neo-realism is defined through these purely optical situations, and they are distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism. (I knew there was a reason why I didn't want Anzac Day to happen - I've forgotten a lot of what I understood 2 weeks ago!) I think the shift here is that viewers aren't swept along with the action-image stuff, they are forced instead to contemplate this new situation.
The crisis of the action-image is again defined… but I don't understand that "form of the trip/ballad" he mentions. However, in the old realism/model of the action-image "objects and setting already had a reality of their own, but it was a functional reality, strictly determined by the demand of the situation, even if these demands were as much poetic as dramatic." (p4) What has happened, according to Deleuze, is that the new modern cinema reality is different, for "objects and settings… take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves. It is therefore essential that not only the viewer but the protagonists invest the settings and the objects with their gaze, that they see and hear the things and the people, in order for action or passion to be born, erupting in a pre-existing daily life." (p4) So that the objects and settings of neo-realism is real in itself. There is a lot of 'banality' and 'everyday' references, and this realness itself becomes a spectacle. Dehumanised landscapes, empty spaces… these real things taking on their own identity perhaps?
From this, there is a new breed of signs, 'opsigns' and 'sonsigns'. They sometimes refer to these everyday things, or reports of the dream, or the past event. The report (for Antonioni) it seems to Deleuze, always has "this function of bringing idle periods and empty spaces together". We no longer can tell the difference between the imaginary and the real, physical or mental. Here I am reminded of Twin Peaks, for there is a very hazy situation with the imagined and the real, and perhaps it's not a good reference, but there is so much going on in Twin Peaks. For sometimes we see Dale Cooper's dreams, or visions, and they are quite similar to every day. Or in everyday life (of the show), we fully expect a giant to come walking out of the forest. And we are presented with questions of real or imaginary…
So! In short, "pure optical and sound situations can have two poles - objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental." (p9)
It is toward the end of part one, chapter 1, when Deleuze mentions Robbe-Grillet (anyone know him?), that I wrote D.L on the side, and I'm trying to remember why… oh! This quote… "The cinema was one of the causes of his evolution (R-G), because it made him discover the descriptive power of colour and sounds, as these replace, obliterate and re-create the object itself." (p12) And this is what happens in Lynch's cinematic reality, colour and sounds have descriptive powers. Textures.
Talking about Japanese cinema, "the action-image disappears in favour of the purely visual image of what a character is, and the sound image of what he say, completely banal nature and conservation constituting the essentials of the script" (pp13-14). We hear about nature, daily life, empty spaces, all weakening the sensory-motor situations (?) and it seems this is heading towards TIME.
Then there's just too many weird words: chronosigns (is that something to do with chronological?), lectosigns, noosigns - and I can't keep up with that.
I think I'll write about the other chapter later….