Thanks, Adrian, for the references. If I may free-associate here a
bit: You recall that the first chapter in Deleuze's second cinema
book (the time-image) is entitled 'Beyond the movement-image',
thereby implicitly referring to Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure
Principle'? And that in the final chapter of Cinema 1 Deleuze is
dealing with the crisis of the movememt-image, which in the case of
American cinema led to the New Hollywood (not sure Deleuze uses this
term), a cinema of ballad, clichés ('clichés, clichés
everywhere...'), of denouncing the conspiracy, i.e. conspiracy cinema
(in some ways anticipating Jameson's 1992 essay 'Totality as
Conspiracy'), but that the American cinema (Hollywood) was ultimately
unable to fully transcend the movement-image, stuck in cliché and
irony, and violence, without producing a genuinely new (i.e. time)
image, unlike European film: Italian neo-realism, the French new
wave, New German cinema... And that European films could do this
precisely because of the catastrophes of the 20th century (WW2,
Holocaust...) ...: Well, in Histoire(s) du cinéma 1, there is a
section in which Godard laments how American cinema never really grew
up (to become adult), how Hollywood and mainstream cinema is a cinema
for (mentally speaking) children, and has remained that. That seems
recognizably close to Deleuze's ideas...
And how could Godard have claimed Deleuze couldn't write if he hadn't
read him?
Hope this is not too incoherent...
H
> Henry wrote:
>
> "Godard was certainly influenced ('informed') by Deleuze ..."
>
> Henry, I am not so sure about this. In the interviews around
> HISTOIRE(S), whenever JLG is pumped about the Deleuze influence, he
> expresses nothing but disdain: in the POSITIF interview, for
> example (one of the best, because the questions are really
> interrogative and critical, rather than fawning and idolatory),
> when asked about the CINEMA books, he says something like: "Maybe
> Deleuze had some ideas, but he couldn't write" !!!! I asked some
> people who know Godard (who shall remain nameless ... ) about this
> remark, and the response was a firm conviction that, in fact,
> Godard had never read Deleuze, beyond maybe a book cover or two! On
> the other hand, there are quasi-Deleuzian formulations from JLG's
> mouth in two periods of the 70s: near the end of the militant
> period (i.e., around the time of ANTI-OEDIPUS' first release), and
> then again at the end of the 70s, when he makes SAUVE QUI PEUT (his
> 'input-output' machinic ideas). However, a hypothesis here is that
> much of this rhetoric (I don't mean that in a bad way) came
> filtered through Jean-Pierre Gorin - who was/is definitely a reader
> of Deleuze beyond the front covers! Gorin's essay, mid 80s, on
> Manny Farber's painting is a supremely Deleuzian text, and he still
> talks of films as 'machines with multiple entry points', etc (see
> his excellent interviews on recent Criterion releases).
>
> Of course, there are a thousand ways to fruitfully interrelate
> Godard and Deleuze, but I am not sure one can rest that relation on
> 'direct influence'.
>
> Adrian
>
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