Medium: Film
First Analysis: “Time-Image/Movement-Image” or “Poetic/Narrative”
Genetic Time-Image: Noo-Sign/New-Signs
Binary Sign: (1) “Aural/Sound-Images” and (2) “Optical/Sight-Images”
Modes: (1) “Author-Function” and (2) “Free Spectator”
Time-Image: An image which is unrecognisable, or “new” to a spectator, or which “shocks” a spectator out of a narrative which otherwise makes sense. A “time-image” creates a moment in which we, the spectator, are forced to go into our own memories (hence, “time”) to construct meaning for ourselves.
Time-images are confusing movements in films, moments which make us go “Huh?” There are two kinds of time-images, “aural” and “optical.” Gilles Deleuze, who coined the term, preferred to look for them in so called “art-films,” as he called “time” the highest pursuit of cinema. He, like many others, could not see any high pursuits in what is called “low culture.” We reject the term “high” and “low” culture. The only thing this binary does is restrict people who like other other kinds of films from having access to the amazing way in which Deleuze’s thought can think moving-images. Deleuze’s thought, I find, produces more things in images than there were before, and allows me to “think” and “speak” cinema anew.
The classical time-image refers to an image which you cannot “name,” which you cannot put a “noun” to, which escapes description (many forms of abstraction are good examples of time-images). Movement-images work firstly as “nouns” (perception-images) while the time-image presents a pure optical event, and/or a pure sound-event which the audience cannot name, and therefore experiences, or contemplates the image anew. This may cause us to have no language, or to resort to the language of poetry. A movement-image presents a story that we follow toward expected actions (often clichés) and which is easily able to be communicated as language (a “plot” description). Deleuze presents the two as a binary, however, I find that there is always the potential for time-images to arise in movement, and for images which seem like “time” to collapse into movement-images (ref: “poetic”). It is never a case of simply saying a film is being an image, but to chart the way these images become over time.
I saw a good example of a time-image in Friends recently, for instance. The characters were sitting around a table discussing an incident from their past. Three of the characters had been there, and one of them hadn’t. They mentioned a little bit of the story and then stopped. The character was confused, and I, as an audience member, was also confused. What were they talking about? As they talked I began to use my imagination, to try and think what might have happened. This is a key element of the time-image: the audience is left to contemplate the image, to work something out for themselves.
This is an “aural” time-image, rather than an “optical” time-image. There are many ways in which a film can confuse you, or make you aware of “time.” By abstracting the image, by disjointing the sound from the image, and by having the characters refer to events in their past which we have not witnessed.
Then “Friends” cut to a close-up of the character who was confused, what Deleuze calls an “affection-image.” The “affect” allows us to “read” emotions on the face of the character, and to feel them ourselves, to wear their face. Then the film cuts to the thing they are talking about, leaving the characters in the lounge behind. I remember the scene from another show, and realise I am watching a “flash-back” show. But this time I am not watching the image as myself, I am watching it as the character who wasn’t there, wearing their face, “becoming them” as Deleuze would say.
I looked at the friends characters in a whole new way, as if I had never seen them before. Usually I see them “signs,” not really as people, but as symbols each with a “cliché meaning” (as movement-images). For this brief moment I see them as if I “love” them, as if I really am their “friend.” I would not have had this experience if I were thinking of the images in my usual TV-watching state of mind. This is why I enjoy Deleuze’s thinking, for the folds of experience it can reveal.
Like Bachelard’s “poetic-images” (rather than “ontic-images”) (2) and Bertolt Brecht’s “author as producer” (taken up by Walter Benjamin) which seeks to construct texts encouraging the audience to “think,” which “induce[s] other producers to produce,” (3) time-images are for the creation of new experience. This is why the “genetic” sign of the time-image is the “noo-sign,” which breaks into image and sound (in cinema). “Noo-images” occur in all art forms, any time there are generic forms in which it can arise; sometimes with image (painting, drawing, film), and at others with sound (music, some poetry, film). Sometimes with real bodies (theatre, performance art, film).
Noo-images are the language of poetry, while “ontic-images” are the language of narrative (images that seek to build “one” meaning, one coherent structure). On the one hand, the time-image is an author function, a “kind” of image an author creates. This is one side of the time-image. I also think of the “time-image” as a “state of mind.” The “time-image” allows me to think some cinema and art (Friends) through in a way that it may not have intended, but which I enjoy, a moment of poetry, a meaning which I create as a free-spectator.
See also: Poetic-Image
.
.
Bibliography (Wayfarer Library)
(1) Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image (1985: Athlone Press, 1989).
(2) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958: Beacon Press, 1969).
(3) Bertolt Brecht, in David A. Gerstner & Janet Staiger (ed.), Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003) p13.
.
.
