What is an Intercessor? Deleuze's original characters in Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité

The relationship of the filmmaker with an ‘intercessor’ figure is fundamental to the definition of the Deleuzian auteur in cinema. Yet recent scholarship within and outside film studies has not adequately defined the nature of the ‘intercessor’ and its relation to other concepts such as the ‘conceptual persona’, the ‘aesthetic figure’, and ‘the Original character’. Scholars such as Charles Stivale view the ‘intercessor’ as a philosophical interlocutor who challenges and extends our ideas and ‘falsifies’ the common-sense presuppositions we hold to be true. By contrast, within film studies Ronald Bogue or Bill Marshall prefer to focus on the deliberate employment of the power of the false, as the passage between the several constructed roles of the ‘intercessor’ character in cinema challenges our notion of fixed and stable identities and thus truth itself. Such work prioritises the relation of intercessor to film-maker. I will reconstruct the notion of ‘intercessor’ found in Cinema 2 and What is Philosophy? by analysing it in conjunction with Deleuze’s concept of the ‘Original’ from Essays Critical and Clinical. Through a close reading of Cinema 2 , in conjunction with analysis of two of Deleuze’s cinematic examples – Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, and Michel Brault, Marcel Carriere, and Pierre Perrault’s Pour la Suite du Monde – I will prioritise the relation of the intercessor to the ‘film world’. I will argue that the intercessor character functions as the limit of a series or plane, and imposes a unique and original perspective on a plane of composition, thus determining the contours of a film-world and constructing an imagined community. My project contributes to a fuller understanding of the creative potential of these deliberately constructed or ‘fabulated’ identities and their importance to Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema.