I hope that Richard Leskosky and Mike Frank can find it in their hearts to
forgive me for making some spelling errors early in the morning when I
wrote my post on *Dead Man Walking.* In addition I regret not being able to
express myself in the lucid prose that their posts are such shining
examples of. I was merely trying to point to a reading of *Dead Man
Walking* that accounts for the "ghost image." I also wanted to indicate
that the film could be read against a horizon defined by affect rather than
politics. A developed reading along such lines would take many pages and
include an exposition of a complex theoretical matrix. My intention was
just to show that such an interpretation is possible. I thought that was
needed to be pointed out since at the time the thread on *Dead Man Walking*
was made up of posts saying that the film was politicaly irreponsible,
posts claiming that the film was progessive, and posts praising the style
of the film. I meant to show that the film could be seen as a machine
working on subjectivity. The paraphrase of Deleuze's take on "method"
acting indicated a parameter of the film's form directly involved in its
work on the subject. Deleuze says (on page 159 of *The Time Image*)  that
the images produced by such acting in certain films "in its most general
definition, the impression is the inner, but visible, link between the
permeating situation and the explosive action." This seems to me a good
description of the thespianism in *Dead Man Walking.* If either of my
interlocutors can spare the time to read and then discuss Deleuze or even
*Dead Man Walking,* I'd be delighted.
 
 If seeing the film as a double passion and relating it to the problematic
of method acting is not "real reflection" for Mike Frank, or is not up to
Richard Leskosky's standards of scholarship, then I apologize for wasting
his time. I must however insist that *Dead Man Walking* opens itself as a
text not when considered as a broadside against the death penalty, but as
what Deleuze calls an affect-image. The film reveals compassion as a limit
experience.
 
If reading the posts complained of was such a waste of energy I wonder how
these two busy professors found the time to post their frustration. I thank
them for making the effort to police  the list.
 
In a recent memo "Richard J. Leskosky" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 
In the discussion of DEAD MAN WALKING, I was surprised to see the following
statement accepted as completely true.
 
>There are more prisons
>than schools and governement is putting whole generation of African
>Americans and Latinos to prison.
 
It seems to me that on the face of it the claim that there are more prisons
than schools is absurd.  Can anyone provide actual figures on this?
 
 
I found more troubling the phenomenon represented by the following passage:
 
"The image of the murdered couple ....is an expression of the permitation
of both of protagonists utter permiation by the elements of the situation
that has lead to Penn's recieving a leathal injection from the state. ....
As
the greatly mourned  Giles Deleuze put it "method" acting is centered around
the permiation of the actor by the situation of the film. In  *Dead Man
Walking* that permiation happens untill it is a saturation and the actors
emit pure affect instead of actions."
 
Are words such as "permitation" and "permiation" actually new critical
terms coined by Deleuze or are they merely examples of sloppy spelling
(say, for "permeation" or "permutation")?  Since there are other
misspellings in the passage, I suspect the latter is the case.  I realize
that lists such as SCREEN-L are less formal than than a scholarly journal
in many ways, but surely if one wishes to be understood one has the
obligation to observe some basic rules of spelling and grammar in trying to
communicate one's ideas.  Even a quick reread before hitting the 'send'
button could spare one's readers a lot of confusion and annoyance.
 
--Richard J. Leskosky
 
Richard J. Leskosky                     office phone: (217) 244-2704
Assistant Director                      FAX: (217) 244-2223
Unit for Cinema Studies                 University of Illinois
 
 
* * * * * * END OF ORIGINAL MESSAGE * * * * * * * *
 
 i can't speak for anyone else but i myself was astonished at the claim about
the relative number of schools and prisons, and thought it likely to be wrong .
. . but the rest of the message--including not only the obvious spelling
errors but, even more important because it has implications for the quality of
the thinking behind the words, an impossibly gnarled and ultimately
unintelligible syntax--suggested that the writer was at best irresponsible and
at worst [expletive deleted] and thus hardly work arguing with . . . some
rhetorical postures are so blatantly not an expression of anything like real
reflection that they are hardly worth taking seriously and one
just goes on the the next memo . . .
 
 . . . i'm afraid that in their rhetorical stance some of the messages on this
and similar lists resemble nothing so much as cartoonish placards annopuncing
that the world is coming to an end . . . i hope that few of us take time to
debate such claims seriously
 
mike frank
 
 
lgs
 
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