I waited and waited, and I think I finally found what I was looking for close to the end of the piece: when Moullet starts to soften his stance and to praise Deleuze for his taste. What Moullet admires is Deleuze, the man of our cinema. What he criticises is Deleuze, the philosopher of our century.

Now this is strange, because Moullet is a man of the cinema, not a philosopher. You would think he would keep to what he knew. But, of course, that is precisely what Deleuze does not do. Or, at least, Moullet thinks that Deleuze is not writing about philosophy, but about the cinema; so I guess that Moullet figures he can write about philosophy if he wants to. He never mentions that Deleuze is writing about the cinema as though it were philosophy (thinking) and, of course, he doesn’t try at all to write about philosophy as though it were the cinema.

It does surprise me that Moullet doesn’t take this shared taste as evidence of shared thinking (which might even follow from Deleuze’s proposition that the movies think). It seems to me that if Deleuze finds so many movies that I like worthy of his attention, it is probable that we are on the same wavelength - or, at least, that he is going to be saying some interesting things about the way movies think, things I ought to think over.

You will realise that I have had to say this upfront - that my first impression of the Cinema books was strongly influenced by a confluence of taste, a shared experience. Moullet wants to suggest something else. He leaves any strong admission of alliance or complicity until the end, as a means of redeeming or redressing what he has been saying to that point. He distances himself at first because if he were not to do that he would have to explain his lack of affinity: how common taste can lead to different thinking.

Probably this does not matter to Moullet. After all, we live in an era in which one’s most venomous enemies share all one’s beliefs, where the revolution is most likely to be betrayed by the infighting of its strongest partisans. If you and I both like Lubitsch, that doesn’t mean that we both like him for the right reasons, does it? Reality always lies under the surface, where your sight alone cannot recover it, and taste is just a surface phenomenon.

But I wonder how else we are to recognise the people we would like to live with and the world(s) we hold in common? Taste makes community - if only because some people are not going to sit through Lubitsch’s Eternal Love (1929) no matter how much they may seem to agree with you about the need for world peace. Moreover, I would say that the articulation of taste (like the movies) is thinking. Lubitsch films think, are thought. If you and I like them, we are thinking alike at least to some extent. To deny this, as has been the practice for so long, is to deny one of the few concrete intimations of the possibility of living (not-necessarily-working) together in common, of talking, of discussing, conversing, rather than silencing dissent with noise.

I think it is instructive that Moullet seems to be conversing as he writes rather than trying to occupy all the speaking and listening positions in the manner of a conventional academic essayist. He goes to great lengths to convince us that he is just a writer, not the Author - and, as I have suggested in my remarks about taste, he makes a point of suggesting that those who read what he writes may not share all his opinions either. Moreover, it is one of the positive aspects of polemic that in overstating or exaggerating its argument it opens up contrary positions. No matter how much I loathe Theodor Adorno’s arguments about popular music, for example, I have to recognise that his invective welcomes my loathing and invites a more tempered refutation, whereas a more dispassionate way of arguing pretends that there is no reasonable answer to the claims it is advancing.

For me, the writing of Deleuze is ‘polemical’ in the same way, and I am surprised that Moullet does not see it or, if he does, that he does not acknowledge it. Of course Deleuze is not obviously polemicising, nor does he write in a conversational way, like Moullet. But it seems to me that, like other contemporary philosophers, he tries to write thinking - that is, to write as if he were thinking, to write so that we can follow (his) thinking, not so that he can convince us of something or make a point beyond a reasonable doubt. When I read Deleuze I feel as though I am in a thought experiment, or a game. What if things were the way he says, what then? Would I like it?

The result is that the compulsion of reading what has been written is in a sense set aside. The writing’s importance as argument is diminished, and instead what is important is what I accept and the consequences of my accepting. This kind of reading is very like the way traditional logic is supposed to work: first you accept certain premises and certain rules of combination and then you find out the consequences of what you have done. But in the writing in which traditional logic is usually deployed the emphasis tends to be placed on the indisputable truth of the premises and the rules - and from that indisputable truth a certain kind of inexorable, fateful quality is derived. Logic is no game: you must accept the consequences.

In the writing of Deleuze (and of others like Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean Louis Schefer), there is not the same certainty about the absoluteness of premises and rules - the premises and rules are not true in the same way, to the same degree. The result is a kind of inevitable abstraction, even a fiction - not the distancing which observes things from above, but an abstraction that arises out of the confusion of being in the middle of things: there is so much here that I am not sure I have got it all. What matters is whether the writing carries conviction - that is, whether I can accept it - not how it has done that (the argument), and particularly not whether what it says corresponds in an easy or obvious manner with the way things seem to be Really. If I am in the middle of things, then I too am an unreliable observer and what I think I know may not be the case when I turn around. The writing can change my viewpoint: it intends to shift the horizon - but it does not pretend to create 360 degrees of vision, much less a sphere. Instead there are what the French sometimes call aperçus, insights, points at which the world as written this way this time can touch me and I can make sense.

This is why I like to sit too close to the screen. There I am in the middle of the movie, and precisely because I am in the middle of the movie, I am not caught up, not directed by the frame. Turning my head or rolling my eyes, I can look at another place on the screen. What I look at is in the movie, but it may not be what I am being directed to see. And, you will have noticed, this is not seeing better, but it is seeing differently: the same thing from a different angle.

‘Where does the game stop? Where does the art begin?’, asks Agnès Varda in Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000), but when I heard her on the soundtrack, too close to the screen, I understood: ‘Where does playing stop? Where does thinking begin?’. Mishearing, misreading. Not what she intended, perhaps? Certainly. Always.

As it happens, the games Varda is talking about involve garbage bins, just like the title of Moullet’s piece - blue, yellow, white and green. Kids are putting stuff in the proper bins, learning about which bin to use. But they are also playing; and (under direction) they are learning how to make pretty, not-necessarily-working things from what society has discarded, gleaning art in trash, playing thinking with their hands. The government-sponsored program that taught these things in France is called Poubelle, ma belle, which sort of translates as ‘My Beautiful Garbage Bin’, but not really (just like Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse sort of translates as The Gleaners and I, but not really). Moullet thinks that Deleuze is dumping everything that is left over into the green bin of time, but I think he is playing thinking - gleaning. And he wants me to play too.

And of course that is the case, just as it is the case that the green bins of the time-image are, as Moullet says, for everything that is left. Moullet thinks that because the bins are for what is left, everything that is left ought to go into them, ought to be the time-image (Moullet is logical). But in his writing Deleuze is quite explicitly taking only some films out of the green bins and turning them over for us to look at again and to think with (Deleuze is poetical). He gleans. And Moullet even approves of that gleaning, praising (at the end) the philosopher’s taste in films.

There is a parallel here that Moullet ought to know better than Deleuze. André Bazin asked ‘What is cinema?’ only in the title for the ensemble of his collected essays and never answered it explicitly - because, I think, he knew that cinema is everything which appears and is given the name. But it is also the case that cinema is only the set that Bazin selected, gleanings offered in his writing. Put in another way, the cinema is what Bazin sees when he looks at the screen. If Deleuze’s actual time-image consists of ‘films of ambition and films of high quality ... which make up only a tiny fraction of the interesting films produced and an even tinier fraction of all the films produced’, as Moullet asserts, this is because these are the films that Deleuze sees (and wants us to see) as distinct from all those in the green bin for us to look at.

But Moullet, the critic and cineaste, does not seem to understand Deleuze’s philosophic adherence to critical vision. For Moullet, agreement arises when what one asserts in language corresponds with what is actually there (truth corresponds to the world). For Deleuze, agreement arises when what one asserts in language persuades one’s audience that this is the way things may be in the world (language can make sense). There are opposing schools of philosophical thinking represented in these two views, and I think they may roughly correspond to what Richard Rorty calls realist and pragmatist traditions respectively.

I am sure that Moullet knows as well as Deleuze that Zola himself, following Hippolyte Taine, wrote that naturalist artists were Naturalists in the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ sense and that Zola also wrote that he wanted to show his readers that the motivations of his characters were fundamentally those of brutes or beasts. What Deleuze does with these ideas of natural impulse is to extend them to cover films Moullet considers unrealistic, like Nick Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades and Buñuel’s later work.

So it seems to me that this disagreement about naturalism is a pretty trivial one, a matter of emphasis, not nearly the inflated pink elephant Moullet wants to make it. I think the main reason that Moullet considers it important is because he thinks he knows the truth of what naturalism Really Is (scientific observation) and he doesn’t like the idea that maybe it is only what we (Deleuze and Zola and Finler and you and me) make it.

This means that Moullet doesn’t think the disagreement is trivial at all, and it also means that he misses the point of what happens when Deleuze begins to write about the time-image.

Because in Deleuze’s books, the time-image only occurs after the second world war - that is, after a set of shattering, disastrous events that tend to be exemplified in our imagination by the establishment of European totalitarian states in the Soviet Union and Italy and Germany, the Holocaust, the atom bomb. This is, for most of us anyway, our era, the one to which we belong (she said ours is the first generation to hear the ticking).

I think that for Deleuze, the sort of thinking that Moullet re-enacts in his reaction to the Cinema books would belong to the era of the movement-image - the one before ours and the one the French have called l’âge du cinéma. Moullet’s ideas of time, which seem to be tied to a certain experience of duration (not to say montage) - and, thus, of movement - are a good example.

But quantum mechanics, much less the physics which has followed quantum mechanics, cannot understand time in that way. A great deal of Deleuze’s writing is concerned with how (and if) time can be rethought to take the apparent paradoxes and impossibilities of contemporary physics into account, and I believe that the time-image belongs to that strand of Deleuze’s writing. At any rate, in the Cinema books the phrase signals something new in the world, a type of image that does not seem to have existed before the war.

Moullet wants to give us the impression that Deleuze never really says what the time-image is, but moufletant, mouvant Moullet is misleading us. At the end of the first chapter of The Movement-Image Deleuze writes:

There was a time when I would have argued that this passage demonstrates that Eisenstein, through some uncanny psychic link, was channelling Deleuze before Deleuze (well, not quite: Deleuze was born in 1925, but you get what I mean). Of course that is not the case. Delusive Deleuze has simply misread, adopted, deformed and refined Eisenstein’s understanding in a productive way, just as he did with Vachel Lindsay’s work on the moving image. Let us try to join him and do what bratty, shifty, bubbly Moufette did not do - understand.

Of course Eisenstein’s third phase and Deleuze’s time-image are not the same thing, but it is intriguing how similar they are - and that they seem to overlap most closely in their understanding of an experience (of time, of ‘vibration’) for which commonsense realist thinking and language have not prepared us.

Isn’t it interesting that Deleuze places himself in an unacknowledged conversation with Eisenstein? But rather than pose as a film theorist, he sticks to philosophy, making his own thinking a homage to Eisenstein. He takes from Eisenstein something of his vision and leaves behind everything that cannot help him to see differently. Why is it that Moullet does not perceive this? Why is it that he cannot do the same with Deleuze’s Cinema books?

Instead Moullet makes a phoney claim about green garbage bins intended to contain whatever there is in heaven and earth that is not in Deleuze’s philosophy - a claim he refutes later by claiming that Deleuze has included only films of ambition and high quality in the category of the time-image. I would say that the truth is that time-images act like termites or viruses or drugs, quickly spreading through a film, invading everything else, ‘subordinating’ the movement-image. I think this is what happens in Le Samourai, where so much of the film rehearses traditional crime film conventions: it is recast into a meditation on duration by the termites of the time-image.

Now if the time-image is that kind of invader or re-territorialiser, one could argue that indeed, the films of the time-image are a vast, vague category of what is left over and transformed, the contents of the green garbage bin. But the time-image itself would perhaps be better thought of as belonging in a bin Moullet does not think of (and not even Agnès Varda invokes): the one reserved for materials that might contaminate us - toxic waste.

I am sure you realise that almost everything I have written here is specious in a way that nothing that Deleuze and Moullet has written is specious. My arguments are opportunistic, poorly structured, riddled with faulty reasoning and misreading. Moullet, whose piece is frankly polemical, is far fairer and more responsible than I. He engages with Deleuze, whereas, after the first couple of paragraphs, I have generally disengaged from Moullet.

If I were to re-engage, it would be to point out those many moments in Moullet’s critique where he suggests that Deleuze has failed to recognise the time-image when it appears in the era of the movement-image. I would say that Deleuze does not seem to want to look back at the prewar years with eyes and ears that have experienced the ticking - but what other eyes and ears do we have now? And I would say that, in the first place, his setting aside of what some have called the ‘prehistory’ of cinema (Edison, the Lumières, Paul, Perry, etc) amounts also to a setting aside of what was historically a new experience: time framed, duration at one remove from its dasein, time abstracted from the space-time of its taking place (the cinema conserves time while annihilating space). This is, I think, the foundation of the experience which re-emerges after the war as the time-image, summoned by disaster perhaps, but (as Eisenstein suggests) only after having been co-opted and assimilated all those years by the movement-image (by ‘montage’), requiring now that the gates be opened so that these dead may enter a new life.

And I would say that Moullet is right to oppose his own slangy, ordinary Joe attitude to Deleuze’s allusive, superior intensity - but that he doesn’t go far enough. Here I think Moullet may be betrayed by his own anxious taste. Instead of congratulating Deleuze for selecting latter-day films of ambition and high quality, surely he ought to have followed the inclination of his own stylistic posture and condemned the philosopher’s effete discrimination. He ought to have championed the movies that everyone knows are no good: the cheap, the stupid, the boring, the inane. For in those movies time turns on us as a toxic avenger, as waste. In those films we experience the feeble agony of time, its dissonance, its implacability, flaccidity. In those films, and in them alone, we can know a time that has no place for us.

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A Little Glossary of French Words You May Not Know Right Away Appearing in This Text

moufette - skunk
mouflet - brat (by extension, moufletant - bratty)
moussant - foamy, bubbly
mouvant - shifting, in motion