Screening Eternity
摘要
Time has been and is at the heart of this analysis and now we consider what the image is and what time is from an ampler Deleuzian location recognising the theological conclusion to the previous chapter. This chapter examines Screening Eternity through a tripartite approach, addressing films, including Citizen Kane and Aftersun; Television and Reality; and Conspiracy and Screening Trauma. As Rodowick reveals, the division of the subject by time exemplifies a fundamental dualism: there is the difference between a force that acts and one that is acted upon mapped out onto other domains, including those of the visible and the utterable in their relation to knowledge power and subject formation. This division between the affecting and the affected is productive of a multiplicity that can never be represented wholly or singly because it is divided from itself by the form of time. For Deleuze the series of time is always a rhizome, never a line, and it is a set of mutations never a dialectical unity, never an act of communication or information. Whatever is divided by time cannot resolve itself into a unity, but there is metamorphosis; it multiplies and differentiates itself, so the audio visuality of modern cinema has a special relation to power. What it produces are ‘spiritual automata’, or ‘images of thought’. Our relations are forces, expressing an absolute or infinite moment. According to this paradigm, a life of the image exists. The image is more profound because it frees itself from its object to become a process, that is, an event as possible so this no longer even needs to be realised in a body or an object. The image is not a representation of an object, but a movement in the world of the mind.