| This dissertation, continuing the work of Rodowick on Deleuze's film theory, critically follows Deleuze's application of Peirce's semiotics and Bergson's theory of time to the subject of film. While recognizing the importance of Deleuze's revolutionary interpretations for a radically new theory of cinema, it takes issue with his dismissal of Peirce's semiotics as insufficient to account for the time-images produced by modern cinema beginning with Italian neorealism. According to Deleuze, Italian neorealism is the hinge between the two distinct semiotic regimes of the movement-image and the time-image. Although Deleuze talks at length about these coalesced sign-regimes, I believe he fails to give a detailed account of the historical evolution leading to such formations.;The wager of this dissertation is that one can fill in the specifics of a given art-historical occurrence, comment on conditions which accompanied its coming to pass, its immediate and distant effects on other movements, without essentializing it nor its origin. It is possible to follow the dynamics at work in the coalescence of a sign type, whether a genre, a movement or a style, without turning Deleuze's genealogy into a history of causes, origins and ultimate goals. Thus, movements which eventually coalesce into larger sign regimes can be seen as virtual tendencies striving for self-expression at a particular material juncture, itself expressive. The multiplicities coalesced in these sign regimes can be seen as series in transformation. They provide elements to think about the emergence of the "new:" something previously unthought, for which prevalent systems cannot ascribe a meaning because it escapes their rules. Exploring Italian neorealism as an inaugural moment, I trace the implications of Deleuze's move to follow Nietzsche's injunction to release the power of falsification and declare illusion to be the truth that art affirms. The question about the "new" involves Peircean notions of interpretation and unlimited semiosis. Against Deleuze, I argue that Peirce's semiotics, which integrates radical chance as an integral part of the process of interpretation, can serve for Deleuze's taxonomy of cinematic signs to account not only for the images of the movement-image, as Deleuze claims, but also those of the time-image. |
