Typewriter: Free Indirect Discourse in Deleuze’s Cinema

The figure of speech variously called “free indirect discourse,” “quasi-direct discourse,” or “represented speech,” dominates Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume study Cinema, a work also containing a theory of cinematic “free indirect images.” Deleuze develops a concept of free indirect images, which, he argues, articulate the social in “modern cinema,” opening political and ethical dimensions of the “time-image.” Although Deleuze does not present his conceptualization of cinematic free indirect images as a theory of his own writing practice, if we link it to the figure as it appears in Cinema, we cannot but wonder how Deleuze’s writing relates to his thought. Cinema‘s reflection on free indirect images exposes a major literary device used by Deleuze since his first books, but the theory mirrors the practice in an interested way, presenting it in a glamorous light that makes it hard to see the position from which Deleuze writes. By ignoring class critique in his theoretical sources, Deleuze makes his own practice seem unquestionably righteous, yet despite its triumphal air and limited, unconscious cosmopolitanism, Deleuze’s theory of free indirect images revitalizes the study of cinematic subjectivity. Beyond the boundaries of film studies, Deleuze’s theory prepares us to think the ethical and political aspects in an implicit, unelaborated concept that informs contemporary modes of social control— the concept of “life.”