Image and Intuition in Beckett's Film
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5339736 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anthony Uhlmann (0000-0002-0140-5064, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 90-106 |
| Publication date | 2004-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sub.2004.0032 |
| OpenAlex | W2026715507 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
Working from a detailed diary Beckett wrote of his thoughts on painting while travelling through Germany and visiting art galleries before World War II, and directed by comments made by Beckett himself, James Knowlson has convincingly displayed how Beckett used images from paintings that had had a forceful impression on him, reconfiguring them in developing his own striking images in later works (256-258).1 Might the same be claimed for Beckett's use of philosophy? In a 1933 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett identifies an interest in philosophical images even if divorced from the systems in which they are used: "Leibniz a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures." Beckett discusses the "image" a number of times in Disjecta (28, 90, 94, 123, 130), and Gilles Deleuze sees the use of the image as key in coming to terms with Beckett's works.2 As is well known, Deleuze develops a reading of Henri Bergson, especially Matter and Memory, in developing his own concept of the image in the Cinema books,3 and as I will attempt to establish below, Beckett knew Bergson's work well and drew upon it in developing his own ideas about the image and its relationship to thought. The Legacy of Bergson In Matter and Memory Bergson draws heavily upon the concept of "the image," a term with a long history in philosophy tying it to inadequate modes of understanding.4 Yet rather than "the image" being a secondary category, linked to the inferior kinds of understanding derived from the testimony of the senses, the image, in Bergson's system, is given a much more prominent place. Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of "images." And by "image" we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealists call a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed halfway between the "thing" and the "representation." (9) What Bergson proposes is not, on the one hand, using the image to displace terms such as "the idea" or "thought"—terms often set up against the image as "superior" mental processes, and both of which are implicit in the term [End Page 90] "representation." Nor, on the other hand, does he propose the image as a means of dissolving the reality of "things" external to one who perceives.5 Rather, he proposes understanding "the image" as a bridge between those objectively existing things and our thoughts. A bridge, because the image exists both in the thing that has or projects an image consistent with the nature of its own being, and in our minds, which receive the projected images in the manner of a screen. "This is as much to say that there is for images merely a difference of degree, and not of kind, between being and being consciously perceived." (ibid., 37)6 For Bergson, my body too is an image, though different from all others in that it is one that I not only perceive externally through perceptions, but internally through my affections (ibid., 17). So the brain is more than a screen that passively receives a projection from outside: it is a screen that in turn acts, and acts in two ways. It both analyses the images projected upon it, and itself selects the movements it executes within its body: "The brain appears to us to be an instrument of analysis in regard to the movement received and an instrument of selection with regard to the movement executed" (ibid., 30). The brain does not produce representations in the manner understood by idealism (bringing the world into being [ibid.,19-22]); rather, it receives and acts upon images (ibid., 19-22, 74). Representations do occur, but they are not the result of our brain adding something to perceptions of images; rather, conscious perception, for Bergson, involves the process of realizing representations by subtracting what does not interest us from an image (that is, the way in which it
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Intuition · Key (lock) · Literature · Movie theater · Painting · Reflexive pronoun · Tying · Computer Science · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |