200515: this is the best of several recent books read on deleuze. this does not mean it is an easier read, as once again this rating reflects how this encourages me through conceptual difficulties of deleuze's work, how inspiring, interesting, remarkable and important. there are others whose interests are more professional, more analytic perhaps- who have found deleuze essentially impenetrable, opaque, meaningless, with far too many terms and far too little logical clarity. this must be why i like him so much. this is not math, not science, though he does make the point at how significant was the innovation of calculus, how this is the only way science can express itself...
i am much more engaged with his vivid, exact, multifaceted images of the the 'time-crystal', but this is getting ahead of his thought. first you have his intense delineation of eighteen to twenty-four signs, his radical interpretation of pierce's semiology- representam, object, interpretant- that he combines not with the familiar signifier-signified of linguistic structuralism, but with bergson's conception, and this is important- of duree'. in fact, of the many, many works this inspires me to read or reread, it is the work of bergson before all else. this is not 'film theory', not referring to much film, but thinking through film, through shot, montage, sequence, through reading the pattern of 'classical films', particularly how generated and different are the films from Russia, France, Germany, and Hollywood, and the changes from 'classic' to 'modern' film, from dialectical to invisible editing, organization and ideal forms, of everything from westerns to inverted as farce. this is all great stuff. certainly encourages me to read deleuze and literature, which is the second of this series...
bogue's critical work makes deleuze much more coherent, shows more and more the importance of bergson, which always engages me- do i like more deleuze or bergson? who knows- but it is more the conceptual tools, the 'images', offered by deleuze, that most fascinates, and film seems to most clearly visualize some aspects of bergson' thought, particularly the apex of senses to the plane of the world, the cone of past interpreting, the sheets of time past... my favorite is deleuze's image of the 'time-crystal'- as mentioned you might need to know everything leading up to it, though even by itself it strikes me as a resonant and beautiful way of thinking of time, of experience, in each our worlds and in that world we all share... is this idealism? not exactly, though as usual deleuze does not address such metaphysical concepts, only the questions, only the thinking, so what is this 'time-crystal', well it is variously mirror, transparent, opaque, refracting, distorting, reflecting, reversing, and so on...
did i mention deleuze has so many 'signs', according to which menu you taste, either eighteen or twenty-four... and then there is the conflict between 'virtual' and 'actual', followed by the 'indescernability' between 'true' and 'false'... and how all this is seen through everyone from Gance, Eisenstein, Griffith, Murnau, Renoir, Resnais... well there are several films i have to see again, indeed this book might not work unless you have seen a lot of films of some great artistic and not just box-office value... but this is more than 'film x demonstrates philosophical idea y', this is how the film itself, as memory, as sensation, thinks philosophically... could go on and on about this book, but mostly i want to go watch some films...