Introduction

Abstract

Having a body, being through time: what more is there to subjectivity than this? So much more, and nothing at all, might be the answer. The epigraph from Gilles Deleuze above seems to encapsulate these two poles of subjectivity, explored in his two-volume work on cinema, The Movement Image and The Time-Image (Deleuze 1986, 1989). Their extensive taxonomies of the cinematic consistently revolve around two modes: bodies, bodiliness, flesh, gesture and corporeality in one mode, and orientations of time to the visible, invisible, virtual, actual, past and present world in the other. After reading and re-reading Deleuze’s Cinema books many times, I have been struck by Deleuze’s simultaneous refusal to discuss subjectivity as such, and his consistent return to conditions of subjectivity in European post-war cinema. That relationship between subjectivity, the world and cinema remains for me a pressing concern. Indeed, what does cinema show, if it does not, in part, reveal the world back to us through audio-visual dimensions that resemble, almost impossibly closely, the world which we inhabit?

The daily attitude is what puts the before and after into the body, time into the body, the body as a revealer of the deadline. The attitude of the body relates thought to time as to that outside which is infinitely further than the outside world.

(Deleuze 1989: 189)