As the corrections to my PhD thesis, on Deleuzean Hybridity in the Films of Leone and Argento, have now been approved, here it is for those who wish to read it.
Basically what I say is that Deleuze formulates his concepts of the movement-image and the time-image primarily in relation to classical Hollywood genre cinema and modern European art cinema respectively. As such, the films of Leone and Argento raise questions regarding this framework, in being post-WWII European films, but also being genre films (westerns, thrillers, fantasy-horror, and a gangster film). I then try to bring out how these films have hybrid characteristics, and relate this to certain earlier and later films to place the two directors within a broader tradition.
Showing posts with label Gilles Deleuze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gilles Deleuze. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
And some more thesis...
The film's position as antithesis to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is evident from its opening scene, as blind ex-reporter Franco Arno (Karl Malden) and his ward Lori (Cinzia de Carolis) pass a parked car on their way home. Inside the car a man is talking, sotto voce. With his (cliche) sensitive hearing Arno realises the discussion implies blackmail, and accordingly asks Lori to take a look while he ties his shoelace. Though Lori can make out one of the men in the car, the other is in shadow; as she looks back Argento cuts to the reverse angle while on the soundtrack a jarring chord, soon to be identified with the blackmail victim cum killer, Dr Casoni (Aldo Reggiani) is heard. Just as in its predecessor, Argento is thus consciously presenting an initial situation in which the action-image breaks down into opsigns and sonsigns. This time, however, aural rather than visual data are to the fore. Additionally, unlike Dalmas, Arno and Lori are in no position to act. As a child Lori is subject to what Deleuze, in relation to the Italian and French time-image cinemas refers to as “motor helplessness”: “The role of the child has been pointed out, notably in De Sica (and later in France with Truffaut); this is because, in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing.” (2005b: 3) Arno, meanwhile, is a “seer” figure, albeit a decidly ironic one on account of his blindness.
Arno's position is further signalled by the next scene, in which Casoni breaks into the Terzi Institute in order to substitute a fake, clean genetic profile for his real, incriminating one. Arno is intimated as having a kind of second sight, sixth sense or intuition that something is happening outside through the way the scene is edited. As Casoni knocks a watchman unconscious, the scene seems to be taking place simultaneously within the real world and within Arno's mind. As the sequence continues and Casoni enters the institute proper, his position does become somewhat more independent and detached. Nevertheless, it is also noticeable that Argento continues to represent him in a different manner than Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. She and her husband double were always physically present in the frame, whether as the dark-clad silhouette or metonymic gloved hands. Casoni, by contrast, is only seen as a shadowy figure when he is seen fleeing the institute from an observer's point of view. Otherwise, Argento goes to considerable lengths to absent his body from the frame. For example, when Casoni later kills Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov), it is almost as if the garrotte goes around her neck by itself, as if it animated by supernatural force. This, of course, is something that would not be out of place in one of Argento's later fantasy-horror films, with their 'Gothic' or 'Expressionist' animate (animistic?) worlds. For, as Deleuze says: “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of Nature, that is, for the unconscous spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum. From this point of view natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no longer any different. A wall which is alive is dreadful; but utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce.” (2005a: 52)
Whilst The Cat o' Nine Tails is a giallo and, as such, eschews outright fantasy, it is nevertheless more open to such possibilities compared to its predecessor. That this is so is, I would argue, most evident in the poetic way Argento depicts his protagonist and antagonist, which I will now continue to explore.
The one thing we do see of Casoni repeatedly throughout the film is the extreme close-up of one of his eyes. It is a peculiar, shocking image: As a deterritorialisation of the eye from the face, it refuses “faciality”. But, if is thereby not a conventional affection-image, it also undeniably has an intense affect, the characteristic of the affection-image. Arguably it thereby presents a fusion of the intensive and extensive and organic and inorganic poles of the affection-image, one that takes a part of the machine assembladge of the body, the eye, and presents it in an unfamilar, machinic context: What does an eye actually do? Deleuze's answer is that, by itself, an eye does not do very much. Rather, the eye only gains its conventional, biological function in conjunction with the other parts of an organic body - other eyes, ears, a brain etc. The cinematic body, that of the shots on strips of film (or latterly frames on a computer disc), is not an organic body. It is purely machinic (or electronic). Within the classical cinema of the movement-image, however, most of the assemblages made were organic, or “rational”. One image (or body part) was joined to another in a way that made sense, both at the level of these parts and of the whole. For instance, for Bazin (195?), John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) was like a wheel. Each part was perfectly in accord with the others. In the modern cinema of the time-image, by contrast, the assemblages of parts are inorganic (“crystalline”) or “irrational”. One image may be joined to another in any manner that the filmmaker sees fit; as previously discussed this was a key part of Leone's way of working. As such, whereas the logic of the movement-image is primarily arborescent, that of the time-image is primarily rhizomatic. From one movement-image we can predict the next, whereas from one time-image we cannot. (In this respect a Markovian analysis of corpuses drawn from these cinemas, of which shots or images follow which, probabilistically or stochastically, might be informationally useful.)
I have already mentioned the way Casoni's eye seems to capture the same visions as Arno witnesses on his mindscreen. In moving between these positions, the cut is “irrational,” making the rhizomatic and arbitrary aspects of editing (or montage) evident. As such, it is another time-image irruption, or instance of becoming time-image, within a primarily movement-image film.
It is also perhaps no coincidence here that Argento has referred to Dziga Vertov as being his favourite amongst the Soviet directors. For, as Deleuze shows, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is precisely a film which exploits the power of cinema's machinic, technological body (albeit one within the context of the movement-image cinema) to go beyond the human. As we shall see, the ability of cinema to present inhuman perceptions through the use of technology is something that Argento will increasingly turn to in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.
Another key aspect of the way Argento depicts Casoni is through his silence, as the killer. While the same was basically true of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there is a difference in the way the two figures function: When Monica makes a telephone call, we hear her (or a) voice. When Casoni does, after abducting Lori, we do not hear his voice. In combination with his relative disembodiment, I would thus argue that The Cat o' Nine Tails is more an exploration of the acousmetre and the mute than a “telephone story”. This again marks it out as a more uncanny film than its predecessor, as one in which “weird science of the most egregious kind” (Koven, 2006: ??), namely the currently discredited idea that an individual's predisposition towards violence is genetic, has a place, even if outright 'magic' does not. The thing that is particularly uncanny about Casoni is his combination of characteristics of acousmetre and mute. On the one hand, he is presented as all but invisible, only appearing as an eye. Insofar as the eye is itself arguably emblematic of the acousmetre, as something potentially all seeing, all knowing and all powerful, or godlike, this is not itself a problem. On the other hand, he is silent. This invokes the figure of the mute, whose uncanny powers depend upon not speaking. As such, Casoni is an in-between, hybrid figure, neither quite voice without body nor body without voice. This position is not necessarily one that can be related to the movement-image and time-image. One of the most complex uses of the voice in cinema identified by Chion (and glossed by Deleuze) is, after all, that of Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). What might be said, however, is that it is a post-modern hybridity, as something that refuses the either/or of acousmetre or mute in favour of their combination.
Insofar as neither the combination of Expressionism and Montage nor the use of the acousmetre directly position The Cat o' Nine Tails as a more Hitchcockian or Langian film (Lang's Metropolis, for instance, using montage contrasts of rich and poor, even as then-wife Thea von Harbou's script rejected revolution) it is worth considering other possible intertextual influences upon the film.
The most important of these, I would argue, is a surprising one: James Whale's 1933 adaptation of H. G Wells's 18?? novel The Invisible Man. The similarities between the two texts are manifold: Both feature mad scientists, or more specifically scientists who are drive mad by their discoveries. Both revolve around invisibility, with the unnamed scientist in Wells's text becoming invisible and Casoni here wishing to become so. Finally, both characters are first partially deacousmatised by being wounded, causing them to leave a trail of blood, then completely deacousmatised and defeated.
Beyond this, there is also the fact that around this time Argento and frequent collaborator Luigi Cozzi had mooted the idea of doing a version of the Frankenstein myth set against the backdrop of 1930s fascism; Paul Morrisey and Antonio Margheriti's 1974 Flesh for Frankenstein perhaps gives some hints of what the resulting film might have been like, featuring as it does a Frankenstein intent on creating a new Serbian “master race” through his experiments.
Unlike his counterpart in Whale's film, Casoni is not, however, truly invisible. Instead, it is only implied that he would like to be through the way he is poetically represented, as a fusion of character and camera consciousness. It is this visibility that appears to account for his muteness: Faced with the extra-sensitive Arno as nemesis, Casoni cannot afford to say anything that might lead to his identification, via the bringing together of opsign and sonsign, or body and voice emanating from it. As further proof of this, we may note the close encounter between the two men. Casoni has just murdered the photographer who inadvertently captured him pushing the blackmailing Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero) in front of a train, As he approaches Arno and Lori, his sound (or leitmotif) plays. He and Arno momentarily pause. It is as if the blind man somehow had an intuition of his presence and the murder that fellow-investigator Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is discovering at that very moment.
By the time of this scene, Argento has given us other instances of Arno's insight: When he and Lori go to visit Giordani, Argento cuts back and forth between their home and the newspaper where Giordani works, much as in the opening break-in, although far more rapid-fire. If the assemblage of shots or images here does not entail irrational cuts of a time-image type, it nevertheless makes the cutting visible rather than invisible, or presents (European) montage rather than (Hollywood) editing. If this is again not strictly speaking movement-image against time-image, that all the forms of montage Deleuze discusses fall within the former cinema, it is again hybrid in character: Hollywood cinema relied upon organic editing to a far greater than its European counterparts, where other approaches, including Soviet visible montage, predominated.
Arno's visit to Giordani, and their subsequent race (or “binominal”/“duel”) with Casoni to get to the photographs first, also relies upon his ability to perceive what others do not: Arno is the one who asks if the photograph of the falling Calabresi was cropped, revealing the pushing hand. This image, along with the scenes in which it figures, serves to further develop Argento's critique of Blow-Up. But whereas the loss of the photographic evidence was a devastating blow to Antonioni's protagonist, Argento's investigators again carry on, determined to find the truth. Compared to his predecessor Dalmas, however, Arno is less wedded to dominant models of truth. His blindness has led him towards insight, or an inner truth.
The scene at the railway station is also of importance in relation to Argento's influences and interlocutors. It is not as visually striking as its set-piece counterparts in the other parts of the Animal Trilogy though its minimal rather than excessive/maximal approach. Nevertheless it shows the ability of the director and his regular editor Franco Fraticelli to construct a concise and effective montage sequence. Eight shots in eight seconds present an impressionistic survey of the murder-as-accident. Besides featuring an average shot length equivalent to the (admittedly more elaborate and extended) shower murder in Psycho, the power of the scene comes as much from combination of the shots as what they contain informationally, or from form rather than content.
Another scene of note here is the encounter between Giordani and Anna Terzi, the adopted daughter of the institute's director and his quasi-incestuous lover. Immediately prior to their meeting, Casoni has poisoned the milk left on Giordani's doorstep. As such, it occupies a privileged position with Argento's frame, one clearly inpired by Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) or Spellbound (1946) and which can be initially discussed in the same terms as Deleuze's analysis of the similar image in the latter film (2005a: 14). But beyond this Argento uses the scene, in which Giordani and Anna awkwardly consummate their relationship, to comment upon the poisoned nature of the inter-personal relationships between most of the film's characters: Far from showing us intimacy, or images codified as intimate in dominant cinema circa 1971, the camera remains at the same distance with the milk still in the forefront. Moreover, a cut glosses over the sexual act itself. Anna, we are invited to understand, has no real feelings for Giordani. Rather, she just wants to know where the investigation is leading. Giordani, meanwhile, is an opportunist, a man taking what he can get. The critical question is clear: What sort of society reduces relationships to such terms?
Arno's position is further signalled by the next scene, in which Casoni breaks into the Terzi Institute in order to substitute a fake, clean genetic profile for his real, incriminating one. Arno is intimated as having a kind of second sight, sixth sense or intuition that something is happening outside through the way the scene is edited. As Casoni knocks a watchman unconscious, the scene seems to be taking place simultaneously within the real world and within Arno's mind. As the sequence continues and Casoni enters the institute proper, his position does become somewhat more independent and detached. Nevertheless, it is also noticeable that Argento continues to represent him in a different manner than Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. She and her husband double were always physically present in the frame, whether as the dark-clad silhouette or metonymic gloved hands. Casoni, by contrast, is only seen as a shadowy figure when he is seen fleeing the institute from an observer's point of view. Otherwise, Argento goes to considerable lengths to absent his body from the frame. For example, when Casoni later kills Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov), it is almost as if the garrotte goes around her neck by itself, as if it animated by supernatural force. This, of course, is something that would not be out of place in one of Argento's later fantasy-horror films, with their 'Gothic' or 'Expressionist' animate (animistic?) worlds. For, as Deleuze says: “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of Nature, that is, for the unconscous spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum. From this point of view natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no longer any different. A wall which is alive is dreadful; but utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce.” (2005a: 52)
Whilst The Cat o' Nine Tails is a giallo and, as such, eschews outright fantasy, it is nevertheless more open to such possibilities compared to its predecessor. That this is so is, I would argue, most evident in the poetic way Argento depicts his protagonist and antagonist, which I will now continue to explore.
The one thing we do see of Casoni repeatedly throughout the film is the extreme close-up of one of his eyes. It is a peculiar, shocking image: As a deterritorialisation of the eye from the face, it refuses “faciality”. But, if is thereby not a conventional affection-image, it also undeniably has an intense affect, the characteristic of the affection-image. Arguably it thereby presents a fusion of the intensive and extensive and organic and inorganic poles of the affection-image, one that takes a part of the machine assembladge of the body, the eye, and presents it in an unfamilar, machinic context: What does an eye actually do? Deleuze's answer is that, by itself, an eye does not do very much. Rather, the eye only gains its conventional, biological function in conjunction with the other parts of an organic body - other eyes, ears, a brain etc. The cinematic body, that of the shots on strips of film (or latterly frames on a computer disc), is not an organic body. It is purely machinic (or electronic). Within the classical cinema of the movement-image, however, most of the assemblages made were organic, or “rational”. One image (or body part) was joined to another in a way that made sense, both at the level of these parts and of the whole. For instance, for Bazin (195?), John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) was like a wheel. Each part was perfectly in accord with the others. In the modern cinema of the time-image, by contrast, the assemblages of parts are inorganic (“crystalline”) or “irrational”. One image may be joined to another in any manner that the filmmaker sees fit; as previously discussed this was a key part of Leone's way of working. As such, whereas the logic of the movement-image is primarily arborescent, that of the time-image is primarily rhizomatic. From one movement-image we can predict the next, whereas from one time-image we cannot. (In this respect a Markovian analysis of corpuses drawn from these cinemas, of which shots or images follow which, probabilistically or stochastically, might be informationally useful.)
I have already mentioned the way Casoni's eye seems to capture the same visions as Arno witnesses on his mindscreen. In moving between these positions, the cut is “irrational,” making the rhizomatic and arbitrary aspects of editing (or montage) evident. As such, it is another time-image irruption, or instance of becoming time-image, within a primarily movement-image film.
It is also perhaps no coincidence here that Argento has referred to Dziga Vertov as being his favourite amongst the Soviet directors. For, as Deleuze shows, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is precisely a film which exploits the power of cinema's machinic, technological body (albeit one within the context of the movement-image cinema) to go beyond the human. As we shall see, the ability of cinema to present inhuman perceptions through the use of technology is something that Argento will increasingly turn to in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.
Another key aspect of the way Argento depicts Casoni is through his silence, as the killer. While the same was basically true of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there is a difference in the way the two figures function: When Monica makes a telephone call, we hear her (or a) voice. When Casoni does, after abducting Lori, we do not hear his voice. In combination with his relative disembodiment, I would thus argue that The Cat o' Nine Tails is more an exploration of the acousmetre and the mute than a “telephone story”. This again marks it out as a more uncanny film than its predecessor, as one in which “weird science of the most egregious kind” (Koven, 2006: ??), namely the currently discredited idea that an individual's predisposition towards violence is genetic, has a place, even if outright 'magic' does not. The thing that is particularly uncanny about Casoni is his combination of characteristics of acousmetre and mute. On the one hand, he is presented as all but invisible, only appearing as an eye. Insofar as the eye is itself arguably emblematic of the acousmetre, as something potentially all seeing, all knowing and all powerful, or godlike, this is not itself a problem. On the other hand, he is silent. This invokes the figure of the mute, whose uncanny powers depend upon not speaking. As such, Casoni is an in-between, hybrid figure, neither quite voice without body nor body without voice. This position is not necessarily one that can be related to the movement-image and time-image. One of the most complex uses of the voice in cinema identified by Chion (and glossed by Deleuze) is, after all, that of Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). What might be said, however, is that it is a post-modern hybridity, as something that refuses the either/or of acousmetre or mute in favour of their combination.
Insofar as neither the combination of Expressionism and Montage nor the use of the acousmetre directly position The Cat o' Nine Tails as a more Hitchcockian or Langian film (Lang's Metropolis, for instance, using montage contrasts of rich and poor, even as then-wife Thea von Harbou's script rejected revolution) it is worth considering other possible intertextual influences upon the film.
The most important of these, I would argue, is a surprising one: James Whale's 1933 adaptation of H. G Wells's 18?? novel The Invisible Man. The similarities between the two texts are manifold: Both feature mad scientists, or more specifically scientists who are drive mad by their discoveries. Both revolve around invisibility, with the unnamed scientist in Wells's text becoming invisible and Casoni here wishing to become so. Finally, both characters are first partially deacousmatised by being wounded, causing them to leave a trail of blood, then completely deacousmatised and defeated.
Beyond this, there is also the fact that around this time Argento and frequent collaborator Luigi Cozzi had mooted the idea of doing a version of the Frankenstein myth set against the backdrop of 1930s fascism; Paul Morrisey and Antonio Margheriti's 1974 Flesh for Frankenstein perhaps gives some hints of what the resulting film might have been like, featuring as it does a Frankenstein intent on creating a new Serbian “master race” through his experiments.
Unlike his counterpart in Whale's film, Casoni is not, however, truly invisible. Instead, it is only implied that he would like to be through the way he is poetically represented, as a fusion of character and camera consciousness. It is this visibility that appears to account for his muteness: Faced with the extra-sensitive Arno as nemesis, Casoni cannot afford to say anything that might lead to his identification, via the bringing together of opsign and sonsign, or body and voice emanating from it. As further proof of this, we may note the close encounter between the two men. Casoni has just murdered the photographer who inadvertently captured him pushing the blackmailing Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero) in front of a train, As he approaches Arno and Lori, his sound (or leitmotif) plays. He and Arno momentarily pause. It is as if the blind man somehow had an intuition of his presence and the murder that fellow-investigator Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is discovering at that very moment.
By the time of this scene, Argento has given us other instances of Arno's insight: When he and Lori go to visit Giordani, Argento cuts back and forth between their home and the newspaper where Giordani works, much as in the opening break-in, although far more rapid-fire. If the assemblage of shots or images here does not entail irrational cuts of a time-image type, it nevertheless makes the cutting visible rather than invisible, or presents (European) montage rather than (Hollywood) editing. If this is again not strictly speaking movement-image against time-image, that all the forms of montage Deleuze discusses fall within the former cinema, it is again hybrid in character: Hollywood cinema relied upon organic editing to a far greater than its European counterparts, where other approaches, including Soviet visible montage, predominated.
Arno's visit to Giordani, and their subsequent race (or “binominal”/“duel”) with Casoni to get to the photographs first, also relies upon his ability to perceive what others do not: Arno is the one who asks if the photograph of the falling Calabresi was cropped, revealing the pushing hand. This image, along with the scenes in which it figures, serves to further develop Argento's critique of Blow-Up. But whereas the loss of the photographic evidence was a devastating blow to Antonioni's protagonist, Argento's investigators again carry on, determined to find the truth. Compared to his predecessor Dalmas, however, Arno is less wedded to dominant models of truth. His blindness has led him towards insight, or an inner truth.
The scene at the railway station is also of importance in relation to Argento's influences and interlocutors. It is not as visually striking as its set-piece counterparts in the other parts of the Animal Trilogy though its minimal rather than excessive/maximal approach. Nevertheless it shows the ability of the director and his regular editor Franco Fraticelli to construct a concise and effective montage sequence. Eight shots in eight seconds present an impressionistic survey of the murder-as-accident. Besides featuring an average shot length equivalent to the (admittedly more elaborate and extended) shower murder in Psycho, the power of the scene comes as much from combination of the shots as what they contain informationally, or from form rather than content.
Another scene of note here is the encounter between Giordani and Anna Terzi, the adopted daughter of the institute's director and his quasi-incestuous lover. Immediately prior to their meeting, Casoni has poisoned the milk left on Giordani's doorstep. As such, it occupies a privileged position with Argento's frame, one clearly inpired by Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) or Spellbound (1946) and which can be initially discussed in the same terms as Deleuze's analysis of the similar image in the latter film (2005a: 14). But beyond this Argento uses the scene, in which Giordani and Anna awkwardly consummate their relationship, to comment upon the poisoned nature of the inter-personal relationships between most of the film's characters: Far from showing us intimacy, or images codified as intimate in dominant cinema circa 1971, the camera remains at the same distance with the milk still in the forefront. Moreover, a cut glosses over the sexual act itself. Anna, we are invited to understand, has no real feelings for Giordani. Rather, she just wants to know where the investigation is leading. Giordani, meanwhile, is an opportunist, a man taking what he can get. The critical question is clear: What sort of society reduces relationships to such terms?
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Deluezean analysis of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's opening sequence
Dario Argento's eclectic and excessive approach to the image is evident from the opening scene of his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The information conveyed by the scene and its successor are straightforward: Rome is in the grip of what we would now term a serial killer. The images themselves, however, are anything but, as Argento jumbles chronology, juxtaposes moving and static images and colour and black and white (both via the technology of optical printing, a recurring element within the film) and plays with the frame. The most straightforward images are those of the (presumed male) killer and his weapons: These are affection-images, close-ups of objects, of knives in their red/velvet lined box and of the killer's black/leather encased hands, especially when caressing the photographic image. But even here there is an added complexity, in that Argento is playing upon cliché. The functional, fashionable garb of Bava's Blood and Black Lace is here fetishised (Needham: ??:??), as a “vurt” or bad object/fetish. We are also encouraged to read the killer as male. Faciality is key here: Though Argento does not present this figure, or her (male) gallery counterpart, as explicitly masked, as in Bava, the implications are equally clear. Man is the aggressor, woman the victim. The “cliché,” a key element of the film, is thereby foregrounded, to be subsequently explored, emphasised and deconstructed. The more complex images are those which present the victim-to-be. A more conventional, less imaginative approach would have been to show her being photographed by the killer and then the killer preparing to strike. Argento's use of moving and static images, along with moving images caught in the act of becoming static, and of colour and monochrome, complexifies this. In particular it is neither movement-image nor time-image. On the one hand these images suggest an action-image relationship, that the killer will act, or has to/should be stopped. On the other hand they imply the breakdown of the action-image and the sensory-motor relationship underpinning it: What has already happened, is in the past? What is still to come?
The final image in this scene, that of a black screen and a scream, is equally significant. It is an image which shows up one of Deleuze's weaknesses, namely his emphasis upon the visual image (thing) at the expense of other images (things). Deleuze presents this image, that of a black screen, as an “empty” set. But, in conjunction with the scream, it is emphatically not. Rather, it is a set which conveys death; indeed, were the sound to be absent, this image in conjunction with its successor (starting with a newspaper hoarding reading the third death of a woman in a month) would still say the same thing, for the viewer (particularly Italian) who can read the image. This is a frequent aspect of Leone, Argento and Questi's images. The sound image, which is unbounded, does not overlap or accord with the visual image, which us bounded by the frame. All three directors thereby go beyond the movement-image, where the frame/set incorporates sound and image, with the former a duplicate and supplement to the latter, towards the time-image, with its separate, non-commensurable opsigns and sonsigns.
The final image in this scene, that of a black screen and a scream, is equally significant. It is an image which shows up one of Deleuze's weaknesses, namely his emphasis upon the visual image (thing) at the expense of other images (things). Deleuze presents this image, that of a black screen, as an “empty” set. But, in conjunction with the scream, it is emphatically not. Rather, it is a set which conveys death; indeed, were the sound to be absent, this image in conjunction with its successor (starting with a newspaper hoarding reading the third death of a woman in a month) would still say the same thing, for the viewer (particularly Italian) who can read the image. This is a frequent aspect of Leone, Argento and Questi's images. The sound image, which is unbounded, does not overlap or accord with the visual image, which us bounded by the frame. All three directors thereby go beyond the movement-image, where the frame/set incorporates sound and image, with the former a duplicate and supplement to the latter, towards the time-image, with its separate, non-commensurable opsigns and sonsigns.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Thesis work #1
Paola Marrati – Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy (2008)
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Some thoughts on Four Flies on Grey Red in relation to the movement- and time-images
In her insightful analysis of Four Flies on Grey Velvet in relation to the Deleuzean time-image, Colette Balmain emphasises the way in which the film foregrounds the Nietzschean "powers of the false".
Though Nina Tobias knows full well that Roberto is not her father and only looks like him, she nevertheless successfully manages to entertain this apparently life-enhancing delusion and successfully knowingly (dis)believe to the point of positioning Roberto as her father in order that she can extract her revenge; I say 'apparently' because Nina's tragedy is that she has not been able to overcome her past, which has determined her present and future, culminating in her demise at the climax of the film. At this stage in his career, Argento, that is, is perhaps not quite completely willing to endorse the murder of innocents, no matter how life-enhancing it may be for the other.
In passing, we might also wonder if this is also something of a reason why the anti-Nietzschean Hitchcock could never quite be a modern, time-image film-maker, that he was still too wedded to a pre-Nietzschean morality and absolutist world-view to allow the killers of Rope, Stage Fright or Strangers on a Train to get away with their otherwise artful crimes. (Yes, Hitchcock would sometimes cite De Quincey's On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, but did he really believe it or was it just for shock?)
Nina's demise itself is replete with meaning insofar as it recapitulates Roberto's decapitation nightmare, thus again presenting the actualisation of the virtual, and is tellingly immediately precipitated by Nina's looking back rather than forwards and thereby failing to see the truck parked in front of her.
In a similar way, though Roberto has not in fact killed anyone, his belief that he has is sufficient to position him within his appointed role in Nina's psycho-drama. Equally, however, this selfsame fact serves to also highlight one of the ways in which Four Flies on Grey Velvet functions as more of a movement-image film in other regards.
Nina, that is, can rely on Roberto's automatic sensory-motor response to the stimuli of having found himself been followed and now getting the opportunity to confront his persecutor, to put her scheme into motion.
This said, the importance of the virtual and the actual here is further confirmed by the location of this key scene in the film, namely an empty theatre. Argento also foregrounds Roberto's entry into this space through a hyper-realist series of four successive shots of his passing through bright red curtains. The first two of these and the fourth are framed from Roberto's point-of-view, but the third is from the reverse angle and thus presents Roberto's entry more from the (impossible) point of view of someone on the other side of the curtains, already positioned within the theatre.
Again, however, if this perhaps represents the actualisation of the virtual, as something Nina had previously planned for 'in her minds' eye', the fact remains that Roberto does not remain external to the set, as the passive seer of the time-image would, but rather changes the relationship amongst the other elements through his active presence amongst them in the manner of a movement-image protagonist.
In this regard, the sequence also presents a different working through of the analogous moment in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage where Sam's inability to fully extend his sensory-motor response into a completed action and his corresponding becoming seer are pivotal to all that follows thereafter.
In a similar vein, Profondo rosso will present a third variation on this scenario, as Marc enters into the set and the action without hinderance, but fails through his perceptual conditioning to notice the vital detail to which he should have responded until it is too late. The image which could or should have proved an impulse fails, that is, to do so.
If, then, Four Flies on Grey Velvet presents the actualisation of one virtual possibility, the one Nina had anticipated through her awareness of her husband's predictable - masculine - response to the stimuli presented before him, palimpsestically The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Profondo rosso present alternative incompossible versions of not dissimilar scenarios.
Though Nina Tobias knows full well that Roberto is not her father and only looks like him, she nevertheless successfully manages to entertain this apparently life-enhancing delusion and successfully knowingly (dis)believe to the point of positioning Roberto as her father in order that she can extract her revenge; I say 'apparently' because Nina's tragedy is that she has not been able to overcome her past, which has determined her present and future, culminating in her demise at the climax of the film. At this stage in his career, Argento, that is, is perhaps not quite completely willing to endorse the murder of innocents, no matter how life-enhancing it may be for the other.
In passing, we might also wonder if this is also something of a reason why the anti-Nietzschean Hitchcock could never quite be a modern, time-image film-maker, that he was still too wedded to a pre-Nietzschean morality and absolutist world-view to allow the killers of Rope, Stage Fright or Strangers on a Train to get away with their otherwise artful crimes. (Yes, Hitchcock would sometimes cite De Quincey's On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, but did he really believe it or was it just for shock?)
Nina's demise itself is replete with meaning insofar as it recapitulates Roberto's decapitation nightmare, thus again presenting the actualisation of the virtual, and is tellingly immediately precipitated by Nina's looking back rather than forwards and thereby failing to see the truck parked in front of her.
In a similar way, though Roberto has not in fact killed anyone, his belief that he has is sufficient to position him within his appointed role in Nina's psycho-drama. Equally, however, this selfsame fact serves to also highlight one of the ways in which Four Flies on Grey Velvet functions as more of a movement-image film in other regards.
Nina, that is, can rely on Roberto's automatic sensory-motor response to the stimuli of having found himself been followed and now getting the opportunity to confront his persecutor, to put her scheme into motion.
This said, the importance of the virtual and the actual here is further confirmed by the location of this key scene in the film, namely an empty theatre. Argento also foregrounds Roberto's entry into this space through a hyper-realist series of four successive shots of his passing through bright red curtains. The first two of these and the fourth are framed from Roberto's point-of-view, but the third is from the reverse angle and thus presents Roberto's entry more from the (impossible) point of view of someone on the other side of the curtains, already positioned within the theatre.
Again, however, if this perhaps represents the actualisation of the virtual, as something Nina had previously planned for 'in her minds' eye', the fact remains that Roberto does not remain external to the set, as the passive seer of the time-image would, but rather changes the relationship amongst the other elements through his active presence amongst them in the manner of a movement-image protagonist.
In this regard, the sequence also presents a different working through of the analogous moment in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage where Sam's inability to fully extend his sensory-motor response into a completed action and his corresponding becoming seer are pivotal to all that follows thereafter.
In a similar vein, Profondo rosso will present a third variation on this scenario, as Marc enters into the set and the action without hinderance, but fails through his perceptual conditioning to notice the vital detail to which he should have responded until it is too late. The image which could or should have proved an impulse fails, that is, to do so.
If, then, Four Flies on Grey Velvet presents the actualisation of one virtual possibility, the one Nina had anticipated through her awareness of her husband's predictable - masculine - response to the stimuli presented before him, palimpsestically The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Profondo rosso present alternative incompossible versions of not dissimilar scenarios.
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