Cinema 1: The Impulse Image

I have now read the chapter on naturalism in Cinema one 4 or 5 times, so I'm finally going to try to make sense of it. It will be a crucial text for me.

First, Deleuze situates the "impulse-image" between the action-image and the affect-image. In the affect-image, which highlights emotion, a part (especially face) is rendered such a way as to become a whole. And space isn't part of a larger environment, but becomes an "any-place-whatever" (123). Through these techniques, emotion is evoked. And moving beyond that, to the action-image, we'll get the "Determined milieu" where things are where they are, not any place whatever. This will trade in affect for action. But in between is the impulse-image, which takes place in an originary world.

To try and make sense of this: a determined milieux is a realistic place. An originary world, by contrast, is a place dominated by impulses, which is to say animal drives. In an originary world "the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena" (123). The impulse image creates a strange fusion of a real milieux and an originary world; it is a determined milieux which seems to have been invaded and controlled by an originary world, usually with a single setting where nature dominates infecting the entire film. Deleuze has a whole list of originary worlds in Stroheim and Bunuel films: "the mountain peak in Blind Husbands...the rock garden of the Golden age..." (125). He concludes that list with: " Even though it is localised, the originary world is still the overflowing location where the whole film happens, that is, the world which is revealed at the basis of the social mileiux which are so powerfully described" (125).

This idea - that the originary world is the originary point - has so much room for unpacking. First, it reminds me of Freud's/Lacan's navel of the dream, which is the place where the conscious mind's meaning-making system is no longer able to graft an interpretation on the overdetermined expression of the unconscious. This seems to be very similar to Deleuze's concept; in the impulse-image, the originary world erupts into the real milieux, rendering the entire milieux a naturalistic system. And at the point of contact between the milieux and the originary world (the desert, the rockgarden) the interpretive act becomes problematic - after all, the desert potion of McTeague/Greed has long troubled reviewers. Besides that navel, the milieux and the originary world seem to have the same relationship as the conscious interpretation of the dream and the unconscious expression lying below it: "But what gives their description such force is, indeed, their way of relating the features to an originary world which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them. This world does not exist independently of the determinate milieux, but conversely makes them exist with characteristics and features which come from above, or rather, from a still more terrible depth" (125-126).

Deleuze identifies a number of directors who attempt to be naturalist but fail, with some interesting results (p 134+, including Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Fuller, Renoir, and others). But he is mostly interested in the three directors who do succeed in being naturalist: Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey. The most interesting part of Deleuze's commentary on these directors seems to be his distinction between how they treat degeneration. Stroheim does straight degeneration; he has an entropic system of degeneration, and he uses Expressionistic techniques of lighting and shadow to demonstrate how degeneration occurs over a period of time (126-127).

Bunuel has a much more interesting and problematic version of degeneration, one which, like Stroheim and expressionism, is linked to surrealism. Deleuze describes the system as follows: "The originary world thus imposes upon the successive milieux not exactly a slope, but a curvature or a cycle" (127). This cyclical nature of degeneration, which takes place as a "precipitating repetition, eternal return" means that there is never anyone who is completely evil (as they will always swing back to good) and that good figures play a stronger role than in Stroheim, as there always exist those on the upper part of the cycle. But ultimately things do not improve, as even the positive figures ("the male or female lover, the holy man") will eventually return and thus are "no less harmful than the pervert or the degenerate" (127). Either way, naturalism becomes very close to leaving the movement image and finding the time-image, but will never get there because it keeps its conception of time "subordinate to naturalistic co-ordinates" and thus naturalism could "only grasp the negative effects of time: attrition, degradation, wastage, destruction, loss, or simply oblivion" (127).

Much later than Stroheim or Bunuel is Losey, in whom the degradation takes the form of "the reversal against self" (137). In Losey, every character breaks down and degenerates when their own impulses are too strong to bear. "Fundamentally, there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality" (137). But Losey does seem to offer up, like Stroheim and Bunuel, an ambiguous form of salvation. This reversal only affects the men: "It seems that the world of impulses and the milieu of symptoms enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge" (138). The women in Losey, by contrast, do not seem to feel the impules. "The leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction."

Well, I'm sure there's much, much more, but I think that's all I have for now. Whew. This Deleuze is a bitch to read and think through, but it's also very satisfying and above all rich with meaning.