Brott on Deleuze and Film

8/2/2019 Brott on Deleuze and Film

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SIMONE BROTT

The University of Melbourne

Extending Deleuze’s later writing on the cinema and engaging both film and built work, the article

explores what I call the ‘‘close-up,’’ an immanent subjectivity of architectural encounter, whereby

the architectural surface aggressively colonizes the subject at close range through a touch or by

another mechanism I describe as the ‘‘withdrawn effect,’’ the surface assimilates the subject.

Close Encounter,

Withdrawn Effects

Terminologies of the SubjectIn a lucid discussion of objecthood in German

aesthetic theory of the late 1920s, Gilles Deleuze

admired the thinking of Alois Riegl and Wilhem

Worringer, for each of whom, in his account,abstract forms wield ‘‘an intense life and expres-

sionistic value, all the while remaining inorganic.’’1

This longer trajectory in German art history and

its implicit theorization of an autonomous subjec-

tivity of form, observed by Deleuze, can be

contrasted with two enduring models of subjectivity

in architectural criticism since World War II. I am

thinking of both the received modernist tradition

in architecture, where the subject is thought to

colonize, capture, or dominate space, and itsattendant postmodern critique, where space is

viewed as a symbolic surface of inscription for

the subject’s fantasies, memories, and anxieties.

My project departs from both architectural

models of subjectivity as mastery and metaphor to

posit a real architectural subjectivity in and of itself.

For Gilles Deleuze, subjectivity does not mean

a person with fixed traits but ‘‘an effect.’’ The

personal identity for Deleuze is precisely a repeti-

tion of concrete effects, namely, the habit of saying‘‘I’’ whereby the ‘‘self’’ becomes as if an a priori

fact.2 Effet , in turn, does not mean a causality or

refer to something ephemeral but to a component

power that ‘‘works’’—the sense in which one

says ‘‘electromagnetic effect,’’ in Deleuze’s usage.3

I will use the term ‘‘effect’’ to designate multiple

components of architectural encounter (such as

a touch, a ray of light, a falling beam).

The ‘‘close-up,’’ not to be confused with

a camera movement or a formal entity magnified,

refers to the close-range field of architectural

encounter, what I think of as an affective surface or

image to which the individuated subject begins tolose ascendancy, a surface that itself becomes an

entity.4 Surface here includes a continuous physical

region such as a wall or a hand, but it extends to the

entire set of disconnected surfaces whose effects

collectively act upon the subject as a unity. The

close-up is distinguished only by the degree of

indiscernibility of the subject in the image and by

the degree of autonomy in greater or lesser quan-

tities of the architectural encounter—in other

words, its power to act and its proliferation of effects. ‘‘Encounter,’’ finally, should not be thought

of as a meeting between two constituted wholes,

a building and a formed consciousness, but rather

as a field of effects for what cannot yet be deter-

mined, for the creation of something new and

unforeseen.

Close-Up EffectsLate in Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass

Darkly , we see Karin (Harriet Andersson)examine a moving reflection of water on a square

region of patterned wallpaper.5 At the moment of

contact, the paisley starts to react to her touch, as

if the fabric has separated from the wall the

moment Karin herself begins to separate, to

fragment. Film then functions not to reproduce

a single-point perspective or view, rather what is

close up is the effects themselves, in relation to

each other. The image enlarges, in a small

region of wallpaper, Karin’s touch, the pattern of

light, the swirls of paisley, the low-relief fabric,

the look of wonderment, the voices in the wall,

the moment of submission, and so on(Figures 1 and 2).6

Later, we are invited into another close-up,

this time of a wallpapered door that Karin opens

only to find, to her alarm, an identically wallpapered

closet behind. It is as if space has been abolished,

leaving only a series of flattened surfaces in its

place; one close-up gives way to reveal a second

and thus the character’s discovery of the site of her

deindividuation. What is presented to the audience

is itself a merging of an anticipated spatial orderwith the circulation of disconnected effects around

Karin’s touch. The spectators, in other words, are

also taken into the image, just as they are active

participants in closing this space.

To be clear, the close-up is not a psychologi-

cal projection onto the objects of the film, a

construction in the mind of the viewer, or a met-

aphor or symbol of subjectivity communicated

through the use of architectural imagery. In the

realist account of the cinema adopted by Deleuze,via the film theorist Andre Bazin with whom

Deleuze held an allegiance, the events in a film are

seen to be real.7 Likewise, an architectural

subjectivity is real insofar as it gives rise to a real

affective event. The architectural close-up pro-

duces determinate effects both within the film and

in the affective space of the audience that wit-

nesses it. I will return to this.

Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 6–16 ª 2008 ACSA

Close Encounter, Withdrawn Effects 6



The wallpaper really does shimmer in the

moving pattern of water, reflected from thesea outside, via a window on the opposite wall; at

the same time, Karin’s actual touch of the

surface becomes the affective singularity for the

discovery of schizophrenia. Through a Glass Darkly

was originally entitled Wallpaper , recalling Char-

lotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.8 How-

ever, unlike the wallpaper in Gilman, the architectural

close-up does not lie passively, a projective surface

for Karin’s schizophrenic decompensation; rather, in

this schema, her loss of identity mobilizes an unan-nounced subjectivity in the wallpaper itself.

This loss of an individuated subjectivity

emerges precisely from the materiality of the close-

up itself, as the close-up isolates the event of

contact between a character and an architectural

series. It is no accident that Deleuze considered the

film close-up to be the par exemplar of the

‘‘affection-image.’’9 What it renders ‘‘up close’’ is

the affective merging of subject and object. In

a discussion of cinema and what he called the‘‘movement-image,’’ Deleuze said:

Affection is what occupies the interval . . . It

surges in the centre of determination, that is to

say in the subject, between a perception which

is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant

action. It is a coincidence of subject and object,

or the way in which the subject perceives itself,

or rather experiences itself or feels itself ‘‘fromthe inside.’’10

But in Through a Glass Darkly , it is not from

any phenomenal interior that Karin feels; rather, it

is strangely from inside the wallpaper that she

suspects herself, in another reality, as a choir of

muffled voices emanates seemingly from behind

her touch, beckoning her to join them on the other

side. The wall close-up draws the character, and

thereby, as Deleuze says, ‘‘suspends individua-tion.’’11 But it suspends her individuation not in the

obvious sense that Karin cannot speak or navigate

space. For Karin, it is the unspeakable itself—

‘‘where am I behind the wall?’’—and the lure of the

unknown—‘‘what happens next?’’—that the

image captures and that grips her. This moment of

decompensation is not a climax in the sense of an

end; rather, it signifies a strange future, something

else that cannot be fathomed.

The architectural close-up departs fromDeleuze’s thinking on the film close-up, which

turns on the human face. According to his concept

of visageite or ‘‘faceification,’’12 when the human

face is zeroed in on by the camera, it becomes

anonymous or ‘‘dehumanized.’’ Deleuze particu-

larly admired Ingmar Bergman’s thesis on the

relation between cinema and the facial close-up,

quoting Bergman in his short essay ‘‘Affect as

Entity’’:

‘‘Our work begins with the human face . . . The

possibility of drawing near to the human face isthe primary originality and the distinctive

quality of the cinema.’’ A character has

abandoned his profession, renounced his social

role; he is no longer able to, or no longer wants

to communicate, is struck by an almost absolute

muteness; he even loses his individuation.13

In the architectural close-up, it could be said

what takes place, rather, is an architectural ‘‘face-

ification’’ where the architectural visage, the sur-face of encounter, is subjectivized and incorporates

the individual subject. Here, ‘‘close-up’’ means the

architectural subjectivity itself isolated and laid bare

as the features of a face. Indeed, for Deleuze, the

human face is itself already a close-up, prior to any

movements of the camera because of the anony-

mous power of its features, its effects, which endow

it with the character of bringing near.

The architectural close-up then deviates from

the filmic close-up as technique and, thereby thehistorical discussion of the gaze and visuality, to

envelop the entire psychokinesthetic situation

between the subject and the material encounter

of architecture.14 But this does not mean the close-

up is nonvisual per se. Rather, its visuality is haptic

in the sense that Deleuze intends in his discussion

of Alois Riegl, for whom haptic ‘‘does not establish

an opposition between two sense organs but rather

invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill

this nonoptical function.’’15 The serial close-ups of encounter can be thought of precisely in terms of

the ‘‘close-vision-haptic space’’ that Deleuze

discovered in Riegl—they concatenate like a visual

blanket that envelops one’s body, what might be

called a surround sight.

Nevertheless, the camera itself ‘‘acts out’’ in

the architectural close-up. The scene in Bergman

1. The ‘‘close-up’’ still of Harriet Andersson touching the wall in Through

a Glass Darkly . (Reproduced from I. Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly .)

7 BROTT



begins with a series of long-distance shots of a crack in the wall, alerting the audience that

something is awry. However, for Karin herself, it is

only at the architectural close-up, which begins

with a touch, the affective merging of matter and

subject, that she is colonized by the image. This

technique is also used in Polanski’s Repulsion,

where long shots of cracks in an apartment wall

herald the crucial scene for Carol (Catherine

Deneuve), whose madness is made manifest at the

receiving surface of her own handprint.16

LikeKarin, Carol is not disturbed that she has authored

the clay-like imprint in the wall, so much as horri-

fied that she has catalyzed its self-movement

(Figures 3 and 4).

Similarly, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Barton

Fink, we see a long shot preceding the camera

close-up here in a hotel room. The architectural

close-up is focused on a section of wallpaper sag-

ging away from the wall. As described in the

screenplay: ‘‘the strip of wallpaper, its glue appar-ently melted, sags and nods above the bed. It

glistens yellow, like a fleshy tropical flower.’’17 In

the next shot, we see the close-up of the epony-

mous Fink (John Turturro) pressed up against the

wallpaper as he desperately tries to fix the sickening

material back onto the wall, and then looks at

his hand ‘‘sticky with tacky yellow wall sweat’’18

(Figures 5 and 6).

Such a literary effect whereby inanimateobjects are attributed subjective or human quali-

ties, the ‘‘pathetic fallacy,’’ or prosopopoeia (con-

verting an abstract quality or idea into a person or

creature) is not what is at stake here. In the

screenplay, the wallpaper feels like a metaphor, but

in the film, the architectural subjectivization is a real

event, which takes effect corporeally, colonizing the

character in a way that cannot be mistaken for

metaphor.19 When Fink merges with the wall, there

is an attenuation in power, an affective transition inthe situation of bodily disgust, which Deleuze, in his

reading of Spinoza, called the affectus.20 Fink loses

autonomy (he is unable to write), while the paper

gains a palpable power; this result of the affective

transaction Deleuze-Spinoza called the affectio.

The close-up wallpaper scene constitutes what

I call the primary effects-image of Barton Fink.

While Fink has already suffered a series of failures

and rejections, the wallpaper close-up is the

moment wherein the film reveals what is at stake.More than this, the wall objet , as in Bergman and

Polanski, is introduced to the audience as if

another character alongside Fink. To be clear, it

does not act in the film like the other characters—it

hovers above Fink and has primacy precisely in its

status of detachment, as what Deleuze in his early

work in The Logic of Sense called a pure ‘‘will of

indifference.’’ 21

To pause for a moment, these three scenes in

Bergman, Polanski, and the Coens could be viewed

as revealing an idiosyncratic microgenre in the cin-

ema, the wallpaper scene. But more importantly, the

cinematic images here contribute to architecture’sown dialogue on the surface, where the wallpaper is

not only defamiliarized but also radically reconsti-

tuted. The wallpaper as architectural entity lies out-

side the dominant history of wallpaper in

architectural discourse as interior design, with its

associations of anodyne superficiality and post-

modern kitsch. It also bears little relation to the

favorable articulations of wallpaper, from the Arts

and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century to

populist movements during the sixties and beyond.The architectural close-up produces a new

entity—neither the entire room nor a fragment of it

in the region of wall; but what might be called

a material becoming-subject born in the indifferent

or ‘‘impersonal’’ effect, to borrow Deleuze’s term.

Deleuze restates the Hungarian film theorist Bela

Balazs’s position: ‘‘the [film] close-up does not tear

away its object from a set of which it would form

part, of which it would be a part, but on the con-

trary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of

Entity.’’22 In Barton Fink, the new entity is the

production of a section of hanging paper into

a distended flower that leaks onto Fink. The archi-

tectural close-up ushers in the wallpaper as a new

character, but of another spatiotemporal order. It

could be said that the wallpaper close-up exists

neither in the reality of the characters in the film

nor in that of the film spectator to whom it bears an

important relation, but in a third realm that attractseffects both ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ the film and

transcends any subjects with fixed traits.

To reiterate, the close-up is irreducible to

psychological fantasy or projection. The failure to

separate from the wall is a real event implying an

attenuation in power or an affective transition: the

audience connects with Fink’s disgust, which is

palpable, and the paper itself gains ascendancy.

2. The wallpaper still of moving pattern of reflected light on wallpaper in

Through a Glass Darkly . (Reproduced from I. Bergman, Through a Glass

Darkly .)




Furthermore, the image is not a mirroring of sub-

jectivity, or the codification of subjectivity within

a space that stares back at Fink like Lacan’s ‘‘sardine

can,’’

23

or what Sartre called the ‘‘look’’ in Being andNothingness. 24 If the wallpaper ‘‘looks,’’ we could

say it looks without getting caught (to relate to

Sartre’s example of the peeping Tom who is caught).

It is a look of pure indifference, a look that, deprived

of any subject, cannot be caught in the act.

The phenomenon described here, further, is

irreducible to the ‘‘gaze,’’ the Lacanian dialectic of

looking and being looked at. The close-up is not

primarily scopic but a bodily bringing close, a vis-

ceral merging of subject and object. It is alsointeresting to note that schizophrenia manifests

typically with auditory, rather than visual, halluci-

nation. In Through a Glass Darkly , the psychosis

begins almost imperceptibly with real sounds the

audience hears but only later suspects belong to an

inchoate psychosis. The close-up of Fink is not

primarily about a look but about getting one’s

hands wet. Whereas the ‘‘regard fixe’’ is frozen in

its paranoiac oscillation between subject and

object, the close-up blurs this distinction in theaffective alteration of bodily states. Karin does not

feel the wallpaper is watching her so much as she

can no longer extricate herself from it.

This schema, while it concerns architectural

experience, departs from any phenomenological

reading, in that it does not cast meaning as the sine

qua non of subjectivity. The claim is not that

meanings lie outside the close-up, rather that they

cannot account for the sheer creativity of the

encounter, in and of itself, which includes a spec-trum of ‘‘asignifying’’ effects. While the effects

emitted include fantasy, interpretation, and other

signifying parts that circulate around the close-

up—glue-yellow-dripping¼ sweat-otherness-

disgust—the close-up is irreducible to any

overarching structuralist system.

My working of the close-up extends Deleuze’s

film close-up—for him the exemplar of the

3. The ‘‘close up’’ still of Catherine Deneuve printing her hand onto the soft wall surface in Repulsion. (Reproduced from R. Polanski, Repulsion.)

4. Clay wall still of Catherine Deneuve’s handprints on the wall in Repulsion. (Reproduced from R. Polanski, Repulsion.)

9 BROTT



affection-image in The Movement Image—but

also reformulates it via what I call the surface of

encounter, as opposed to the personological face.

The articulation of the close-up further departs

from Deleuze’s conception in that it not onlyengages narratives of action-reaction, subjects

reacting to situations, that is, Deleuze’s ‘‘move-

ment-images,’’ but also initiates the dissolution of

the subject in the image, closer to Deleuze’s ‘‘time-

images.’’25 All architectural close-ups therefore

involve a bodily kinesthetic situation as per the

movement-image, but they begin to leak beyond

this, permitting effects of memory, imagination,

psychosis, and the intrusion of ‘‘pure optical and

sound situations, in which the character does notknow how to respond.’’26

Withdrawn EffectsIn the last scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s

Zabriskie Point , a girl stares at a Wrightian villa in

Death Valley until it blows itself up.27 The same shot

is then repeated in a series of mysterious slow-

motion explosions.The image, unable to satisfy itself

or reach its goal, must repeat itself, machine-gun like,

to pursue its effects.The initial explosion sequence of the building whole causes the screen to fill with

detritus, with furniture and flying pieces from inside

the villa, a spatial and temporal blow-up shot in slow

motion to the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd.The

audience is taken inside the explosion in what is

a blurring of the image itself 28 (Figures 7 and 8).

If the close-up elaborated in the previous

discussion is distinct, assertive, and successful,

there is concealed in it another type of image that it

strains to avert, a less sure image—no less vivid—but one that falters or blurs in its ascent. It is not

always clear what the image wants. Its subjectivity

may be less articulate, but this does not disqualify

it. The uncertainty of this image, as will be seen, is

none other than a necessary confusion between the

individual subjectivity that it engulfs and the rise of

a creative impersonal subjectivity. The vast

5. Still of John Turturro and sagging wallpaper in Barton Fink. (Reproduced from Joel Coen and written by Ethan and Joel Coen, Barton Fink, 1991.)

6. Still of John Turturro’s hand sticky with ‘‘wall sweat’’ in Barton Fink. (Reproduced from Joel Coen and written by Ethan and Joel Coen, Barton Fink.)




effects-image of Antonioni takes in not only the

audience but also Daria (Daria Halprin)—who is

supposed to have catalyzed it—and everything

else. It continues the work of the close-up, pushing

the subject into further obscurity.

The question arises, however; does the

explosion mobilize itselfor take place in the mind of

the protagonist—a repetitive dream sequence?

While the explosion prolongs itself, through slowmotion and seriality, the character herself under-

goes a manifest disappearance in what is a confu-

sion of agency and, ultimately, erasure of her

personal identity. Even if she did dream for the

explosion or organize it for real, she is what Deleuze

might have called a vanished character in ‘‘any-

space-whatever.’’ The affect, rather than grafting

itself on to the subject—like the wallpaper close-up

in Barton Fink—is here withdrawn, concealed in

the very process by which it absorbs the subject.Deleuze favored Pascal Auge’s term espace

quelconque to describe the ‘‘emptied spaces’’ of an

extinct personal subjectivity. But it could be argued

that in any-space-whatever, the personal subjec-

tivity is only extinct insofar as she is absorbed into

the field of the close-up as a part subject. For

Deleuze, absorption in espace quelconque means

literally an effacement,29 yet we might say that in

the effects-image, absorption rather is production.

Daria’s subjectivity is surely an effacement by the

desert to which she submits for most of the film,

but here, in the explosion for which she is clearly

a catalyst, her subjectivity becomes productive.

Furthermore, it could be said that in Antonioni’s

film, desubjectivization is a creative act rather than

a form of pathology, as in the examples of Berg-

man, Polanski, and the Coen brothers.If the close-ups of the earlier discussion are

accomplished via surfaces that colonize the char-

acter from the outside by emitting effects, in this

architectural space of pure annulment, we could say

the effects-image takes in all the effects in order to

produce a situation of ‘‘withdrawn affect.’’ Any-

space-whatever produces affect precisely by its

mechanism of withdrawal.

To return to the earlier discussion of the

movement-image, Deleuze proposes a movementfrom the camera close-up (or the affection-image)

in Bergman to the ‘‘faceless’’ emptied spaces of

Antonioni, such as the desert.30 In Zabriskie Point ,

however, I suggest it is not Antonioni’s desert,

a pure emptiness that is any-space-whatever, but

the positive effects-image of the explosion itself.

Inside the space of the explosion, there is little

difference between a table leg and a human one

and between burning plastic and a television. Here,

the effects-image withdraws all but only to produce

something new, an ‘‘amorphous set which has eli-

minated that which happened and acted in it. It is an

extinction or a disappearing.’’

31

Deleuze imaginesespace quelconque thus:

The amorphous set in fact is a collection of

locations or positions which coexist . . .

independently of the connections and

orientations which the vanished characters and

situations gave to them . . . The any-space-

whatever retains one and the same nature: it

no longer has coordinates, it is a pure potential,

it shows only pure Powers and Qualities,independently of the states of things or

milieux which actualize them.32

The close-up event of the explosion in the

calm gaze of a university student only retains the

loose effects stripped of their former organization

(which it converts into its own impersonal subjec-

tivity). In the desert, Daria is a student radical; but

while the explosion unravels, she is no one. The

ethic of Zabriskie Point , if there can be one, is thatsubmission to the Californian desert is insufficient.

To mobilize a radical production, to lose one’s

individuality, and to lose one’s self, something has

to be made—or, in this case, blown up.

575 BroadwayHere, I move from the cinema to my own archi-

tectural encounter of a built work. By placing this

example after the cinema studies, I do not mean to

privilege the live close-up, given the realist accountof architecture in film that underlies the project as

a whole. Rather, the following exploration of a shop

interior extends the image established in Zabriskie

Point , just as it highlights the withdrawn close-up

of lived architecture.

The Prada Store at 575 Broadway, New York

City, by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture–

Rem Koolhaas, is many things: sometimes a shoe

7. The explosion still of slow-motion exploding house interior in Zabriskie

Point . (Reproduced from M. Antonioni, Zabriskie Point .)

11 BROTT



store, sometimes a small picture theatre, or the

Barcelona Pavilion if you turn your head sideways

(Figure 9).33 I include myself in this example as

witness to the close-up image of an interior, which

generates a powerful feeling of absorption—of

being absorbed into its surfaces. In this space, the

entire set of effects (what Deleuze calls the

‘‘expressed’’), rather than being ‘‘reflected,’’ is

withdrawn into a blur of soft, hazy surfaces. For

Deleuze, the close-up as visageite is a ‘‘reflecting

and reflective unity.’’ 34 Here, conversely, in the

shop, the withdrawn close-up in extremis takes the

form of withdrawal and dissolution.

The absorptive surfaces of 575 Broadway exert

a negative pull, drawing one inside them, in what

can be described as a dull affect. This withdrawn

and withdrawing character owes itself to the

spongy materials and blurry detailing of the store.

Unlike the traditional hard and reflective surfaces of

status, such as diamond, gold, and marble, the

surfaces of 575 Broadway are soft, porous, and

nonreflective.35

The materials, objects, and surfaces in the

store include ‘‘alufoam,’’ ‘‘soft foam,’’ ‘‘silicone

mat,’’ ‘‘silicone bubble,’’ and ‘‘metal cloud’’—

punctured aluminum and rubber surfaces, which all

resemble Swiss cheese—‘‘polyester screen,’’ ‘‘gel

wave,’’ ‘‘foam brick,’’ ‘‘foam trays,’’ ‘‘foam box,’’

and ‘‘resin shelves’’ (Figures 10 and 11). Consider

by contrast the hard, reflective surface quality of

the Barcelona Pavilion: the glossy onyx and mirror-

like chrome columns that express reflection and

surface traits over structure.36 The impersonal

effects of 575 Broadway are no longer a reflecting

and reflected unity but the inverse: antireflection,

dissolution, and withdrawnness into the surfaces.

Even the metallic panels are matt or perforated, and

what first appears to be hard turns out to be foam,

fabric, and drapery.

Entering the store from the backstair at

Mercer Street, I look ahead and see the mirrored

reflection of a three-foot-high timber partition in

the distance and a gray metallic vertical member

somewhere in front of the panel, perhaps a duct or

a column. I walk over to the stair to find the timber

skate valley that fills the room and will later carry

shoes. What I first saw is not a reflection but the

upturned wooden floor curving away from me. When

I move around the curved rink, I realize that what

appeared to be a duct or column is in fact a chain-

mesh drapery hanging cylindrically from the ceiling

and falling away behind the hill (Figure 12). This

proliferation of surface effects leads to a height-

ened sense of distraction and dissolution in space.

While the axonometric speaks a cogent formal

arrangement—a double height space delineated by

the cutaway valley, the narrow mezzanine walkway,

and cylindrical elevator mass—the experience of

these objects is of a total loss of space, zero coor-dinates, and a liquefaction of edges and bound-

aries.37 This blurry or indeterminate space is

apparently not caused by the formal arrangement

but is, rather, constituted as an ‘‘amorphous set’’ of

effects: the translucent resin-y and corrugated

white plastic surfaces that dissolve shelving units

into walls and the vague presentation of bound-

aries. Even the boundary to the outside is incon-

gruous. The street above is transparent to those

inside, recalling the May 1968 Situationists: Sous les pave s, la plage! (beneath the paving

stones—the beach!) but recast here: under the

paving stones—the store?

The excitement of this space lies in just this

liquefaction and giddiness of surfaces accessed

visually, but felt intensely, as vertigo, distraction,

and disconnect. The effects retract or hover around

the customer—one is not merely inside this space

but dissolved by and into its surfaces. Unlike the

close-up in Bergman and Polanski, where the effectcolonizes the character, here the close-up image

produces a more subtle attenuation of power; a less

perceptible dissolution of subjectivity is enacted

where one becomes other in the merging of person

into matter. Consider the architect’s statement,

‘‘Luxury is Attention’’:

As the noise level increases (see Times Square),

the demands on our nervous systems . . .

accelerate. The ultimate luxury is focus and

clarity. Museums are popular, not for their

content, but for their lack of . . . you go, you

look, you leave. No decisions, no pressure. Our

ambition is to capture attention and then, once

we have it, to hand it back to the consumer. 38

But, unlike the distraction space of the mall

where surfaces, signs, and objects loudly compete

8. Espace quelconque still of advanced explosion in Zabriskie

Point.(Reproduced from M. Antonioni, Zabriskie Point .)




for attention, here it is a tacit seduction by surfaces

that are almost there. There are few options in the

store and little merchandise on display, so it is not

the clothing but the architecture that demandsattention, that mesmerizes, through the dissolution

of the self that ‘‘attends,’’ the self that can be

‘‘commanded.’’ Luxury here is overattention. The

architecture as overdesiring production subsumes

not only the customer but the clothes too; the latter

rendered surplus value of the architecture. The

clothes themselves remain underdetermined and

unremarkable. The couture houses the interior here

and not the other way round.

In terms of circulation, 575 Broadway does not

appear to dictate or navigate any paths or points of

egress—while there is a simple, unitary system of circulation.The formal configuration of objects and

volumes is clearly expressed in the published dia-

grams, while seemingly indeterminate in actual

experience. One of the surprising formal objects is

the cylindrical elevator, which appears in this blurry

space to be too articulate—and thus almost artifi-

cial or unreal. With no substantive background to

foreground itself against, it begs the question, what

does it articulate itself from? Its intersection with

the ground plane seems exaggerated, almost on the

wrong side of signification (the elevator wall and

floor disappear due to the overarticulation of thevoid) (Figure 13).

The original wallpaper designed by 2Â4,a black

and white mural, no longer exists. It consisted of

a series of large repeating black smudges stretched

across the two hundred foot length of the inner wall

and was vaguely reminiscent of Warhol’s ‘‘Flowers’’

series (1970). But these graphic smudges of 2Â4

present more the aftertaste of Warhol, the expressive

effects of the flower image—a big blot. Whereas it

may have once been a properly signifying flower, theblot refers almost only to itself—it remains on the

side of the effects and close-up and not signification.

In Warhol, we find the same endless circulation of

images and deferral, but he also produced charged

images of guns and death—‘‘proper’’ referents,

irreducible to smudges or patterns, whose individu-

ality remains intact. Just like the explosion in Zab-

riskie Point , it is the indiscernibility and

desubjectivization of the subject in the image rather

than her total erasure that catalyzes the subjectivi-zation of form and production of the close-up.

ConclusionsIf the first close-up series shoots the effects-image

‘‘up close’’ in order to capture the dissolution of the

subject in the image; the second image hovers

around the subject, a cloud of effects that renders

the subject indistinguishable. The close-up image

and its withdrawn affective counterpart zigzag

between surface and depth, enacted in thedesubjectivization of the subject. In Through

a Glass Darkly , it is only by virtue of the window on

the opposite wall that a reflection can arrive at the

wallpapered surface and produce the movement of

light necessary for the affective moment. Barton

Fink is called by an opening in the wall that can

only be sealed by pasting the paper back onto its

9. The valley view of theatre in R. Koolhaas, Prada Store. (Photograph courtesy of Armin Linke.)

10. ‘‘Silicone mat,’’ ‘‘gel wave,’’ store fixture surfaces. (Reproduced by

permission of OMA from Rem Koolhaas, Prada. [Milano: Fondazione

Prada Edizioni, c2001].)

11. Fixtures and surfaces. (Photograph courtesy of OMA.)

13 BROTT



substrate, a hideous hole that must be flattened.

The close-up surface wields a certain thickness, its

power is to colonize the individual and undermine

any sense of deep space as it grafts itself onto the

character, while the surfaces of 575 Broadway, andthe exploded effects of Zabriskie Point , float

anonymously in a nondifferentiated space, dispersing

the subject across a field of disconnected effects.

The intention of this analysis is not to con-

flate buildings and films, and neither is it to

undertake a phenomenology of architecture in

film, or to debate architectural media. Clearly, the

use of film examples to discuss architecture raises

a methodological and epistemological problem

about the status of the close-up image. However, itis important to understand that I am changing the

methodology here: the close-up is neither phe-

nomenological nor epistemological since there is no

preexisting subject to whom an image is presented.

The realist account of film that underlies the

close-up schema clearly departs from phenome-

nology. For Edmund Husserl, aesthetic reception

involves an unwitting grasping or reaching out by

the subject toward a real object that lies outside the

artwork in which the object is represented.39

Inthe schema proposed here, alternatively, the self-

movement of the effects-image reaches out for

a real subject. To cite Deleuze’s analysis of Alfred

Hitchcock and the theory of the spectator, it could

be said that the close-up connects a person

watching the film in a series with effects ‘‘inside’’

the film that constitute a real subject production in

relation to the viewer, who becomes a part subject

in the event of the image. Ipso facto, the field of

effects within the film reaches out for and acts uponthe character herself, whose identity the close-up

both determines and incorporates in its overall

performance.

Film functions in my schema by making

explicit a veritable encounter that comes before the

separation of subjects and objects. However, this is

not an amplification of a projected reality; rather,

to borrow a concept from Bazin, the cinema12. View of mesh drapery ‘‘hanging column.’’(Photograph courtesy of OMA.)




participates at a higher level of reality—it is a pri-

vileged reality.40 The heightened tenor of the film

creates a raised affect in the audience that witnesses

it, and what is real is the unwitting movement-to-

affect by the architectural effects produced in the

film.This is not to say that there exists in reality this

person or this architectural scene; what is real is the

affective situation established in the compressed

space of the cinema and the determinate effects that

arise in the cinematic encounter itself.

Likewise, the close-up effects of 575

Broadway function at a heightened reality, which

transcends the delimited formal and temporal

coordinates of an architectural interior. While not

erased literally, the subject of 575 Broadway is

forced to suspend disbelief about her dissolution in

the surrounding surfaces. The defamiliarizing

experience of 575 Broadway is in a sense identical

to that of the cinema—but for the silver screen. The

close-up image produced in film could be said to

contribute to the entire order of architecturalencounter.

The aims of this article are substantially dif-

ferent from those of the dominant architectural

scholarship on Deleuze’s cinema books. Writers

such as Manuel De Landa and Sanford Kwinter,

inspired by Deleuze’s time-image, have contributed

to a contemporary tendency in the American

architectural academy which frames temporality as

the new leitmotif for reformulating architecture.41

Architecture’s reaction to Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and

Cinema 2 could broadly be said to constitute an

attempt to temporalize space or to reformulate

architecture as ‘‘time.’’42 In my reformulation, I do

not explicitly discuss time and movement, or the

Bergsonisme, in relation to cinema and architec-

ture. The focus is rather the subjectivity immanent

to the aesthetic object.

The close-up encounter and productive model

of image presented here bring into focus the

emerging models of ‘‘effect’’ in current architec-

tural debate as they reject the epistemology of the

postwar architectural image. However, the broad

contemporary models of the image—as reproduc-

tion: the photograph and the media image, and

representation: the image as meaning or text—

both observe the phenomenological tradition of

architecture, premised as they are on a constituted

object (the image) centered on meaning (exper-

ience) and presented to a fixed subject.

43

The close-up, in eschewing the linguistic, representational, and

personological conception of subjectivity, provides

architecture with a model that speaks to the con-

crete, aesthetic basis of all subject productions. Such

a schema opens the possibility to think an unmedi-

ated subjectivity of the architectural encounter itself,

freed of the transcendental ego and the separation

of subject and object, long regarded as insufficient

to account for the creativity of architectural pro-

duction in all its effects.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (London: Athlone Press, 1988),

p. 574, note 32.

2. Gilles Deleuze, Empirisme et Subjectivite: Essai sur La Nature Humaine

Selon Hume (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953). In English,

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’sTheory of

Human Nature, Constantin V. Boundas, trans. (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1991), p. 113. To be clear, the term ‘‘effet’’ is never

formalized into a concept of subjectivity in and of itself by Deleuze—this

is my usage.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, Michael Hardt, Sandra Buckley, and

Brian Massumi, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000

[first English 1972]), p. 153.

4. I am referring to Deleuze’s discussion of Balazs and Eisenstein in Gilles

Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 95–101.

5. Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly , DVD (c1961, AB Svensk

Filmindustri, Criterion Collection, 20, 2003).

6. It is important to understand that these nonvisual and psychological

effects are irreducible to any purely visual register, even if there are

camera close-ups involved in the scene. The architectural close-up acts

directly upon both the protagonist and the film spectator, opening up

a new, hitherto unthought, existential realm—and for this reason, it has

primacy.

7. See Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans., and essays selected by Hugh

Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, c1967–1971), p. 14. It is

precisely this realist conception of the cinematic image that separates

Bazin from, say, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, importantly, also discusses

the power of the photographic close-up to reveal new modes of the

subject, but his account, counter to Bazin, is deeply rooted in concepts of

authenticity and representation. For Benjamin, photographic reproduc-

tions are always ‘‘depreciated’’; and what is ‘‘jeopardized,’’ he says, is

‘‘the authority of the object.’’ Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ (1936), in Hannah Arendt, ed.,

and Harry Zorn, trans., Illuminations (New York: Pimlico, 1999),

p. 215. Also see my conclusion for further discussion of the realist

model.

8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and afterword by Elaine R. Hedges, The

Yellow Wallpaper (New York: Feminist Press, 1973). However, in Gilman,the paper becomes a site of projection for her aggression, thereby

restoring the separation of subject and object.

9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam, trans. (London: Continnum, 2005), p. 89. I will hence-

forth cite this later edition.

10. Ibid., p. 67.

11. Ibid., p. 102.

12. See Ibid., p. 101.

13. Ibid., p. 238, quoting Bergman in Cahiers du Cinema , October

1959.

13. Elevator floor detail. (Photograph courtesy of OMA.)

15 BROTT



14. I am thinking of Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cin-

ema,’’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

15. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 492–93.

16. Roman Polanski, Repulsion, DVD (1965, U.K.: Anchor Bay Enter-

tainment, 2001).

17. Joel Coen, ‘‘Barton Fink,’’ in Collected Screenplays: Ethan Coen and

Joel Coen Vol. 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 397–540.

18. Ibid.

19. Compare this wallpaper close-up with the image of the hotel in flames

in a later scene. By contrast, the John Goodman character is laughing in

the fire; the image’s unreality is Fink’s persecutory fantasy of the infallible

Karl ‘‘Madman’’ Mundt.

20. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy , Robert Hurley, trans.

(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), pp. 48–49.

21. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense , Constantin V. Boundas, ed., and

Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004), p.

116. He says: ‘‘The battle hovers over its own field, being neutral in

relation to all of its temporal actualizations, neutral and impassive in

relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and the brave;

because of this it is all the more terrible. Never present but always yet to

come and already passed, the battle is graspable only by the will of

anonymity which it itself inspires.’’

22. G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , p. 98.

23. In Lacan’s famous example of the fishermen, the subject is seized by

a fantasy of alienation from his context. It is an unbearable self-con-

sciousness and condition of ‘‘standing outside,’’ the fantasy of being out

of place that causes one to be brutally watched by that which cannot

watch (the sardine can/the unfamiliar social milieu). He narrates:

‘‘Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it! Well, it doesn’t

see you!’’ Italics in original. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Con-

cepts of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., and Alan Sheridan,

trans. (London: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 95.

24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomeno-

logical Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes,trans. (London:Methuen, 1958), p. 261.

25. The close-up is given by the surface but, rather than being a property

of the surface itself, it is the technology by which the architecture takes in

the subject. It could be argued, however, that for Deleuze, it is the

time-images of Cinema 2 by which the subject-image distinction is

completely eliminated, not the movement-images of Cinema 1, where the

subject still exists in a relation with the object to which she reacts in

various ways. However, the architectural close-up in my formulation is an

important starting point for the development of the effects-image pre-

cisely because it retains the subject. In doing so, it reveals the merging of

the subject in the image, highlighting two critical parallel processes,

namely, a desubjectivization and a subjectivization. But there is also

a disciplinary reason for this choice. By retaining the subject initially, the

preliminary movement-image of Cinema 1 raises the very problems of

subjectivity peculiar to architecture, which have frequentlybeen left out in

the emphasis on Deleuze’s time-image.

26. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and

Robert Galeta, trans. (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 261.

27. Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point , VHS (1970, New York:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991).

28. You cannot see an explosion anymore, once you are taken inside it.

29. G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , pp. 122–23.

30. Ibid., p. 123.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Rem Koolhaas, Prada Store (Soho: Miuccia Prada, 575 Broadway,

2002).

34. I am using Deleuze’s idea of the close-up of the face. See G. Deleuze,

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , p. 89.

35. While there are many mirrored surfaces in the store, these act

to absorb rather than to reflect people. Patrons have been

observed walking into mirrors in the interior, mistaking these for a space

beyond.

36. The subject of Mies’s interior arises in the space between objects,

which it masters from a distance.The separation of subject and object in

the Pavilion is guaranteed by the primacy of a formal space in which there

never arises a confusion between surface, space, and subject. It is inter-

esting to note that Koolhaas is an avowed Miesian.

37. There is an axonometric and other drawings in OMA/AMO

Rem Koolhaas, Projects for Prada (Milan: Fondazione Prada Edizioni,

c2001).

38. Ibid.

39. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenol-

ogy , W. R. Boyce Gibson, trans. (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 287. Husserl

observing Albrecht Durer’s etching of a knight on horseback says that in

the aesthetic act, our attention is focused not on the images themselves

but on the ‘‘‘depicted’ realities, the knight of flesh and blood . . .’’ to

which the figures transport us.

40. See A. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans., and essays selected by Hugh

Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, c1967–1971), p. 14.

41. See Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the

Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c2001); Manuel

De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Contin-

uum, 2002). This is not to devalue the importance of these works or to

exclude the question of temporality from the architectural encounter, only

to say that my reading of Deleuze, in its focus on the subject, moves in

another direction.

42. I cannot elaborate on the reasons for this here; however, Deleuze

tends to valorize the time-images of Cinema 2 vis-a-vis the movement-

images of Cinema 1.

43. This is not to deny other models of image in architecture theory but to

draw attention to the phenomenologicalview, with its constituted subject,

as an enduring tradition in architectural thought.


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Brott on Deleuze and Film

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