Correspondences: cine-dialogues in time

Submission note: This thesis is submitted in total requirement for a Masters by Research to the Department of Creative Arts and English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria.

This thesis looks at Deleuze’s concept of modern cinema as a cinema of time in conjunction with his later work on the discipline of art, developed with Félix Guattari in their 1991 book What is Philosophy? In his two cinema books, Deleuze thinks of cinema in evolutionary terms, and sees modern cinema as a continuing project. This sits in contrast to cinema theorists who see cinematic modernism as a particular historic period (spanning 1960s-late1970s). As Deleuze’s books were written in the 1980s, many examples he uses are the same as those used by theorists who see modernism as a specific period. However, even though he does not write specifically about cinema again, he continues to develop these ideas through his and Guattari’s concept of the discipline of art. Specifically, this thesis identifies similarities between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of chaos (the infinite) and Deleuze’s notion of time (influenced by Henri Bergson). It looks at earlier incarnations of the idea of chaos found in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work on cinema and in Bergson’s concept of disorder. The thesis argues that these concepts illuminate a contemporary example of modern cinema: Correspondences. Between 2006-2012 the Contemporary Cultural Centre in Barcelona (CCCB) commissioned a set of six filmmakers to correspond via cinematic letters. The project began with a cinedialogue between filmmakers Victor Erice and Abbas Kiaorastami. After the success of the first exhibition in 2006, Correspondences developed further to include another five pairs of filmmakers: José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas, Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso, Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawasi, Jaime Rosales and Wang Bing, and Fernando Eimbcke and So Yong Kim.