A further extension of this insistence from the outside is also found in Deleuze’s Time-Image. A brief and simplified synopsis of Deleuze's Cinema books can introduce a more detailed analyses on how the ‘outside’ pervades the image. The division between Deleuze's two cinema books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, charts the fundamental shift from classical pre-World War 2 cinema (movement-image) to post-World War 2 cinema (time-image). The movement-image is namely, cinema that is dependent on movement and action and is epitomised in the Hollywood genre film. Character perceptions and actions relate directly to the events in the narrative structure. The movement-image is a spatialised cinema, in which time is expressed and measured through movement. Deleuze asserts that a breakdown in the sensori-motor system after World War 2 leads to the time-image. Archetypically seen in European modernist or art films, such as the films of Godard, characters are unable to act and react in direct and immediate ways to their situations. The image is cut off from sensory-motor links and becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"
Night was a film I produced and co-directed with a Finnish filmmaker Joona Pettersson. It began as a work on dreams (or more specifically le songe in French, which may also be used to signify the concept of consideration or daydreams). But the only tangible dream logic in the narrative may be felt in the irrational cuts and temporal uncertainty.
The ‘rational’ cut is found in the classic movement-image. This logical edit is structured within the continuity system whose purpose is to make the story as legible and smooth running as possible. Deleuze’s time-image is distinguished by incommensurable or non-rational links and vacant and disconnected spaces (‘any-space-whatevers). In this kind of cinema the journey becomes the privileged narrative form. Within the passage, characters no longer direct the movement and themes of inner mental imagery, dreams and illogical visions, disruptions and breakdowns bring about a pure visual and aural image.
"The so-called classical cinema works above all through linkage of images, and subordinates cuts to this linkage. On the mathematical analogy, the cuts which divide up two series of images are rational, in the sense that they constitute either the final image of the first series, or the first image of the second....rational cuts always determine commensurable relations between series of images and thereby constitute the whole rhythmic system and harmony of classical cinema....Time here is, therefore, essentially the object of an indirect representation, according to the commensurable relations and rational cuts which organize the sequence or linkage of movement-images....modern cinema can communicate with the old, and the distinction between the two can be very relative. However, it will be defined ideally by a reversal where the image is unlinked and the cut begins to have an importance in itself. The cut, or interstice, between two series of images no longer forms part of either of the two series: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non-commensurable relations between images".
In Night, the protagonist moves from shot to shot across varying, illogical and precarious spaces: an apartment interior, a park, a forest, an empty field, a dirty train. Although there is no logical continuation between these spaces, they are joined together in a formal and atmospheric order through gradual tonality shifts and colour. It is impossible to determine with certainty the physical or temporal link between these shots. There are long takes that have no clear motivation or point of view. The implicit theme of Night is one character's search of reality through transition. We know that the subject exists, but do not know in what kind of reality. In Night we may not see any clear sign that reality has shifted but we are certain of its occurrence. Nothing but the protagonists movements advance the film through time and it is impossible to establish an emotional relationship to him, as he remains impassive and expressionless. In Night the long take in the forest is dense with visual detail but none of which it adds to the character’s identity. As the camera trails the subject from behind, a sense of the unknown and thus eternal possibility pervades.
Thought from the outside
Section 5
This type of editing relates directly to Deleuze’s cinema project as "the force or pressure of time goes outside the limits of the shot, and montage itself works and lives in time" Night is also characterised by several long takes. The inordinately long (for a short film) duration of these shots expresses the force of time through lack of spatial change, that is, movement or action. It is also here, in the long take, that Deleuze discusses how time, past and present find form in depth-of-field.
“We suggest that depth of field has many functions, and that they all come together in a direct time-image. The special quality of depth of field would be to reverse time's subordination to movement and show time for itself. We are not saying that depth of field has the exclusive rights to the time-image....Our point is that depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of past, the aspects of each region. This would be less a function of reality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection but 'an invitation to recollect...”
It is, at this point, interesting to mark how Deleuze’s discussion of depth of field informs any critique on the work of video. Deleuze links the use of depth of field to memory. The connection to memory is not necessarily literal such as the use of flashback or through psychological imagery. Through an increased clarity of image detail in spatial represention, memory emerges from an actual present or "of the exploration of a sheet of past from which these recollection-images will later arise". With Bergson’s term "sheet of past" we can visualize a space where both actual and virtual image co-exist. One of the major differences in the image quality between film and video is the increased depth-of-field seen in the video image due to its sophisticated digital captors. The resolution and detail in the video image functions as another way of evoking time in an illusional space.
In Night depth-of-field is a space in which the viewer can explore "virtual zones of the past" and decipher details of memory within the actual image. In the Deleuzian sense, depth-of-field is understood as a "function of remembering" and as a "figure of temporalization" [that] ....gives rise to all kinds of adventures in memory, which are not so much psychological accidents as misadventures of time..." As Jacques Aumont states:
"...the cinematic apparatus implies not only the passage of time, a chronology into which we would slip as if into a perpetual present, but also a complex, stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past(s), future(s) -and not only because we use our memory and expectations, but also because, when it emphasises the time in which things take place, their duration, cinema almost allows us to perceive time".
While the duration of fictional time is indeterminate, Night also presents time as a pure solid. The light in the film is uniform (overcast daylight) so that there is no indication of time passing until the very end when one sees change of light as the sun comes out in a single long take. This change in the quality of the image and temperature in colour may indicate a change but this is in direct conflict to the unspecified spaces which the subject continues to traverse.
