RESEARCH CHAPTER 04
How format, wear, and bodies make media carry history
Wear, format, resolution, architecture, and the performer’s body let time settle inside the material of the medium.
Central question
When do wear, format, architecture, and the performer's body cease to be signs of age and begin to alter what the image makes visible and how it can be seen?
Questions still open
- In each film, does the material difference arise from capture, preservation, restoration, projection, or platform transcoding, and how should those layers be separated?
Argument and analysis
Wear, format, resolution, architecture, and the performer’s body let time settle inside the material of the medium.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Caught by the Tides, and Dry Leaf turn media ageing from a nostalgic theme into a mechanism that organizes the image. Low resolution is not automatically truthful, and an old format is not automatically resistant; the material change must alter visible relations and the viewer’s task.
Track format changes, image damage, demolition, and bodily ageing: do they continue to produce differences in later shots?
Scope
Hypothesis: 'media-body crystal' is an atlas working term for testing material change, not a concept already named by Deleuze.
- Chinese manuscript locator
- Bearing Time Chinese DOCX, paragraphs 453–512.
References
- 01
CHINESE RESEARCH MANUSCRIPT
Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
The complete Chinese chapter and its bibliography.
- Locator
- DOCX paragraphs 453–512
- 02
SCHOLARSHIP
Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory
Provides secondary context for photography, cinema, memory, and the crystal; it does not establish the atlas working term 'media-body crystal'.
- Locator
- Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory (2009).
- Note
- Atlas entry: chapter guide and edition bibliography.
- 03
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 · 1
- 01
Films and viewing entries · 3
- 01
- 02
- 03
Dry Leaf · Alexandre Koberidze · 2025 · New York Film Festival film notes
Counterexamples and limits
If low resolution, grain, or a retro filter can be exchanged for another surface style without altering shot relations, it is an aesthetic choice rather than evidence that media material carries time.
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.
12How images not grounded in a single capture reorganize the sources of timeGenerative models rewrite photography’s ‘that-has-been’ as a statistical past of training data, weights, and prompts.