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Mental Landscapes: Bazin, Deleuze, and Neorealism (Then andNow)Justin Horton

Cinema Journal, Volume 52, Number 2, Winter 2013, pp. 23-45 (Article)

Published by University of Texas PressDOI: 10.1353/cj.2013.0005

For additional information about this article

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Justin Horton is a PhD candidate in the program in Moving Image Studies in the Department of Communication atGeorgia State University. His research interests include lm realism, sound studies, and subjectivity and embodiment. His currently at work on a dissertation on subjectivity, affect, and out-of-body experience. His work has also appeared iCinephile , and his article “The Unheard Voice in the Sound Film” placed rst in the 2012 Society for Cinema and

Media Studies Student Writing Competition and is forthcoming inCinema Journal .

Mental Landscapes: Bazin,Deleuze, and Neorealism(Then and Now)by J USTIN H ORTON

Abstract: Though often thought to advocate an “objective” cinema, Bazin instead prof-fered a “supernatural” conception of realism, one deeply invested in character interior-ity. This article brings together Bazin’s writings with Deleuze’s theorization of free indirectcinematic discourse to reconcile the hallucinatory ending of George Washington (DavidGordon Green, 2000) with the neorealist paradigm.

The New York Times critic A. O. Scott claims that such recent American lms asChop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, 2007) and Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

evince a new form of American realist cinema highly indebted to Italian neo-realism. Noting a resemblance in style, tone, and subject matter, Scott labels

this emerging trend “neo-neo-realism.” 1 Focusing on characters whose ascents upthe American socioeconomic ladder have stalled on the very lowest rungs, these

lms share, Scott claims, a “common ancestry” with the celebrated postwar Italiancinema. Neorealism, he argues, sought to illuminate the lives of marginal charac-ters through a radical shift in cinematic style that abandoned classical approachesby casting nonprofessional actors and depicting social injustices. The New Yorker ’sRichard Brody promptly countered, claiming that neorealism, as a style, hit its limit

in Italy by favoring the “outer life at the expense of the inner life.”2

In embracingthe neorealist aesthetic, these contemporary lmmakers, Brody suggests, fail to ac-count for character interiority, instead latching on to an outdated model. The critical reception of these lms is instructive, for the debate it rekindledabout the possibilities of cinematic realism emerged at a time when Film Studies,

1 A. O. Scott, “Neo-Neo Realism,” New York Times Magazine , March 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009 /03/22/magazine/22neorealism-t.html.

2 Richard Brody, “About ‘Neo-Neo-Realism,’” New Yorker , March 20, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/online /blogs/movies/2009/03/in-re-neoneorea.html.

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confronted with the ontological problem of the digital, was in the midst of reconsider-ing the work of André Bazin, a project that began in earnest with the publication ofPhilip Rosen’s Change Mummi ed in 2001 and Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cine-

matic Time the following year.3

Thus, Brody’s claim about neorealism and its relationto interiority opens up the question of the legacies of both neorealism and its greatestadvocate, Bazin, in provocative ways. The importance of neorealism to the develop -ment of the modern cinema cannot be overstated, and its historical signi cance is inno way contested, 4 yet the legacy of neorealism as a project remains the subject ofdebate. Assessments such as Scott’s and Brody’s re ect, I contend, a deeply entrenchedconception of both neorealism and of Bazin that is prevalent within the popular pressand the academy, and that has only begun to be redressed in the past decade. For these reasons, in what follows, I examine George Washington (David Gordon

Green, 2000), a work that Scott isolates as a precursor to this most recent emergenceof a realist aesthetic in the contemporary American art house. Green’s lm adheres tothe customary checklist of the neorealist inheritance: long takes, deep-focus cinema -tography, episodic narrative, a cast of nonprofessionals, and so forth. However, for allits surface similarities to postwar Italian cinema, George Washington presents a numberof seeming contradictions. On the one hand, it squares with the neorealist tendencyto depict the material realities of poverty by focusing on those who rarely receivesuch a sympathetic cinematic treatment: poor black children of the rural AmericanSouth. On the other hand, late in the lm, seemingly incongruent moments crop up,

and, surprisingly, these have been ignored in most critical appraisals. To account forsuch deviations, I put into conversation the work of Bazin and that of Gilles Deleuzeto show how the latter’s radical reevaluation of neorealism and his elaboration of afree indirect cinematic discourse provide a framework with which we might reconcilethe contradictions in Green’s lm while clarifying some of the stakes of Bazinian real -ism. Furthermore, I demonstrate how such a shift from a supposedly objective modeto character interiority can in no way be construed as an abandonment of politicalengagement in favor of psychological digression; rather, the interaction of lmmakerand subject within the free indirect mode of address is at the very heart of Deleuze’s

political undertaking. My analysis incorporates the elements of George Washington thatfrequently are dismissed—if, indeed, they are acknowledged at all—as departuresfrom the neorealist prototype and instead frames them squarely within both Bazin’sand Deleuze’s projects. In the article’s rst half, I consider how Bazin, read too often as a “naive literalist,” 5 provides us a remarkably nuanced and exible theorization of realism, one for which,until recently, he was seldom given enough credit. In this regard, this study seeks to join

3 Philip Rosen, Change Mummied: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001);

Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2002).

4 For the centrality of neorealism to modern cinema, see András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European ArtCinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, eds.,Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007).

5 Adam Lowenstein, “The Surrealism of the Photographic Image: Bazin, Barthes, and the Digital Sweet Hereafter ,”Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (2007): 54.

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the growing body of literature that has expanded the parameters of Bazinian realismbeyond the reductive account of his work that coalesced with 1970s psychoanalytictheory. Next, I pair this broadened Bazinian realism with Deleuze’s lm philosophy,

particularly his recasting of neorealism in terms other than cinematic ontology andfaithfulness to the pro lmic event. Deleuze’s and Bazin’s conceptions of neorealismbegin from different premises, yet they exhibit signi cant points of contact, and eachilluminates the other. Through close analysis, we can see how Deleuze’s notion offree indirect discourse allows us to reconcile the bulk of George Washington’s “tradi-tional” neorealist style with its confounding, hallucinatory ending, one which disturbsthe notion of an unproblematic depiction of “objective” reality by shifting us into anintersubjective space. This blurring of the distinction between the subjective and theobjective, I argue, is fully in line with the type of neorealism that Bazin once imagined

and predicted.

The Revival of Bazin. Bazin’s place within lm theory is an unusual one: his writingson cinema were quickly canonized when Film Studies was solidifying itself as a disci -pline and then, following the psychoanalytic turn in the 1970s, were widely rejected,only to be returned to with renewed interest today. Although his proli c output as acritic, his cofounding of Cahiers du cinéma, and his fostering of the young critics whowould later form the French New Wave are by themselves enough to secure Bazin’splace in lm history, his most enduring contribution is as a theorist of cinematic real -

ism. Indeed, his “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” serves as perhaps themost important theoretical work on lm realism. 6 In it, he argues that the cinema is aninherently realist medium in that the mechanical processes of the camera and its pho-tochemical rendering of an image on a lmstrip effectively replace the artist’s role asmediator between reality and the work of art. As Bazin famously proclaimed, “All thearts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage fromhis absence.” 7 Consequently, Bazin argues, the camera’s ability to capture “objective”reality without having to be ltered rst through the sensibility of the lmmaker freesthe painter or the sculptor to pursue abstraction, leaving the camera to quell human-

kind’s obsession with time and its xation on death through the veracity of the photo -chemically rendered image. Identifying many of the same qualities that Roland Barthes also would point toin Camera Lucida, Bazin does much to account for the appeal and allure of the photo -graph. 8 But cinema’s alluring essence—and Bazin for touting it—came to be regardedwith suspicion in the 1970s. The emerging in uence of semiotics, the reinvigoratedMarxism of Althusser, and the growing vogue of Lacanian psychoanalysis becamebraided together—most notably in the pages of Screen —in an effort to bring to lightthe ideological underpinnings of the medium. Hence, Bazin’s statement that “the

6 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? , vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2005), 9–16. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from What Is Cinema? are fromGray’s translation.

7 Ibid., 13.

8 For the resonances between these two thinkers, see Lowenstein, “Surrealism.”

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photographic image is the [pro lmic] object itself ” 9 was attacked for its espousal of a“transparent” rendering of reality, which, the argument goes, fails to acknowledge theideological work carried out by the cinematic apparatus. Film, argued some critics of

the era, is not a “window onto the world” but a collection of fragments masquera dingas a uni ed whole, manufacturing and then pacifying spectator desire while at thesame time effacing the traces of its enunciation. 10

And for quite some time, there Bazin sat, the exemplar of naive classical theory,playing the foil to the more properly political contemporary lm theories. In recent

years, though, many within the eld, “anxious about the stability of their object” 11 inlight of the proliferation of the digital, have returned to the problems that animatedclassical theory, asking anew in light of “ lm without lm” the question that adornsthe cover of Bazin’s famous collection: What is cinema? 12 Thus, a much more complex

Bazin has emerged, one that many scholars—with the exception of Dudley Andrewand a smattering of others—had failed to acknowledge adequately. Indeed, a revivalof sorts, sometimes labeled “neo-Bazinian,” 13 is under way, one initially sparked byRosen and Doane and signaled most manifestly by a recent series of events: rst,the “ Ouvrir Bazin / Opening Bazin” conference held jointly at the University of Paris-Diderot and Yale University in November 2008; second, the publication of TimothyBarnard’s English translation of What Is Cinema? , which tones down the religiosity ofthe Hugh Gray–translated edition that sits on most cinephiles’ shelves; 14 third, DudleyAndrew’s self-described manifesto on Bazin’s place in contemporary lm studies, What

Cinema Is! ;15

and, nally, a collection of essays stemming from the “Opening Bazin”conference that delves into the lesser-read elements of Bazin’s corpus. 16 In one piecefrom this collection, Colin MacCabe, whose writings in the 1970s helped to crystallizean orthodox view of Bazin as naive, recants his position in what amounts to an avowalof the limitations of the psychoanalytic project of the era. 17 MacCabe states:

9 Bazin, “Ontology,” 14.

10 Some of the canonical works that reect this sentiment include Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic

Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology , ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1986), 186–298; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986);Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

11 Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (2000): 350.

12 In addition to the aforementioned Rosen and Doane publications, see Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London:Reaktion Books, 2006); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Pho- tography , ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 23–40.

13 The 2010 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Los Angeles featured a panel titled “The NewBazin,” and one scholar’s blog collected articles under a similar moniker. See Catherine Grant, “Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies,” Film Studies for Free (blog), May 18, 2010, http://lmstudiesforfree

.blogspot.com/2010/05/bazinian-neo-bazinian-and-post-bazinian.html.14 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? , trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Press, 2009).

15 Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

16 Dudley Andrew, ed., with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York:Oxford University Press, 2011).

17 Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtean Theses,” Screen 15, no. 2 (1974): 7–27.

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do not constitute realism. While Bazin singles out these aesthetic qualities for theirbringing “the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoyswith reality”—what we might call perceptual delity—they are not necessary criteria

or measures of realism. Rather, the choices work to reintroduce “ambiguity into thestructure of the image,” thereby calling upon “a more active mental attitude on thepart of the spectator.” 24

To set up his conception of realism against classical lm structure, Bazin providesthe analogy of a bridge over a stream. The bricks—scenes, shots—that constitute thebridge are arranged in a continuous fashion so as to create a uni ed path, forming theeasy passage that is the Hollywood text. By contrast, lms such as Rossellini’s, Bazinclaims, are structured around a different sort of unit: the stones in the riverbed. Therocks that jut above the surface of the water were not intended to be a pathway, al -

though they may be utilized as such: “The big rocks that lie scattered in a ford are nowand ever will be no more than mere rocks. Their reality as rocks is not affected when,leaping from one to another, I use them to cross the river. If the service which theyhave rendered is the same as that of the bridge, it is because I have brought my shareof ingenuity to bear on their chance arrangement.” 25 Classical and neorealist struc-tures may begin on the same bank and end on the opposite, but what is most crucialabout neorealism is that it requires an effort on the part of the spectator to link up thefacts of the narrative. In the jump from one stone to the next, viewers might miss someinformation thought too important to excise in a classical lm, but, as a result, they

are forced to contemplate their unsteady grounding. This accounts for the jarring gapsin neorealism and the tendency of its directors to chronicle in painstaking fashion thebanal while glossing over crucial narrative developments. Thus, whereas the classicalcinema guides the viewer along with its “excessive obviousness,” 26 the neorealist work,at its best, restores ambiguity, which rewards an active, probing spectatorship. It is clear that Bazin’s realism is multifaceted: on the one hand, the camera’s au -tomatism gives us reality without the intervention of the artist; on the other hand, thecinema is “profoundly aesthetic.” 27 And while certain stylistic choices render an imageclosely in accord with human perception, Bazin insists that this aesthetic must work

in concert with a narrative looseness that restores the ambiguity of life that the Hol-lywood lm had all too tidily eliminated. Thus, installing one facet over and above theothers is an error: that is to say, to insist that the ontology argument is the linchpin is toreduce the importance of the aesthetic; likewise, to hold up a handful of visual strate -gies as constituting Bazinian realism is to ignore the correspondence between imageand world that the camera enacts. 28 But Bazin’s “denial of an ontological distinction

24 Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? , 1:36.

25 Bazin, “In Defense of Rossellini,” in ibid., 2:99.

26 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode ofProduction to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3.

27 Bazin, “Aesthetic of Reality,” 25.

28 Morgan argues that most critics have ignored this provocative claim of the “Ontology” essay entirely. See Morgan,“Rethinking Bazin,” 450.

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problem of realism is thought through and, in some respects, answered by Deleuze’sphilosophical foray into the cinema.

Trauma, Agency, Vision. Deleuze’s taxonomy of the cinema is split between two volumes, one concerning the movement-image and the other the time-image. Keyhere is that, like Bazin before him, Deleuze does not regard the coming of synchro -nous sound as a de nitive dividing line in the history of lm. Rather, Deleuze, in ahistoricist moment uncommon throughout the rest of the Cinema books, follows Bazin’speriodization exactly: the cinema, he argues, cleaves with the rise of neorealism. In the

rst line of The Time-Image, Deleuze writes that Bazin “showed that neo-realism didnot limit itself to the content of its earliest examples.” 40 Instead, it morphed: in theclassical movement-image, the narrative circumstance gave way to character action,

which, in turn, altered the situation. In the time-image, such intervention becomesimpossible. The trauma of the war gave rise to a “pure optical situation,” wherein

vision does not lead to a character’s action but to paralysis. “This is a cinema of theseer,” he explains, “and no longer of the agent.” 41 Neorealism, then, is de ned notby its social content but by the incapacitation of its characters. And, too, like Bazin,Deleuze points to Rossellini, arguing that the lmmaker, thought by many to have“abandoned” neorealism by turning away from its “social mooring,” instead “perfectsit.” 42 For both Bazin and Deleuze, neorealism is a rupture in the cinema, a birthing ofthe new. Deleuze’s thought situates the cinematic image in the liminal space between

reality and dream, subjective and objective—a condition that Bazin can only impre -cisely label “supernatural.” Yet in the case of George Washington, perhaps “supernatural” isn’t too far off themark. Critical appraisals often falter in nding the appropriate descriptors for it. Onsome levels, it surely ts the customary realist criteria: if so inclined, a viewer couldeasily apply the “naive” writings of Bazin and, by focusing on the lm’s depiction ofpoverty, location shooting, and nonprofessional players, mount a critique from thefamiliar and well-beaten path. Yet there remains something more elusive at play inGreen’s lm. Most recognizable is its reliance on an emotionally detached voice-over

narrator and painterly depictions of nature, which call to mind the work of TerrenceMalick, whose in uence is felt throughout George Washington.43 Critics frequently praisethe movie for its realistic evocation of the particularities of the Southern, AfricanAmerican experience, yet, nearly in the same breath, they label it “dreamlike,” “lyri -cal,” akin to a “sleepwalk.” 44 In short, the lm is at once realist and impressionist,

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 2.

42 Ibid.

43 Green acknowledges Malick’s inuence, and Malick would go on to produce Green’s third feature, 2004’s Undertow .See David Gordon Green, interview with George Ducker, The Believer , November 2006, http://www.believermag.com

/issues/200611/?read=interview_green.

44 Respectively, Peter Travers, review of George Washington , Rolling Stone , December 10, 2000, 113; Jonathan Rosen-baum, review of George Washington , Chicago Reader , http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/george-washington

/Film?oid=1064655 (accessed August 19, 2010); Peter Rainer, “ Witch Craft,” New York Magazine , November 6,2000, http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/4020/.

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seen in the lm repeatedly swinging a rod against a train car, working at nothing,“animated in vain.” 47 This leaves the children, granted a greater spatial mobility thanthe adults, to traverse the any-spaces-whatever. The situation recalls Deleuze’s descrip -

tion of the youth of neorealism, who are “affected by a certain motor helplessness,but one which makes them all the more capable of seeing and hearing.” 48 (Think:Bruno [Enzo Staiola] in Bicycle Thieves or Edmund [Edmund Meschke] in GermanyYear Zero [Roberto Rossellini, 1948]). This augmented receptivity results in a “distur -bance of equilibrium” that gives the normally quotidian “the pace of a dream or anightmare.” 49 George Washington presents one with such a situation: a dreamlike, poetic,even hallucinatory realm, one in which, to quote Deleuze, “we no longer know whatis imaginary or real, physical or mental.” 50 Thus, Deleuze’s description of an other -wordly environment in neorealism clearly applies in this case, for the lm “feels” real

yet somehow heightened, at once too vivid and too abstract. Deleuze’s rethinking of neorealism does not stop at the landscape and the altered

vision it enacts. The time-image, he maintains, troubles a host of normally stablebinary oppositions, such as dream-reality, subject-world, and self-other. This hazingof boundaries, “embryonic from the start of Italian neo-realism,” marks for him thecinema’s power. 51 In the following section, I examine Deleuze’s understanding of thetechnique of free indirect discourse to show how the move away from the surfaces ofpoverty to character interiority cannot be construed as an abandonment of the politi-cal project of postwar Italian cinema but is instead its culmination.

Free Indirect Subjectivity. The notion of free indirect discourse comes to us fromthe study of literary narrative. First attributed to Charles Bally in 1912, the devicecreates a middle term between the direct presentation of a character’s actions, desig-nated through the use of the rst person or quotation marks, and an indirect presenta -tion, in which an objective, third-person narrator relays the character’s action and/or internal thoughts. 52 Put simply, the free indirect mode of address portrays direct(i.e., rst-person) speech (here meaning “internal” monologue) in an indirect manner,effectively conjoining subjective and objective registers. In literary practice, a writer

presents a character’s internal thoughts without the accompanying signi ers or syn -tactical markers that would lead the reader to associate a particular phrase as issuingfrom the mind of the character; nonetheless, this ostensibly “objective” presentation“speaks” the character’s internal state of mind. Flaubert serves as illustration: “She[Emma Bovary] looked about wishing that the earth might crumble. Why not end itall? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looked at the paving-stones,saying to herself, ‘Jump! Jump!’” 53 In Jones’s analysis, the rst and nal sentence of the

47 Ibid., 3.

48 Ibid.49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 7.

51 Ibid.

52 Steven Ullman, Style in the French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 94–120.

53 Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Gloria G. Jones, “Free Indirect Style in Mrs. Dalloway ,” Postscript 14 (1997): 72.

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objective images is for the philosopher “cinema’s degree zero, its de ning possibility.” 58 According to Deleuze, the instances of character subjectivity that interrupt an other -wise objective cinematic depiction are not, as some literary theorists might suggest, the

character intruding upon the telling of his or her own story or a convenient device toenable an author to bypass the direct presentation of character subjectivity. Rather,more crucially, the lmmaker enters into a mimetic relationship with the character’sway of seeing; this relationship is a profoundly social act for the philosopher, for itnecessitates an oscillation of roles between the lmmaker and his or her character.Deleuze elaborates this point in relation to the ethnographic lms of Jean Rouch,noting how the European documentarian must, in a sense, “become” the subjects ofhis lm in order for his images to “speak” in his or her dialect, thereby subverting theimperialist tendency in documentary wherein the lmmaker swoops in with camera

on shoulder, capturing the non-Western oddness of the Other.59

In a surprising move,Deleuze extends this lm subject– lmmaker reciprocity beyond ethnographic cinemaand into the realm of the ction lm, remarking, quite curiously, that such a free in -direct oscillation may do more than merely represent a people but, indeed, may callthem into existence. Such are the stakes of Deleuze’s political project, one far removedfrom a simple depiction of poverty and desperation in long takes and deep focus.

Truth and Fabulation. We have seen how Deleuze’s taxonomy allows us to consider acontemporary lm in the neorealist vein in vastly different ways from those commonly

employed. With the radical possibilities of free indirect discourse now established, wemay next grapple with George Washington’s signi cant departures from the neorealistprototype. Recall that George Washington is most confounding in the moments in which itdeviates from the facile realist “checklist”—location shooting, nonprofessional actors,long takes, and the like. George Washington is sprinkled throughout with peculiar mo -ments, such as a fedora inexplicably burning in front of a church or a boy deliveringa soliloquy while dressed in a dinosaur mask. Yet the greatest anomaly—and the onemost frequently avoided by critics—is the lm’s odd climax. George, rememberingBuddy’s indifference to religion and (presumably) concerned that he may have been

denied an afterlife, removes the boy’s body from its well-hidden place and baptizesthe corpse in a muddy stream. When the body is later discovered, Vernon and Sonya,fearful of arrest, steal a car and attempt to skip town. Here, the lm shifts gears fromits “pillow shot” lyricism to something stranger: a car crash is treated like a nuclearmeltdown; a lm crew (ostensibly Green’s) is seen recording the protagonist; and ournarrator, heretofore speaking in the past tense, breaks into the present tense and adifferent vocal register as she asks over the image of the hero, “What do you see?” Toanswer this question is to abandon the bearings that the traditional understanding ofrealism provides.

58 Schwartz, “Typewriter,” 109.

59 Rouch considered his process of lmmaking to be akin to entering a trance state ( ciné-trance ) in which the lm-maker becomes something other than him- or herself. To such a line of thinking, Deleuze is clearly indebted. SeeJean Rouch, Ciné-ethnography , trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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The sequence begins with George in full hero regalia (wrestling singlet, makeshiftcape, and a hat made from the fur of his dead dog) surveying the wrecked vehicle,which, according to Nasia’s voice-over, ipped during Sonya and Vernon’s unseen

escape attempt. Workers in hazmat suits spray re extinguishers at the still-spinningtires as various children attempt to summarize the events that transpired to a televisionnews crew already on site. George then proceeds to run away from the scene as Greencuts to a shot of Nasia approaching a railroad crossing, where she sees the injuredautomobile thieves on foot along the tracks. Back to George: he continues to run, thistime turning to look over his shoulder. He appears frantic and weakened as he movestoward the outer wall of an abandoned factory. From the apparent point of view ofGeorge, a news reporter and cameraperson sprint toward him as if seeking his com -ment. George falls against the wall and slouches to the ground as his eyes roll back in

his head. From an extreme wide shot, we see a lm crew (noticeably different from thenews crew we just saw, as evidenced by the 35mm camera rig and boom microphoneas opposed to the video equipment and reporter’s handheld mic) recording George (heis sleeping, dead, unconscious?). Green next cuts abruptly to a shot of an unharmedGeorge sitting in a chair, lavalier microphone pinned to his shirt, as an unseen inter-

viewer asks what George considers the most important attributes of a hero and whichof those attributes he possesses. Green provides some clues of sorts earlier in the lm that allow me, with the aid ofDeleuze, to reconcile this anomaly and recoup the lm’s ending within our suf ciently

broadened conception of neorealism. During a scene in which George and Vernondiscuss their respective diving abilities with younger boys in the locker room of thecommunity pool, Nasia is seen peeking around a corner, as if spying on the conversa -tion in progress. Here, Nasia is granted access into a privileged instance and space.This could be easily dismissed, however, if it weren’t for a similar scene just prior tothe climactic sequence. George, seemingly alone on a rooftop, throws the helmet thatprotects his frail head to the ground. Again, Nasia is seen standing behind a wall,watching. At no point in either of these two instructive scenes is she ever framed withinthe same shot as the boys or as George. She does not participate or interact with the

other characters, nor do they appear to be aware of her presence. Likewise, when wesee Vernon and Sonya along the tracks, Green supplies us no master shot combiningthe three characters within a uni ed spatiotemporal eld. It seems unlikely that Nasia was actually present in either of these moments. What,then, might we make of her surreptitious presence? Deleuze’s theory of a free indi -rect style of cinematic enunciation—whereby the “distinction between what the char-acter [sees] subjectively and what the character [sees] objectively [vanishes], not infavor of one or the other, but because the camera [assumes] a subjective presence,[acquires] an internal vision, which [enters] into a relation of simulation with the

character’s way of seeing”—provides us an answer.60

In the free indirect mode, we

60 Deleuze, Cinema 2 , 148. Although he never addressed the topic in explicit terms, Bazin recognized and admiredmoments of free indirect cinematic discourse. Of Agnès Varda, Bazin writes, “Varda links her work to the intimatediary or better still to a kind of rst person récit that for discretion’s sake prefers to appear in third person.” Quotedin Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! , 106.

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have a contamination of voices, a third position between subjective and objective thatis not xed but rather marks the space between the two poles that move in a constantoscillation. Thus, Nasia, our narrator, attempts to tell the story of that fateful summer,

but, upon reaching the boundaries of her own fragmentary knowledge and possessingno insight into George’s inner state, she adopts a new tactic. No longer able to makesense of the events that next took place, we enter into her interior thoughts, but theseare “spoken” as if emanating from George’s consciousness. At no other point in the

lm are we provided an image that connotes George’s subjective vision as we are inthe shot in which the reporters run toward him, microphones in outstretched arms.It is my contention that what one sees here is Nasia creating a ctional assumption ofGeorge’s state of mind, engaging in what Deleuze terms a process of “fabulation,” ofstorytelling. The narrator, confronting the limits of her own ability to understand the

events that transpired, begins to ll in the gaps “to produce a means of knowledge”not out of evidence but “out of pure vision.” 61 Hence, in the climactic scene, we shiftbetween multiple positions: George’s subjectivity; Nasia, at once as character withinthe story and again as supplier of the narrative frame; and director Green, whoseenunciative position forms the camera’s consciousness. Green’s presence complicatesthe proceedings even further, as he “plays” George’s heard-yet-unseen interviewer inthe denouement: the director’s voice literally enters into the lm. The schizophrenic,hallucinatory nature of the ending of George Washington derives precisely from its poly-

vocality, as Nasia’s memory and recounting of events collide with the spectator’s (vis-

à-vis Green’s) entry into George’s consciousness, all of which is muddled further bythe seeming presentness of the depiction before us. Are we witnessing fantasy, reality,dream, memory? In the time-image, we nd that there is no answer, for the real and

virtual, the past and the present, coexist. To consider this further, though, we mustclarify two of Deleuze’s key concepts—the crystal and the circuit. Deleuze holds that, within the realm of the time-image, one can no longer distin -guish between what is actual and what is virtual; in fact, the distinction is irrelevantto Deleuze, for both the actual and the virtual are two sides of the same image. The

virtual, though, is not merely that which didn’t happen but could have happened.

Instead, Deleuze insists that the virtual is itself fully real, and what we think of as“reality” is, in fact, an actualized virtuality: all possibilities were available from thestart. The virtual, then, is the reality from which the actual springs, and Deleuze seesneorealism as inaugurating a disturbance between the realms, a moment wherein the

virtual—always coexisting with the actual—makes its presence felt, makes itself vis -ible. Deleuze, by way of analogy, notes: “It is as if an image in a mirror . . . came tolife, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that theactual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo,following a double movement of liberation and capture.” 62 These duplicate images

oscillate between one another, an alternation that Deleuze calls a circuit. In such a cir -cuit, “the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, or rather their images,

61 Deleuze, Cinema 2 , 18.

62 Ibid., 68.

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continually [follow] each other, running behind each other and referring back to eachother around a point of indiscernibility. But this point of indiscernibility is preciselyconstituted by the smallest circle, that is, the coalescence of the actual image and the

virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time.”63

Thissmallest circuit forms the Deleuzian “crystal”: the exact point where the real, presentmoment fuses with its virtual double, which springs from the mind of the perceivingsubject. Hence, with the crystal-image, we begin to experience time as it is, for it substi-tutes the indirect presentation of time found in the classical movement-image in favorof time’s direct presentation, and “the pure force of time . . . puts truth into crisis.” 64

Thus, the mixing of voices and of enunciative positions in George Washington servesto cloud the distinction between the actual (in this case, what actually occurred withinthe diegesis of the lm) and the virtual (that is, what Nasia invents or fabulates); the

two cannot be distinguished or reconciled. This circuit is made explicit with George’sactions in the late scene in question. When we rst see George, he runs as if respond -ing to a call for help; upon our return to him, he appears to be moving as if to avoidcapture. In other words, in one instance, we see an image of George, and in the next,we see that image’s mirror opposite. Deleuze, speaking both of Hitchcock generallyand more speci cally of Luchino Visconti’s founding neorealist lm Ossessione (1943),describes the time-image’s ineffectual hero as being “prey to a vision, pursued by it orpursuing it, rather than engaged in an action.” 65 We can see readily how these wordsmap onto George’s failed heroics.

This oneiric climax, completely ungrounded in any “objective truth” or stable nar-rative point of view, would at rst seem irreconcilable with a traditional conceptionof what realism is. Yet Deleuze’s understanding demonstrates how such a sequence iscompatible with what he saw emerging in the postwar Italian cinema, for fundamen-tal to neorealism are “subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visualdreams or fantasies, where the character does not act without seeing himself acting,complicit viewer of the role he himself is playing.” 66

The ending of George Washington is an unsettling one; for the bulk of the lm, Nasia’sauthority as narrator accompanies us and provides a seemingly stable frame. Suddenly,

with no warning, we experience a rupture in the narrative and nd ourselves withinDeleuze’s crystal—or perched unsteadily on one of Bazin’s riverbed stones. And therewe are left with her question: “What do you see?” Nasia proves incapable of answer -ing, so at rst she turns to her own ction and then, nally, to us, the lm’s viewers,for the answer. George, at the beginning and the ending of the lm, is enigmatic, awk -ward, suffering from delusions of grandeur. Nasia is the visionary seer in George Wash-ington, for she suffers from a paralysis of action but one accompanied by a heightened

vision and awareness of both time and possibility. Nasia, like Ingrid Bergman in Europa’51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952) “has learnt to see,” and with this lesson, she puts truth

63 Ibid., 69.

64 Ibid., 130.

65 Ibid., 3.

66 Ibid., 6.

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Thus, x and y are “incompossible”: not simply contradictory but, oddly, equally validand yet invalidated by the other. The notion of imcompossibility proves foundational to what is perhaps Deleuze’s

most complex and baf ing argument in the Cinema books. Here, we have two positionsthat begin as truths that eventually have the potential to falsify one another. Neither,though, is intrinsically false. From this peculiar notion, Deleuze introduces the powersof the false, the ability of the cinema not simply to speak for colonized peoples but alsoto call a people into being. 75 Such a proclamation is curious on two levels: rst, we tendto think, especially in relation to the postcolonial ethnographic cinema that Deleuzeexamines in this section of Cinema 2, that colonized identities are liberated by the truthand conversely are caged by falsities. Second, how does the lmic medium—mere lightcollected and then projected on a screen— create a people?

The answer, according to Deleuze, lies with free indirect discourse. Let us thinkof the “truth”—demonstrated earlier as being simultaneously true and false—of thecolonized as one constructed by the colonizer. By dictating both the record of historyand the tongue in which that history is recounted, the colonizer comes to manufac -ture the truth. The subjects then may counter this truth with another that in turnfalsi es the original. This is not, however, a matter of correction, of substituting theactual reality, the more accurate account, for the one created and endorsed by theoppressors. Rather, through a process of storytelling, of fabulation, the colonized sub -

vert the reality of the colonizers. This process of fabulation, though, is aided by the

presence of an intercessor, who provides the means by which the “invented” storycirculates—in terms of the Cinema books, this intercessor is, obviously, the lmmaker.As Deleuze explains, to accomplish this complex subversion, the two parties in thecreative endeavor must “become” one another: the lmmaker, a subject; the subject,a lmmaker. Deleuze begins his discussion of fabulation with a consideration of JeanRouch’s ethnographic lm Moi un noir (1958), wherein “the ‘director’ handed authorialcontrol over to that lm’s ostensible ‘subjects,’” which resulted in a lm which “canonly with quali cation be called his own.” 76 Similarly, Deleuze, in speaking of ShirleyClarke and her documentary Portrait of Jason (1967), writes that “the lm she wanted to

make about herself became the one she made about Jason.”77

Thus, Clarke is as muchthe subject of the lm as is the titular performer. As we will see, this sort of becoming-through-falsi cation also nds articulation in George Washington. Deleuze’s aim here is to undo the Cartesian subject, the idea that Ego = Ego, 78 anequation that Rodowick describes as being “alien” to Deleuze’s entire philosophicaloutlook. 79 The traditional documentary in which an outside party explores anotherculture or group reinforces the differing status of the lmmakers and the lm’s sub -

jects. In short, it rei es the status of an other as the Other, as lmmaker and subject

75 Deleuze, Cinema 2 , 216–221.

76 Andrew, What Cinema Is! , 121–122.


78 Ibid., 133.

79 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine , 140.

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of the lm remain “separate.” The only solution to this conundrum is for the twosides to approach each other in a becoming, a transformation, a metamorphosis. Byspeaking her thoughts through the language of the colonized, the lmmaker becomes

something other than herself—the “I is another” (“ Je est un autre”) formulation thatDeleuze takes from Rimbaud. 80 Similarly, the documentary subject, in constructingnot what he was or is but, instead, what he might become, is engaged in a process ofcreation, of storytelling. Thus, through their aesthetic partnership, both the documen-tary lmmaker and the subject of the documentary collectively craft a ction. This

ction, a story of possibility, has the potential to awaken the sense of possibility inothers similarly situated. The “objectivity” of the lmmaker is corrupted by speakingin the manner of the subjects of the lm. And by doing so, the lmmaker assists in thefalsi cation of history as dictated by the colonizer and, at the same time, perpetuates

a ction, the performance of the colonized as lm subjects. George Washington features just such a dual becoming. In short, the lm is an exem -plar of the powers of the false. I have already detailed its unusual story of a segmentof the population that rarely is so generously depicted: the poor black youth of theAmerican South. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that director David GordonGreen is white. The presence of free indirect discourse does not merely create anindiscernibility of past and present or memory and dream but similarly opens up justthis sort of fabulation, this co-falsifying narrative. Nasia, in the privileged position ofnarrator, speaks for her (and the lm’s) hero, George, but in the manner in which she

would imagine him to speak for himself. Recall the ending of the lm where George isrst seen running toward the car accident, then away from it, and is last shown being

interviewed by a supposed news reporter about his heroism. What heroic act did heaccomplish? We know that he arrived on the scene too late to prevent the crash, andwe never again see Vernon or Sonya, so we may assume that George had no handin their rescue or apprehension. Thus, into the fact of the car crash Nasia inserts animagined intervention by George, one that conforms to both her and George’s hopethat he would one day become a hero on a par with his idols. Yet the visual narra-tion contradicts Nasia’s account by showing George retreating and collapsing. Both

outcomes are mutually exclusive: each story falsi es the other, and both are aided byGreen, who refuses to provide an answer, declines to clarify what “really” happened. How, then, does the act of fabulation, as Deleuze insists, invent a people? Postcolo -nial theory has taught us to extend the concept of colonialism and imperialism beyondthe boundaries of nations and to apply it to marginalized groups, even (and perhapsespecially) to those in the West. By framing the young characters of George Washington as subaltern subjects, we push free indirect discourse to its more politically engageddimension. In the epigraph that opens this section, Deleuze describes the process of

80 Deleuze, Cinema 2 , 153. This line comes from Rimbaud’s 1871 letter to Demeny, one that appears to be im-mensely inuential on Deleuze’s work. Note the similarities: “I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it,I hear it. . . . I say one must become a seer , make oneself a seer . The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, rationaland immense disordering of the senses . . . . Let him die charging among those unutterable, unnameable things.”Arthur Rimbaud, “Excerpt from ‘Lettre à Paul Demeny: Charleville, 15 mai 1871,’” trans. A. S. Kline, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud3.htm (accessed July 28, 2010).

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fabulation as a crossing over of sides, an approach toward the opposite partner inthe lmic endeavor. Green intentionally avoided making a lm about his own white,middle-class experience and instead brought an ethnographic perspective to George

Washington. “In America,” says Green, “I think there’s a certain economic level whererace really stops being an issue, because everyone’s already got enough going on justtrying to put food on the table. Plus, I don’t necessarily think 26-year-old white guysare that interesting. So why would I want to make another movie about their coffeeshops and romantic pitfalls?” 81 Despite his naïveté here, Green, in choosing to focuson poor blacks in the postindustrial American South in George Washington, initiates atwo-way process of becoming. Green cast his lm by visiting churches, youth groups, and playgrounds to ndhis cast of nonprofessional actors. By adopting an episodic narrative structure and

allowing the children to improvise their lines according to his loose scenario, Greenfreed himself to organize the lm around only those scenes that “worked”; few eventswere crucial in terms of plot, and scenes that didn’t work were expendable. 82 It is inthis sense that the lm clearly displays its neorealist inheritance as well as facilitatesthe creation of a people, as it allows Green’s actors to “play” in a way that thoroughlyaligns with Deleuze’s powers of the false. To proceed, we must rst clarify some terminology. D. N. Rodowick points out thatthe rendering of fabulation as “storytelling” in Tomlinson and Galeta’s translation ofCinema 2 loses some of the speci city of the book’s original French. Deleuze’s actual

term récit is “neither precisely a document nor a ction, but a form of enunciationthat gravitates between these two poles in a free indirect relation.” Rodowick describesfabulation as being beyond either narration or description, beyond the mimetic (show-ing or simulative) and the diegetic (narrative or telling). 83 For example, the cameradirectly represents the pro lmic event and, thus, performs a mimetic function. At thesame time, the selection and ordering of events via editing (and, to an extent, the inclu-sion and exclusion that is the framing of the shot) conforms to the dramatic or diegeticmode. It is apparent that these two modes function simultaneously in the cinema; withDeleuze, though, designating an element of the visual or audio tracks as a function of

one or the other becomes quite dif cult. We have seen in the case of George Washington that we cannot attribute the diegesis unproblematically to Nasia’s narratorial logic.Likewise, the mimetic event is complicated, for we cannot know whether what we areseeing and hearing actually happened or whether it is fantasy. Further, if it is indeedfantasy, to whom can we attribute this gment? Hence, fabulation refers not simply tostorytelling, or to a blending of the mimetic and diegetic modes, but to a fundamentaldisturbance between mimetic and diegetic operations.

81 David Gordon Green, “If I Ever Do Anything Clever, Shoot Me,” interview with Danny Leigh, Guardian , September25, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2001/sep/25/artsfeatures1. Despite Green’s proclamation, his secondfeature, All the Real Girls (2003), tackles precisely this, the love lives of twenty-six-year-olds, though in an episodic,poetic style somewhat reminiscent of George Washington .

82 David Gordon Green, “No-Budget Strategy,” interview with No Budget Film School, October 22, 2006, posted toYouTube on April 8, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h3tAMIqf3w.

83 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine , 157.

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This disturbance is the key to George Washington. The disruption of the usual stablerelationship between subjectivity and objectivity, sound and image, creates a becom-ing, a mutual transformation in which real children play ctional ones, and through

this process and with the help of Green, these ctions become real; lies become truths.And in this way, Green relinquishes the position of director who passively or objec-tively records the “real” before him and, instead, becomes one of his subjects. The

young children of George Washington do not sound a cry that is uniquely that of poor,black kids in the postindustrial South. Rather, they and Green create a highly speci ccollective enunciation that possesses the ability to awaken those similarly situated in

yet another becoming, thereby “calling into existence” those that might not have ex-isted before. For this to occur, the children of the lm had to step toward the camerato become they who tell their story. And David Gordon Green, the director, had to

transform also, to become a young black child, un noir . This is not to say, however, that the act of fabulation on offer in George Washington somehow neutralizes the inequalities of race or class. One need only look to the adultsin the lm to see the constraints still at work: Damascus’s white employer docks him aweek’s pay as punishment for some undisclosed offense; Rico (Paul Schneider), a whitelaborer in his twenties, sets up secret trysts with a black woman (Ebony Jones), osten -sibly to avoid detection by others of their interracial affair; there is an uncomfortableexchange between the mother of a white child ( Joyce Mahaffey) and George’s aunt( Janet Taylor) after the former’s son was rescued from drowning by George. Ever the

occupiers of liminal spaces, children are the only ones in this lm capable of initiatingan emancipatory line of ight. But it is in light of the children’s becomings that the lm’s title becomes especiallysigni cant: George Washington, having effectively founded the nation, is the signi erto which one points to unify the concept of America—as governmental seat, preemi-nent founding father, literally exchanged as currency. But whereas the historical gureof George Washington can be said to have called forth the white- and male-dominatednation, George Washington founds a “missing” people, those whose existence cannot besubsumed under the nation as signi ed by the lm’s namesake.

Conclusion. In aligning George Washington with neorealism, A. O. Scott was partly cor-rect, for the lm ts the customary criteria of the postwar Italian cinema: a depictionof the harsh realities of the poor, an episodic narrative structure, the use of nonpro-fessional actors, a stylistic reliance on long takes and deep-focus cinematography. Toframe the lm in such a manner, though, is to set aside the highly unusual ending alto -gether. This article has sought to reclaim this portion of the text as within the boundsof Bazin’s realism, and precisely for the reasons that many would likely exclude it.Within his thought exists a curious realism—poetic, magical, supernatural, surreal—

and George Washington is in keeping with it. That Bazin never rigorously de ned his terms opens up the discussion to someonewho attempts such an elaboration of the irrational image—Deleuze. Although thephilosopher is by no means a realist, the resonances between his thought and Bazin’sare, in places, keenly felt; note, for example, their shared allegiance to Henri Bergson’snotion of durée, their identical cinematic periodization, and their similar conceptions

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of the lmic image as “hallucinatory.” 84 I’ve argued that Deleuze’s rethinking onneorealism picks up where Bazin’s discussions left off, contemplating not the “socialcontent” of this celebrated movement but rather its “visual and sound nakedness,” a

condition he describes as less like reality and more like “a dream or a nightmare.”85

The dreamlike quality of George Washington can best be explained, I contend,through Deleuze’s notion of free indirect discourse, a director’s “speaking” through hischaracters but in their speci c dialects. The free indirect mode puts the lm’s makerand its subjects into an oscillation, one that serves to obliterate the distinction betweensubjective and objective, for though the two are distinct, they are indiscernible. AndGeorge Washington complicates even this complex arrangement, for the free indirect isin this instance doubly inscribed: Nasia engages in a free indirect récit about George,and Green crafts George’s story by incorporating Nasia’s “dialect”: thus, the director

speaks indirectly for Nasia, who, in turn, speaks indirectly for George. The free indi -rect discourse in this instance is not a falsi cation in two parallel directions but ratheris tiered, or better, triangular. As the debate between Scott and Brody that opens this article illustrates, there re-mains a rather limited conception of what the realism of postwar Italy was and whatits legacy is today. That is to say, although neorealism married an austere style with apolitical urgency, its end result was not the “objective” depiction of social reality—asif such a thing were even possible. Bazin posits that there is more to neorealism thansocial reality or documentary aesthetics. He nds, rather, an “attitude of mind.” 86 He

describes the Naples Rossellini renders in Voyage to Italy as a landscape that “is ‘ ltered’through the consciousness of the heroine. If the landscape is bare and con ned, it isbecause the consciousness of an ordinary bourgeoise itself suffers from great spiritualpoverty. Nevertheless, the Naples of the lm is not false. . . . It is rather a mental land -scape at once objective as a straight photograph and as subjective as pure personalconsciousness.” 87 We hear the echo of Bazin’s passage, a summation of free indirectdiscourse without ever terming it as such, throughout the lm philosophy of Deleuze,despite the fact that Bazin’s essay predates the publication of The Time-Image by thirty

years. Many have noted the theoretical overlap between the two thinkers, but I’ve at -

tempted here to draw an even straighter line between them and, indeed, to continuethis line from Italian neorealism to a contemporary lm that bears its forerunners’legacy; and I do so not for the reasons most readily assumed—a facile list of aesthetictechniques and an unduly limited array of subject matter—but for others scarcelyrealized. The characteristics of late neorealism that Bazin enumerated variously as“surreal,” “poetic,” “magical,” and “supernatural” are the by-products of ambiguity,

84 Bazin: [C]inema is a “really existing hallucination,” for “every image should be experienced as an object and everyobject as an image.” Bazin, “Ontology,” in What Is Cinema? , trans. Barnard, 9–10. Deleuze: “[E]very perception ishallucinatory because perception has no object.” Quoted in Keith W. Faulkner, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses ofTime (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 24.


86 Bazin, “In Defense of Rossellini,” in What Is Cinema? , vol. 2, 98.

87 Ibid.

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qualities that Deleuze would later describe as a general condition of “indiscernibility,”the moments in which reality and dream, truth and ction, subjective and objective,lose their distinction and bleed irreconcilably over the boundaries of each. Bazin, in

grappling with neorealism during the time of its emergence, writes, “History does notrepeat itself; we have to get clear the particular form this aesthetic quarrel assumestoday.” 88 This article has aimed to show that this quarrel over realism persists. ✽

The author wishes to thank Angelo Restivo, Jennifer M. Barker, Ted Friedman, Carol Winkler, and the anonymousCinema Journal reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

88 Bazin, “Aesthetic of Reality,” 16.

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