| In the régime of the movement-image, intervals are vital to the perception of motion, sensation, affection and change; in the time-image, perception becomes a 'perception of perception', offering a shift of emphasis that is witnessed in the image itself rather than the linkages (or cuts) between images. What this means is that when montage, the foundation of classical cinema, loses its hold time begins to be increasingly spatialised. For instance, in film noir the past or narratives that tell a person's life-story through his or her point of view is shown in ?ashbacks. This classical device gives way, in the era of the time-image, to a perpetual duration that cannot be located in one moment or another. Memory elides temporal distinction in ways such that only 'is it in the present that we make memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past' (D 1989: 52). The time-image frequently becomes a site of amnesia where waves of action turn the world at large into a matrix in which personages seem to ?oat indiscriminately. Certain films, such as Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu (1939) or Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1946), suggest that subjectivity can only be felt through the perception of time: humans, be they spectators or characters in film are determined by the environs of time in which they are held. Deleuze calls the effect that of a 'timecrystal', a way of being that is discovered in a time inside of the event that allows it to be perceived. In La règle du jeu the time-crystal might be the illuminated greenhouse or the chateau in which the characters are held. In Welles' film it would be the hall of mirrors in which the characters shatter the narrative to pieces. |
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