Lest I be accused of irony, I must state explicitly that there is no reason to suppose that Lindsay and Deleuze ever knew of one another. Lindsay literally did not have the time to read postmodern French philosophy. And we know that Deleuze openly rethought and transformed all who had gone before him. There is no reason to suspect that he would have treated Lindsay otherwise than he treated the Stoics, Bergson, Peirce, Kafka and the rest. On the contrary, it would be entirely in line with his method to have accorded Lindsay pride of place in Chapter 4, where the three varieties of the movement-image are first discussed.
Now, as I re-read that Chapter and the ones to follow, the "perception-image" (64), the noun, corresponds to yellow Splendor, the thing seen; the "affection-image" (65-66), the adjective, corresponds to blue Intimacy, the way it is seen; and the "action-image" (64-65), the verb, to red Action and motion. Indeed, Deleuze advances metaphors of shot distance which parallel those I have claimed are at work behind Lindsay's text: the long shot for the perception-image, the close-up for the affection-image, and the medium shot for the action-image: far, near and midpoint (70). At the end of that Chapter, like Lindsay he even notes that no film consists of just one type of image: "Nevertheless, a film, at least in its most simple characteristics, always has one type of image which is dominant" (70).
Perhaps the connection is Peirce. Certainly Deleuze has made explicit use of Peirce in the Cinema books, invoking Peirce's various classifications of signs near the end of Chapter 4 of Cinema 1 (69), connecting Peirce's "Firstness" to the affection-image (98-99), his "Secondness" to the action-image (98; 142), using "Thirdness" as a way of understanding the mental and relational images of Hitchcock's cinema (197-205), and using a critique of Peirce to look forward and backward at the beginning of Cinema 2 (30-34). What interests Deleuze, however, are the categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness that are, for Peirce, phenomenological and apparently in some measure pre-semiotic. These categories are replicated and elaborated in the Icon-Index-Symbol trichotomy of signs to which I had recourse in understanding Lindsay earlier, but Deleuze eschews any direct application of this strictly semiotic trichotomy, so the line from Lindsay to Deleuze through Peirce is far from being a single straight one.
There is a way of understanding Lindsay's classifications in terms of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. In the essay called "The Principles of Phenomenology", Peirce's Firstness has to do with the quality of a phenomenon, and "is predominant in feeling" (79). Immediacy and affect are central here, as they are in Lindsay's category of Intimacy and Deleuze's affection-image. Secondness has to do with actuality, which manifests itself phenomenologically in action and reaction: "the real is active, we acknowledge it, in calling it the actual" (79). Resistance, event, struggle are all associated with Peirce's idea of Second, which in this light seems as kin to Lindsay's category of Action as it is to Deleuze's action-image. The problem is with Thirdness, where the connection does not seem nearly so obvious. In the discussion of this principle, Peirce stresses the synthetic properties of Thirdness and its plurality. At one point he employs diagrams to demonstrate that three is the equivalent of many ("analysis will show that every relation . . . is nothing but a compound of triadic relations", 93). But Lindsay's category of Splendor also synthesizes the plural, forging visual and imaginative relations. Those golden extra-long shots frame crowds of people, masses of buildings and sparkling things. And, as I have already stressed, Splendor also involves manifestations of fantasy and belief: representations of relations, metaphors, symbols. For Peirce Thirdness is relation: thought, law, conduct and what is to be.
This would mean that Lindsay's Splendor anticipates the mental image that Deleuze attributes to Hitchcock; or that the grand perception-image of Deleuze, which he himself links to the French First Wave and poetic realism, to Pasolini, Rohmer, Griffith, Eisenstein and Vertov, is a relation-image, Thirdness itself. It would mean that the cinema right from the start poses a question, advances a hypothesis, asks itself what it is--requires thought as well as seeing, hearing and feeling. It would mean that all three of Peirce's modes of being "are so inextricably mixed together that no one can be isolated" in whatever appears to us--which is, after all, precisely what Peirce himself asserts ("Principles" 75).
Now, what is to be done with this strange trichomotous
coincidence? I sense a tremendous opportunity here, a rare synthesis, an insight
worthy of celebration . . . but it is poised beyond my seeing. The dancing cinema-machine,
of course, was invented several times by several people, and so were some of
the axioms of film thought (that it is language, photography, movement, juxtaposition,
to name but four). Film techniques, like the dissolve or superimposition, are
constantly reinvented and redeployed. But in this instance almost seventy years
has intervened, and in that period much that was only promise has been realized;
some would say the cinema has grown up, grown old and is dying. Is it that the
philosopher of our times, striving to see the cinema with the eyes of a bourgeois
looking for a seat at the Grande Café, has willed himself into an innocence
that was the poet's by right of birth? Is it that Deleuze's mentors, Henri Bergson
as well as Peirce, contemporaries of Lindsay's, cannot help but think (culturally,
historically) like the poet, and Deleuze has (wittingly) made himself their
fugitive medium? Or is it, as I believe, a question of délire
by contagion, the madness of the cinema and of thinking images, souls connected
along a ribboned series of enframed places always looking ahead and behind,
not around?
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