On Cinema — Deleuze

VII. Crystals of Time

Reading notes, Fall 2021

The crystal image is the central concept of Cinema 2. For Deleuze, a crystal of time is an image in which the distinction between present and past, actual and virtual, can no longer be maintained. The crystal is formed when the present moment, instead of passing cleanly into the past as a completed event, coexists with its own past image. "The actual and the virtual coexist and enter into tight circuit." This is not a representation of memory — it is a genuine indiscernibility, a point where the two directions of time become visible simultaneously and cannot be untangled.

Bergson's concept of the recollection image provides one avenue into this. In the recollection image, memory is not stored in the brain like a file but preserved in its entirety in the past, which is a virtual dimension that coexists with every present moment. The brain does not contain the past; it is an instrument for selecting from the past what is useful for present action. When the sensory motor schema breaks down and action becomes impossible, the recollection image surfaces not as a voluntary retrieval but as an intrusion: the virtual past pressing through into the actual present without the usual filter of practical need. This is the experience of involuntary memory, and it is one of the sources from which the crystal image can form.

Last Year at Marienbad is Deleuze's primary example of the crystal image in practice. In Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's film, the question of whether events actually happened the previous year is never resolved, because the film refuses to maintain a boundary between what occurred and what was imagined, anticipated, or desired. The architecture of the hotel — its corridors, mirrors, and formal gardens — becomes a crystalline structure in which the characters move through time that is simultaneously recollected and invented. The images do not represent a confused character's unreliable memory. They represent a genuine coexistence of possible pasts, and it is this coexistence that constitutes the crystal: not confusion, but multiplicity held without resolution.