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10 - Recollection-images (second mental-image)

from Section II - Second Introduction – A Series of Images and Signs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2019

David Deamer
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

The second of the three avatars of the mental-image is the recollection-image. Recollection-images describe memories: perceptions, affects and actions coalesce as moments of the past actualised on-screen in the present and for the future. This is no longer the world of imagination, of the dream-image; no longer an alternative world, a space and time with different rules, modes and laws. The recollection-image is rather the return to consciousness of memory, which is actualised as a matter-image within the real of the film world. This matter-image is the flashback. Flashbacks may be triggered by an event in the present; or the present may demand a memory to be sought for, a memory which will at first be elusive. Flashbacks may simply repeat a moment from inside the film, a reminder for the character (and for the viewer); or come from a time before the film (which in being actualised, the film now encompasses). Furthermore, these memories may not simply be bare reconstitutions, but also – perhaps inevitably – become coloured by the present. These images may repeat a number of times with difference; or they may belong not to a single character, but to the film, and thus be attributed to a group consciousness as a collective remembrance; or they may explore the variations in the memories of several characters. Accordingly, for Deleuze, such flashbacks will be distributed between the two extreme poles of the recollection-image as either memory as ‘an explanation, a causality or a linearity’; or memory as the ‘fragmentation of all linearity … [as] breaks in causality’ (C2: 49). The former designates a general sign of composition named destiny. While Deleuze does not go on to divide this general sign of composition into its full molar and secondary attributes, a division will here be assumed to describe a difference in degree and – following the example of the dream-image with its rich and restrained forms – similarly adopt strong and weak forms: strong destiny and weak destiny. The genetic sign of the recollection-image describes fragmentations of memory, memories which no longer serve to drive forward the narration using the past in the present for the future; but a narration which becomes lost in the past, in memories, which now become the primary matter-image of the film. Deleuze names this process forking paths.

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Chapter
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Deleuze's Cinema Books
Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images
, pp. 127 - 131
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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