RESEARCH CHAPTER 03
How memory searches the past and the present forks
Sheets and peaks are two different chronosigns: recollection searches a virtually preserved past for a sheet, while peaks let incompossible presents each persist in its own right.
Central question
If recollection does not retrieve a stored fact, how does cinema select, change, or fail among sheets of the past that coexist with the present?
Questions still open
- How do the repeated returns in Je t'aime, je t'aime and the multiple recollections in Citizen Kane differently alter the relation between past and present?
Argument and analysis
Sheets and peaks are two different chronosigns: recollection searches a virtually preserved past for a sheet, while peaks let incompossible presents each persist in its own right.
Citizen Kane sends each witness into a different sheet of the past, yet no sheet totals Kane. Hiroshima mon amour and Je t’aime, je t’aime likewise make recollection a directed but fallible search: the former repeatedly actualizes the past of Nevers within the present of Hiroshima, while the latter's memory machine repeatedly drops back into one stretch of a life without recovering its whole. Last Year at Marienbad cannot be assigned wholesale to sheets of the past: versions in which the encounter happened, never happened, or is happening persist as incompossible peaks of present. The two chronosigns can adjoin within one film, but they cannot substitute for one another.
First ask whether recollection selects a sheet of the past. If no common past is available for search, ask which versions of the present each persist yet remain incompossible. Record the direction and failure of the search separately from the consequences of each version.
Scope
Editorial synthesis: the pure past and sheets of the past have Bergson-Deleuze grounding; the film comparison and the phrase 'the present loses sovereignty over history' are atlas interpretations.
- Chinese manuscript locator
- Bearing Time Chinese DOCX, paragraphs 274–448.
References
- 01
CHINESE RESEARCH MANUSCRIPT
Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
The complete Chinese chapter and its bibliography.
- Locator
- DOCX paragraphs 274–448
- 02
PRIMARY TEXT
Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image primary editions
Provides the film-philosophical coordinates for sheets of the past, peaks of the present, and recollection as search.
- Locator
- Cinema 2 English translation, approximately pp. 98–125; the key account of sheets of the past begins at pp. 98–99.
- Note
- This page uses short paraphrases and edition navigation rather than reproducing the book; Chinese display propositions are not verbatim Deleuze quotations.
- 03
SCHOLARSHIP
D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine
Explains the relation between the time-image, recollection, and nonchronological past.
- Locator
- D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997).
- Note
- Atlas entry: bilingual chapter guide and edition bibliography.
- 04
ATLAS ANALYSIS
Deleuze time-image film catalogue
Compares action, memory, sound, and media material across films.
- Locator
- The corresponding film entries in the Deleuze time-image film catalogue.
Films and concepts
Concepts and terms · 2
- 01
- 02
Films and viewing entries · 2
- 01
- 02
Counterexamples and limits
If nonlinear recollection is finally corrected by one causal timeline and serves only to reveal a single truth, disrupted chronology does not establish the coexistence of sheets of the past.
Further reading
The crystal-image keeps actual and virtual distinct while making them exchange places in a minimal circuit.
06Archives preserve materials while later history changes their evidentiary meaningAn archive’s temporality comes from the institutional chain of filming, naming, classifying, storing, accessing, and reusing.
10How unnamed, unreturned, and unaccounted-for deaths organize the presentThe dead continue to organize the living’s time; a corpse, funeral, or ghost does not automatically make a death-image.