This essay, as it has already begun to do so, will first explicate Deleuze’s cinematic concepts of the crystal-image and crystalline narration. It will then examine this image in relation to its aptitude for demarcating the actual and the virtual, the exterior and the interior, the objective and the subjective, the subject and the object, the public and the private, the political and the personal, and the present and the past; however as the crystal-image reaches its peak, its point of indiscernibility, these binary oppositions escape their respective borders and blur into one. I will attempt to map out this dynamic process as it appears in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing[7] and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy[8].
Time-images are created from optical and sonic images that break with the sensory-motor schema (what Deleuze called opsigns and sonsigns).[9] When an actual image is cut off from its sensory-motor extension, it fragments into either an opsign or a sonsign. These two singular fragment-images, because they have been disassociated from their sensory-motor extension and from the film’s logical (causal) trajectory, produce an interval (‘any-space-whatever’). This interval respectively relaxes the viewers’ sensory-motor schema and offers them a moment to gather their thoughts. In these reflective moments the viewer invents a virtual image, or virtuality, to reconcile meaning between opsigns, sonsigns, the actual image and narrative continuity; the virtual image envisaged in the viewer’s mind is summoned from his past (memories, dreams, experiences, collective and personal clichés) and supplements his perception and understanding of the actual image. As Henri Bergson explains, within an individual’s relaxed sensory-motor world, objects become both more and less than they are otherwise.[10] Ronald Bogue elaborates on this belief as he remarks that humans perceive objects through their accumulated experiences of them, through their memories, fears, desires, and plans, loading them with characteristics that extend into complex patterns of association and anticipation; selective perceiving as individuals ignore those aspects of the object that do not interest them.[11] Accordingly the virtual image, as Deleuze writes, can be thought of as a double or a reflection of the actual image.[12] More fascinating though, the virtual image that the first actual image connotes can inversely in turn be actualised. These two images when they coalesce together constitute the crystal-image. The crystal-image reaches its peak at the ‘point of indiscernibility’ and the demarcation between the actual and the virtual becomes unassignable.
Crystalline narration can be considered as a variation on this theme, as film narrative trajectory presented through a continual chain of actual and virtual images that coalesce, crystallise at the point of indiscernibility, and swiftly exchange positions. Bogue describes a film composed of crystalline narration as being itself “a massive crystal-image” where “its construction proceeds along various circuits of exchange among indiscernibles … the same circuit … [passing] via three figures, the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, the seed and the milieu.”[13] He further asserts that “crystalline states are crystals of time not simply because they disclose the coexistence of actual present and virtual past in every moment … but because they reveal different ways in which the whole of that great ocean of the [collective and personal] virtual past may be related to the ongoing actualisation of time in a present moving toward a future.”[14] The employment of crystalline narration transforms the film into a cinema of poetry, wherein the actual image is the text, and the virtual image is the connoted literal and metaphorical meanings that the reader emanates from this text. This poetry mimesis faculty of the crystal-image, along with its reverential point of indiscernibility, enables not only the actual to melt into the virtual (and vice versa) but also for the film’s subjects to collide into its objects and its binary oppositions to collapse onto each other.
As noted above, crystal-images only come into existence when the sensory-motor schema, of both the actual image and the viewer’s, disintegrates. Deleuze identified five instances or scenarios of when this occurs:
1) The dispersive situation; when the links between actions and milieus are stretched and relaxed, loosely constructed.
2) The deliberately weak lines; when gaps in the action arise because continuousness of the action-image does not persist.
3) The balade-form; when an aimless wandering affects the action and the sensory-motor rhythms are replaced by the rhythms of a light stroll, jaunt or continual round-trip journey.
4) The consciousness of clichés; the parodic handling of the modern world as a realm of clichés.
5) The denunciation of the conspiracy; stories of diffused conspiracies, anonymous plots and ubiquitous technological surveillance.[15]
These five are instances of when action, time and milieu (setting or situation of the image) do not collate together; it can be said that these are of moments when action is blocked and the interplay of the interval, op and son signs and the crystal-image bursts forth.
In Do the Right Thing, Mookie’s leisurely paced pizza deliveries permit the camera to playfully wander around the block, briefly tracking the day-to-day stories of its ethnically African-, Porto Rican- and Korean-American residents. This balade-form/jaunt that Mookie evokes changes the rhythm of the film, moving it from being a conventional fast-paced, purely cause-and-effect sensory-motor action narrative to a relaxed sensory-motor round-trip journey continuously open to the possibilities of new aural and visual rhythms.[16]
Laleen Jayamanne writes in her article ‘Do the Right Thing: Blocking and Unblocking the Block’ that “critics [and viewers] tend to move quickly to the violent moments … and forget to register the non-eventful, leisurely moments.”[17] She goes on to explain that this is due to viewers’ hasty attempts at narrativising the film; to read its main events as being the burning of the pizzeria and the murder of Radio Raheem.[18] She remarks how this kind of reading is at complete odds with the majority of film wherein nothing much happens – “people just hangin’ around, going up and down the block, looking, talking, looking for trouble, just listening to music, drinking, combing hair, just passing the time.”[19] It is during these moments when both the film’s and viewer’s sensory-motor schema is most relaxed and the splendid appearance of unique characters, new aural and visual rhythms, and op and son signs motivates the creation of crystal-images. Many of these crystal-images excite a pragmatic discussion on African-American history, racial politics, intercommunity relations and identity; they evince that great ocean of the virtual past as it structures the ongoing actualisation of time in a present moving toward a future.[20]
One crystalline moment is the interconnected murder of Radio Raheem and the burning of the pizzeria, the supposed climax of Do the Right Thing. This event is triggered by Sal allowing a few customers to come in after they’ve just closed shop for the day. In this brief re-opening, Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out also seek out another opportunity to protest and demand that Sal put up some brothers on the wall; their symbolic choice of weaponry here is rap music – Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’. Sal yells at them to shut off the “jungle music” and then smashes the radio with a baseball bat after they refuse. This then sparks a physical brawl between Sal and Raheem, of which during there is a cut to a shot of a framed picture of Muhammad Ali in a boxing match with an Italian-American – a momentary virtual past image that intensifies the violence. Later on, the fight is taken outside and the rest of the block joins in on the hollering. Soon the police (“New York City’s finest”) arrive and arrest the two instigators; three of the policemen, in wrestling with Raheem, choke him. After they leave, there is a poignant panning shot of the block recalling and remembering the murders of African-Americans committed by state police: “Mookie they killed him, they killed Radio Raheem / Murder, they did it again just like Michael Stewart [1958 – 1983][21] / Murder, Eleanor Bumpurs [1918 – 1984][22], Murder / Damn man, it’s ain’t even safe in our own fucking neighbourhood / Never was, never will be / We ain’t gonna stand for shit no more Sal you hear me, ain’t gonna stand for the fucking police, punk / This is plain as day, they didn’t have to kill the boy.” Here, the public hollering transforms into a poetic incantation. The crystal-image emerges as the actual image deliberately and literally exhumes the virtual past – Raheem’s death is compared to that of other real-life police brutality victims. Due to this, the separation between the past and the present, the private and the public, the localised and the national, and the personal and the political obliterate and blur into one. Another actual-virtual circuit that this event conjures pertains to African-American comedian and activist Dick Gregory’s speech ‘Human Rights and Property Rights’: “Understand young folks, when you put property rights ahead of humans rights – understand you’re tampering with nature … you see, property rights is controlled by man, and human rights is controlled by nature.”[23] Linking the event to this speech illuminates not only how much of a historical re-enactment the event essentially is but also how much of a racial-political divider it can be. Lee himself even explains how there is a division between black and white reception over Mookie and his throwing of the garbage can through the window (which initiates the pizzeria’s burning): “No black person has ever asked me, “Did Mookie do the right thing?” Never. Only white people. Black people, there’s no question in their minds why he does that.”[24]
Do the Right Thing’s preoccupation with the names of public figures, such as the remembrance of the victims of police brutality, Sal’s wall of fame, Smiley’s two political idols and Love Daddy’s radio roll call, is fascinating. These moments of dedication excite the sensory-motor schema and result in the creation of crystal-images; they take the film out of its own internal verisimilitudinous microcosm and place it in a reality that is even more familiar to the audience. The camera’s close-up of Sal’s Italian-American wall of fame with Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Robert DeNiro and others transforms it into an opsign. This opsign brings with it a virtuality of Italian-American identity and territorialises the pizzeria; unifying one’s private identity with one’s public identity. Similarly, Love Daddy’s roll call of past and present African-American artists “… Tracy Chapman, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington … we wanna thank you all for making our lives just a little brighter” is a sonsign, and through the evocation of those names a black cultural identity and history of suffering and perseverance materialises in the form of a virtual image. This specific virtual image is actualised in the poignant scene where the youth taunt Da Major; they calling him “a bum, an old drunk zero”, and he responds defiantly: “what do you know about me … about anything, unless you don’t stood in the door listening to your five hungry children crying for bread, and you can’t do a damn thing about it, your woman’s standing there and you can’t even look her in the eye, unless you done that, you don’t know me, my pain, my feelings.” Even more polemical is the boy answering back with no real historical insight into African-American suffering: “You’re right I wouldn’t stand in the doorway … I’d be out getting a job, doing something anything to put food in their mouth … I don’t want to know your pain … you’re the one who put yourself in the situation.” Through its two-sided debate on African-American self-determinism, this crystal-image encapsulates time. Moreover, Smiley’s constant promotion of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in his speech-acts emphasises how political ideology can have a direct influence on one’s personal lifestyle. Ultimately, the crystal-images here are used to recall an African-American history for the purpose of examining the progress of these people.
In a similar fashion, Moffatt’s Night Cries also deals with the politics of remembering and the history of a people who have been dispossessed by the governmental powers that be. Here, crystal-images facilitate the film’s exploration of the official policy of assimilation and its effects by bringing forth memories from the past into the present. Night Cries has been called “an autobiography of a whole generation of Aborigines.”[25]
It presents a unique case of an aging white mother and her adopted middle-aged Aboriginal daughter. The political circumstances that formed their relationship are explored through the many memory-flashbacks. These flashbacks emerge because there are deliberately weak lines/gaps in the action-image. In the scene where the daughter feeds the mother, there are extreme close-up shots of their facial features, particularly the eyes. The camera then turns to the array of framed childhood photographs on the mantle. This is a crystalline moment as the virtual image of the daughter remembering happier childhood times coalesces with the actual image of the photographs.
Another crystal-image moment is when the daughter places clothing on the washing line. Here, a mid shot captures Marcia Langton’s frustrated body as she heaves, and squints her eyes; what she seems to be glaring at is her memory of playing on the beach with her adopted mother. Peter Kemp, in his analysis of the film, describes this memory as being equally joyous and traumatic in that, when the mother leaves for a brief moment the daughter’s worldview becomes confused, and “seaweed being happily hurled instantly transforms into globs of thick, dark videotape.”[26] Meaghan Morris in her article ‘Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public Memory’ seems to concede with this description as she notes that here “the daughter remembers a childhood crisis of loss and abandonment (and perhaps comes close to remembering an earlier crisis, the loss of her black mother).”[27] The common virtual image that this memory-flashback evokes is of the Aboriginal baby/child being taken away from her biological mother, of the Aboriginal mother being left childless. This virtuality in itself is actualised through the very actual image that creates it; as Morris suggests that the child’s losing of her adopted mother at the beach comes to re-enact the child’s initial loss of her biological mother.
These two crystalline moments, along with the film’s final scene of the mother on her deathbed and the daughter crying in a foetal position beside her, ultimately portray their relationship as a bond of love and dependency;[28] that despite the damaging and regretful historical and political circumstances that unite them there still exists, at the core, an irremovable familial bond. The sonsign of the daughter’s crying, which replicates that of a baby’s crying, reinforces this sense of familial dependency.
In conclusion, both Lee and Moffatt employ crystalline narration for the prime purpose of evoking the past, and through this doing exemplify and reinforce Deleuze’s belief that the crystal-image is a proficient manifestation of time. The actual images of Do the Right Thing re-enact and recall an African-American history of suffering and perseverance; this virtuality is also in turn actualised. Similarly, Night Cries’ op and son signs remember the Australian Government’s official policy of assimilation, and throughout the film its ramifications are explored through the present lives of the mother and daughter. Ultimately, the crystal-images of these two films emphasise the thin and intricate line that separates the past and the present, the personal and the political, and the private and the public, and how often it is crucial to think of them as being bipolar facets of one notion – just like how the actual and the virtual images are different facets of the crystal-image.
Bibliography
Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Universal Pictures. 1989.
Night Cries. Dir. Tracey Moffatt. Ronin Films. 1990.
Batchen. Geoff. ‘Complicities’. Artful. College of Fine Arts Students Association.
October 1990.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York. London: Routledge. 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. London: Athlone. 1989.
Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Do the Right Thing: Blocking and Unblocking the Block’. Toward
Cinema and Its Double Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. 2001.
Kemp. Peter. ‘Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/10/night.html. Last accessed: 05/11/08.
Mockus. Martha. ‘Me’shell Ndegeocello’. Acampora. Christa Davis; Cotton. Angela L.
Eds. Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom. New York: SUNY Press. 2007.
Morris. Meaghan. ‘Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public
Memory’. Aedon: The Melbourne University Literary Arts Review. 4.1. 1996.
Rolling Stone. ‘Spike Lee – the Rolling Stone Interview’. Rolling Stone. July 11-25. 1991.
Wikipedia. ‘Eleanor Bumpurs’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Bumpurs. Last
accessed: 05/11/08.
Wikipedia. ‘Michael Stewart (Graffiti Artist)’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stewart_(graffiti_writer)#cite_ref-2. Last accessed: 05/11/08.
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone, 1989, p. 69.
[2] Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, New York, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 119.
[3] Bogue, p. 107.
[4] Deleuze, p. 81.
[5] Deleuze, p. 80.
[6] Bogue, p. 126.
[7] Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, Universal Pictures, 1989.
[8] Night Cries, dir. Tracey Moffatt, Ronin Films, 1990.
[9] Bogue, p. 107.
[10] Bogue, p. 110.
[11] Bogue, op. cit.
[12] Deleuze, p. 68.
[13] Bogue, p. 126.
[14] Bogue, op. cit.
[15] Bogue, p. 108.
[16] Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Do the Right Thing: Blocking and Unblocking the Block’, in Toward Cinema and Its Double Cross-Cultural Mimesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 235.
[17] Laleen Jayamanne, op. cit.
[18] Jayamanne, op. cit.
[19] Jayamanne, p. 237.
[20] Bogue, p. 126.
[21] Wikipedia, ‘Michael Stewart (Graffiti Artist)’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stewart_(graffiti_writer)#cite_ref-2, last accessed: 05/11/08.
[22] Wikipedia, ‘Eleanor Bumpurs’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Bumpurs, last accessed: 05/11/08.
[23] Martha Mockus, ‘Me’shell Ndegeocello’, in Christa Davis Acampora, Angela L. Cotton, eds., Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, New York: SUNY Press, 2007, p. 85.
[24] Rolling Stone, ‘Spike Lee – the Rolling Stone Interview’, Rolling Stone, July 11-25, 1991.
[25] Geoff Batchen, ‘Complicities’, Artful, College of Fine Arts Students Association, October 1990.
[26] Peter Kemp, ‘Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/10/night.html, Last accessed: 05/11/08.
[27] Meaghan Morris, ‘Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public Memory’, Aedon: The Melbourne University Literary Arts Review, 4.1, 1996, p. 12.
[28] Morris, op. cit.
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