Guy's Saturday Extravaganja!

Deleuze Precis

• In Welles, fixed point exists through which “sheets of past” coexist and confront each other. (116)
• In Resnais, death does not fix on an “actual present”; it cannot be traced back to/reduced to a single experience. (116)
• Voice-off loses centrality as a result of dissonance with the visual image. (116)
• Confrontation between sheets of past takes place directly, each capable of being present in relation to the next. (116)
• Different levels of past do not relate back to a single character, family, or source. (116)
• Memory-machine does not consist in recollecting, but rather in reliving a precise moment of the past. (117)
• Complex memory relationship between Nevers and Hiroshima, he keeps her distant from his memories, she draws him into hers. This is a method of forgetting. (118)
• Idea of age tends to take on an autonomous political, historical, or archaeological range. (118)
• Durations can be inferior and superior to human time. (118)
• Resnais plunges us into a Memory which overflows conditions of psychology. (119)
• Each sheet of past is a continuum. (119)
• Resnais’ tracking shots define continuums; circuits of variable speed. (119)
• “Boulanger transformation”: a square may be pulled into a rectangle whose two halves will form a new square, wit the result that the total surface is redistributed with each transformation. (119)
• If we take the smallest imaginable region of this surface, two infinitely close points will end up being separated, each allocated to one half, at the end of a certain number of transformations. (119)
• Each transformation has an ‘internal age’, and we may think of a coexistence of sheets or continuums of different ages which form a topology (119)
• What happens is that the transformations or new distributions of a continuum consistently and inevitably end in a fragmentation; every region of a continuum 'may begin by changing shape in a continuous way but will end up being cut in two. (120)
• Resnais enjoys creating maps and cartographies for his characters, for biographies allow him to delimit the different 'ages' of each character. (121)
• The map appears, first, as descriptions as objects, places and landscapes: series of objects are used as witnesses in Resnais' films. (121)
  • These objects are above all functional, as the mental function or level of thought which corresponds to it. (121)
    • Resnais conceives of cinema not as representation of reality, but rather the way the mind functions. (121)
• The Bibliotheque Nationale's books, trolleys, shelving, etc. constitute the elements and levels of a gigantic memory where men themselves are only mental functions, or 'neuronic messenger.' (121)
• In Resnais' films, cartography is essentially mental and cerebral, representing the brain as world, as memory, as 'memory of the world.' (122)
• **Resnais creates a cinema which has only one singular character, Thought. (122)
• In Resnais' films, the inadequacy of the flashback doesn't stop his work as a whole being based on the coexistence of sheets of past, the present no longer even intervening as centre of evocation. (122)
• In interpreting flashbacks, Bergson's distinction between the 'pure recollection', which is always virtual, and the 'recollection-image', which makes it actual only in relation to a present. (123)
  • Bergson states that pure recollection should not be confused with the recollection-image which derives from it; it remains a 'magnetizer' behind the hallucinations which prompt it. (123)
• Non-chronological time is extracted, by constituting a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of traverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them. (123)
• When recollection fails, one enters the territory of false recollections with which we trick ourselves or try to trick others. (123)
  • It is possible of the work of art to succeed in inventing these paradoxical hypnotic and hallucinatory sheets whose property is to be at once a past and always to come. (123)
• 'The absence of the childhood-adolescence-adult age progression in Resnais......perhaps pushes him to reconstitute a synthesis of the life-cycle on the creative plain.....' (124)
• Success appears when the artist reaches the excess which transforms the ages of memory or the world: a 'magnetic' operation, and this operation explains the 'montage' rather than the other way around. (124)
• Resnais has often said that characters do not interest him, but the feelings that they could extract from them like their shadows. (124)
  • Characters are of the present, but feelings plunge into the past. (124)
• When transformations themselves form a sheet which courses all the others it is as if feelings set free the consciousness or thought with which they are loaded: a becoming conscious according to which shadows are the living realities of a mental theatre and feelings the true figures in a 'cerebral game'. (125)
• If feelings are ages of the world, thought is the non-chronological time which corresponds to them. (125)
• If feelings are sheets of the past, thought, the brain, is the set of non-localizable relations between all these sheets, the continuity which rolls them up and unrolls them like so many lobes. (125)
• Resnais says of cinema, that something ought to happen 'around the image, behind the image and even inside the image.' (125)
  • This is what happens when the image becomes the time-image. (124)
• The world has become memory, brain, superimposition of ages or lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, creation or growth or even new lobes. (125)
• The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future. (125)
  • Independent of and fixed point. (125)
• The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time. (125)