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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathGraham
 
 
 
 
 

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His «Cinema» is thus arranged to enable an encounter with this danger, in which a contrary effect, that is, a different «remembering,» is produced. This corresponds to Benjamin’s «concept of history«: «To articulate that which has passed historically is not to recognize ›how it then really was.‹ It is to empower a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.» [33] The prerequisite for this is a consciousness of the «nowtime » [Jetztzeit] which makes time «stand still» so that the «true image of the past» can come alive in a unique way—it «rushes silently past» and allows in this movement the recognition of that which has relevance for the present: «The materialist cannot do without the concept of a present that is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a halt… Where thinking suddenly arrives in a constellation saturated with tensions, to which it gives a shock, which crystallizes it into a monad.» [34]

Deleuze in contrast presumes the modern cinema as a «special linkage between unconnected images» and asks for a thinking that arises from this linkage. This thinking is described as «power which has not always existed» it derives from an outside more distant

 

than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an unthinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world.» [35] That is, in the linkage of the unconnected images in modern cinema, thought is burdened with a «world memory.« Both Benjamin as well as Deleuze thus seek the unthought and the inconceivable of history in an ecstatic thinking, and both seek and see it in the crystal, an achronological temporal structure that conceals within it a shock. «This is the unsummonable in Welles, the undecidable in Resnais, the inexplicable in the Straubs, the impossible in Marguerite Duras, the irrational in Syberberg,» Deleuze explains, and in general with the «absolute contact […] between non-totalizable, asymmetrical outside and inside.« [36] Such a contact is produced by the projection screen in Graham’s «Cinema» as an «irrational cut» (Deleuze) that correlates heterogeneous acoustic and optical situations and time experiences with one another without the resulting tension continuing in action. Referring to the indissolubility of this tension, Deleuze explains: «It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable. Not a

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