Taste of Cherry
DIRECTED BY Abbas Kiarostami
(Abbas Kiarostomi Productions,1997)

What then might all this mean in relation to the problematic of the “actual” and “virtual” natures of, respectively, the photographic and post-photographic cinemas of the 21st century? Firstly, that since the advent of the time-image (a cinema which Deleuze and Rushton make clear had existed before the decisive break of World War II, since its qualities are organically embedded in the movement-image as well), the recent digital turn has not introduced anything significantly different to the stakes at hand. According to Deleuze, the “actual” and the “virtual” emerge from the same plane of image-formation, so there is no essential distinction between, say, WALL-E or Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) (except perhaps that the former might be considered a movement-image while the latter may be considered a time-image). Secondly, while the movement-image has come back into full force with the “spectacle-cinema” of directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and J.J. Abrams, the time-image does not automatically present a natural opposition to this movement-image cinema, nor is it under threat by the digital turn. If anything, the digital turn has allowed for a replenished time-image cinema, alongside a re-invigorated movement-image cinema, by opening up the digital wave — a hand-held, cost-effective, and supremely transportable system of image-production and distribution — to countries and cultures that had traditionally remained outside the hegemony of the American and European cultural industries. The digital turn has allowed independent filmmakers like Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (for whom “digital is liberation theology”) to emerge on the international scene and make DV films that do not sacrifice their time-image aesthetic, and are able to thrive and circulate outside the heavily commercialized, mass-industrial sector.

Perhaps most important, as Deleuze makes clear in his discussion of Godard’s films, the time-image can still find a place in the post-photographic world (the broken analogic world depicted by WALL-E for instance) precisely when it has formulated a break with such a world, a rupture that necessarily enjoins us to cultivate what Hoberman had called a “new realness” or, better yet, what Deleuze calls “belief in this world”:

Rushton explains, through the example of Godard’s critical cinema, that “what is at stake for these Godardian experiments is a sense in which cinema breaks free from the world, so that the question of the image and of montage is no longer one of reconnecting with the world, as it was for the movement-image… Against this bringing together of man and the world, Godard’s breakages between the image and world instead introduce the ‘unthought’ element.” Applied to the post-photographic cinema of the 21st century, the “unthought” of thought returns again, only this time in the formation of CGI images that come from the outside of the analogic world, an outside that obligates us to think in new forms, using new systems of expression, and which moves us to cultivate a belief in the “New Real” of this world.