An intriguing anachronism can be found in Deleuze’s discussion of the perception-image, which he elaborates first in relation to French Impressionist filmmakers such as Epstein, Gance, and L’Herbier before abruptly turning to the likes of “modern” directors Pasolini, Antonioni, Rohmer, and Godard. Why do they come up here so early on in Cinema 1, especially since Deleuze’s trajectory throughout the two volumes proceeds, despite his insistence to the contrary, almost entirely as a linear historical
account?66 In the regime of the movement-image, the division between subjective and objective is undermined through free indirect discourse, but that happens only with respect to the image. With the modern time-image, the free indirect mode extends to sound as well. Thus, sound, no longer serving as mere accompaniment to the image, attains its own autonomy, and once liberated, it may enter into free indirect relation with the image. Thus, the French Impressionist cinema’s loosening of subjective and objective perspective with respect to the image is something of a precursor of the fully audiovisual, more radical free indirect mode that is to come.
In addition to the aforementioned Rohmer and Godard, Deleuze points to Marguerite Duras and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet as filmmakers whose experimental, disjunctive use of sound introduces an “irrational interval” into the cinema, an “incommensurable complementarity” between sound and image.”67 The image is now capable of showing that which sound cannot convey, and sound utters that which remains invisible within the image.68 Each comes to perform the function of the other, in essence “transfiguring,” to borrow a term of Nietzsche’s from the previous chapter, each into the
66 He writes in the first line of the preface to the original French edition, “This study is not a history. It is a taxonomy of images and signs.” Deleuze, Cinema 1, ix.
67 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 144.
68 “What speech utters is also the invisible that sight sees only through clairvoyance; and what sight sees is the unutterable uttered by speech.” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 260.
realm of the other.69
The appeal of the time-image for Deleuze is that it gives rise to “pure optical and sound situations” with which the viewer must reckon, confronting her with “limit situations,” a term he borrows from Karl Jaspers (perhaps by way of Heidegger) to designate extraordinary moments where one encounters the limits of one’s own consciousness.70 The cinema possesses the capability to unleash such a situation—but so, too, does heautoscopy, which fundamentally calls into question the nature of one’s own selfhood in ways other modes of hallucination do not. These are thus two privileged but extraordinary circumstances in which the self is revealed to be doubled but that transpire outside
everyday life and “normal” perceptual experience. In contrast, the bodily “stretching” Nancy theorizes in relation to sound is always, already operating in the realm of the aural, though it most often escapes our attention precisely because we tend to hear rather than to listen, which for Nancy is always an act of “straining toward” that which is “not immediately accessible.” He continues: “To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, … a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance.”71 Listening thus brings about its own sort of limit situation, one that forces the self into confrontation with itself—not as two distinct entities but as a space of relay and interrelation. Nancy, again:
To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to “me” (the supposedly given subject), or to the “self” of the other, … but to the relationship in self.72
Nancy means this quite literally. He argues that listening “can and must appear to us not as a metaphor
69 Deleuze briefly mentions The Birth of Tragedy in the same chapter that he discusses sounds detachment from the image. For him, Nietzsche’s book demonstrates the difference between direct presentation (musical) and indirect presentation (the mediated image). Deleuze, Cinema 2, 239.
70 See Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1919); and Martin Heidegger, Being and
Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010): 309. 71 Nancy, Listening, 14–15, emphasis in original.
for access to self, but as the reality of this access.”73
The philosophical value of a film like The Tree of Life (above and beyond its overtly
metaphysical “content”) is that it carries the potential to cue the viewer to precisely this reality, a reality to which we are typically blind—blind precisely because it is a reality that is on a fundamental level soundful. Heautoscopy likewise may also grant access to a similar realization, though its occurrence is exceedingly more rare. It is better, therefore, to seek it out in the more attainable domains of listening and of cinema, domains that I consider alongside one another in this next and final section.