This paper focuses on the question of the possibility of revolutionary cinema, posed by Walter Benjamin in his ground-breaking paper "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and responded by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, a sequel to Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. In his 1935 essay, Benjamin affirmed tcchnologically mediated mass culture and its political potential. He proposed that the concepts introduced into the theory of art in the age of mechanical reproduction are "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism" and "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands." However, the essay"s 1936 postscript reverses some of its fanner hopefulness, observing that the technological reproduction that had aestheticized everyday life had also aestheticized politics, which lead to mise-en-scene of masses by fascism.<BR> Deleuze recapitulates this question by opposing the movement-image to the time-image. According to him, the revolutionary courtship of the movement-image and an art of the masses as subject was broken off, giving way to the masses subjected and to their leader like Hitler. The movement-image as the bond that cinema had introduced between movement and image from the outset, would have to be abandoned, in order to set free other powers called the time-image.<BR> The time-image has two chronosigns which mark the various presentations of the direct time-image. The first concerns the order of time. This order is not made up of succession, which means it is non-chronological. The first chronosign has two figures: the coexistence of all the sheets of past and the simultaneity of points of present. There is still another type of chronosign which constitutes time as series. This second type of chronosign has also the property of bringing into question the notion of truth. The false achieves the power of becoming which constitutes series, which develops an act of legend, of story-telling. In the third world, authors trapped in the post-colonial condition constitute cinema of minorities where making legend and story-telling show the possibility of modern political cinema.
(0)
(0)