F 2 F

It is interesting that this word appears untranslated, in brackets. It appears only once in the cinema books, but it is enough to hint that Deleuze's notion of "turning-away," like many of his ideas about film, maintains connections with Situationism. For the Situationist, détournement is a strategy of "defacement," although a defacement that is subliminal. For example, a détournement could involve transforming the commercial message of a billboard into a revolutionary slogan, not in the manner of a graffiti artist, but in such a way that the revolutionary slogan would at first seem imperceptible, or part of the intention of the advertisers. It is a strategy that does not "turn away" from the mechanisms of the spectacle but rather incorporates them in order to more effectively reach the consumer unconscious. Deleuze's analysis of the face and its framing, as well as deframings of the face in the cinema of Godard, Antonioni, and Hitchcock, are détournements, exposing the circuits the face inhabits, while also creating new ones.

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