THE CYNEPHILE

Deleuze writes: “In Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the driver wavers between killing himself and committing a political murder and, replacing these projects by the final slaughter, is astonished by it himself, as if the carrying out concerned him no more than did the preceding whims. The actuality of the action-image, the virtuality of the affection image can interchange, all the more easily for having fallen into the same indifference.

In the third place, the sensory motor action or situation has been replaced by the stroll, the voyage and the continual return journey. The voyage has found in America the formal and material conditions of renewal. It takes place through internal or external necessity, through the need for flight. But now it loses the initiatory aspect that it had in the German journey (even in Wenders’s films) and that it kept, despite everything in the beat journey (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider). It has become urban voyage, and has become detached from the active and affective structure which supported it, directed it, gave
it even vague direction. How could there be a nerve fibre or sensory motor-structure between the driver of Taxi Driver and what he sees on the pavement in his driving mirror? And in Lumet, everything happens in continual trips and return journeys, at ground level, in aimless movements where characters behave like windscreen wipers (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico). This is in fact the clearest aspect of the modern voyage. It happens in “any space whatever marshalling yard,” disused warehouse, the undifferentiated fabric of the city–in opposition to actions which most often unfolded in the qualified spacetime of the old realism. As Cassavetes says, it is a question of undoing space, as the story, the plot or the action.”

[From Cinema I: The Movement-Image, by Gilles Deleuze]

Blair Mclendon, WKCR Arts Programmer and lover of obscure cinema. (Forgive the blurry iPhone photo.)

Fellow Cinephiles — here’s a chance to hear me spout off in a different medium. An interview will air tonight (September 9th) at 9:30 pm on 89.9 FM and online at wkcr.org (click on the “listen now” button in the upper right hand corner). Topics covered include Steve McQueen’s Hunger, “Slow” cinema (more satisfying than slow food), auteurism, Cassavetes, you name it.
Blair Mclendon, who invited me to be on the program, is a diehard cinephile from San Diego who is taking a class with Andrew Sarris this semester — I have to admit I’m a little jealous. Anyway, have a listen!