Notes on Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I

Preface to the French Edition

Deleuze explains that his Cinema books aim not to provide a study of the history of cinema but a classification of cinematographic concepts, the images of thought through which the great directors think: movement-images and time-images. The first part deals with the former; the second part, the latter. Deleuze draws from Henri Bergson in making this overarching classification. It is Bergson who discovered the movement-image and furthermore the time-image in Matter and Memory in making the diagnosis of the modern world that “[m]ovement, as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed” (Deleuze xiv).

I suppose this formulation of Bergson by Deleuze harkens back to (for me) or anticipates (for the reader who has not gone further) the example in Bergson’s third thesis: sugar melting in water. The conception of movement as merely a translation in space (i.e. the dispersion of sugar molecules succumbing to their intermolecular attraction to the water molecules, thus encapsulated by them) fails to account for the qualitative change in the “whole” (i.e. the transformation of sugar and water into sugar water—to analogize this qualitative change that is to say). But more importantly there is a change in the whole—not only the system of sugar water but furthermore the glass in which they are mixed, the subject waiting for them to incorporate, to everything. Such a switch in thinking about movement, so to include even the subject from the perspective of the whole, I think, represents the collapse in the distinction between external movement and psychic image mentioned here by Deleuze on Bergson.

Chapter 1. Theses on movement—First commentary on Bergson

Deleuze comments on the three theses on movement advanced by Bergson in Matter and Memory to ultimately apply them to the study of cinematographic concepts. (For me the first thesis made more sense in light of the third, so even if it doesn’t make any sense at first, push forth and it will be rewarding.)

First thesis: movement and instant

“[M]ovement is distinct from the space covered” (Deleuze 1).

To better define this first thesis, let us first define what it is not: what is it like to equate movement and the space covered? To equate them is to conceptualize movement as composed of immobile sections and, added to them, abstract time, time that is spatialized or understood using categories that refer to space. Think of a flip book: each page captures an immobile drawing, the succession of which through flipping gives us the illusion of movement. (I just saw this on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2E8QaUP1Qv/?igsh=ODA4ZnU0azlsYmlm) It is an illusion, because however and how much the movement is subdivided movement will always occur in concrete duration and on the other hand however and how much immobile sections succeed one another, movement will always occur between the two sections. Here Deleuze puts forth two opposing formulas: “immobile sections + abstract time” 

“real movement —> concrete duration”

I am inclined to understand this part as such: one conflates different dimensions in two ways—from movement to sections, from sections to movement. More specifically, by equating movement with the space covered, that is with the succession of slices of the space-time continuum, one attempts to decompose movement into immobile sections, or add immobile sections into movement. Yet movement by its nature always occurs in concrete duration, and even with the addition of abstract time along with immobile sections, movement happens between the sections or “behind your back” as Deleuze puts it.

The formula for false movement “immobile sections + abstract time” is also termed cinematographic illusion by Bergson, as it is akin to the way in which  cinema in its very early days was produced. Deleuze comments on this name by contextualizing Bergson in his time-period in which the essence of cinema was yet to be revealed through montage, the mobile camera, and the emancipation of the viewpoint by separating production and projection. While accepting Bergson’s critique of attempts to reconstitute movement through immobile sections, Deleuze rejects Bergson’s critique of cinema specifically.

Second thesis: privileged instants and any-instant-whatever’s

The so-called cinematographic illusion can be distinguished into two camps: ancient (poses or privileged instants) and modern (sections or any-instant-whatever’s). 

The ancients, on the one hand, had the tendency to see what is immanent around them from the top-down, as a panoply of manifestations of the transcendent Form or Idea, which itself is eternal and immobile. Movement, then, is the transition from one privileged-instant to another that contains the essence of the stages in constant flux. The moderns, on the other hand, came to identify movement not with transcendent forms but with immanent sections: “Everywhere the mechanical succession of instants replaced the dialectical order of the poses” (Deleuze 4). This not to say that any-instant-whatever cannot be remarkable; remarkable or banal, it is still an immanent analysis of movement, not a transcendent synthesis of it.

These two modes of illusion as differentiated by Bergson reminded me of the nature of photography described by Postman: “By itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract. It does not speak of "man," only of a man; not of "tree," only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of "nature," any more than a photograph of "the sea"” (Postman 72). By providing only snapshots of reality, photographs are analytic than synthetic, empirical than intelligible. In conjunction with Bergson’s comparison (although I am in no way corresponding the typography/photograph distinction made by Postman with the ancient pose/modern section distinction made by Bergson) one can observe that it is indeed the case that movement conceptualized simply in terms of any-instant-whatever’s lack the ability to point to concepts or ideas that make a certain collection of them intelligible (without an additional use of language of course). [This is just a note to myself, but I wonder if I can make sense of Rohmer’s conversion through Stromboli in this connection.]

(Back to Deleuze) Yet they are both illusions in that, “in both cases, one misses the movement by constructing a Whole, one assumes that ‘all is given’, whilst movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable” (Deleuze 7). (I think this part is difficult to understand as new concepts are introduced. This is my mere attempt to track my understanding; take it with a grain of salt.) Both the ancient and the modern attempts of reconstituting movement presuppose a conception of time as either an imperfect reflection of eternity or a result of there being different sections that succeed one another, hence, missing the reality that movement is duration and time not an independent or abstract variable added to immobile sections to constitute movement but itself incorporated in movement. In other words, the whole is neither given nor giveable, because the whole is not a set of sections or forms to which time is added but itself incorporates the dimension of time. Yet for the reasons that the Whole isn’t given nor giveable, Deleuze does not discard the notion, as we shall see in the third thesis.

Here, Deleuze points to the perplexity of the first invention of cinema. Cinema held an odd position, as it synthesizes photographic snapshots or instants that presuppose the modern metaphysics of movement that tends to analysis rather than synthesis. It, therefore, goes against the grain. And perhaps this is precisely the reason for the convergence of cinema and philosophy in this project of Deleuze’s, a kind of an “intercutting of cinema and philosophy” (xii). Cinema unveils the paradox in the present system of thought; it is an anomaly bringing about a kind of meta-philosophical paradigm shift. Hence, considering such a nuance cinema brings, Deleuze diverges from Bergson’s forceful demonstration of cinema as entirely of the modern sort (“any-instant-whatever’s” that still belongs to a sort of illusion) by introducing a new notion of philosophy.

Third thesis: movement and change

“[N]ot only is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole, or of a whole” (Deleuze 8). Movement can express translation in space; yet paradoxically it happens between the immobile sections or parts, linking them to another way of looking at movement, that is transformation in the whole. And the whole is the Open, the nature of which is to change and that which is defined in terms of relations, which are not properties of the objects but rather belong to the whole. In this regard, the whole is distinguished from sets that are closed: “the sets are in space, and the whole, the wholes are in duration, are duration itself, in so far as it does not stop changing” (Deleuze 11). Movement by its nature of constant change and expression of duration overcomes closed systems; and this “closing” is always artificial: it is by the senses and faculties of understanding that we cut up the whole into parts, yet to see the reality is to see the whole.

References: 

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image. 1983. translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. 1985. Penguin, 2010.