Sensory-Motor Rupture: How a Character Becomes a Seer

The archaeological procedure at Pompeii succeeds: casting, clearing, and identification make two bodies visible. Katherine cannot extend what she sees into an act capable of treating her marriage. The more exact the technical operation, the clearer the inadequacy of personal action.[1, ch. 1, p. 2]

In the final movement of Germany Year Zero, Edmund keeps walking, stopping, picking up, looking, and climbing. Each movement is completed, yet none repairs his father's death, restores the family, or opens a next step. The atlas therefore judges that movement remains while its extensible bond with the world disappears. Deleuze on page 2 places the child in the seer lineage only by saying that he ‘dies from what he sees’; Marrati on pages 56–57 discusses the final wandering through Bazin. Neither source performs this shot-by-shot action analysis for the atlas.[1, p. 2][3, pp. 56–57]

In Europa '51, machines, workers, rollers, and passages are no longer unified by the use ‘workplace’ into one recognized object. When Irene later says that she thought she saw prisoners, she is not comparing the factory to a prison: Deleuze stresses that a few audio-visual features send the same object through another circuit and open a mental vision. The character does not cease all action; she begins to see relations that use does not exhaust.[1, ch. 1, pp. 2, 20–21; ch. 3, pp. 45–46][4, pp. 107–113]

Marrati locates the postwar turn in a changed relation between image and action: reality no longer appears as a situation to be mastered, and seeing acquires autonomous value. The seer is produced by the situation rather than predetermined by a passive character type.[3, pp. 57–61]

Germany Year Zero's ending leaves children's play, traffic, church, and ruined buildings within Edmund's continuing wandering; the immediate past of his father's death is not converted by the route into a reparative task. Earlier, a recorded political speech crosses the ruined Chancellery. The atlas reads these two passages together as the double pressure of historical and immediate past upon the final present. Deleuze on page 2 says only that the child ‘dies from what he sees’; page 3 gives the general formula linking motor helplessness to greater visual and auditory capacity. Neither passage develops the atlas's three-tense cross-reading.[1, ch. 1, pp. 2–3]

Tropical Malady is not a film discussed in Cinema 2. The atlas treats the photographs, blackout, tiger image, near-silence, and nocturnal forest opening around the second title sequence as a cross-period test. The title break alone establishes only a reset of viewing conditions: the continuity of the first half's romantic actions stops there. Whether a seer structure forms must still be tested throughout the ensuing night forest by asking if sound, occlusion, and bodily movement persistently refuse coordinates for a next action. Only then may the criterion transfer; this is an atlas inference, not Deleuze's judgment on the film.[1, ch. 1, pp. 2–5][4, pp. 107–113]

Chapter 9 of Cinema 2 moves audio-visual relations away from an action centre: sound can leave the visible mouth, and the image can refuse to illustrate sound.[1, Chapter 9, pp. 251–261; chapter 10, pp. 262–265]

For the atlas shot log, first list the space, body, and absence supplied by the image separately from the source, duration, and history supplied by sound. This is an atlas method, not a sentence attributed to Cinema 2.

India Song's voices preserve a relational history that no visible body can authenticate, while Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach makes score, hands, instruments, and documentary time enter the same act of viewing. Both films remind us that a sonsign is not a synonym for voice-over and an opsign is not a synonym for an empty shot; the criterion is whether each changes the temporal position of viewing.[4, Sections on ‘Opsigns’ and the sound-image, pp. 107–118, 165–177]