-Devdutt Trivedi
Gilles Deleuze’s study of cinema, based on the theories of Henri Bergson, presents the uncertain relationship with montage, the juxtaposition of images, and mise-en-scene, the spatialized formation of rhythms in time. Deleuze’s study of Bergson is through a study of the relationship between perception and action to link space and eventual time, since perception leads to Bergsonian indeterminate action which finds its measure in time and not space. Deleuze goes on to study the affect of perception-action through the sensory and motor divisions of the brain, or as Deleuze himself puts it ‘a motor tendency on a sensory nerve.’
Whereas the Hollywood cinema concentrates on perception-image and its resultant action derived from the space, Deleuze argues that an even more sophisticated cinema exists in the hands of those who explicitly deal with the notion of passing time on its axes of past, present and future to withdraw the process of action into what he called machinic-assemblage.
Along with Alain Resnais and Robert Bresson, Orson Welles is the film artist who Deleuze dedicates large volumes to in his tour-de-force accomplishments on film: Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image. Deleuze’s reading of Welles is perhaps the most significant one where ‘as soon as we reach the sheets of past it is as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave, time gets out of joint, and we enter into temporality as a state of permanent crisis.’ This crisis gives rise to the affect, the break up of sensory-motor relations that show on the face of the actor since the face, according to Deleuze, ‘gathers and expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden.’ None of this is truer than in perhaps Welles greatest work, his first film after Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons completed in 1942.
Adapted from Booth Tarkington’s novel of the same name about an aristocratic family in Midwest America during the turn of the century, the film was heavily cut up by the production company RKO. Welles was fired from his job at RKO with the production company, claiming a new motto ‘showmanship in place of genius’, as a public backstab to Welles’ methods. Welles had left the 131 minute cut with the film’s editor, Robert Wise, when he left America on a mission to Latin America, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor during the production of Ambersons in December 1941. The trip to Latin America would result in his remarkable feature documentary It’s All True (unfinished and assembled by various contributors in 1993), while Ambersons would be chopped down to its present 84 minute version.
Welles would tell film maker Peter Bogdanovich decades later that it would have been a better film in its original length. The film however did well at the box office and was shown along with a B-film Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, indicating that RKO did not see it as a poor business venture. The film was also nominated for four Oscars, Best
Picture, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography and Best Art Decoration. Although it is evident, from this evident, that RKO did not “dump” Ambersons, they did plug its revenues after firing him after they reached $500,000 mark.
Truffaut’s analysis of the film was that Welles had replaced the ‘artful manipulation’ of Citizen Kane with ‘an emphasis on action over camera work, the stretching of real time.’ In the Bergsonian sense, Truffaut seems to be referring to the withdrawal of perception in space, to action in time which is stretched over the location of the film: The Ambersons Mansion. One can add that the withdrawal of perception is followed by an extreme withdrawal of action, so that the spectator is confronted with the static nature of the image, as opposed to its ornamented forms in Kane, and instead the nature of Welles’ own omnipresent, omnipotent voice over makes the freeze-frame nature of the film become auditory driven. Not only is the voice-over language-sound information, the characters speak outside the realm of the frame. Welles engagements with tonalities of voice will only find a match in a very different milieu in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. Welles engages the audience with the nature of the pure voice, just as on the image track he lights the image irrespective of the placement of the actors, their affected faces, and instead captures the affect of black and white film itself, an élan-vitale in the Bergsonian sense.
Welles second work does not require the death of a character at the becoming or the ghostlike presence of Rosebud to establish the nature of out-of-touch time that he would continue to develop until his last film noir Touch of Evil in 1958. Welles abstracts the inside of the frame, Hollywood’s conception of the something film, instead of the Arthouse film’s conception of the ‘nothing’ film, where situation dissolves for the sake of documentation. The space is then choreographed and lit for Welles to allow for a deceptive presence of ornamentation through objects that populate the image.
Welles surrounds his material spaces consisting of characters, with either the property of remembering or knowing, both which are key concepts in his construction of time. Remembering refers to the unknown nature of the past, where as knowing refers to the deceptive nature of the ornamentation he achieves in the image. Welles would oscillate between these ideas of known and unknown in his documentaries aptly titled It’s All True and F for Fake(1973). Welles transforms within the logic of the two titles, the nature of the known as a philosophical ideal i.e. true/truth to its falseness with reference to Bergsonian matter formed out of the temporally derived Deleuzean action-image i.e. fake.
Welles transposes Tarkington’s text to constitute the verbal utterances of his characters which indicate his themes. The utterance serves the function of allowing language to enter the realm of indeterminate action. Deleuze’s study of affect and the face is can be accommodated in Bergson’s own insight on language in Time and Free Will, that ‘language gives a fixed form to fleeting sensation.’ Language is uttered through the lips, followed by the sensory-motor affect captured on the face. Words from Tarkington’s text are highlighted by Welles to do with time and memory. Utterances such as ‘I can’t remember’, ‘twenty years ago’ and ‘yesterday…over the weekend’ elaborate on the
relationship between memory and time, whereas utterances such as ‘…because I know him’ and ‘Now you’ve done it’ speak about the relationship between the known and action (measured in time) within the logic of the known.
Whereas Deleuze argues that Vertov’s freeze frame cinema is about the space in-between two images, once can argue that Welles’ is between the transitions from one image to another, the fade out, especially the dissolve, that emphasize a transformation in the cinematic object, which for Welles is the unknown domain of the film’s form. Welles transposes this to the location-space through a town that is changing, with characters uttering lines like ‘so changed.’ Deleuze’s reading of this logic in Cinema 2: The Time Image is the most important:
The sheets of the past can be evoked and summoned: Isabelle’s marriage of pride, George’s childhood, his youth, the Amberson family…But the images drawn out from these are quite useless because they can no longer be inserted into a present which would extend them into action: the town has been so transformed, the new motivity of cars has replaced that of carriages, the present has changed so profoundly that the recollections can no longer be used.
Welles transforms Eisenstein’s mastery of the episode to the logic of the sequence. Each sequence is constructed in Kafka’s logic of being ‘able to show how spatially distant and chronologically separate regions were in touch wit each other, at the bottom of a limitless time which made them contigous.’ Welles constructs with every new location-sequence a new abstraction of language-affect that functions in the form of a unique machine assemblage. At the same time the continous nature of the chamber piece format with similar locations within the mansion and outside make this Welles’ most consistent work.
Courtesy:
Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson, 1896
Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, 1910
One Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Les Editions de Minuits, 1980
Cinema 1; Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze, Les Edition De Minuits 1985
Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Village Voice