What did Cinema do in “the War,” Deleuze?

Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume study of cinema is underwritten by a major historical claim—that of a fundamental break between two distinct eras of cinema—the classical and the modern. Classical cinema, dating roughly until around the early 1940s, favored a form of what he describes as ‘true narration’ developing ‘organically, according to legal connections in space and chronological relations in time.’² Such a cinema portrayed and celebrated a world in which actions generate situations which in turn generate new actions that link up in a progressive and emancipative series. A world in which consciousness is gradually raised as things make better sense and justice is gradually done; in which the contingencies of life are subject to order so that a higher truth may be secured, and in which peoples, both individually and collectively, become increasingly coherent. Characters and societies encounter misfortunes but only in the form of challenges which are overcome in their journey to a more complete state. In this sense classical cinema was said by Deleuze to have rested on the myth of a ‘true narration’ on which the major political projects of its period also depended; the myth that the many different temporalities of lives can be synthesized in a time of ‘the people’ that erases their differences and conflicts either in the form, as with the Soviet project, of the ‘universal proletariat,’ or as with the American project, of the ‘universal migrant.’ Soviet directors such as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, for example, attempted to portray the progressive and linear temporality of ‘the people’ struggling to overcome historical trials and tribulations in the process of their becoming full subjects.³ The very purpose of film, for Eisenstein especially, was to inspire the action of the masses-as-people by increasing their sense of themselves as a collective subject possessive of a ‘revolutionary consciousness.’⁴ In early Hollywood film, likewise, directors such as D.W. Griffith mythologized the historical processes and events through which the diversity and conflicts of ‘the people’ were overcome in restoration of their essential unity.⁵

During the mid-twentieth century, Deleuze argues, a cinematographic mutation took place serving to undermine this belief in the unanimity of ‘the people’ and its narrative time. A new form of ‘false’ rather than ‘true’ narration became more influential and a properly ‘modern cinema’ emerged. In place of chronological time cinema became characterized by a ‘chronic non-chronological time.’⁶ Whereas true narration functioned to instill coherence to the world and the characters that populate it, false narration functioned by tearing it apart. The actions of the characters depicted become aberrant, dysfunctional, generating an aimless wandering and series of chance, loose connections. The world depicted became one where contingency reigns, where the discernment of differences between what is true and false becomes difficult, and characters are thrown haplessly from situation to situation, without possibility of redemption. Rather than being a sorry story of disenchantment, however, Deleuze argued that the predominance of ‘false narration’ in postwar cinema testified to an improvement in its story-telling function. For what cinema did was not to mourn the loss of, or attempt to restore, the possibility of true narration but to reject it in a positive fashion in favor of the ‘power of the false.’⁷ The truth is, Deleuze argues, that in its actuality the world does not add up, and as subjects in the world we are necessarily destined always to fail to achieve coherence, only ever constituting false unities forever prey to the decomposing affects generated by the world. To believe and practice otherwise is to resist the true falsity of the world. In modern cinema, by way of contrast, we are shown the truth that indeed we never cohere, neither individually or collectively, that the political concept of ‘the people’ is always bound to fail, that ‘the people’ will always go AWOL regardless of the attempts of regimes to unify them.⁸

The mediating factors which Deleuze argued explained the transition between these two eras were plural but the one which he invoked repeatedly and insisted on above all others was that of the...