Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image

The Problematic of the Digital Image

It is only at the very end of his two-volume study of the cinema, in a kind of prospective addendum, that the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze raises the problematic of the digital image. In presenting the digital image as a challenge to cinema—a challenge that can either render it obsolete or occasion its wholesale functional metamorphosis—Deleuze reasserts, one final time, the privilege of aesthetics over technology that literally pervades the cinema study. And despite his own recognition that a full treatment of the digital image is beyond the purposes of his study, his very willingness to enumerate its principal "effects" suggests a hope that cinema can in fact be reborn through the digital. These "effects" themselves have the effect of specifying the digital image in relation to the time-image, and thus indicate a path for rethinking cinema after the digital. For this reason alone, Deleuze's analysis of the digital image deserves to be quoted at length:

new automata did not invade content without a new automatism bringing about a mutation of form. The modern configuration of the automaton is the correlate of an electronic automatism. The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death. . . . The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favor of an omni-directional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed "data," information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. Finally, sound achieving an autonomy which increasingly lends it the status of image, the two images, sound and visual, enter into complex relations with neither subordination nor commensurability, and reach a common limit insofar as each reaches its own limit. In all these senses, the new spiritual automatism in turn refers to new psychological automata. ¹

What Deleuze's analysis shows is that, despite their apparent close correlation with the digital image, none of these effects (including perpetual reorganization of the image or, more technically, the constant refreshing of scanned video and digitized images) is specific to it. Rather, these effects cumulatively represent the achievements of the more radical products of time-image cinema.

Thus the model of Bresson's cinema is "a modern psychological automaton" but one that has "no need of computing or cybernetic machines"; Bresson's characters are "defined in relation to the speech-act, and no longer, as before, by motor action." ² Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu's 180° continuity shots assemble an image "end to end with its obverse," thus "turn[ing] . . . the shot around" (citing Nöel Burch), while Michael Snow's The Central Region, with its electronically controlled rotary machine, "muddles [the] directions, [the] orientations" of space in a way that destroys the "primacy of the vertical axis that could determine them" and leaves only "an opaque surface which receives, in order to disorder, and on which characters, objects and words are inscribed as 'data.'" ³ Developed further by Jean Luc Godard, this dissolution of the vertical screen calls forth an entirely new...