p.166 (Eisenstein) from the image to thought there is shock or vibration, which must give rise to thought in thought; from thought to the image, there is the figure which must be realised in a kind of internal monologue capable of giving us the shock again. And yet there is something quite different in Artaud: a recognition of powerlessness… What cinema advances is not the power of thought but its “impower”, and thought has enver had any other problem…
what the enemies of cinema criticizes it for (like George Duhamel, ‘I can no longer think what I want, the moving images are substituted for my own thought’), is just what Artaud makes into the dark glory and profundity of cinema… the hero has become incapable of achieving his thoughts, he is reduced to only seeing a parade of images within him, his spirit has been stole (me: spirit as in reasoning, rational humanity!). The spiritual or mental automaton is no longer defined by the logical possibility of a thought which would formally deduce his ideas from each other… it is no longer thought which confronts repression, the unconscios, dream, sexuality or death, as in expressionism (and also in surrealisim), it is all these determinisms which confront thought as higher “problem”…
p. 263 on one hand, the great spiritual automation indicates the highest excercise of thought, the way in which thought thinks and itself thinks itself in the fantastic effort of an autonomy; it is in this sense that Jean-Louise Schefer can credit cinema with being a giant in the back of our heads, Cartesian diver, dummy or machine, mechanical man without birth who brings the world into suspense. But, on the otherhand, the automation is also the psychological automaton who no longer depends on the outside because he is autonomous but because he is dispossessed of his own thought, and obeys an internal impression which develops solely in visions or rudimentary actions..
Notes from Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image. London: Athlone, 2000 (1989); my emphasis
Creative Evolution 