[…]  The crystals of time

The cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world. This is why, very early on, it looked for bigger and bigger circuits which would unite an actual image with recollection-images, dream-images and world-images. This is surely the extension that Godard calls into question in Slow Motion, when he takes issue with the vision of the dying (I’m not dead, because my life hasn't passed before me'). Should not the opposite direction have been pursued? Contracting the image instead of dilating it. Searching for the smallest circuit that functions as internal limit for all the others and that puts the actual image beside a kind of immediate, symmetrical, consecutive or even simultaneous double. The broad circuits of recollection in dream assume this narrow base, this extreme point, and not the other way round. This sort of direction already appears in links through flashback: in Mankiewicz, a short circuit is produced between the character who tells a story 'in the past' and the same person in so far as he has surprised something in order to be able  to relate it; in Carne, in Daybreak, all the circuits of recollection which bring us back each lime to the hotel room, rest on a small circuit, the recent recollection of the murder which has just taken place in this very same room. If we take this direction to its limit, we can say that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is 'coalescence' between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.

We recognize here the very specific genre of description which, according to Robbe-Grillet's requirement, instead of being concerned with a supposedly distinct object constantly both absorbs and creates its own object. Ever vaster circuits will be able to develop, corresponding to deeper and deeper layers of reality and higher and higher levels of memory or thought. But it is this most restricted circuit of the actual image and its virtual image which carries everything, and serves as internal limit.  We have seen how, on the broader trajectories, perception and recollec­tion, the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, c rather their images, continually followed each other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of indiscernibility. But this point of indiscernibility is precisely constituted by the smallest circle, that is, the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time. We gave the name opsign (and sonsign) to the actual image cut off from its motor extension: it then formed large circuits, and entered into communication with what could appear as recollection-images, dream-images and world-images. But here we see that the opsign finds its true genetic element when the actual optical imagecrystallizes with its own virtual image, on the small internal circuit. This is a crystal-image, which gives us the key, or rather the 'heart', of opsigns and their compositions. The latter are nothing other than slivers of crystal-images.

The crystal-image, or crystalline description, has two definite sides which are not to be confused. For the confusion of the real and the imaginary is a simple error of fact, and does not affect their discernibility: the confusion is produced solely ‘in someone's head'. But indiscernibility constitutes an objectiveillusion; it does riot suppress the distinction between the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other's role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversi­bility. In fact, there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible. These are 'mutual images' as Bachelard puts it, where tin exchange is carried out. The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the mind, it is the objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double. Hence two orders of problems arise, one of structure, the other of genesis.  First, what are these consolidates of actual and virtual which define a crystalline structure (in a general, aesthetic, rather than a scientific, sense)?  And, later on, what is the genetic process which appears in these structures?

The most familiar case is the mirror. Oblique mirrors, concave and convex mirrors and Venetian mirrors are inseparable from a circuit, as can be seen throughout Ophüls's work, and in Losey, especially in Eve and The Servant. This circuit itself is an exchange: the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field. The exchange is all the more active when the circuit refers to a polygon with a growing number of sides: as in a face reflected on the facets of a ring, an actor seen in an infinity of twins. When virtual images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others. This situation was prefigured in Welles's Citizen Kane, when Kane passes between two facing mirrors; but it comes to the fore in its pure state in the famous palace of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai, where the principle of indiscernibility reaches its peak: a perfect crystal-image where the multiple mirrors have assumed the actuality of the two characters who will only be able to win it back by smashing them all, finding themselves side by side and each killing the other.

The actual image and its virtual image thus constitute the smallest internal circuit, ultimately a peak or point, but a physical point which has distinct elements (a bit like the epicurean atom). Distinct, but indiscernible, such are the actual and the virtual which are in continual exchange. When the virtual image becomes actual, it is then visible and limpid, as in the mirror or the solidity of finished crystal. But the actual image becomes virtual in its turn, referred elsewhere, invisible, opaque and shadowy, like a crystal barely dislodged from the earth. The actual-virtual couple thus immediately extends into the opaque-limpid, the expression of their exchange. But it needs only a modification of conditions (notably of temperature) for the limpid face to darken, and for the opaque face to acquire or rediscover its limpidity. The exchange is started again. So long as the conditions are not made precise there is definitely a distinction between the two sides, but they are indiscernible. This situation seems to bring us close to science. And it is no accident that it is developed in Zanussi as a result of a scientific inspiration. What interests Zanussi, however, is the 'power' of science, its relation to life, and first of all its projection into the life of men of science themselves." The Structure of Crystals clearly shows two men of science, one of whomshines and already possesses all the light of official science, pure science, whilst the oilier has withdrawn into an opaque life and obscure tasks. But, from another point of view, is it not the obscure face which becomes luminous, even if this light is no longer that of science, even if it becomes more like faith as in an Augustinian 'illumination', whilst the representatives of pure science become peculiarly opaque and pursue projects with a shameful will to power (Camouflage, The Imperative)?  Zanussi is one of those authors who, since Dreyer, have known how to enrich dialogue with a religious, metaphysical, or scientific content, while still keeping it as the most everyday and trivial determin­ation. And this success comes precisely from a principle of indiscernibility. Which is luminous, the clear scientific schema of a brain section, or the opaque cranial dome of a monk at prayer (Illumination)?  Between the two distinct sides, a doubt will always remain, preventing us from knowing which is limpid and which is dark, considering the conditions. In A Woman's Decision, the two protagonists 'stay in the middle [milieu] of their fight, frozen and covered in mud, while the sun rises'.  This is because the conditions echo the environment [milieu] too, like the weather conditions that we see again and again in Zanussi. The crystal is no longer reducible to the external position of two mirrors face to face, but to the internal disposition of a seed in relation to the environment. What will be the seed with which we can sow the environment, this desert-like and snowy expanse which is opened out in Zanussi's films? Or else, despite men's efforts, will the environment remain amorphous, at the same time as the crystal is emptied of its interiority, and as the seed is only a seed of death, fatal illness, or suicide (Spiral)? Exchange or indiscernibility thus follow each other in three ways in the crystalline circuit: the actual and the virtual (or the two mirrors face to face); the limpid and the opaque; the seed and the environment. Zanussi attempts to bring the whole cinema under the influence of these various aspects of an uncertainty principle.

Zanussi has made an actor out of the man of science; that is, a dramatic being par excellence. But this was already the situation of the actor in himself: the crystal is a stage, or rather a track [piste], before being an amphitheatre. The actor is bracketed with his public role: he makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous. The actor is a 'monster', or rather monsters are born actors - Siamese twin, limbless man -because they find a role in the excess or shortcoming that affects them. But the more the virtual image of the role becomes actual and limpid, the more the actual image of the actor moves into the shadows and becomes opaque: there will be a private project of the actor, a dark vengeance, a strangely obscure criminal or justice-bringing activity. And this underground activity will detach itself and become visible in turn, as the interrupted role falls back into opacity. We can already recognize the dominant theme of Tod Browning's work, in silent film. A fake limbless man takes to his role and has his arms really cut off, for the love of the woman who could not bear men's hands, but tries to recover his dignity by organizing the murder of a rival who is whole (The Unknown). In The Unholy Three, the ventriloquist Echo can no longer speak except through his dummy, but regains control of himself in the criminal project he pursues disguised as an old woman, even though he confesses his crime through the mouth of the man who was wrongly accused. The monsters in Freaks are monsters only because they have been forced to move into their explicit role, and it is through a dark vengeance that they find themselves again and regain a strange clarity which arrives in the lightning to interrupt their role." In The Black Bird it is in the course of a transformation that 'the actor' is struck by paralysis, when he was going to use his role of bishop in a criminal intent: as if the monstrous exchange suddenly froze. An abnormal, suffo­cating slowness permeates Browning's characters in general, in the crystal. What we see in Browning is not a reflection on the theatre or the circus, as we will see in others, but a double face of the actor, that only the cinema could capture by instituting its own circuit. The virtual image of the public role becomes actual, but in relation to the virtual image of a private crime, which becomes actual in turn and replaces the first image. We no longer know which is the role and which is the crime. Perhaps it needed an extraordinary understanding between an actor and an author: Browning and Lon Chaney. This crystalline circuit of the actor, its transparent face and its opaque face, is travesty. If Browning achieved a poetry of the unassignable in this way, it seems that two great films of travesty have inherited his inspiration: Hitchcock's Murder, and Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge, with its marvellous black backgrounds.

To such a varied list we should add the ship. It too is a track, a circuit. It is as if, as in Turner's paintings, splitting in two is not an accident, but a power which is part of the ship. It is Herman Melville who, in his novels, fixed this structure for all time. Seed impregnating the sea, the ship is caught between its two crystal­line faces: a limpid face which is the ship from above, where everything should be visible, according to order; an opaque face which is the ship from below, and which occurs underwater, the black face of the engine-room stokers. But it is as if the limpid face actualizes a kind of theatre or dramaturgy which takes hold of the passengers themselves, whilst the virtual passes into the opaque face, and is actualized in turn in the settling of scores between engineers, in the demonic perversity of a boatswain, in a captain's obsession, in the secret revenge of insurgent blacks. This is the circuit of two virtual images which continually become actual in relation to each other, and are continually revived. It is not so much Huston's Moby Dick which gives the cinematographic version of the ship, but rather Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, in which the majority of the forms of the crystal-image are un­doubtedly to be found: the yacht called 'The Circe' reveals a visible face and an invisible face, a limpid face that for a moment the naive hero allows himself to be caught by, while the other face, the opaque one, the great dark stage of the aquarium of monsters, rises in silence and grows as the first one becomes vague or blurred. And, in a different way, it is Fellini who discovers, beyond the circus-track, a circuit of the ship as ultimate fate. The ship in Amarcord already presented itself as a vast seed of death or life on the sea of plastic. But, in The Ship Sails On, the ship makes the face of a growing polygon proliferate. It initially splits in two according to the division of bottom and top: the entire visible order of the ship and its sailors is at the service of the grand dramaturgical project of the singer-passengers; but, when these passengers from the top come to see the proletariat at the bottom, it is the latter who become in turn spectators, and listeners to the singing competition which they impose on those at the top, or to the musical competition in the kitchens. Then the split changes its orientation and now divides the singer-passengers and the proletarian-shipwrecked on the bridge: here again the exchange is made between the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, in a Bartok-like musical device. Then, later, the split has become almost a splitting in two: the dark warship, blind and closed-up, terrifying, which arrives to reclaim the fugitives, is actualized all the better because the transparent ship carried out its funerary dramaturgy in a marvellous circuit of faster and faster images where the two ships end up exploding and sinking, giving back to the sea what ends up as the sea, an eternallyamorphous environment, a melancholy rhinoceros which stands for Moby Dick. This is the mutual image, this is the cycle of the crystal ship in a pictorial and musical end of the world, and, among the final gestures, the young maniacal terrorist who cannot stop himself throwing a final bomb into the dark ship's narrow porthole.

The ship can also be the ship of the dead, the nave of a simple chapel as place of an exchange. The virtual survival of the dead can be actualized, but is this not at the price of our existence, which becomes virtual in turn? Is it the dead who belong to us, or we who belong to the dead? And do we love them against the living, or for and with life? Truffaut's fine film, The Green Room, arranges the four faces which form a strange green crystal, an emerald. At one point, the hero hides in a little shelter with dulled windows with green reflections, where he seems to have a glaucous existence, where it is impossible to tell whether he is living or dead. And in the chapel's crystal can be seen a thousand candles, a bush of fire which is always missing a branch to make it into the 'perfect figure'. The final candle of he or she who has been able to light only the last-but-one will always be missing, in an irreducible persistence of life which makes the crystal infinite.

The crystal is expression. Expression moves from the mirror to the seed.  It is the same circuit which passes through three figures, the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, the seed and the environment. In fact, the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallize an environment which is at present [actuellement] amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image. Once again the actual and the virtual are exchanged in an indiscernibility which on each occasion allows distinction to survive. In a famous sequence in Citizen Kane, the little glass ball breaks apart when it falls from the hands of the dying man, but the snow that it contained seems to come towards us in gusts to impregnate the environment [milieux] that we will discover. We do not know in advance if the virtual seed ('Rosebud') will be actualized, because we do not know in advance if the actual environment enjoys the corresponding virtuality. Perhaps this is also the perspective from which to understand the splendour of the images in Herzog's Heart of Glass, and the film's double aspect. The search for the alchemical heart and secret, for the red crystal, is inseparable from the search for cosmic limits, as the highest tension of the spirit and the deepest level of reality. But the crystal's fire will have to connect with the whole range of manufacturing for the world, for its part to stop being a flat, amorphous environment which ends at the edge of a gulf, and to reveal infinite crystalline potentialities in itself ('the earth rises up from the waters, I see a new earth . . .').  In this film Herzog has set out the greatest crystal-images in the history of the cinema. There is an analogous attempt in Tarkovsky, continued from one film to the next, but always closed again: Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character (his mother, his wife), with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples (his mother and the child he was, his wife and the child he has). And the crystal turns on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environ­ment: what is Russia, what is Russia . . .? The seed seems to be frozen in these sodden, washed and heavily translucent images, with their sometimes bluish, sometimes brown surfaces, while the green environment seems, in the rain, to be unable to go beyond the condition of a liquid crystal which keeps its secret. Are we to believe that the soft planet Solaris gives a reply, and that it will reconcile the ocean and thought, the environment and the seed, at once designating the transparent face of the crystal (the rediscovered woman) and the crystallizable form of the universe (the rediscovered dwelling)? Solaris does not open up this optimism, and Stalker returns the environment to the opacity of an indeterminate zone, and the seed to the morbidity of some­thing aborting, a closed door. Tarkovsky's wash (the woman aIso washes her hair against a wet wall in Mirror), the rains that provide rhythm for each film, as intense as in Antonioni or Kurosawa, but with different functions, constantly bring us back lo the question: what burning bush, what fire, what soul, what sponge will staunch this earth? Serge Daney observed that, after Dovzhenko, certain Soviet film-makers (or those from eastern Europe like Zanussi) kept the taste for heavy materials and dense still lifes which were, in constrast, removed by the movement-image in western cinema.In the crystal-image there is this mutual search — blind and halting — of matter and spirit: beyond the movement-image, ‘in which we are still pious’.

The seed and the mirror are taken up yet again, the one in the work in process of being made, the other in the work reflected in the work. These two themes, which had run through all the other arts, had to affect cinema as well. Sometimes it is the film which is reflected in a theatre play, a show, a painting, or, better, a filmwithin the film; sometimes it is the film which takes itself as its object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made. And sometimes the two themes are quite distinct: in Eisenstein, the montage of attractions already produced images in the mirror; in Last Year in Marienbad  by Resnais  by Renais  and  Robbe-Grillet, the two big theatre scenes are images in a mirror (and the entire Marienbad hotel is a pure crystal, with its transparent side, its opaque side and their exchange). In contrast, Fellini's 8 1/2 is a seed-image, in process of being produced, which feeds on its setbacks (except perhaps in the big scene with the telepath which introduces a mirror-image). Wenders's The State of Things is all the more in seed-form because' it aborts, becomes dispersed and can be reflected only in the reasons which block it. Buster Keaton, who is sometimes presented as a genius without reflection, is perhaps the first along with Vertov to have introduced the film within the film. In Sherlock Junior, this is in the form of a mirror-image; on another occasion, in The Cameraman, it is in the form of a seed which arrives directly via the cinema, even though manipulated by a monkey or a reporter, and constitutes the film in process of being made. Sometimes, on the other hand, in the manner of Gide's Counterfeiters, the two themes or the two cases cross and join up, becoming indistinguishable. In Godard's Passion, the pic­torial and musical tableaux vivants are in the process of being produced; at the same time the female worker, the wife and the boss are the mirror-image of what, nevertheless, reflects them themselves. In Rivette, theatrical representation is a mirror-image but, precisely because it is constantly failing, is the seed of that which does not manage to come to completion or to be reflected, hence the very odd role of the rehearsals of Pericles in Paris Belongs to Us, or Phaedra in L'amourfou. Yet another form appears in Welles's Immortal Story: the whole film was the mirror-image of a legend staged again by the old man, but at the same time stood on its own terms as the initial occasion which would make the legend itself germinate and give it back to the sea.

It was inevitable that the cinema, in the crises of the action-image, went through melancholic Hegelian reflections on its own death: having no more stories to tell, it would take itself as object and would be able to tell only its own story (Wenders). But, in fact, the work in the mirror and the work in the seed have always accompanied art without ever exhausting it, because art found in them a means of creation for certain special images. By the same token, the film within the film does not signal an end of history, and is no more self-sufficient than is the flashback or the dream: it is just a method of working, which must be justified from elsewhere. In fact, it is a mode of the crystal-image. If this mode is used, then it has to be grounded on considerations capable of giving it a higher justification. It will be observed that, in all the arts, the work within the work has often been linked to the consideration of a surveillance, an investigation, a revenge, a conspiracy, or a plot. This was already true for the theatre in the theatre of Hamlet, but also for the novel of Gide. We have seen the importance that this theme of the conspiracy takes on in the cinema, with the crisis of the action-image; and it is not only in Rivette - an irresistible atmosphere of conspiracy spreads through Last Year in Marienbad. Yet all this would only constitute a perspective of very secondary importance if the cinema did not have the most powerful reasons for giving it new and specific depth. The cinema as art itself lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot [complot], an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. The only rejoinder to the harsh law of cinema - a minute of image which costs a day of collective work - is Fellini's: 'When there is no more money left, the film will be finished.' Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film. This is the true 'state of things': it is not in a goal of cinema, as Wenders says, but rather, as he shows, in a constitutive relation between the film in process of being made and money as the totality of the film. Wenders, in The State of Things, shows the deserted, run-down hotel, and the film crew, each of whom returns to his solitude, victim of a plot whose key is elsewhere; and this key is revealed in the second half of the film as the other side, the mobile home of the producer on the run who is going to get himself murdered, causing the death of the film-maker, in such a way as to make plain that there is not, and there never will be, equivalence or equality in the mutual camera-money exchange.

This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy  of unequal  change  or  the  impossibility  of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money: in Marx's two formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange. Godard presented Passion as posing precisely this problem of exchange. And if Wenders, as we saw in the case of his first films, treated the camera as the general equivalent of all movement of translation, he discovers in The State of Things the impossibility of a camera-time equivalence, time being money or the circulation of money. L'Herbier had said it all, in an astonishing and mocking lecture: space and time becoming more and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time as 'imaginary warrants of human capital'.This was not the explicit theme of the masterpiece Money, but it was its implicit theme (and in a film of the same title, inspired by Tolstoy, Bresson shows that money, because it is of the order of time, makes impossible any reparation for evil done, any equivalence or just retribution, except of course through grace). In short, the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation. What the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money, this inflation which time puts into the exchange, this 'overwhelming rise'. The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time. The crystal-image thus receives the principle which is its foundation: endlessly relaunching exchange which is dissymmetrical, unequal and without equivalence, giving image for money, giving time for images, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end. And the film will be finished when there is no more money left...

The crystal-image may well have many distinct elements, but its irreducibility consists in the indivisible unity of an actual image and 'its' virtual image. But what is this virtual image in coalescence with the actual one? What is a mutual image? Bergson constantly posed the question and sought the reply in time's abyss. What is actual is always a present. But then, precisely, the present changes or passes. We can always say that it becomes past when it no longer is, when a new present replaces it. But this is meaningless. It is clearly necessary for it to pass on for the new present to arrive, and it is clearly necessary for it to pass at the same time as it is present, at the moment that it is the present. Thus the image has to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it was not already past at the same time as present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. According to Bergson, 'paramnesia' (the illusion of déjà-vu or already having been there) simply makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor. 'Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other... Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into percep­tion and recollection ... will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.’

Bergson calls the virtual image 'pure recollection', the better to distinguish it from mental images - recollection-images, dream or dreaming — with which it might be readily confused. In fact, the latter are certainly virtual images, but actualized or in the course of actualization in consciousnesses or psychological states. And they are necessarily actualized in relation to a new present, in relation to a different present from the one that they have been: hence these more or less broad circuits, evoking mental images in accordance with the requirements of the new present which is defined as later than the former one, and which defines the former one as earlier according to a law of chronological succession (the recollection-image will thus be dated). In contrast, the virtual image in the pure state is defined, not in accordance with a new present in relation to which it would be (relatively) past, but in accordance with the actual present of which it is the past, absolutely and simultaneously: although it is specific it is none the less part of 'the past in general', in the sense that it has not yet received a date.’ As pure virtuality, it does not have to be actualized, since it is strictly correlative with the actual image with which it forms the smallest circuit which serves as base or point forall the others. It is the virtual image which corresponds to a particular actual image, instead of being actualized, of having to be actualized in a different actual image. It is an actual-virtual circuit on the spot, and not an actualization of the virtual in accordance with a shifting actual. It is a crystal-image, and not an organic image.

The virtual image (pure recollection) is not a psychological state or a consciousness: it exists outside of consciousness, in time, and we should have no more difficulty in admitting the virtual insistence of pure recollections in time than we do for the actual existence of non-perceived objects in space. What causes our mistake is that recollection-images, and even dream-images or dreaming, haunt a consciousness which necessarily accords them a capricious or intermittent allure, since they are actualized according to the momentary needs of this consciousness. But, if we ask where consciousness is going to look for these recollection-images and these dream-images or this reverie that it evokes, according to its states, we are led back to pure virtual images of which the latter are only modes or degrees of actualization. Just as we perceive things in the place where they are, and have to place ourselves among things in order to perceive them, we go to look for recollection in the place where it is, we have to place ourselves with a leap into the past in general, into these purely virtual images which have been constantly preserved through time. It is in the past as it is in itself, as it is preserved in itself, that we go to look for our dreams or our recollections, and not the opposite.  It is only on this condition that the recollection-image will carry the sign of the past which distinguishes it from a different image, or the dream-image, the distinctive sign of a temporal perspec­tive: they exhaust the sign in an 'original virtuality’. This is why, earlier, we were able to assimilate virtual images to mental images, recollection-images, dream or dreaming: these were so many incomplete solutions, but on the track of the right solution. The more or less broad, always relative, circuits, between the present and the past, refer back, on the one hand, to a small internal circuit between a present and its own past, between an actual image and its virtual image; on the other hand, they refer to deeper and deeper circuits which are themselves virtual, which each time mobilize the whole of the past, but in which the relative circuits bathe or plunge to trace an actual shape and bring in their provisional harvest. The crystal-image has these two aspects: internal limit of all the relative circuits, but also outer-most variable and reshapable envelope, at the edges of the world, beyond even moments of world. The little crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe: everything is included in the capacity for expansion of the collection constituted by the seed and the universe. Memories, dreams, even worlds are only apparent relative circuits which depend on the variations of this Whole. They are degrees or modes of actualization which are spread out between these two extremes of the actual and the virtual: the actual and its virtual on the small circuit, expanding virtualities m the deep circuits. And it is from the inside that the small internal circuit makes contact with the deep ones, directly, through the merely relative circuits.

What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.  Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal. The crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal. We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time, Cronos and not Chronos. This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world.  The visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting. Except, Bergson adds, this splitting never goes right to the end. In fact the crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and which is the other. This is unequal exchange, or the point of indiscernibility, the mutual image. The crystal always lives at the limit, it is itself the 'vanishing limit between the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet... mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection1. What we see in the crystal is therefore a dividing in two that the crystal itself constantly causes to turn on itself, that it prevents from reachingcompletion, because it is a perpetual self-distinguishing, a distinc­tion in the process of being produced; which always resumes the distinct terms in itself, in order constantly to relaunch them. 'The putting into abyss [mise-en-abyme] does not redouble the unit, as an external reflection might do; in so far as it is an internal mirroring, it can only ever split it in two', and subject it 'to the infinite relaunch of endlessly new splitting’. The crystal-image is, then, the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself. So there will be different states of the crystal, depending on the acts of its formation and the figures of what we see in it. We analysed earlier the elements of the crystal, but not the crystalline states; each of these states we can now call crystal of time.

Bergson's major theses on time are as follows: the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved. Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life. And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset. But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a common­place, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change. Bergson is much closer to Kant than he himself thinks: Kant defined time as the form of interiority, in the sense that we are internal to time (but Bergson conceives this form quite differently from Kant). In the novel, it is Proust who says that time is not internal to us, but that we are internal to time, which divides itself in two, which loses itself and discovers itself in itself, which makes the present pass and the past be preserved. In the cinema, there are perhaps three films which show how we inhabit time, how we move in it, in this form which carries us away, picks us up and enlarges us: Dovzhenko's Zvenigora, Hitchock's Vertigo and Renais’ Je t'aime je t’aime. In Resnais' film, the opaque hyper-sphere is one of the most beautiful crystal-images, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, the gushing forth of time. Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul

or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, 'the affection of self by self as definition of time.

Let us suppose an ideal state which would be the perfect, completed crystal. Ophiils's images are perfect crystals. Their facets are oblique mirrors, as in Madame de… And the mirrors are not content with reflecting the actual image, but constitute the prism, the lens where the split image constantly runs after itself to connect up with itself, as on the circus-track in Lola Montez. On the track or in the crystal, the imprisoned characters bustle, acting and acted on, a bit like Raymond Roussel's heroes exercising their prowess at the heart of a diamond or a glass cage, under an iridescent light (The Tender Enemy). One can only just turn in the crystal: hence the round of episodes, and also of colours (Lola Montez), of waltzes and also of earrings (Madame de…), of the master of ceremonies' visions in the round in La ronde. Crystalline perfection lets no outside subsist: there is no outside of the mirror or the film set, but only an obverse where the characters who disappear or die go, abandoned by life which thrusts itself back into the film set. In House of Pleasure, the tearing-off of the old dancer's mask reveals no outside but an obverse which sends and guides the busy doctor back to the ball. And, even in his tender and familiar asides, the pitiless M. Loyal in Lola Montez keeps on thrusting the failing heroine back on the stage. If we consider the relations between theatre and cinema in general, we no longer find ourselves in the classical situation where the two arts are two different ways of actualizing the same virtual image, but neither do we find ourselves in the situation of a 'montage of attraction', where a theatrical spectacle (or a circus, etc.), being filmed, itself plays the role of a virtual image which would serve to extend the actual images by succeeding them for a time, during a sequence. The situation is quite different: the actual image and the virtual image coexist and crystallize; they enter into a circuit which brings us constantly back from one to the other; they form one and the same 'scene' where the characters belong to the real andyet play a role. In short, it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacle, in accordance with the demands of a pure optical and sound perception. The scene, then, is not restricted to providing a sequence but becomes the cinematographic unity which replaces the shot or itself consti­tutes a sequence shot. It is a properly cinematographic theatri­cality, the 'excess of theatricality' that Bazin spoke of, and that only cinema can give to theatre.

Its origin would perhaps be Tod Browning's masterpieces. At any event, Ophüls's monsters do not really need a monstrous appearance. They pursue their round in frozen and iced images. And what do we see in the perfect crystal? Time, but time which has already rolled up, rounded itself, at the same time as it was splitting. Lola Montez can include flashbacks: the film would be enough to confirm, if it were necessary, the degree to which the flashback is a secondary procedure whose value arises only from serving a deeper move. For what counts is not the link between the actual and miserable present (the circus) and the recollection-image of former magnificent presents. The evocation is certainly there; but what it reveals at a deeper level is the dividing in two of time, which makes all the presents pass and makes them tend towards the circus as if towards their future, but also preserves all the pasts and puts them into the circus as so many virtual images in pure recollections. Lola Montez herself experiences the vertigo of this dividing in two when, drunk and feverish, she is about to throw herself from the top of the marquee into the tiny net which is waiting for her below: the whole scene is seen as in the lens of the pen-holder dear to Raymond Roussel. The dividing in two, the differentiation of the two images, actual and virtual, does not go to the limit, because the resulting circuit repeatedly takes us back from one kind to the other. There is only a vertigo, an oscillation.

In Renoir too, from The Little Match-Girl where the Christmas tree appears adorned with crystals, automata and living beings, objects and reflections enter into a circuit of coexistence and exchange which constitutes a 'theatricality in the pure state'.  And it is in The Golden Coach that this coexistence and exchange will be taken to their highest point, with the two sides of the camera or the image, the actual image and the virtual image. But what are we to say when the image ceases to be flat or double-faced, and depth of field adds a third side to it? It is depth of field, for example in La règle du jeu, which ensures a nesting of frames, a waterfall of mirrors, a system of rhymes between masters and valets, living beings and automata, theatre and reality, actual and virtual. It is depth of field which Substitutes the scene for the shot. We will be all the more hesitant to give it ihe role intended by Bazin, namely a pure function of reality. The function of depth is rather to constitute the image in crystal, and to absorb the real which thus passes as much into the virtual as into the actual. There is, however, a great difference between the crystals of Renoir and those of Ophüls. In Renoir, the crystal is never pure and perfect; it has a failing, a point of flight, a ‘flaw.’ It is always cracked  And this is what depth of field reveals: there is not simply 'a rolling-up of a round in the crystal; something is going to slip away in the background, in depth, through the third side or third dimension, through the crack. This was already true of the mirror in the flat image, as in The Golden Coach, but it was less visible, whilst depth makes it clear that the crystal is there so something can escape in it, in the background, through the background. La règle du jeu produces a coexistence of the actual image of men and the virtual image of beasts, the actual image of living beings and the virtual image of automata, the actual image of characters and the virtual image of their roles during the party, the actual image of the masters and their virtual image in the servants, the actual image of the servants and their virtual image in the masters. Everything is mirror-images, distributed in depth. But depth of field always arranges a background in the circuit through which somethingotn flee: the crack). It is interesting that a"number of answers have been" giverTto the question, who does not play [he rules of the game? Truffaut, for instance, says that it is the airman. Yet the airman remains locked into the crystal, prisoner of his role, and hides when the woman proposes thai he should escape with her. As Bamberger observed, the only character who is out ofline [hors règle], not allowed in the chateau and yet belonging to it, neither outside nor inside, but always in the background, is the gamekeeper, the only person who does not have a double or reflection. Bursting in, despite the prohibition, in pursuit of the poaching valet, mistakenly killing the airman, he is the one who breaks the circuit, who shatters the cracked crystal with rifle shots and causes its contents to escape.

La règle du jeuis one of Renoir's finest films, but it does not give us the key to the others. For it is pessimistic, and proceeds by violence. And it does violence first of all to Renoir's complete idea. This complete idea is that the crystal or the scene is not restricted to putting into circuit the actual image and the virtual image, and absorbing the real into a generalized theatre. Without recourse to violence, and through the development of an experimentation, something will come out of the crystal, a new Real will come out beyond the actual and virtual. Everything happens as if the circuit served to try out roles, as if roles were being tried in it until the right one were found, the one with which we escape to enter a clarified reality. In short, the circuit, the round, are not closed because they are selective, and produce a winner each time. Renoir has sometimes been criticized for his taste for the makeshift and improvisation, both in his direction in general, and in his directing of the actors. This is in fact a creative virtue, linked to the substitution of the scene for the shot. According to Renoir, theatre is inseparable - for both characters and actors - from the enterprise of experimenting with and selecting roles, until you find the one which goes beyond theatre and enters life.2" In his pessimistic moments, Renoir is doubtful that there can be a winner: in that case there are only the keeper's shots which make the crystal explode, as in La règle du jeu, or the turbulence of the river swollen by the storm and stung by the rain in A Day in the Country. But, following his temperament, Renoir bets on a win: something takes shape inside the crystal which will succeed in leaving through the crack and spreading freely. This was already the case with Boudu, who rediscovers the thread of water when he comes out of the intimate, closed-in theatre of the bookshop where he has tried many roles. It will be the case with Harriet in the grandiose film The River, where the children, sheltered in a kind of crystal or Hindu pavilion, try roles, some of which take a tragic turn, as a result of which the younger brother dies tragically, but in which the girl will serve her apprenticeship, until she finds in it the powerful will for life which becomes identified with the river and joins it again on the outside. A film strangely close to Lawrence. For Renoir, theatre is primary, but because life must emerge from it. Theatre is valuable only as a search for an art of living; this is what the disparate couple in Little Theatrelearn. 'Where then, does theatre finish and life begin?' remains the question always asked by Renoir. We are born in a crystal, but the crystal retains only death, and life must come out of it, after trying itself out. Even as an adult, the teacher in Picnic on the Grasswill experience this adventure. The wild dance at the end of French Cancan is not a round, a flowing-back of life into the circuit, into the theatrical scene, as in Ophüls, but, on the contrary,a gallop, a means by which theatre opens into life, pours out into life, carrying Nini along in a troubled stream. At the end of The Golden Coach, three characters will have found their living role, while Camilla will remain in the crystal, to try still other roles in it, one of which will perhaps make her discover the true Camilla.

This is why, although he fully shares the general taste of the French school for water, Renoir makes such a special use of it. There are, according to him, two states of water, the frozen water of the glass pane, the flat mirror, or the deep crystal, and the fast, flowing water (or the wind, which plays the same role in Picnic on the Grass). Rather than being naturalism, this is much closer to Maupassant, who often sees things through a pane, before following their course on a river. In A Day in the Country it is through the window that the two men observe the family arriving, each of the two playing his role, one that of the cynic, the other that of the scrupulous sentimentalist. But, when the action develops on the river, the test of life causes the roles to be dropped, and shows a good sort in the cynic, while the senti­mental one is revealed as an unscrupulous seducer.

What we see through the pane or in the crystal is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one by the next while going towards the future, but also of preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth. This dividing in two, this differentiation, did not achieve completion in Ophüls because time rolled itself up, and its two aspects relaunched themselves into the circuit whose poles they recharged while blocking up the future. Now, in contrast, the dividing in two can come to completion, but precisely on condition that one of the two tendencies leaves the crystal, through the point of flight. From the indiscernibility of the actual and the virtual, a new distinction must emerge, like a new reality which was not pre-existent. Everything* that has happened falls back into the crystal and stays there: this is all the frozen, fixed, finished-with and over-conforming roles that the characters have tried in turn, dead roles or roles of death, the macabre dance of recollections that Bergson speaks of, as in the chateau in La règle du jeu or the fortress in Grand Illusion. Some of these roles may be heroic, like 'the two enemy officers in pursuit of rites which are already outmoded, or charming, like the test of first love: they are none the less condemned, because already destined for recollection. And yet the trying out of roles is indispensable. It is indispensable so that the other tendency, that of presents which pass and arereplaced, emerges from the scene and launches itself towards a future, creates this future as a bursting forth of life. The two fugitives will be saved by the sacrifice of the other. Harriet will be saved because she will be able to renounce the role of her first love. Saved from the waters, Boudu will also be saved by the waters, abandoning the successive roles granted him by the too intimate dreams of the bookshop and his wife. One leaves the theatre to get to life, but one leaves it imperceptibly, on the thread of the stream, that is, of time. It is by leaving it that time gives itself a future. Hence the importance of the question: where does life begin? Time in the crystal is differentiated into two movements, but one of them takes charge of the future and freedom, provided that it leaves the crystal. Then the real will be created; at the same time as it escapes the eternal referral back of the actual and the virtual, the present and the past. When Sartre criticized Welles (and Citizen Kane) for having reconstituted time on the basis of the past, instead of understanding it in terms of a dimension of the future, he was perhaps unaware that the film-maker closest to his wishes was Renoir. It was Renoir who had a lively awareness of the identity of freedom with a collective or individual future, with a leap towards the future, an opening of the future. This is even Renoir's political consciousness, the way in which he conceives the French Revolution or the Popular Front.

There is perhaps yet a third state: the crystal-image caught in its formation and growth, related to the 'seeds' which make it up. In fact there is never a completed crystal; each crystal is infinite by right, in the process of being made, and is made with a seed which incorporates the environment and forces it to crystallize. The question is no longer that of knowing what comes out of the crystal and how, but, on the contrary, how to get into it. For each entrance is itself a crystalline seed, a component element. We recognize the method that will be increasingly adopted by Fellini. He began with films of wandering, which relaxed the sensory-motor connections, and made pure sound-and-optical images rise up — photo-novel, investigation-photo, music-hall, party. But the concerns were still those of escaping, leaving and going awav. He became increasingly concerned with entering into a new" element, and multiplying the entrances. There are geographical entrances, psychic ones, historical, archaelogical, etc: all the entrances into Rome, or into the world of clowns. Sometimes an entrance is explicitly double; thus the crossing of the Rubicon inFellini's Roma is a historical evocation, but a comical one, through the intermediary of a school memory. One could, for example, make a count of these entrances as so many types of image in 8 1/2: the childhood recollection, the nightmare, the distraction, the dreaming, the fantasy, the feeling of already having been there.3" Hence the honeycomb-presentation, the cubicled images, the huts, niches, cabins and windows which mark Satyricon, Juliet of the Spirits, and City of Women. Two things happen at once. On the one hand, purely optical and sound-images crystallize: they attract their contents, make them crystallize and compose them from an actual image and its virtual image, its mirror-image. These are so many seeds or entrances: in Fellini, numbers and amusements have replaced the scene, and made the depth of field redundant. But, on the other hand, by entering into coalescence the images constitute one and the same crystal in the course of infinite growth. For the crystal as a whole is only the ordered set of its seeds or the transversal of all its entrances.

Fellini has fully grasped the economic principle which says that only admission [entrée] pays. The only unity of Rome is that of the spectacle which connects all its entrances. The spectacle becomes universal, and keeps on growing, precisely because it has no object other than entrances into the spectacle, which are so many seeds in this respect. Amengual has given a profound definition of this originality of spectacle in Fellini, with no distinction between watching and watched, without spectators, without exit, without wings or stage: less a theatre than a kind of giant Luna Park, where movement, which has become movement of world, makes us pass from one shop-window to another, from one entrance to another through all the cubicles. Thus, we can see from this the difference between Fellini and Renoir or Ophüls: Fellini's crystal does not include any crack through which we could, we should, leave to reach life; but neither has it the perfection of an established and cut crystal which would hold life to freeze it. It is a crystal which is always in the process of formation, expansion, which makes everything it touches crystall­ize, and to which its seeds give a capacity for indefinite growth. It is life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity.

Does this mean that all entrances are equal? Yes, certainly, in so far as they are seeds. Of course seeds maintain the distinction that there was between the types of sound and optical images that they make crystallize - perceptions, recollections, dreams, fanta­sies…But these distinctions become indiscernible, because there is a homogeneity of seed and crystal, the whole of the latter being no more than a greater seed in the process of growth. But other differences are introduced, in so far as the crystal is an ordered set: certain seeds abort and others are successful; certain entrances open while others close again, as in the frescoes of Rome which turn blank on being looked at and become opaque. It is not possible to predict this, even if one has premonitions; nevertheless, a selection is made (although in a completely different way from in Renoir). Let us take the entrances or successive seeds in one of Fellini's masterpieces, The Clowns. The first, as often in Fellini, is the childhood memory; but it will crystallize with impressions of nightmare and poverty (the imbecile clown). The second entrance is the historical and sociological investigation with an interview of clowns: the clowns and the filmed locations enter into resonance with the crew in process of filming, and form another impasse. The third, the worst, is more archaeological, in the television archives. At least, it persuades us, at this point in our classification, that the imaginary counts for more than the archive (only, the imaginary can develop the seed). Then the fourth entrance is kinesthic: but it is not a movement-image which' represents a circus spectacle, it is a mirror-image which represents a movement of world, a de­personalized movement, and reflects the death of the circus in the death of the clown. It is the hallucinatory perception of the clown's death, the funeral gallop ('faster, faster') where the funeral carriage is transformed into a champagne bottle from which the clown pops. And this fourth entrance is in turn replugged, in the emptiness and silence, like at the end of a party. But an old clown, left behind at the fourth entrance (he was out of breath, the movement was going too fast), is going to open a fifth, purely of sound and music: with his trumpet he invoked his vanished companion, and the other trumpet replied. Across death it was like a 'beginning of world', a sound-crystal, the two trumpets each alone, and yet each a mirror, an echo…

The organization of the crystal is bipolar, or rather two-sided. In surrounding the seed, it sometimes passes on an acceleration, a hurrying, sometimes a hopping or fragmenting, which will constitute the opaque side of the crystal; and sometimes it gives it a limpidity which is like the test of the eternal. On one side would be written 'Saved!', and on the other 'Doomed!', in an apocalyptic landscape like the desert in Satyricon.  But we cannot tell in advance; an opaque side may even become limpid throughimperceptible transformation, and a limpid side be revealed as deceptive and become dark like Claudia in 8 1/2. Will everything be saved, as the final round in 8 1/2 leads us to believe, carrying along all the seeds around the white child? Will everything be lost, as in the mechancial starts and funerary fragmentations which lead to the woman-automaton in Casanova? It is never wholly one or wholly the other, and the opaque side of the crystal, for instance, the ship of death on the sea of plastic in Amarcord, also points to the other side which extricates itself and does not die, whilst the limpid side, like the rocket of the future in 8 1/2, waits for the seeds to come out of their honeycomb or their funerary haste to carry them off. In fact, the selection is so complex, and the imbrication so tight, that Fellini created a word, something like 'procadence', to indicate both the inexorable course of decadence and the possibility of freshness or creation which must accompany it (it is in this sense that he calls himself fully an 'accomplice' of decadence and ruination).

What we see in the crystal is always the bursting forth of life, of time, in its dividing in two differentiation. However, in opposition to Renoir, not only does nothing leave the crystal -since it keeps on and on growing - but it is as if the signs of selection are reversed. In Fellini, it is the present, the parade of presents that pass, which constitutes the danse macabre. They run, but to the tomb, not towards the future. Fellini is the author who was able to produce the most prodigious galleries of monsters: a tracking shot surveys them, stopping at one or another, but they are always caught in the present, birds of prey disturbed by the camera, diving into it for a moment. Salvation can come only from the other side, from the side of the pasts which are preserved: there, a Bxed shot isolates a character, takes him out of the line, and gives him, even if it is only for an instant, a chance which is in itself eternal, a virtuality which will be valid for ever even if it is not actualized. It is not that Fellini has a particular taste for memory and recollection-images: there is no cult of former presents in his work. It is in fact like in Péguy, where the horizontal succession of presents which pass outlines a route to death, whilst for every present there corresponds a vertical line which unites it at a deep level with its own past, as well as to the past of the other presents, constituting between them all one and the same coexistence, one and the same contemporaneity, the ‘in-ternal’ [internel] rather than the eternal. It is not in the recollection-image but in pure recollection that we remain contemporary with the child that we were as the believer feels himself contemporary with Christ. The child in us, says Fellini, is contemporary with the adult, the old man and the adolescent. Thus it is that the past which is preserved takes on all the virtues of beginning and beginning again: it is what holds in its depths or in its sides the surge of the new reality, the bursting forth of life. One of the finest images in Amarcord shows the group of schoolboys, the timid one, the prankster, the dreamer, the good pupil, etc., who meet in front of the big hotel as soon as the season is over; and, while the snow crystals fall, each on his own and yet all of them together sketch a clumsy dance-step or an imitation of a musical instrument, one going in a straight line, another tracing circles, another turning round on the spot. . . There is in this image a science of precisely measured distance which separates each of them from the others, and yet an organization which connects them. They lodge themselves in a depth which is no longer that of memory, but that of a coexistence where we become their contemporaries, as they become the contempora­ries of all the 'seasons' past and to come. The two aspects, the present that passes and goes to death, the past which is preserved and retains the seed of life, repeatedly interfere and cut into each other. It is the line of those taking the waters in a nightmare in 8'/s, but interrupted by the dream-image of the luminous girl, the white nurse who gives out the tumblers. Whatever the speed or the slowness, the line, the tracking shot is a race, a cavalcade, a gallop. But safety comes from a ritornello which is placed or unrolls round a face, and extracts it from the line. La Strada was already the quest for the moment when the wandering ritornello could settle on the man who is finally at peace. And on whom will the ritornello place itself, calming the anxiety in 8 1/2, on Claudia, on the wife, or even on the mistress, or only on the white child, the internal [internel] or contemporary of all the pasts, who saves everything that can be saved?

The crystal-image is as much a matter of sound as it is optical, and Félix Guattari was right to define the crystal of time as being a ‘ritornello’ par excellence. Or perhaps, the melodic ritornello is only a musical component which contrasts and is mixed with another, rhythmic component: the gallop. The horse and the bird would be two great figures, one of which carries away and speeds up the other, but the other of which is reborn from itself up to the final destruction or extinction (in many dances, an accelerated gallop comes as the conclusion of figures of rounds). The gallop and the ritornello are what we hear in the crystal, as the two dimensions of musical time, the one being the hastening of the presents which are passing, the other the raising or falling back of pasts which are preserved. Now, if we consider the problem of a specificity of cinema music, it seems to us that this specificity cannot simply be defined by a dialectic of the sound and the optical which would enter into a new synthesis (Kisen-stein, Adorno). Cinema music, through itself, tends towards releasing the ritornello and the gallop as two pure and self-sufficient elements, while many other components necessarily intervene in music in general, except in exceptional cases such as the Bolero. This is already true in the Western, where the little melodic phrase comes as the interruption of galloping rhythms (Blowing Wild by Zinnemann and Tiomkin); it is even more obvious in musical comedy, where .the rhythmic stepping and walking, which is sometimes military even for the girls, come up against the melodic song. But the two elements are also combined as in Daybreak by Carne and Jaubert, where the basses and the percussion give the rhythm while the little (lute launches the melody. In Gremillon, one of the cinema's most musician-like authors, the gallop of the farandolcs returns us back to the repeat of the ritornellos, the two separated or brought together (Roland-Manuel). It is these tendencies that achieve perfect expression when the cinematographic image becomes crystal-image. In Ophüls, the two elements fuse in the identification of the round with the gallop, while in Renoir and Fellini they are distinct, one of them taking on to itself the force of life, the other the power of death. But, for Renoir, the force of life is on the side of the presents which are launched towards the future, on the side of the gallop, whether this is that of the French cancan or the Marseillaise, whilst the ritornello has the melancholy of that which is already falling back into the past. For Fellini, it seems to be the opposite: the gallop accompanies the world which runs to its end, the earthquake, the incredible entropy, the hearse, but the ritornello immortalizes a beginning of world and removes it from passing time.  The galloping of the circus clowns and the ritornello of the ordinary clowns. Again things are never that simple, and there is something unascribable in the distinction of ritornellos from gallops. It is this that makes the collaboration between Fellini and the musician Nino Rota extraordinary. At the end of Orchestra Rehearsals, we first hear the purest gallop from the violins, but a ritornello rises imperceptibly to succeed it, until the two intertwine with one another more and more closely, throttling themselves like wrestlers, lost-saved, lost-saved . . .The two musical movements become the object of the film, and time itself becomes a thing of sound.

The final state to be considered would be the crystal in the process of decomposition.  The work of Visconti shows this. This work reached its perfection when Visconti was able both to distinguish and put into play, in varying combinations, four fundamental elements which haunted him. In the first place, the aristocratic world of the rich, the aristocratic former-rich: this is what is crystalline, but like a synthetic crystal, because it is outside history and nature, outside divine creation. The abbot in The Leopard will explain it: we do not understand these rich, because they have created a world to themselves, whose laws we are unable to grasp, and where what seems to us secondary or even inopportune takes on an extraordinary urgency and importance; their motives always escape us like rites whose religion is not known (as in the old prince who gets his country hack and orders a picnic). This world is not that of the creative artist, even though Death in Venice presents a musician, but precisely one whose work has been too intellectual and cerebral. Nor is it a world of simple art enthusiasts. Rather, they are surrounded by art; they are profoundly 'knowledgeable about' art both as works and as life, but it is this knowledge which separates them from life and creation, as in the teacher in Conversation Piece. They demand freedom, but a freedom which they enjoy like an empty privilege which could come to them from elsewhere, from the forebears from whom they are descended, and from the art by which they are surrounded. Ludwig II wants 'to prove his freedom, whilst the true creator, Wagner, is of another race, much more prosaic and less abstract in reality. Ludwig II wants roles and more roles, like those that he tears from the exhausted actor. The king orders his deserted castles, as the prince his picnic, in a movement which empties art and life of all interiority. Visconti's genius culminates in the great scenes or compositions, often in red and gold: opera in Senso, reception rooms in The Leopard, Munich castle in Ludwig, grand hotel rooms in Venice and music-room in The Innocent: crystalline images of an aristocratic world. But, in the second place, these crystalline environments are inseparable from a process ol decomposition which eats away at them from within, and makes them dark and opaque: the rotting of Ludwig II's teeth, family rot which takes over the teacher in Conversation Piece, the debasement of Ludwig II’s love-affairs; and incest everywhere as in the Bavarian family, the return of Sandra, the abomination of The Damned; everywhere the thirst for murder and suicide, or the need for forgetting and death, as the old prince says on behalf of the whole Sicily.  It is not just that these aristocrats are on the brink of being ruined; the approaching ruin is only a consequence.  For it is a vanished past, but one which survives in the artificial crystal, which is waiting for them, absorbing them and snapping them up, taking away all their power at the same time as they become lodged in it.  Thus the famous tracking shot with which Sandra opens: this is not deplacement in space but sinking into time without exit.  Visconti’s great compositions have a saturation which determines their darkening.  Everything becomes confused, to the point of indescernibility of the two women in The Innocent.  In Ludwig, in The Damned, the crystal is inseparable from the process of making opaque which now makes triumphant the bluish, violet and sepulchral shades, those of the moon as twilight of the gods or lost kingdom of heroes (the sun-moon movement thus has a completely different value than in German expressionism, and especially in the French school).

The third element in Visconti is history.  Because, of course, it doubles decomposition, accelerates or even explains it: wars, assumption of power by new forces, the rise of the new rich, who are not interested in penetrating the secret lawas of the old world, but aim to make it disappear.  However, history is not identical with the internal decomposition of the crystal; it is an autonomous factor which stands on its own, and to which Visconti sometimes dedicates marvelous images and sometimes grants a presence which is all the more intense for being elliptical and out-of-field.  In Ludwig, very little history will be seen; we know about the horrors of war and Prussia’s assumption of power only indirectly, all the more so, perhaps, because Ludwig II wants to know nothing about it.  History growls at the door.  In Senso, in contrast, history is present, with the Italian movement, the famous battle and the abrupt elimination of Garibaldi’s supporters; or, in The Damned, with the rise of Hitler, the organizations of the SS, and the exterminations of the SA.  But, present or out-of-field, history is never scenery.  It is caught obliquely in a low-angled perspective in a rising or setting ray, a kind of laser which comes and cuts into the crystal, disorganized it’s substance, hastens its darkening and disperses its sides, under a pressure that is all the more powerful for being external, like the plague in Venice, or the silent arrival of the SS at dawn…

And then there is the fourth element, the most important in Visconti, because it ensures the unity and circulation of the others. This is the idea, or rather the revelation, that something arrives too late. Caught in time, this could perhaps have avoided the natural decomposition and historical dismantling of the crystal-image. But it is history, and nature itself, the structure of the crystal, which make it impossible for this to arrive in time.  Already in Senso, the distraught lover cried ‘Too late, too late’, too late in relation to the history that divides us but also because of our nature, as rotten in you as in me.  The prince, in The Leopard, hears the 'too late’ which spreads through the whole of Sicily: the island, whose sea Visconti never shows, is so completely embedded in the past of its nature and history that even the new regime will be powerless to do anything for it. 'Too late" will constantly be the rhythm of the images in Ludwig, because it is his fate. This something that comes too late is always the perceptual and sensual revelation of the unity of nature and man. Thus it is not a simple lack; it is the mode of being of this grandiose revelation. The 'too-late' is not an accident that takes place in time but a dimension of time itself. As a dimension of time, it is, through the crystal, the one which is opposed to the static dimension of the past as this survives and weighs in the interior of the crystal. It is a sublime clarity which is opposed to the opaque, but it has the property of arriving too late, dynamically. As perceptible revel­ation, the too-late is a matter of unity of nature and man, as world or milieu. But, as sensual revelation, the unity becomes personal. Thus the shattering revelation of the musician in Death in Venice, when through the young boy he has a vision of what has been lacking in his work: sensual beauty. It is the unbearable revelation of the teacher in Conversation Piece, when lie discovers a petty criminal in the young man, his lover in nature and his son in culture. Already in Obsession, Visconti's first film, the possibility of homosexuality arose as the chance of salvation, of escaping from a stifling past, but too late. However, let us not think that homosexuality is Visconti's obsession. Amongst the finest of the The Leopard's images is the one where the old prince, having given approval for the love-match between his nephew and the daughter of the nouveau riche, to save what can be saved, has a revelation in a dance with the girl: their glances embrace; they are for each other and at each other, while the nephew is pushed into the background, himself fascinated and nullified by the grandeur of this couple, but it is too late for the old man and the girl alike.

Visconti is not in control of the four elements right from the beginning of his work: often they are still difficult to distinguish, or encroach on each other. But Visconti is searching and has a foreboding.  It has often been observed that the fishermen The Earth Trembles present a slowness, a hieratic quality which was the sign of a natural aristocracy, in contrast to the nouveaux riches; and, if the fishermen's attempt fails, it is not just because of the wholesalers, but because of the weight of an archaic past which ensures that their project is too late. Rocco himself is not just a 'saint'; he is an aristocrat by nature, in his family of poor peasants: but too late to come back to the village, because the city is already totally corrupt, because everything has become opaque and because history has already brought change to the village… But it seems lo us that it is in The Leopard that Visconti achieves complete control, as it were in harmony of his four elements. The searing too-late becomes as intense as the 'Nevermore' of Edgar Allan Poe; it also explains the direction Visconti would have been able to take in translating Proust.  And Visconti's pleas cannot be reduced to his apparent aristocratic pessimism: the work of art, and conditions its success, since the perceptible and sensual unity of nature and man is the essence of art par excellence, in so far as it is characteristic of it to arrive too late in all other respects expect precisely this one:  time regained.  As Baroncelli put it, the Beautiful truly becomes a dimension in Visconti; it ‘plays the role of the fourth dimension’.  […]