CINEMA 1: Prefaces and Chapter 1

Yesterday, October 3, we had our second meeting, going through the prefaces and the first chapter of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 - The Movement-Image. Thanks for the participants for interesting discussions - and especially to the presenter for preparing an overview of the contents.

You'll find my notes for the Chapter 1 below. Next meeting is on October 31, read Chapter 2 for that session.

Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image | notes by Janne Vanhanen, 3.10.2011

Chapter 1: Theses on Movement; First Commentary on Bergson

Deleuze distinguishes three theses on movement in Bergson’s philosophy and the chapter at hand relates these problems of movement to cinema.

1) First thesis: movement and instant. Bergson: “movement is distinct from the space covered.”
Space covered = past (divisible and homogeneous)
Movement = present, the act of covering (indivisible, heterogeneous)

One cannot reconstitute movement with “immobile sections” (i.e. positions in space or instants in time). An artificial reconstitution adds the abstract idea of succession to positions (space) or instants (time) → one produces divisible, homogeneous time that is alike space (“timeline”).

This denotes failure in two ways:
a) movement always takes place between two instants or positions, no matter how much we divide space or time into smaller and smaller fragments;
b) however much time is divided, movement takes place in concrete duration, i.e. it is qualitative.

Hence, the “correct formula” of [real movement] → [concrete duration] is opposed to the false formula of [immobile sections] + [abstract time]. The latter is, for Bergson, the “cinematographical illusion”. This is because cinema includes, as its basic technical elements, instantaneous or immobile sections (images) and the addition of impersonal movement (the abstract time of the projection). They together produce “false movement” that is similar to the Ancient paradoxes of movement of Zeno (which for Bergson are false paradoxes) or the notion of natural perception (phenomenology).

Deleuze: yet again, Bergson errs here a little, as for D. it is evident that cinema provides us movement-image, not the formula [immobile sections] + [abstract time] = [illusion of movement]. Cinema must be understood as the projection-perception situation, not considered merely from its technical conditions (still images plus movement by projection apparatus). In cinema we have experience of movement. This did not appear to Bergson, perhaps due to the novelty of the medium. What is properly cinematic, for Deleuze, appears in the medium’s progress to montage, mobile camera and the freeing of the point of view. As a result, the basic cinematic unit – “shot” – is no longer spatial but temporal.

2) Bergson’s second thesis makes a further distinction between illusory movement, between “privileged instants” and “any-instant-whatevers”.

Ancient conception of movement – privileged instants
Movement was understood to refer to intelligible elements (Forms or Ideas of ancient philosophy) which are immobile and eternal. Ideal elements are actualized in the matter-flux of “our” phenomenal world, they are like potentialities embedded and embodied in matter. → Movement (change) expresses an ideal synthesis taking place between unchanging forms; movement is essentially transition from one form to another, an order of essential poses (e.g. the development of human from infancy to childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age…).

Modern conception of movement – any-instant-whatever
Movement is related to any-instant-whatever (the scientific view), i.e. movement is no longer recomposed from privileged instants (ideal poses), but from immanent material elements (sections). This denotes not intelligible or ideal synthesis but sensible analysis. Mechanical succession of instants replaces the dialectical order of poses. “Cinema = system which reproduces movement by relating it to the any-instant-whatever.” Cinema “samples” the world at a given rate, relating these samples to each other, whereas the antiquity was concerned with making essential distinctions between things (i.e. how to categorize the world).

Deleuze: yet it might seem that cinema thrives on privileged instants (alike ancient ideal poses): “Eisenstein extracted from movements or developments certain moments of crisis, which he made the subject of the cinema par excellence” (C1, p. 5). But there is a crucial distinction: cinema is modern in the sense that the privileged instants are “remarkable or singular points which belong to the movement”, i.e. they are immanent to the act itself and not actualizations of some pre-existent transcendent form. It is within the any-instant-whatever that the distinction is made: regular or singular, ordinary or remarkable… This is “the modern dialectic” (of Eisenstein etc.), not the ancient dialectic of forms. The “production of singularities (the qualitative leap)” happens via the “accumulation of banalities (quantitative process)”. (C1, p. 6.)

This process makes cinema (along with its contemporaries) an art capable of “responding to the accidents of the environment” (p.7). Deleuze brings up the example of musical comedy and the “action dance” of Fred Astaire, as well as the “action mime” of Charlie Chaplin.

Relating movement to any-instant-whatever brings up a challenge of being capable of thinking the production of the new – of the remarkable and the singular – among any moment whatever.

3) This challenge brings us to the third thesis: movement is commonly understood as translation in space, i.e. shifting of objects’ positions in space. Yet, for Bergson, movement understood properly has as much to do with transformation as with translation: there is a qualitative change involved with events of movement. Considered abstractly, movement cannot be understood in terms of its quality – the “motivation” for movement is lacking in such description. For Bergson movement is always connected with the aspect of duration (durée). (Bergson’s example of dissolving sugar in a glass of water.)

Isolation of elements into limited sets is artificial: every individual movement is, then, a part of the wider, vibratory or resonant movement of the Whole. This whole is not closed, transcendental Totality, as in ancient thought, but an open whole (as Deleuze derives from Lucretius’ understanding of nature as parts-within-parts continuum). There cannot thus be total determination of any given movement, since new relations can always be added up to the situation. The whole is defined by Relation (network of relations that assures perpetual change).

Whole is thus contrasted to the set – artificially closed unit of parts. The formula of false or illusory movement [immobile sections] + [abstract time] refers to sets, while the formula [real movement] → [concrete duration] refers to the opening up of a whole.

Third thesis yields three levels: i) sets or closed systems which are defined by discernible objects or distinct parts; ii) the movement of translation between these objects; iii) the duration or the whole which constantly changes according to relations. These correspond cinematically to i) instantaneous images (i.e. immobile sections), ii) movement-images (mobile sections of duration) and iii) time-images (duration-images, change-images, relation-images, volume-images… beyond movement itself). (C1, p. 11.)