Introduction

One of the main claims of Deleuzian film-philosophy is that ‘[t]he movementimage of the so-called classical cinema gave way, in the post-war period, to a direct time-image’ (Deleuze 2005b, xi). The present chapter examines the time-image of the modern(ist) cinema through a study of Alain Resnais’s HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (HIROSHIMA MY LOVE 1959), which is emblematic of this Deleuzian image-regime. In relation to this, Patricia Pisters (2011a) has observed that the film ‘is a crystal of time, which gives us the key to the time-image in general’ (102; cf. Deleuze 2005b, 67). This is particular evident in the film's exploration of the temporality that occurs ‘in-between’ events, which opens up a ‘Borgesian labyrinth of time’ full of virtual pathways. For Deleuze, the bifurcation of causal linearity in the time-image is intimately connected with the rupture of the sensory-motor linkages that constituted the movement-image. The cinema of Resnais contains prime examples of how non-linearity becomes the ‘soul’ of the medium in post-war cinema for Deleuze (2005b), for whom the time-image emerges from cinema's own Kantian revolution in which ‘the subordination of time to movement was reversed’ (xi). Questions of temporality are for Deleuze by nature philosophical questions, because ‘time has always put the notion of truth into crisis’ (126). In this manner, the opposition between the sensory-motor movement-image (chronological, causal, action-response, representational, physical, etc.) and its breakdown in the time-image (sensory-motor ruptures, Bergsonian durée, encounters, anti-representationalism, mental landscapes, etc.) is deeply philosophical.

For Bordwell, on the other hand, as Oliver Speck (2010) observes, ‘art cinema appears to be a genre whose primary characteristic is the creation of ambiguity’ (50). According to Bordwell, the modern(ist) formal ‘ambiguities’ are justified by a new vraisemblance.