The cinematographic signs in Deleuze and Tarkovskij

Abstract

Movies can be read and understood not only as a coherent narrative of action, but also as a set of signs correlating with each other. On the basis of the sign system redesigned and adapted to the movies by Gilles Deleuze, the article discusses the presentation of the most important concepts of the flow of time and the immediate time detected in the cinema. In order to conceptualize / define the cinematographic signs, Deleuze used Charles Sanders Peirce‘s and Henri Bergson‘s theories, although neither of them associated their theories with that new cultural phenomenon, that is, the cinema. Deleuze, who associates film practice with Peirce‘s triadic model of the sign and Bergson‘s theory of time duration (durée), identifies in cinema films the pure optical and sound situations recognized in cinematographic production, to which he attributes the dimension of cinematographic signs (opsigne and sonsigne). The paper also describes an example of a practical analysis of the signs defined by Deleuze in Andrei Tarkovsky‘s film The Mirror (1975). The film director was concerned with the process of capturing the flow of time both theoretically and practically. According to Tarkovsky, cinema does not need to have words, actors, music, yet it does not exist without moving images, that is, without the flow of real and authentic life. In concordance to this notion, Deleuze approves that cinema or purposefully captured images are not a language in a traditional sense. But it is a transparent material of the film as the construction of images. That kind of a moving progression must have at least two perspectives: actual presentation (hic et nunc) and excursion to a virtual reality and both can form the plane of immanence. This relation among different kind of images as signs of time, in deleuzian’s terms, has a potential power of making the cinematographic crystal (crystal-image), which is able simultaneously to present the variety of converging events of human life.