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Deleuze and the Time-Image: A Cinema of the Virtual Mind Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg When Gilles Deleuze proposed a theory of second cinema, a cinema in which time is the dominant mode of audiovisual communication, he used modern films as examples to prove his theories. And yet, what he describes a cinema where virtual and actual, real and imaginary, subjective and objective are indistinguishable is a postmodern cinema, one that translates the images of the human mind into a pure cinema, and creates a simulacra based on a variety of images. In her essay “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema”, Barbara Filser posits a theory of a third cinema, one that would develop from Deleuze’s theory of the time-image into a cinema of the 21 st century 1 . This third cinema is a virtual reality, embedded in Deleuze’s time-image theory to create a cinema of the mind, directly from the thoughts of the spectator/character. Deleuze’s modern - or I would argue, postmodern cinema - is an attempt to show how the image is “the system of the relationships of time.” 2 In order to understand and interpret Deleuze’s theories of the time-image, I will analyse these theories and other analyses of Deleuze’s work, using as examples two postmodern films: Abre los ojos (Alejandro Amenábar 1997) and Solaris (Steven Soderbergh 2002). 3 In these films, a virtual construct is created from the minds of the main characters and each becomes a part of this cinema. In effect, this is the cinema that Deleuze envisions, one coming from the mind of the character/spectator and in which they exist, as opposed to watch. The films are representations of the type of cinema that Deleuze theorises, and thus ideal for understanding and interpretation of these theories. Deleuze once said in an interview that, “the brain is the screen.” 4 It would seem, though, that the brain is also the projector. Much as a projector is fed information that it then displays onto a screen through a lens like an eye, so the brain is fed a variety of images and sounds that are then projected onto a screen, either inside, or in the case of a virtual reality, outside. As the technical object is replaced by an organic one, so the distinction between the real and the virtual becomes blurred. Much of postmodern cinema examines the difference between the real and the virtual image, ideas created by the human mind. For Fredric
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Page 1: Deleuze and the Time-Image: A Cinema of the Virtual Mind ... · When Gilles Deleuze proposed a theory of second cinema, a cinema in which time is the dominant mode of audiovisual

Deleuze and the Time-Image: A Cinema of the Virtual

Mind

Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

When Gilles Deleuze proposed a theory of second cinema, a cinema in which

time is the dominant mode of audiovisual communication, he used modern films

as examples to prove his theories. And yet, what he describes – a cinema where

virtual and actual, real and imaginary, subjective and objective are

indistinguishable – is a postmodern cinema, one that translates the images of the

human mind into a pure cinema, and creates a simulacra based on a variety of

images. In her essay “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema”, Barbara Filser posits a

theory of a third cinema, one that would develop from Deleuze’s theory of the

time-image into a cinema of the 21st century1. This third cinema is a virtual reality,

embedded in Deleuze’s time-image theory to create a cinema of the mind, directly

from the thoughts of the spectator/character. Deleuze’s modern - or I would argue,

postmodern cinema - is an attempt to show how the image is “the system of the

relationships of time.”2 In order to understand and interpret Deleuze’s theories of

the time-image, I will analyse these theories and other analyses of Deleuze’s work,

using as examples two postmodern films: Abre los ojos (Alejandro Amenábar 1997)

and Solaris (Steven Soderbergh 2002).3 In these films, a virtual construct is created

from the minds of the main characters and each becomes a part of this cinema. In

effect, this is the cinema that Deleuze envisions, one coming from the mind of the

character/spectator and in which they exist, as opposed to watch. The films are

representations of the type of cinema that Deleuze theorises, and thus ideal for

understanding and interpretation of these theories.

Deleuze once said in an interview that, “the brain is the screen.”4 It would

seem, though, that the brain is also the projector. Much as a projector is fed

information that it then displays onto a screen through a lens like an eye, so the

brain is fed a variety of images and sounds that are then projected onto a screen,

either inside, or in the case of a virtual reality, outside. As the technical object is

replaced by an organic one, so the distinction between the real and the virtual

becomes blurred. Much of postmodern cinema examines the difference between

the real and the virtual image, ideas created by the human mind. For Fredric

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Philament TIME – November 2012

34

Jameson, “the postmodern looks … for shifts and irrevocable changes in the

representation of things and the way they change.”5 This comes about in the time-

image, a shift in representation and the interpretation of that representation,

through a cinema that is self-aware as cinema, drawing attention to itself by virtue

of an imitation of the cinematic experience. If cinema separates itself from other art

forms by virtue of its similarity to dreams, then to understand Deleuze’s theory of

what cinema is means to explore its relation to the dreams and memories of the

human mind. The time-image is the postmodern in its hyperreality: where the real

and the imaginary, the virtual and the actual, co-mingle and interact so as to

become indistinguishable. Abre los ojos and Solaris are examples of the execution of

this third cinema, this cinema of the time-image.

Abre los ojos begins with a young man, César, wearing a mask, recounting

supposed recent events of his life to a psychiatrist in a prison where César is

awaiting trial for murder. César’s life had been fairly ideal: he was handsome and

rich, and enjoyed himself sexually with a number of one-night stands. One of the

women with whom he slept, Nuria, became obsessed with him; in a fit of jealousy

over another woman, Sofía, Nuria drives her car off a bridge, killing her and

disfiguring César. At first, César is unable to cope with his disfigurement, but

doctors are able to restore his face and he wins over Sofía. However, Sofía and

Nuria keep interchanging, though both claim to be Sofía, and he murders her.

Eventually, he and the psychiatrist discover that César had killed himself decades

before. It is not 1997, but the 22nd century, and César had himself cryogenically

frozen; his life is in fact a virtual reality program. But something went wrong;

hence his brain confused the images of Sofía and Nuria. Rather than let the

program begin again, César jumps from a virtual building, where he will either die

or begin life in the real world of the future.

Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris tells the story of Chris Kelvin, a

psychiatrist on Earth in the distant future. He is asked by the government to travel

to a distant planet, where the crew of a space station orbiting the planet Solaris has

begun behaving strangely. When he arrives on the station, one crew member has

committed suicide, and the remaining members, Snow and Gordon, have isolated

themselves and are refusing to say what has happened. After his first sleep on the

space station, Chris awakes to find his wife beside him; but it cannot be his wife, as

she has been dead for several years. Chris discovers that the planet has made a

psychic connection to the crew and recreates people from their memory. But they

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35

are not the actual people, rather the crew’s memorial interpretations. Chris first

intends to return to Earth with her, but when the Visitor discovers that she is not

really Rhea (the wife), she chooses to let Gordon disintegrate her. Chris decides to

remain on the space station in the hopes that she will return, even though it

eventually plummets into the planet.

In the first chapter of Cinema 2, Deleuze writes: “A camera-consciousness …

would no longer be defined by the movement it is able to follow or make, but by

the mental connections it is able to enter into.”6 In Abre los ojos and Solaris, the

camera, in effect, enters into the minds of César and Chris, to connect and create a

cinema based on their memories. They are no longer only viewers of the cinema,

but characters in their own cinema. At the beginning of Abre los ojos, César has a

dream that Madrid has emptied of people, save himself. He runs down a normally

busy street, screaming for someone to see him; this scene is then repeated, except

with the city full of its usual population. As César drives down the same street, a

camera crew would seem to be filming him; this suggests that already, César is in a

film of his life, one that he is recounting to his psychiatrist as narrator and

unwitting actor. He is creating his own cinema while in an unconscious state, with

a computer program accessing his memories to give him his ideal life. In the same

manner, in Solaris, as Chris approaches the space station, editing moves between a

close-up of Chris’s face and one of the planet, large and round like a camera lens,

as though from this moment, the planet is filming him. It is not long after his

arrival that the planet recreates Chris’s dead wife, and a cinema is played out with

this recreation. Deleuze posits that as the distinction between subjective and

objective loses its relevance, optical situations or visual descriptions will replace

action.7 In his cinema, the viewer/character no longer knows what is real. “It is as if

the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each were being

reflected in the other, around a point of indiscernability.”8 César’s mind confuses

Sofía and Nuria; the virtual Rhea looks and sounds like the real Rhea. Their

internal cinemas have been externalised, and become bidirectional, as the internal

affects the external and vice versa, as each attempts to compensate for the unreality

of their respective situations.

Deleuze interprets contemporary cinema as a combination of opsigns and

sonsigns; these refer to images, memories, and dreams/fantasies. This is what

Slavoj Žižek calls the “reality of the virtual,”9 in which these varying images can

replace the real. These signs are the visual and auditory components of the time-

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36

image film; they are neither caused by nor extended into action. Therefore, they

represent the purely audio-visual situation.10 César’s life is only in his mind, in the

absence of an actual corporeal (i.e. movement-based) existence. His life is now a

series of opsigns and sonsigns, which make time and thought visibly perceptible

and audible. For Deleuze, these signs are fantasy, as César’s virtual life is a fantasy.

But César’s mind cannot keep Sofía and Nuria separate. A subjectivity is created

by opsigns and sonsigns, which according to Deleuze create the “pure-image”, one

that he relates to a concept by Henri Bergson, in that “we do not perceive the thing

or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it … by virtue of our

ideological beliefs and psychological demands.”11 The force of César’s memories

“combine the optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of a

simply intellectual consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital

intuition” 12 to create this excess of opsign and sonsign. This is a kind of

simulacrum, or hyperreality, one that Jean Baudrillard would look upon

negatively, as having no relation to the real, in the postmodern context. For

Baudrillard, the real is the alibi of the model.13 Translating this to Deleuze’s time-

image, the opsigns and sonsigns refigure themselves into a simulation of the real, a

virtuality that does have some relation to the real; but that reality has been lost in

the cinema, refigured through its conception of time.

And that conception of time becomes traced and retraced through circuits of

the molecular biology of the brain; this brain is the being, which he translates into

the “One”, becoming an entity within time. Alain Badiou attempts to unlock

Deleuze’s concept of the One, seeing a “Deleuzian discovery of beings as merely

superficial intensities of simulacra of being”14. The One emerges in cinema as a

being in multiplicity, as opposed to a singular entity. There is a mimetic vision of

being, created as images pass through the circuits and planes of the mind. This is

related to Deleuze’s concept of the body without organs, which is all things of

possibility together in a kind of liquid form, waiting for formation.15 Anna Powell

writes, “The spectator’s perceptions, struggling to process their undistilled affects,

slide into a molecular assemblage with the body of the film.”16 In the time-image

postmodern cinema, the spectator is both Chris, whose cinema is being created

from his mind, and the Visitor, who becomes this molecular assemblage, or body

without organs. Each watches the other as cinema. By positing a cinema that comes

directly from the mind, Deleuze integrates the body without organs, the

multiplicitous being, into “a division … [an] emptiness in order to find the whole

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37

again.”17 The “white holes and spaces” made by the opsigns and sonsigns in the

fabric of the One create a cinema of dualities: objective and subjective, and real and

imaginary. The Visitor is not the actual wife, but she is real; she is virtual, but

corporeal; she is indiscernible, but not imaginary. She is One, in multiplicity.

Deleuze does not see the body as separate from thought and subject to its will;

rather the body forces thought. This is an interpretation from Matter and Memory by

Henri Bergson, who writes that in consciousness, all images depend on the central

image of the body and its variations, and that there is a system of images that form

an individual’s perception of the universe, changed in the image of the body.18 For

Bergson, the body is the conductor, a conduit between objects that influence it and

those on which it acts.19 Deleuze’s body is that around which memory is formed,

leaving a present that is open to past and future. Like memory, “the body is never

in the present, it contains the before and after, tiredness and waiting.”20 In his

essay “Belief in the Body”, Patrick Ffrench writes of Deleuze’s cinema of the body

that, “the connection between the visual field and movement has been interrupted.

The individual now finds him or herself confronted by a vision to which the body

no longer has the capacity to react.”21 As the virtual and the actual images of his

real and imagined past become confused in his mind, César’s body changes. He

refuses to remove his mask for his psychiatrist, as he remains convinced his face is

still deformed. Deleuze writes, “to mount a camera on the body … [makes] it pass

through a ceremony … imposing a carnival or a masquerade on it which makes it

grow into a grotesque body.”22 When César believes he has killed Sofía/Nuria, he

sees his once beautiful face transformed back into a monstrosity, as though this

cinema he has created returns him to the grotesque. Bergson sees the body as the

boundary between the past and the future; it is what Deleuze interprets as the

pointed end of the present. In Solaris, a metaphoric camera is placed on the body of

the Visitor; her body is the grotesque of Rhea’s, created from the mind of Chris. By

extension, the planet is a camera, acting through the Visitor to view the cinema of

Chris, in order to observe him. The postmodern cinema passes through the circuits

of memory and imposes itself on the body, how the body must now move and

how it must perceive. Chris must find a way to incorporate the corporeality of the

Visitor, to confront his memory of his wife as a separate entity as opposed to in the

circuits of his mind. Her body is the boundary between the past and the future.

The time-image ultimately rests in the body and its cinematic, crystalline

representation.

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38

The world of this new Deleuzian cinema does not just present images to the

spectator; it surrounds them.23 It is created by the crystal image, or crystalline

description. This occurs when an actual image crystallizes with its own virtual

image. The subject cannot discern between real and imaginary; more to the point,

each one takes on the other’s identifying marks and can be reversed. The

indiscernibility between the two is an “objective characteristic of certain existing

images which are by nature double.”24 Deleuze equates the crystal image with the

mirror, literal and figurative. A subject or object stands in front of a mirror in an

actual state, to view their virtual state in the mirror. Laura Marks writes that there

is no objective record of the past; the indiscernibility of actual and virtual is the

crystal image.25 These crystal images start as seeds; César and Chris’s memories are

the seeds from which the crystalline images are formed into the virtual reality they

encounter in their cinemas. The layers of their past memories form the crystal

image that lies at the base of the cone of their present, and from which images

emerged filtered by those layers; images both actual and virtual. In Abre los ojos,

César’s mirror is literal: near the beginning of his story, it shows him in his beauty.

After his accident, it shows him in his monstrousness. When his virtual world

begins to confuse Sofía and Nuria, it also begins to confuse his face between its

pre- and post-accident appearance. The mask he wears becomes a mirror to those

who would look on his apparent disfigurement. He does not know which woman

is actual or virtual, or indeed if he (or his facial appearance) is virtual or actual. In

Solaris, Chris looks at the Visitor as a mirror to his own memory of his wife, and

the image he has of himself in her. Deleuze writes that when the actual and the

virtual come together they de-solidify; the virtual becomes limpid and the actual

becomes dark. In each film, as César and Chris confront the virtual and the actual

together, each desolidifies and melds into the other. Deleuze writes, “It is as if an

image in a mirror … came to life, assumed independence and passed into the

actual” and then could go back to that mirror.26

But how do the virtual and the actual come to separate, and mirror each other

at the same time? Between the planes of the mind, Deleuze envisions circuits, and

“the broad circuits of recollection in dreams assume this narrow base”27 of the

point of the present, and the circuits run between the layers of planes of the past.

Powell writes, “The purely optical and sound description is an actual image on a

circuit of exchange with a virtual one.”28 She further writes that the crystal image is

the point on the smallest internal circuit. Deleuze’s vast circuits correspond to

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39

deeper layers of reality and consequently higher levels of memory, which moving

along these circuits through the planes of the mind take on virtual forms. “It is this

most restricted circuit of actual image and its virtual image which carries

everything, and serves as internal limit.”29 The virtual image grows along these

circuits. Bogue writes, “We perceive objects through our accumulated experience

of them.”30 Chris perceives Rhea through his accumulated experience of her; that

experience is run through the circuits of his mind to create the crystalline

representation of her in the Visitor. For Deleuze, there is no virtual that does not

become actual. The Visitor becomes an actual Rhea for Chris, so much so that he

chooses to remain in the cinema created for him rather than return to the reality of

Earth. The opposite is the case for César. Deleuze writes, “It is the whole of the

real, life in its entirety, which has become the spectacle, in accordance with the

demands of the purely optical and sound perception.”31 César cannot live in this

space where the real and the virtual are indiscernible, and chooses to return to

reality, although it is a reality of which he has no concept. The circuits created

through postmodern time-image cinema lead to such a melding of the actual and

the virtual in the crystalline image that it forces the subject to realize and assess the

state of the cinema their minds have created.

Deleuze proposes that the state of cinema lies in the crystalline regime. The

organic regime is independent of the description of setting; it exists on its own.

This is the regime of the real, which is or is recognized by continuity, actual

linkages and logical connections. This organic/real regime consists of two modes of

existence: “linkages from actuals from the point of view of the real, and

actualizations in consciousness from the point of view of the imaginary.”32 The

crystalline regime stands in for its object, and creates it; this is the regime of the

imaginary. Here, “the actual is cut off from its motor linkages … and the virtual,

for its part, detaches itself from its actualizations, [and] starts to be valid for

itself.”33 The two are now combined, running intertwined on a circuit that makes

one indiscernible from the other. In Abre los ojos, César is no longer able to discern

between the actual and the virtual. Indeed, for him all is virtual, but this virtuality

has itself become confused with the organic. In César’s mind, he wants what for

him is the real: Sofía. But the circuits can no longer discern between this real and

the imaginary; the actual and the virtual have become one, and the virtual replaces

Sofía with Nuria. Deleuze extends the organic/crystalline regime concept to

organic/crystalline narration. In organic narration, there is the development of

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40

movement as a result of which characters react to understand and/or reveal a

situation. In crystalline narration, the collapse of the sensori-motor schema into

purely opsigns and sonsigns means a character cannot or will not react. This new

status of narration means that, “narration ceases to be truthful, that it, to claim to

be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying.” 34 The space station in Solaris

becomes a crystalline space, a setting that can only have virtual materials that

cannot be explained in a spatial way. Movement derives from the time-image, and

non-chronological time produces false movements. 35 As both Abre los ojos and

Solaris present their stories in non-linear time, the movement derived from the

time-image becomes false as it moves through the crystalline regime in crystalline

spaces, where the actual and the virtual are indistinguishable.

For Deleuze, “The formation of the crystal, the force of time, and the power of

the false” coordinate to be at the centre of the time image. False narration is

outside of the system, but all participate in this narration. The crystalline regime

works with crystalline option and sound descriptions to create false chronic

narratives. The power of the false is liberated time. 36 César, by virtue of his

cryogenic state and dream existence, has been freed from chronological time; he

has entered the pure time-image, the aeonic time, where false narration can give

him the life he was denied. He is a participant by virtue of his consent, and the

characters created by his virtual reality participate, as do those monitoring the

computers that generate the virtual reality. In Solaris, a false narrative is created

through the presence of the Visitor. Bogue writes that narratives of (Deleuze’s)

crystal films issue from a split connection of the virtual and actual, making the true

and the false indistinguishable, thereby making it almost impossible for the

characters to distinguish between the false and the true, since they look the same.

The Visitor looks (and sounds) exactly the same as Rhea; only his memory of the

real (factual) prevents him from assuming she is Rhea. But as the false narrative is

created through the circuits of his mind into the crystalline regime, so the false

narrative forces Chris into the role of the forger. Both César and Chris are forgers

of their cinemas, as it is created from their minds. Marks writes that experience

cannot be represented directly and in its entirety.37 The postmodern cinema’s state

of narration “ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes

fundamentally falsifying.”38 As such, the crystalline regime must be created in

order to fill in the gaps of experience that cannot be represented, which requires

the forger, the characters from whom the virtual is created.

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41

César occupies an aberrant physical space, in that he is unconscious; the life he

leads is one of time, the images are trapped in a time created by and for a cinema.

In considering Christian Metz’s theories of the language of cinema, Deleuze

divides cinematic narration between fact and approximation. The cinema of fact

presents a story and rejects its other possible directions (which, according to

Deleuze, would create a language of cinema); the cinema of approximation is a

sequence of images that are assimilated to propositions 39. César exists in this

postmodern cinema of approximation, one without language, where time disturbs

narrative. Deleuze equates a language system of cinema to the movement-image:

visual imagery, created by time-image, is a-signifying and a-syntactic. Cinema is a

plastic mass and not formed linguistically. The Visitor in Solaris is a proverbial

plastic mass, a body without organs; she has been formed by the imagery in

Chris’s mind. In Temenuga Trifonova’s essay on Deleuze, she writes that the

information system of the brain is “pre-human, neutral, pre-linguistic”, and that

the pre-human state of the world is revealed through cinema. There is no language

to describe either the Visitor or the reason for her presence, only suppositions. She

is coming directly from the mind, pre-linguistic, and therefore not a fact but a

cinema of approximation.

Although Deleuze believes that the time-image is the dominant mode of

cinema, he also states that time cannot be represented directly. And while opsigns

and sonsigns are direct presentations of time, “the present is the sole direct time of

the cinematographic image.”40 That is to say, the camera can only ever show the

present, but all presents are haunted by a past and a future. As the characters are

creating their own cinemas in the present, these cinemas are haunted by the past

(the invasion of Nuria’s image, the virtual Rhea) and affected by the possibilities of

the future (will César be in a virtual jail for a virtual murder, and will Chris remain

with the virtual Rhea?). Kerslake examines Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant,

according to whom, “there is no beginning or end to time itself.”41 If, then, the

present is the time-image, then all times are the present, in the sense that the

present is so fleeting (a moment ago it was the future and a moment from now it

will be the past,) that cinema becomes a repetition of experience and that can only

be represented in the present time. Deleuze writes, “The aberration of movement

specific to the cinematographic image sets time free from any linkage.”42 This time-

image is the potential to free images from a fixed perspective; specifically, as

Deleuze would have it, a fixed time perspective. According to Kerslake, Deleuze

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42

follows the Kantian philosophy of time, which states that the structure of time

“conditions our experience of moving bodies.”43 As César and Chris move their

bodies through space, their bodies are subject to time; not linear time, but

Deleuzian cinematic time, one that would place the present in a kind of stasis,

where past and future and layered onto the past. This is the “power of time to

overturn one’s most intimate memories.”44 If the time-image supposes something

beyond linear time, a space where time is layered with past, present, and future,

then cinema, and especially postmodern cinema, is the means through which that

time can be explored.

Deleuze describes modern cinema as retaining from the object, only that which

is of interest to the subject – “richness is thus superficial.”45 Opsigns and sonsigns

relate to the recollection image, which brings in only an aspect of the object; those

aspects which the subject wishes to remember, or can only remember. Deleuze

places recognition into two categories: automatic and attentive. Automatic

recognition is that of the habitual, everyday – for example, we recognize a glass of

water, or a bus, or a person whose face has been seen before. But attentive

recognition “inserts itself between stimulation and response,” reinforcing it with

psychological causality. This attentive recognition comes from a description that

replaces the object in its independent state, selects certain features and makes for

different descriptions that are always questioned. Deleuze separates this state into

organic and inorganic. Deleuze envisioned the human mind, or more specifically

human memory, as a series of planes. The image of an organic object passes

through these planes, which in turn each retain part of the image, through which

the subject’s perception reconstitutes the image into the inorganic. Each plane

cancels another out, or contradicts, or joins, or forks another.46 Bergson posits that

memory images are a combination of pure memory and perception. But as

perception remains attached to the past and is inextricable from the subject, pure

memory is subsumed, which forms the seeds of the inorganic. “A human being

who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt … keep before his

eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past.”47 César is in

effect dreaming his life; the memories he has of Sofía and Nuria have passed

through the planes of his mind and that which he has extracted from each. His

present existence, being in a dream-like state, is a simulacrum of his past and in

that state he cannot distinguish between the memories of the two women.

Trifonova writes that Bergson’s theory of duration is based on his idea that déjà vu

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is an authentic expression of mental life, a preservation of the past in the present.

This is similar to Deleuze’s thought of the time-image and memory, with time as “a

continuous forking into the incompossible presents and not necessarily true

pasts.”48 César’s dream is formed by two objects from the planes of his memories

that have collided and become entangled. His attentive recognition of the

inorganic object is the “recollection-image [that] is not virtual, it actualizes a

virtuality on its own account.”49 As the inorganic takes the place of the organic,

déjà vu becomes the organic remnants of memory, colliding with what the subject

sees and hears and what he believes he should see and hear.

Further expanding on Bergson’s dream theories, Deleuze writes,

The Bergsonian theory of dreams shows that the dream is not at all closed to

the sensations of the external and internal world. However, he no longer

relates them to specific recollection-images, but to fluid, malleable sheets of

past which are happy with a very broad or floating adjustment.50

In what Bergson calls pure recollection, Deleuze interprets as essentially (or

necessarily) a virtual image. For Deleuze, virtual is not the opposite of real, but the

opposite of actual. The Visitor is not actually Rhea, in that she is the virtual

representation of Chris’s image of Rhea, but she (the Visitor) is still real. According

to Bergson, that which is real is something that the subject can reach out to and

touch.51 Unlike César, Chris is not dreaming; rather, the Visitor is his dream made

into a virtual reality. Deleuze proposes a different kind of dream: the implied

dream of cinema. Chris is not sleeping, therefore he is not literally dreaming; yet, a

dream image, a recollection-image, of Rhea comes to him in the form of the Visitor.

“It is no longer the character who reacts to the optical-sound situation, it is the

movement of world which supplements the faltering movement of the character.”52

In her book on Deleuze, Claire Colebrook suggests that Deleuze’s core idea of

cinema is that which frees images from a fixed perspective.53 The implied dream

takes the fixed dream perspective from the subject and places it outside, in the

movement of the world. César and Chris are both “motionless at a great pace.”54

César cannot make any physical movement, so the world revolves around him.

Chris, in the isolation of space, also is unable to move and so the implied dream is

created from his mind to move around him. If as Kerslake writes, Deleuzian

cinema would cut us off from our bodies and social beings, then the characters of

the time-image postmodern film are not only characters or subjects, but also

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spectators. Richard Rushton writes, “Deleuze’s spectator … is created almost

entirely by the film.”55 And while he is referring to a more literal spectator, i.e. the

audience watching the film, Chris and César are also watching: Chris watches the

cinema of his dead wife, and César watches the cinema of what could have been

his life. The virtual representations of the real are created by implied dreams; these

implied dreams are the postmodern interpretations of the time-image cinema.

But from where does this virtual come? How is it a semblance of the actual,

and how can it be discerned as virtual? According to Deleuze, it is not necessarily

possible to differentiate between the two. This is because of time: the virtual image

is defined in accordance with “the actual present of which it is the past

simultaneously.”56 In his book The Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes,

Only the past and the future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present

which absorbs the past and the future, a future and past divide the present at

every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both

directions at once.57

Deleuze places the virtual image outside of consciousness, in time, preserved

there. Powell interprets Deleuze’s two time categories: chronos (actual spatialized

time that is measured by clocks) and aeon, the virtual existence of duration where

“the present moment has two sides contemporaneously: its actual, physical

extension and its virtual side that is already part of duration.”58 The actual image

and the virtual image become two sides of the same moment. In Solaris, the Visitor

is an actual recreation of Rhea, and at the same time a virtual recreation of Chris’s

conception of Rhea. Bogue writes that for Deleuze’s cinema, “the past is conserved

not in the material brain but in itself, and all past memories coexist in a virtual

dimension.”59 César’s past exists in a virtual dimension, one that in the process of

being actualized sifts through the planes of his memory and cannot coalesce into

the real, as the aeon of time does not permit the virtual to understand the chronos

of his memories and how the two women are separated. His past being nothing

but, Deleuze’s time-image would have his past be uninterpretable in its virtual

state. Kerslake sees Deleuze’s conception of the past as layered at the ever-

increasing base of a cone – the tip is the present reaching in to the future, and

“these layers of the past have a virtual existence.”60

In examining the time-image, Deleuze investigates what makes cinema,

cinema. Postmodern cinema, in finding its primary mode in time as opposed to

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movement, focuses on the mind and its circuits of virtual and actual, real and

imaginary, as the creator. Through exploration of the creation of virtual cinema,

Abre los ojos and Solaris are examples of Deleuze’s third cinema. If the brain is the

screen and the projector, and takes time from the linear to the aeonic, this would

seem to be the cinema Deleuze is attempting to find. Deleuze’s time-image cinema

places the character in the role of creator and spectator simultaneously, discarding

the sensori-motor schema in favour of time along the planes and circuitry of

memory. This cinema becomes the crystalline image, where the actual becomes

virtual, and opsigns and sonsigns replace the relation of movement to

understanding, to the relation of time. As the present is split between past and

future, so the memory is split between virtual and actual, and cinema is derived

from this dichotomy. Deleuze’s vision of modern cinema moves into postmodern

cinema and the state of virtual reality.

Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg is currently writing her PhD at King’s College, London, on contemporary Spanish

fantastic film. Her previous work explores science fiction and film theory, the crossover of cinema and video

games, and cultural motifs in postnational cinema. This paper was inspired by the genius of Deleuze.

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1 Barbara Filser, “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema: Cinema 1, Cinema 2 – and Cinema 3?” in Future

Cinema, Jeffrey Shaw & Peter Weibel, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 217.

2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, trans. (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xii.

3 Alejandro Amenábar, Abre los ojos (Canal+ España, 1997), film; Steven Soderbergh, Solaris (Twentieth

Century Fox Film Corporation, 2002), film. 4 Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze” Gregory Flaxman, ed. The

Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2000), 370.

5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991), ix.

6 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 23.

7 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.

8 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.

9 Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3.

10 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 18.

11 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 20.

12 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 22.

13 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser trans. (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1994), 121.

14 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 44.

15 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum,

2004), 40.

16 Anna Powell, Deleuze: Altered States and Film, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 100.

17 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 21.

18 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1911), 25.

19 Bergson, 78.

20 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 189

21 Patrick Ffrench, “Belief in the Body” Paragraph 31:2 (July 2008), 161.

22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 190.

23 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68.

24 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 69.

25 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, (Durham NC:

Duke University Press 2000), 73.

26 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68.

27 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68.

28 Powell, 39.

29 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 69.

30 Bogue, 110.

31 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 84.

32 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127.

33 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127.

34 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131.

35 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131.

36 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 142.

37 Marks, 30.

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38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131.

39 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 26.

40 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 35.

41 Kerslake, 9.

42 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 37.

43 Kerslake, 7.

44 Kerslake, 13.

45 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 45.

46 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 46.

47 Bergson, 155.

48 Trifonova, 134.

49 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 54.

50 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 56.

51 Bergson, 24.

52 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 59.

53 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze. (London: Routledge, 2002), 48.

54 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 59.

55 Richard Rushton, “Deleuzian Spectatorship”, Screen 50:1 (Spring 2009), 48.

56 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 79.

57 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, trans. (New York: Colombia

University Press, 2000), 164.

58 Powell, 168.

59 Bogue, 15.

60 Kerslake, 15.


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