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The appearing memory: Gilles Deleuze and Andrey Tarkovsky on `crystal-image'

Alexander Kozin
Memory Studies 2009; 2; 103
DOI: 10.1177/1750698008097398

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ARTICLES

The appearing memory: Gilles Deleuze and

Andrey Tarkovsky on ‘crystal-image’
ALEXANDER KOZIN, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Abstract
In this article I examine the concept ‘crystal-image,’ as developed by Gilles Deleuze in
the two volumes of Cinema (1986–89). In these texts, Deleuze examines the ways in
which phenomenality of time discloses itself through the semiotic dimension of cinema.
Subsequently, Deleuze identifies three distinctly different senses of cinematographic
time: (1) time as the movement of image; (2) the movement of time-image; and (3)
the appearance of time itself. In this article I elaborate the latter via the concept of
‘crystal-image’. The main objective behind my examination is two-fold: demonstrate
that cinema can be approached as a special kind of phenomenological inquiry (semiotic
phenomenology) and, on the strength of this hybrid method, further our under-
standing of memory and its materiality. An analysis of Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Solaris
provides an illustration.

Key words
disclosure; limit-phenomena; materiality; semiotic phenomenology; Solaris

INTRODUCTION
…there are not only instantaneous images, that is, immobile sections of movement;
there are movement-images which are immobile sections of duration; there are,
fi nally, time-images, that is, duration-images, change-images, relation-images,
volume-images which are beyond movement itself… (Deleuze, 1986: 11)

Although the above quote outlines the very basics of Deleuze’s typology of time,
these basics are sufficiently clear to suggest that only the third kind of image, time-
image, is deemed to be of special significance to Deleuze. In this article, I explain this
emphasis by connecting a particular kind of time-image to the phenomenological
concept of remembering. As one of the original phenomenological themes, together
with imagining, remembering has been approached first by psychologically minded

MEMORY STUDIES © SAGE Publications 2009, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1750-6980, Vol 2(1): 103–117 [DOI: 10.1177/1750698008097398]

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104 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

phenomenological research (e.g. Casey, 1987; Sartre, 2004; Strauss, 1966) and, more
recently, by the phenomenological studies of time, memory, history and narrative (e.g.
Carr, 1991; Kearney, 2002; Ricoeur, 2006). In turn, I would like to propose that Gilles
Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (1986) and Cinema 2 (1989) added to both orientations. Speci-
fically, through a focused reading of his works, I argue that, as a property of time,
memory can be shown in a series of reflective and reflexive images. With this thesis,
I see this article as a contribution to the general theme of this special issue, which
seeks to disclose the relationship between time and various forms of sociality, be it
architecture, schooling or film-image.
In order to proceed with my argument, I suggest that we should approach Deleuze
through the method of semiotic phenomenology.1 The implications of this perspective
demand an argument of its own. The multiplicity of phenomena studied by Deleuze
easily conceals his method behind concrete investigations, be it a historical figure or
a social phenomenon, for example, ‘Bergson’, ‘Kant’, ‘Francis Bacon’, ‘cinema’ or
‘Baroque’. A great variety of his foci as well as his critique of traditionalism contribute
to the difficulty of locating Deleuze within any traditional philosophy. At the same time,
it is hardly possible to see him completely outside of any philosophical tradition; hence,
the importance of identifying the precise position from which he contributes to the main
object of this examination: bringing a phenomenological argument and semiological
analyses together in order to show the birth of a concept (crystal-image).2 The latter
should help us understand better how memory may show itself as a materiality.3
There is much evidence that Deleuze espouses both phenomenology and semiology,
albeit in very different veins. In his early overview of French philosophy, Bernhard
Waldenfels (1983) describes Deleuze as a second-generation phenomenologist, who is
no longer attached to the phenomenological foundation directly but is attached to it
via numerous associations and dissociations. More specifically, Waldenfels grounds his
view of Deleuze in the fact that the latter was highly influenced by the radical turn in
phenomenology in the late 1960s and followed that turn toward ‘a transformation of
phenomenology’ (1983: 488). Instigated by Jacques Derrida, this turn retains not only
the focus on the empirical world but also its modes of constitution (transcendentals),
neither one of which can be fully accessible to experience on its own. This position
evolves from the notion of radical difference, or différance, which is essentially a Kantian
legacy, insists Waldenfels. Unlike Derrida, who coined the term and so incorporated it
in his philosophy explicitly, Deleuze had never acknowledged the impact of différance
on his thought beyond a mere motivation past Kant. However, it is precisely in the
motivation that we find a continuous association with phenomenology.
In Deleuze, the latter comes about in two ways: by way of an ongoing argument vis-
à-vis Henri Bergson with the key phenomenological figures, such as Edmund Husserl,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, and by his philosophical
projects, that is, ‘analyses of concept-making’ (Deleuze, 1990: 177). The influence of
phenomenology on these analyses becomes evident from the acknowledgment that
Deleuze bestows on Husserl and his contribution: ‘Husserl thought a decisive step
forward when he discovered a region of vague and material essences (in other words,
essences that are vagabond, inexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed,

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 105

metric and formal essences’ (1990: 177). In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze
confirms this admiration in practice, as he conducts his argument in an implicitly phe-
nomenological key that can be traced in both the set-up and the trajectory for his
deliberations: he begins with the analysis of representation (phenomenon) as it was
introduced by Plato and ends in the realm of social phenomenology with the question
of the Other and the third. He is more explicit about his intellectual commitments
in Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, of which the aim and purpose are both
transcendental and phenomenological; an examination of how the artist could paint
‘the scream more than the horror’ (2004: 12) situates Deleuze alongside with the
phenomenologists of transcendence, who stress the possibility of givenness being a
phenomenon in itself rather than a mode of constitution for what is being given (e.g.
Henry, 1973; Janicaud, 1997; Marion, 2002).
The emphasis on phenomenality in itself leads Deleuze to a philosophical method
that Slavoj Žižek calls ‘dialectical materialism in its fullest sense’ (1993: 38). With Marx,
explains Žižek, Deleuze understands philosophy as necessarily critical, that is, as an
inquiry that seeks to subvert sedentary thinking via nomadic interventions rather than
analytical reversals. The latter cannot help but presuppose a different kind of dia-
lectical relationship. This relationship engages other than traditional dualities offered
by Hegel, for example, ‘abstract’/‘concrete’, or by Husserl, to that matter, such as eidos
and hyle. Instead, Deleuze introduces dual liminal categories such as ‘sense-event’ or
‘time-image’, which express themselves differently when engaged in either the em-
pirical or the transcendental realms. According to Žižek, these categories have two
faces: ‘one face is turned toward things – that is, it is the pure, non-substantial surface
of Becoming ...; the other face is turned toward Language – that is, the pure flux of
Sense in contrast to representational Signification’ (1993: 123). The strongest, perhaps,
among these two-faced concepts is the relation-concept, whose two components are
the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual.’ Divided by experience, the actual, or ‘quantum particles’,
meet at the nodal points, creating ‘waves or oscillations’ (Žižek, 2004: 4).
With this dual focus (surface of being and pure sense), Deleuze asks himself the
most basic phenomenological question: What makes the appearance of various phe-
nomena possible if one accepts that their phenomenality exceeds the boundaries of the
sensual? The answer to this question is sought out in the liminal realm, where extreme
signification resides, on the surface of the matter. Thus, for the object of his phe-
nomenologically oriented philosophy Deleuze takes a liminal phenomenon, or the sign
that emerges from the collusion between ‘matter’ and ‘force’ in the divide between
‘organic’ and ‘non-organic’, ‘image’ and ‘effect.’ This divide does not close with the
reduction to a single concept; like the other side of the coin, or, to use Deleuze’s own
metaphor, the fold, the other side cannot be removed or ignored. The proximity of the
dialectically bound units distinguishes them only at the point of indistinguishability,
or ‘compossibility’ that proceeds to the concrete from the possible, thus allowing for
the actual and virtual to co-exist in the mode of dialectical co-determination. Deleuze
locates this mode in a systemic concept that he calls ‘a body without organs.’ A body
without organs is ‘nonstratified, unformed, intense matter’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 153).4

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106 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

In this article, I approach this matter in the semiotic terms, as a system of disclosure.5
Deleuze designates literature as one such system, and in Cinema 1 names film as
another: ‘The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)’ (Deleuze 1986: ix, italics in the
original). He finishes Cinema 2 with the following elaboration, ‘It seems to us that
cinema, precisely through its automatic and psycho-mechanical qualities, is the system
of pre-linguistic images and signs’ (1989: 262).6 I take the above two quotes as direct
evidence for the semiotic phenomenological method, whereby cinema is conceived
as a semiotic system, which, by virtue of its liminal status is capable of disclosing the
world in its constitutive dimensions, including the most fundamental of those, – that of
time: ‘it [time] is inherent in cinema … It pulsates through the blood vessels of the film,
making it alive through various rhythmic pressures’ (Deleuze 1989: 114). At the end of
his analysis, Deleuze proposes two models: (1) time as movement and instant, and (2)
time as movement and change. In the next section, I recuperate Deleuze’s argument
that institutes the second model as a new orientation for understanding materiality
of time (memory) as ‘time-image’.

ARGUING FOR ‘TIME-IMAGE’

The argumentative trajectory toward ‘time-image’ is conducted by Deleuze in the
traditional philosophical key as long as it engages major ‘philosophers of time’: Plato,
Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson and Heidegger. Of special importance
for Deleuze’s argument is a set of two pair-figures: Plato and Aristotle, and Leibniz and
Bergson. Thus, Deleuze begins his argument in Cinema 1 by claiming that Plato sought
to impose a self-sustained (circular) and therefore non-productive ambiguity on the
process of making sign-images. Although Deleuze proffers this critique in a number of
texts, he summarizes his sentiments most strongly in an essay titled ‘The Simulacrum
and Ancient Philosophy’. In the essay’s section ‘Plato and Simulacrum’, Deleuze goes
as far as to define his entire philosophical project as ‘a reversal of Platonism’ (2001:
291). The use of the term ‘reversal’ is notable, and Deleuze emphasizes this importance
by playing in the same paragraph on the words ‘reverse’ and ‘reserve,’ meaning to
show that any reversal brings about a reservation, which suspends the natural course
of events and thus makes the nature of the reversal visible. In order to understand the
real need for this reversal, argues Deleuze, one must consider Platonism as ‘a dialectic
of rivalry (amphisbetesis), a dialectic of rivals and suitors’ (2001: 292).
Importantly, one cannot simply bypass this dialectic: it has been in use for as long
as we, the humans, can remember. In the course of human history it has generated
most basic concepts, expounding this very dialectic. The most important philosophical
concept for Platonism is time, and so, argues Deleuze, this concept must be excavated,
scrutinized and reformulated. According to Deleuze, ‘Plato understands time as eternity’
(1994: 5). It can hardly be otherwise because Plato’s conception on time is based on
myth which, for Deleuze, presupposes a separation between spirit and matter and
the eternal return of spirit to all the reformed matter. The pursuit of spirit by matter

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 107

and the rivalry among dematerialized ideas set time to zero, making Deleuze rightfully
suspicious about wider philosophical implications of Platonism: the primacy of spirit
and the ability of ideas to perfect themselves by way of establishing the ‘right’ fit to the
corresponding matter. The idea of time as a regulated change is alien to Deleuze, who
refuses to accept either natural or divine order as the proper foundation for the ap-
pearance of time. He therefore continues his analysis by examining those conceptual
shifts that have occurred on account of Plato. I would like to present this archeology
in the next three subsections.

First shift: From Aristotle to Leibniz

The first shift observed by Deleuze leaves behind the Euclidian geometry of move-
ment as an essential character of time. It also leaves behind Aristotle, who follows
the Platonic logic to proclaiming that ‘time is a number’ (Deleuze 1989: 130). For
Aristotle, time moves by increments, some of which are so small as to allow us to call
them instants. Once divided into instants, time becomes the purview of sciences, first
abstract, such as mathematics, physics and astronomy and then bio-technological:
cryogenics, bionics, robotics, etc. The connection of time to technology makes Deleuze
use Ford’s assembly line as a metaphor for the movement image; it is a line that moves
and, as it moves, it accumulates, adds to the original image thus making the image
appear as if it gets fuller and fuller with every frame and every cut until it reaches com-
pleteness. Charles Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times serves as an illustration of this
model; in general, argues Deleuze, the old cinema fills up the space of perception
by showing time as a sequentially ordered movement toward a pre-specified point
of destination (imaginary) or backward toward an achieved product (memory).
Deleuze contrasts this naturalistic concept of time with Leibniz’s process-oriented
concept, which he summarizes in The Logic of Sense:

Time is the result of the operation of compossibility. The latter means that, with the
monads being assimilated to singular points, each series is extended in other series
which converge around these points, another world in another time begins in the
vicinity of points which would bring about the divergence of the obtained species
(2001: 297, italics in the original)

The syntactic complexity of this quote matches its logic. Traditional interdisciplinary
divides point to the incompatibility of ‘points’ and ‘species’, making it impossible to
conceive of a system that would position a mathematical and a biological concept next
to each other without creating some kind of ambiguity. However, argues Deleuze, if
we approach ambiguity not as a mathematical deficiency, as would Aristotle, but as
Leibniz did – in line with his differential mathematics – in terms of a space created by an
addition to nothing (defined as ‘zero plus one,’ where ‘one’ is an instant), time would
indeed show itself as ambiguous. But unlike Plato’s thinking of time as the ambiguity
of pursuit, which can only lead to the past, or as the progressive development in a
series along an infinitely long path, which is but a prolongation of the present, Leibniz
thinks of time as if it were a forgotten future, or a future that has been committed to
memory before it actually occurred.
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108 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

Second shift: From Leibniz to Bergson

However, for Leibniz, time is still bonded by number; moreover, like Aristotle, Leibniz
gives absolute priority to number ‘one’; hence, monadology. Both mathematics and
philosophy begin with ‘one’, leaving us little if any room to think time as ‘many’. At
the same time, claims Deleuze, it was Leibniz who first suggested that time should
be viewed as ‘a movement’. Following this logic, Bergson suggested that time was
the movement of number ‘one’. If Leibniz begins and ends with ‘one’, Bergson takes
‘one’ as the nexus of multiplications: ‘“One” can only multiply itself. It is the most
abstract number’ (2002: 58). In multiplication, time is non-directional; hence, the
human ability to experience time as it moves for itself. ‘For Leibniz’, Deleuze writes,
‘the countdown never begins and never stops, or, rather, “everything is the beginning”’
(1989: 45). For Bergson, time runs like a stream, everything is movement, or ‘durations
of different tensions’ as opposed to ‘the homogenous time of beginnings and origins’
(2004: 275). In this definition of time, the tensions should be understood as the
temporal effects of the matter on the world and the world on the matter. This kind of
genesis was particularly attractive for Deleuze given his interest in the empiricism of
a transcendental kind.

Third shift: After Bergson

As a philosopher of time, Bergson is definitional for Deleuze, who begins his Cinema 1
and Cinema 2 with one of many commentaries on Bergson and essentially constructs
his own model of time on the basis of the Bergsonian view of time: ‘a state of things
that would constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor
center of reference would be assignable’ (1986: 57). No wonder then that Deleuze
approaches time at the intersection of memory and matter. At the same time, con-
cerned with both semiotics and phenomenology, Deleuze makes sure that he puts a
hyphen in the compound word ‘time-image,’ stressing our understanding that image
belongs to time and does not just represent time. It also designates a relationship of
mutual contamination of the two terms. The content available to consciousness blends
with the subconscious absorption of this content, bringing memory to perception. This
is to say that ‘time-image’ collapses the two parallel times together in a space which,
as I argued earlier, can be defined as ‘liminal’. This kind of space does not know the
distinction between the past, present and future. In that space, time appears only as
singular memory.

‘CRYSTAL-IMAGE’
For accessing this kind of time, Deleuze suggests a particular visual aesthetics, – the
new cinema (e.g. Italian neo-realism, French neo-classicism, Russian neo-symbolism).
According to Deleuze, the new cinema is what produces singular memory in the
intolerable, the unbearable and the impossible. Its mission is ‘to make holes, to

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 109

introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify images, by suppressing many things that
have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything’ (Deleuze 1986:
22). By openly embracing this agenda, the cinema of the last half of the 20th century
severed its connection with the cinema that had come before it. The latter showed just
an image; the former shows an analytic of an image. With this ‘extra’, the distinction
between the real and the imaginary had to be foregone: the new cinema was very con-
vincing in demonstrating its indiscernability.7 In turn, the same feature brought in a
new conception of frame and framings, which exposed ‘transcendentals’ for an analytic
intervention. For Deleuze ‘transcendentals’ show themselves as ambiguous signs (e.g.,
Peirce’s ‘thirdness’); hence the need to supply their phenomenological exposure with
a semiological interpretation, helping us follow ambiguity toward its appearance in an
assemblage, which is the minimal unit of ‘visual semiosis.’
According to Deleuze, ‘Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with
a world’ (1989: 68). An opening line of the chapter on ‘crystal-image’ in Cinema 2,
this quote not only confirms the relationship between the world and imagery; it
establishes the direction of fit: images to the world (e.g. memory to photographic or
cinematographic image). This is not to say that images do not come from the world; on
the contrary, the kind of analysis Deleuze presupposes deals precisely with the move-
ment from the actual to the virtual toward a mirror image; hence, the significance
of the semiotic concept ‘mirror’ for Deleuze’s entire philosophy: ‘Mirror is a turning
crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible character … and the crystal turns
over on itself’ (1989: 88). The emergent signs and their assemblages in the film are
based on the confluence of the two.8 I see in the film what I otherwise could have
seen in the mirror, except that the film shows more than a reflection, while mirror does
only that. Both create oblique, opaque and obscure images; however, only the film
shows dynamic indiscernability of the actual and the virtual: ‘Distinct, but indiscernible,
such are the actual and the virtual which are in continuous exchange’ (1989: 71). This
insistence on the material presence without content (body without organs) reflects
Deleuze’s emphasis on the pure signifier. He finds it in the concept ‘crystal-image’.
The choice of the name for the concept can be explained through the physical pro-
perties of mineral morphology: the structure of a crystal allows us to see how, with
each turn of the crystal, what is opaque and virtual becomes luminous and actual.
This reversibility makes all sorts of binaries coalesce, taking us beyond anthropological
structuralism with its staple distinctions: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, ‘saying’ and ‘said’, ‘past’
and ‘future’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our thoughts become matter, while matter becomes
an object of our thoughts. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes
the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting, or, to put it in
phenomenological terms, the ‘given’ and ‘givenness’. Once again, we must remind
ourselves that the kind of phenomenology that preoccupies Deleuze is neither strictly
speaking transcendental, although it examines ‘transcendentals’ or ‘liminalities,’ nor is
it empirical, although it presupposes ‘matter.’ The liminal in-between that it explores is
not empty; it contains a prime mover, and it is in that pivot that we find one of the most
basic conditions for our experience of the world as image: ‘what we see in the crystal
… is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one after the

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110 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

next, while going towards the future, but also of preserving all of the past, dropping it
into the obscure depth’ (Deleuze 1989: 87). The ‘crystal-film’ that rises from the liminal
place gives us a glimpse of time, and of course, the time that appears is inalienable
from the place of its appearance. While Dekel, Guggenheim, Gutman and Varvantakis
(this volume) explore this place at the site of architecture, I would like to examine it in
Andrey Tarkovsky’s feature film Solaris (1972).

ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S SOLARIS

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze refers to the following quote from Tarkovsky,
‘time becomes the basis of bases in cinema, like sound in music, like color in painting’
(1989: 288).9 With this quote, Deleuze openly recognizes Tarkovsky’s film-making
as congenial to his own. However, this interconnection is not the main reason for
choosing Solaris for the following analysis. First, Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1970)
has been a classic of the science-fiction genre since its first publication in 1961. This
importance is manifest in two cinematic translations of it, – Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris
and Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 Solaris. In addition, the novel has been influential in
both science-fiction literature (e.g. Michael Crichton’s 1987 novel Sphere exploits ‘alien
materialization’, which is one of the main themes of Solaris) and science-fiction film
(e.g. Paul Anderson’s 1997 film Event Horizon). The influence of Lem’s novel lies in him
introducing the possibility of having time appear as matter (simulacrum of a human
being) ‘made’ from human memories. Solaris was conceived as a psychodrama that
takes place on a space station orbiting a planet-like ocean ‘Solaris’. After the flight
control center on the earth looses communication with the station, psychologist Kris
Kelvin is dispatched to Solaris to evaluate the mission. When on the station Kelvin
encounters ‘visitors’ who have already ‘affected’ the remaining three crew members.
The rest of the film is dedicated to Kris’s coming to terms with the possibility of
the materialized memory of his dead wife, who pays her living husband a visit of
conscience.
Inevitably, even in as ‘unfaithful’ an adaptation of Solaris as Lem claims Tarkovsky’s
film to be, the main theme had to be preserved; thus, in his own interpretation of the
novel, Tarkovsky proclaimed his intention to show the same nexus of time, memory
and matter as was keeping Lem’s novel together. This is how Tarkovsky describes what
is going on in the film: ‘in their striving for knowledge people in the film loose grasp
on reality, which challenges them through the dreams and material manifestations’
(1986: 199). In question are thus such philosophically laden notions as ‘reality,’
‘materiality’ and the ways of showing them.10 More importantly, this nexus is not
given by way of a narrative; it is rather shown as crystal-time turned into time-crystals,
which are sign-images capable of forming constellations or families of signs. We
can observe these constellations at ease in all Tarkovsky’s films as he constructs and
presents his assemblages in prolonged and detailed sequences. In this respect, Solaris
is no exception: there is no rush of time; nor is time presented through extreme
emotional effects.11

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 111

In the following, I investigate four sets of images from Solaris in the order that
reflects the pivotal movement of crystal-time in the film. Each set is designed to represent
time semiotically, as a visual symbol that reflects on the world and its experiences:
‘Cinema uses the materials given by nature itself, by the passage of time, manifested
within space that we observe about us and in which we live’ (Tarkovsky, 1986: 177).12
The first set includes the opening and the closing images from Solaris. The film
opens with the image of underwater grass. It closes with an image of Pieter Breugel’s
painting, The Hunters in the Snow (1565). The two images are connected by the idea
of ‘home’, a central theme that informs all Tarkovsky’s works. The water grass image
comes to be definitional for both Tarkovsky’s cinematography and, co-extensively,
Deleuze’s interest in Tarkovsky: ‘this is not an extensive and action-oriented image but
rather impactful in a sense that it alters our awareness of time via an overt stretching
out of the affective interval between action and perception’ (modified from Powell,
2007, pp. 137–8). Tarkovsky calls this very image ‘indivisible and elusive’ and explains
its significance as follows: ‘if the world is inscrutable, then the image will be so too’
(1986: 106). The brilliance of the color and the weaving of the grass represent the
primordial time when the ‘mother-earth’ had not yet been divided into elementals by
the humans, but appeared as a whole. There cannot be a memory of this time, for
this time is before memory. It is the spiritual, physical, and biological home for the
entire human race.
Tarkovsky is nostalgic about this kind of time; yet, when he presents it in the his-
torical perspective at the end of the film through the image of Hunters in the Snow
he admits of the inevitability of having to part with this life and its recurrent return.
In the Hunters, Breugel shows the twilight of a winter day by blending together the
brown-green of the sky and the yellow-white of the snow-covered earth. The hunters
(frontal figures in the lower left-hand side corner) are returning home literally and
symbolically: they have belabored and for that were granted an easy descent with a
view of the home from the height that the home-dwellers do not possess. The view
is ‘disclosive’ in the phenomenological sense: the home, which lies below, unfolds
before the viewer layer by layer as an aesthetic object.13 One can find an association
with Homer’s Odyssey here: when Odysseus returns home he sees it anew as if from
the divine perspective, all too close and still all too small (this image will come up in
the last scene of Solaris, an island with a home will be coming up close first and then
moving further and further away). In Breugel’s painting, people are living a pastoral life:
they are hunting, carrying wood, preparing food, fishing, playing and skating on the
ice. However, the tonality of the surrounding context is in transition: the sky is about
to turn dark, the snow is glowing green.14 In Solaris, Tarkovsky is still an idealist in his
critique of science and technology, but he is also already a visionary, who anticipates
the advent of modernity.
The pastoral image of the grass and the image of the home-coming hunters
recover their significance vis-à-vis the image of a modern city and the image of the
space station. The first image comes from the footage shot by Tarkovsky in Tokyo,
which was the fastest growing metropolis at the time. This ‘other’ image is the very
movement-image that Deleuze has criticized in the beginning of his Cinema 1. For

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112 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

Tarkovsky, too, the modern city symbolizes speed, anonymity and death. Yet, the
function of this scene in the film is more complex than simply a straightforward critique
of modernity. Tarkovsky uses the first image as a place of transition for the appear-
ance of the second image and thus links the two sides of modernity, its own and its
emerging double, postmodernity. He merges the image of the human anthill and the
image of the isolated space station that too features multiple levels and tunnels but is
suspended in outer space as if in opposition to the earth and to the collective psyche
of the many as it itself offers us a focus on the isolated psyche of a few. Removed
from their primordial home, displaced, the inhabitants of the space station are, at the
same time, situated in the midst of this home’s most technologically advanced accom-
plishment. The juxtaposition of the two images is subtle: unlike the highway tunnels
that lead outside into the imaginary world of the future, the tunnels of the space
station are closed onto themselves like the tunnels of memory.
Still, Tarkovsky’s contribution to depicting the time of modernity was not in showing
memory as a series of shifts from elevated highways to tunnels, – both Antonioni
and Goddard had already done that, and Tarkovsky acknowledged their claims to
originality.15 His own unique insights about relating the arteries of a quintessential
modern city to the tunnel structure of a space station deal with having the pastoral
home, the dream of dreams, produce two simulacra, – the modern city as the hori-
zontally dispersed vulgarization of the pastoral time, the second home, and the third
kind of home, a miniature ‘earth’ of the space station, which although not a home in
the technical sense, rests at the limit of the primordial home, or, to be more proper,
of the liminal space. It is there, then, in the liminal ‘zwischen’ that things begin to
happen, both wondrous and terrifying. Crossing is therefore not a place, but a state
of transformation. Trigg (this volume) shows the effects of this transformation in the
relationship between trauma, subject and object. The collapse of an emotion with a
movement coincides with the fusion of pastoral and modern settings. There, Tarkovsky
plants his own metaphysics. The influence of Tolstoy, who assigned the highest ethical
priority to the moral orthodoxy, on the director can be traced in another conflated
symbol-image: the first aside in the film is the iconic image of Christ the Redeemer by
Andrey Rublev (ca. 1410), a conceptual metaphor that provides a meta-commentary
on the accompanying image of the first appearance of Harey (Natalia Bondarchuk),
thus suggesting the divine intervention into the matters of human morality.
According to the plot of Solaris, Kris is indirectly responsible for the suicide of Harey,
his wife, and so he has to carry the guilt of her death to his own literal and meta-
phorical fall. The film ends with Kris falling into the ocean and into his only home
(depicted as a house standing on an island), joining the past and the future in the never-
ending present. The collapse of the literal and metaphorical charges the appearance
of memory with spiritual energy as Tarkovsky introduces this memory as a human em-
bodiment. It is difficult to miss the force of the dual appearance: in the first image
the God’s face appears in the static object of a religious icon and in the second Harey
appears as an embodied memory past the person who she comes to represent. Notably,
the religious notion of ascension finds a direct phenomenological correspondence in
the notion of vertical givenness. Both designate the liminal sphere, which makes the

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 113

time of this dual appearance divine. With this turn of the crystal, the construction of
new identities for the specters proceeds according to the strictest sense of ethics. Fol-
lowing this extraordinary sense of ethics makes Harey disappear as she wills herself
into immaterial oblivion after the final realization: ‘I am not who I am.’ The final set of
images shows the ethical side of time as the unity of a dead body and its living bearer.
In this set we see a commoners’ version of pieta, where the limp body belongs to
the person who has just died before and for the other, and not just any other, not
even a loved one, but the other of the self that one was used to possess and wanted
to share but was eventually forced to give up. Here, the reclining Harey is simul-
taneously tending to Kris as a lover but also as an angel, the home-knitted throw on
her back reminiscent of angelic wings, the divine symbol of transformation; she is
slightly hovering over the pleading man, her touch coming from the early renaissance
Italian painting by Giovanni di Paolo’s The Annunciation (1435). An angel, she comes
to Kris as a materialized response to the call of conscience. But as she becomes human
herself, unlike the angel who rejoices at the opportunity to become human, she realizes
that she ought to die. Her body is not hers and her memories are not hers any longer.
Out of love for the other whose flesh she embodies, she ought to disappear. The
divine ‘crystal-image’ changes into the ethical ‘crystal-image,’ a time-event expressed
by Tarkovsky as follows: ‘In the end everything can be reduced to one simple element
which is all a person can count upon: the capacity to love’ (1986: 200). In completing
the turn of the crystal, the same love that brought the living memory to flesh makes
the matter immaterial.

CONCLUSION
For Andrey Tarkovsky, ‘film is an emotional reality’ (1986: 176). Film recovers our
emotional lives in dreams that reflect the primordial state of being; pre-separated
from the yoke of the natural attitude, this state does not know about the antagonism
between the unreflective attitude and the super-reflective state. The human being
and the divine being, the two variations of the original kind (before the secondary
division into men and women), merge along the same line of flight: memory. The
depth of human memorials comes about as visual symbols (images), while the texture
is provided by the narrative. In the Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that
the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images
of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why
its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as
liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By
moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human
world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying
its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.
To this scheme, this article added two emphases: (1) on the method of Deleuze’s
investigation and (2) on the phenomenon of crystal-time. Specifically, I suggested

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114 MEMORY STUDIES 2(1)

that semiotic phenomenology should be taken for the preferred method of inquiry into
the work of Deleuze. In order to illustrate the relevance of semiotic phenomenology,
I reproduced the philosophical argument that led Deleuze to the concept of ‘time-
image’. Tracing the trajectory of the philosophical argument established the progressive
path for the analysis, where the phenomenon of time would appear as ‘thirdness,’ or a
meta-sign that emerges between the signifier and its reference after all the subjective
and objective considerations have been dealt with. It is precisely after such resolutions
that I introduced the concept of ‘time-image’ and then elaborated it in the analysis
of Solaris, one of the seminal films by the Russian film director Andrey Tarkovsky.
The analyses identified four modes for the appearance of ‘crystal-time’: as pastoral,
modern, divine and, finally, ethical time-image. The progression from one time-facet to
another required a change of the corresponding spatial coordinates, from the mother-
earth, to the modern city, to the outer space, to the encounter with the impossible on
board the space station, to the humanization of that encounter. The four facets of
time make four corresponding kinds of memories. The first dream-memory is idyllic;
it is a mythical memory of the place without a human; the second memory is that of
the actual home, the buzzing confusion of the modern city. Then one encounters an
appearance of the past memory as wonder. The appearance is awesome, divine. In
the film, it comes as a materialization of time, its form is that of a biological entity, a
human being, who is nonetheless a memory of the things passed as well as a spiritual
being. The encounter with materialized memory calls for the highest form of sacrifice
and therefore takes time to ethics. In the end, in Solaris, ‘crystal-time’ shows itself
as the destruction of the past memory in the name of the future to come.

Notes
1 On the origin of semiotic phenomenology, see Holenstein (1974). For a number of
ingenuous applications of semiotic phenomenology to communication studies, see Lanigan
(1989, 1992).
2 This emphasis distinguishes my perspective from that of the vitalists, who consider the
concept of ‘life’ to be the most important aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy (e.g. Ansell-
Pearson 1999; Colebrook, 2006; Hallward, 2006). My key objection to this emphasis lies in
its inner logic, which is based on the genealogical link to Bergson rather than the analytic
procedure used by Deleuze in his investigations.
3 It might be important to note that the concept of memory used here is Deleuzian; it means
‘singular memory’. Parr calls it ‘a memory’ and argues that ‘it is the memory of double
becoming; neither psychological, nor collective, this memory puts the inside and outside
together’ (modified from Parr, 2006: 129–30).
4 One can also call the body without organs ‘a limit, which enables thought, feeling, and
action’ without them showing themselves as thought, feeling or action (modified from
Murphy, 2000: 231).
5 For other applications of semiotics to the analyses of materiality, see Gutman and
Kontopodis, this volume. A phenomenological perspective in relation to the same
phenomena can be found in Trigg, this volume.

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 KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 115

6 According to Lecercle, Deleuze identifies four fields (worlds), where signs are encountered:
(1) worldliness; (2) qualities and sense impressions; (3) love; and (4) art (2002: 212–13). For
Deleuze, both literature and cinema belong to the last field.
7 John Rajchman clarifies: ‘cinema comes about as another art of seeing and acting […],
which would make visible something unseen and intolerable’ (1999: 43).
8 Thus, in Cinema 2, Deleuze distinguishes between and among hyalosigns, or crystals of
time, chronosigns, noosigns and lectosigns.
9 Adapted from Bogue (2003).
10 There is an uncanny similarity in this perspective with what Deleuze said about new cinema
and reality: ‘The new cinema displayed a new kind of art, a new kind of wholeness, a new
kind of image and revealed hitherto unexplored areas of reality’ (1989, pp. 83–4).
11 Here I agree with Petric who states that ‘Tarkovsky rejects facial expression as a way of
conveying ideas’ (1989–90: 32). Instead, a master of the expressionless face, Tarkovsky
entrusts the facial image with a regular sign function, thus simultaneously demystifying and
problematizing the concept of face.
12 Another way of putting it, the key objective of camera movement for Tarkovsky,
according to Petric, ‘is to penetrate the environmental facts, based on the director’s belief
that the camera is capable of unearthing the hidden significance of the material world’
(1989–90: 29).
13 When showing the Breugel painting in the film, Tarkovsky uses the running image, which
punctuates the sameness of an object in movement.
14 Although Deleuze never mentions Breugel in his works, as a mannerist, the painter should
be particularly appealing to the philosopher who reminds us that mannerism ended Baroque
by taking it to the rule, making its appearances orderly, strict and solemn, eliminating the
immediacy of the ‘fold.’
15 See Tarkovsky (1986).

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ALEXANDER KOZIN (PhD in Philosophy of Communication) is a Research Fellow at

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where he has participated in the international
research project ‘Comparative Microsociology of Criminal Defence Casework’ since
2003. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, ethnomethodology,
conversation analysis, semiotics, ethnographic methods and discourse analysis.
He has published in Semiotics, Crime, Media, Culture, Semiotic Sign Systems,
Text and Talk, Janus Head, Comparative Sociology and other academic journals.
He is currently working on the book project The Liminal Place of Law. Address:
Freie Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften,
Alteneinstrasse 2–4, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. [email: alex.kozin@gmx.net]

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