Here are my notes for last session, chapters 4 & 5 of Cinema 1. Take care, Janne
Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image | Janne Vanhanen 20.1.2012
Chapter 4: The Movement-Image and its Three Varieties; Second Commentary on Bergson
Deleuze begins by returning to Henri Bergson on the question of the identity of movement and image. The necessity for this identification comes about during a ”crisis in psychology” at the turn of 19th and 20th Centuries when images are seen to belong to consciousness, movemenent to space. Accordingly, images are thought of as qualitative and without extension, movement in turn is quantitative and extensive, taking place in absolute, extended space. Now, the problem and “crisis” comes with the question: how to move from one to the other, from movement to image, or vice versa? How do matter and mind interact? It seems that this confrontation with materialism and idealism leads only to irresolvable dead end. Either one posits matter as the prime substance or one grounds everything in mental terms. Yet, both approaches retain the distinction between (true) reality and (mere) appearance.
Two figures appear in philosophy at this pivotal point: Edmund Husserl and Bergson – yet neither of them considers cinema as providing any answers to the crisis, and cinema is here Deleuze’s topic, after all. Husserl considers the mind–matter problematic: all consciousness is consciousness of something, perception is thus intentional. For Bergson, in turn, all consciousness is something. Both try to bridge the divide between matter and mind, thing and consciousness, in considering the action of perception. For both phenomenology and Bergsonism, the object and the perceiving subject form an inseparable union, there would be no perception without both aspects.
The difference is that Husserl as phenomenologist, however, starts with a bigger baggage than Bergson. Phenomenology supposes the existence of ”natural perception”: that there is consciousness that perceives, in the first place. Bergson goes further away from common sense in this case: he starts with a more non-intuitive proposition that there are matter-images – a universal flow of images, and that consciousness is a distinct kind of image in that matter-image-flow.
What is meant by “image” by Bergson is then something else than how it is understood generally: for Bergson image is affection – the influence of a thing upon another. A thing-as-image ”projects” itself upon others which ”perceive” the thing’s influence. This is metaphysics of light or emanation: all “things” project themselves outwards, perceptions means receiving this influence. Being is being-perceived (as Bishop Berkeley has stated).
In fact, speaking of things or even images is somewhat misleading, as for Bergson and Deleuze the ultimate reality is in the boundless interaction that distinguishes something as a thing. Deleuze posits this “infinite set” of images as “a plane of immanence” [note: the French for “plane”, plan, is the same term as is used by Deleuze for the cinematic “shot”]. Plane of immanence is the movement that connects every isolated system (“closed set”) to each other and forms an open Whole. (C1, pp. 58–59.)
To speak of images instead of things or bodies is to highlight this interaction. Language ascribes to bodies a status of nouns, onto which qualities (adjectives) and action (verbs) are imposed. Nouns are already something, they have an essence. Images, in turn, are already becoming, on-the-way, affecting and being affected. The term image also corresponds with the metaphysical plane of affection as light.
Between distinct images, there are so-called ”laws of nature” governing this interaction: for instance, physical laws and law-like probabilities like causation. Matter operates, for the most part, mechanistically, determinably, predictably. Like an isolated system of particles bouncing upon each other and driving each other into movement. Yet, there are interactions or encounters that do not result in such mechanistic causation.
This gap in causality and determination can be called ”life”. Life introduces temporality into the proceedings: life constitutes a delay in the relay system of determination. In the mechanistic interaction movement is translated into another type of movement. A simplest kind of life possesses a choice of some kind: there is an impulse and then – a decision, even a tiniest one – not total determination.
Perception is part of movement because it is linked to action (or reaction). This is meant by the term sensory-motor link: perception translates movement (image’s influence), internalizes it via senses and neural structure and transforms it into action. This is Bergson’s Darwinistic view: perception is born out of the biological need to react, to respond in order to survive within an environment.
Hence the sensory capacity is evolutionarily determined: perception is a living being’s capacity to react to its environment. Yet, one cannot take in all the excitations of the world. Thus the sensory-motor system is, in the first place, selective. This is the intuition of Freud also: senses limit our perception, sift out the most relevant aspects of consideration for our existence. There is a kind of schematicism here: the more limited the choices, the easier it is to react in a proper manner. Nonliving things react to everything indiscriminately, their perception of the world is in this sense “perfect”; life, on the other hand, selects and chooses.
Here, in the schematic action of selection, images are translated into the kind of representations we usually think about when thinking about images. Bergson’s primary meaning of image is ”presence”, whereas image in general terms is understood as representation.
For Bergson presence is light, representation is the diminishing of light, isolation, darkening. Mental representation of a thing is only a selected filtering of its aspects, like partially reflected light back onto its surface. This obscures the ”true” nature of perception as the interlinking of movement between different images: perceived object, its influence, act of perception, its processing in the neural system etc. There would be no perception without the unity of these. In this sense the separation between subject and object is artificial.
And if the separation between subject and object is secondary, this results in the understanding of the world as the open Whole, a unity of interactions, a universal resonance: matter-flow.
What, for Deleuze, is of special interest in cinema is its direct relation to this universal movement. Cinema does not anchor itself in phenomenological natural perception – where movement is still related to ideality (with existential coordinates in the place of essential ones, as in earlier philosophy). For phenomenology all perception is intentional: it has form, it is of something. Therefore it pre-establishes the perceiving body (if not consciousness) as an existential given. Cinema, in turn, is able to show us the world imaging itself, without a necessary subjectivity to act as its focus.
Cinema’s power is its potentiality towards the acentered, non-representational image-interaction. Natural perception starts with this amorphous state, and then moves towards defined representations. Cinema can reverse this and proceed toward gaseous perception where matter is matter, not something represented and in itself mute and invisible. ”Universe as metacinema” (C1, p. 59).
Deleuze distinguishes three varieties of movement-images in cinema, corresponding to life as the interval. There is movement (action–reaction) and there is, in some cases, interval (a gap in the causal chain). This presupposes time alongside movement and the living images (life) inhabit time. Life involves framing: isolated systems are formed, according to sensory and active capacities; certain actions are framed – anticipated. Schemes of reception and action are formed. The living image is “an instrument of analysis in regard to the movement received” (C1, p. 62). As inhabiting intervals, living images are “centres of indetermination” (ibid.).
Life presents opacity for the light emanated by images to seep into, intervals of varying scale according to the scale of complexity of the living images. There are two systems of reference: one is image-as-it-is: image considered as a part of universal interaction; the other is a perspective of a single living image, as it perceives and receives and transmits action.
Acquiring the subjective point of view by framing is the basis of the first movement-image type, Perception-image. Taking-in the world from a perspective, the world curving around the centre of indetermination as a horizon of possibility. This already supposes another type of image, Action-image, as perception is but one facet of the impulse–reaction circuit and the interval of indetermination between them. Action is the delayed reaction of the centre of indetermination. (C1, p. 64.)
The incurvature of the world around the centre of subjective perception is the basis of action-image. “I” perceive the “virtual action” of others upon me and the “possible action” that “I” have upon others. Perception relates movement to bodies (nouns), action relates movement to acts (verbs).
Yet, between perception and action there is an in-between zone of Affection-images. It vacillates between perception and action: it is how the subject feels itself “from the inside”, hovering between the subject and the object. Affection-image relates movement to quality (adjectives), it marks the absorption of external movement that is not transformed into objects of perception or acts of the subject. Rather these come together in “pure quality”. (C1, p. 65.)
Affection is not a fault in the working of the impulse–reaction system, but rather its third necessary given. It belongs most closely to the interval of indetermination as it breaks down the relay of received movement and executed movement. Affection is the dimension of quality, of expression. This is something added to the “mechanical” perception of an impulse, it is how perception feels to us. It is feeling with our perceiving bodies. For human beings Deleuze situates the expression of this qualitative feel into the face (he discusses face-shots and close-ups in relation to the affection-image in a later chapter in Cinema 1).
Last, Deleuze brings up attempts to move away from the perspective of the centre of indetermination or subjectivity in cinema. “How can we rid ourselves as ourselves?” (C1, p. 66.) Deleuze mentions Samuel Beckett’s work Film, in the context of which he distinguishes movement-images as such and then, when related to centre of indetermination, three types of “subjective” movement-images: perception-, action- and affection-images. Yet, these are probably not the only kinds of images, as one can relate to time as well, as the open Whole is space-time or matter-flow. Here Deleuze mentions only “memory-image” in reference to Bergson, but leaves the door open for an inventory of a great variety of images…
Deleuze brings up the semiologist C.S. Peirce and the relationship of image and sign. “It is clear that the image gives rise to signs” (C1, p. 69). Here the sign can be considered as a certain image which represents a type of images; either from the point of view of its composition, or its genesis or its formation (or even extinction). Yet, the comprehensive classification of images and signs will have to wait, says Deleuze, and so we shall postpone that for a while…
Further, Deleuze describes examples of the three types of movement-images: perception-image in Lubitch’s The Man I Killed, action-image in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and affection-image in the close-ups of faces in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. We close the chapter with a final general classification: a) perception-image relates to the long shot, b) action-image to the medium shot and c) affection-image to the close-up, yet they each open up a perspective to the whole of the film.
Chapter 5: The Perception-Image
Deleuze begins the discussion of one of the three movement-image types, perception-image, by considering the two sides of perception: objective and subjective. In Beckett’s Film this was the constant point of vacillation: between the objective and the subjective image. In cinema the subjective image is often understood as seen “by” someone “within” the set. This perspective can have sensory factors (the blurred view of a drunken character etc.), active factors (view of an action by someone taking part in it) and affective factors (view by someone in love, for instance, seeing the object of his/her adoration, as seen in the example of Fellini’s The White Sheik).
This subjective image can supposedly be checked against an “objective” one, the “real” world as-it-is (view unblurred by drunkenness or by affection, etc.). Objective image would then be from the point of view of someone who is not part of the set. Yet Deleuze questions this distinction: who is to say what is external, what internal? An initially “outerior” viewpoint may turn out to belong to the set that is considered, after all. Integral to cinema is the movement between the subjective and the objective. Deleuze mentions Jean Mitry, who presents us with the notion of semi-subjective image as the image proper to cinema: the anonymous viewpoint of the camera, shifting its association from characters to outside and back again.
Deleuze asks us to suppose that the perception-image is indeed semi-subjective, but admits that since such semi-subjectivity does not coincide with natural perception (i.e. subject-centered point of view) it is hard to define the status of such image. The term Deleuze comes up with is the semi-subjective image being like free indirect discourse. This is posed against the subjective perception-image’s direct discourse (the “me” perspective) and objective perception-image’s indirect discourse (the neutral “outside” perspective). In literary studies free indirect discourse means a style of writing when the narrator and the character are mixed. What is characteristic of free indirect discourse is that it combines different subjectivities within a heterogeneous system. The point is that free indirect discourse retains two (or more) subjectivities; it does not merge them into seamless whole, but yet brings them together. It goes beyond the division between the objective and the subjective points-of-view.
Deleuze finds comparisons to this in the “internal” division of the subject – Cogito – of philosophy and art: an empirical subject needs a transcendental subject to reflect it. I watch myself act, I reflect myself… I think my thoughts. Pasolini thinks that this doubling-up denotes the possibility of “the cinema of poetry”: characters’ point of view is expanded and combined to others by camera/framing and montage. A “camera-consciousness” yanks the subjective image out of its neurotic centre. (C1, p. 74.) For Pasolini, cinema has gone through a long evolution to attain this (self-)consciousness in Antonioni, Rohmer, Godard… (and Deleuze adds Pasolini himself to this list).
Deleuze ends up equating the free indirect discourse of perception-image with Peirce’s dicisign. It is perception “framed” – perception of a perception, the divide between the neurotic-subjective characters and the obsessive camera (for example, a shot of a character who is very markedly observing something: camera sees the character seeing…).
Deleuze reiterates the Bergsonian view: subjective perception is one in which the image varies in relation to a central and privileged image; objective perception is where all images vary in relation to one another. Here the positions of what are normally understood as subjective and objective images are reversed: delirium, dreams, hallucinations are objective, matter in variation, without a central (subjective) perspective. The French and German schools took this type of subjective view to its outer reaches: the centre of reference was itself put into movement.
Deleuze discusses the “liquid” images of the French school as resembling just this type of images and opposes here the perceptions, affections and actions of men on land and men on sea. On land the movement is always between two points, on water the point is always between two movements (C1, p. 79). This liquid “cine-eye” presents a movement from dicisign (frame as isolated image) to reume: image becoming-liquid, passing through or under the frame, away from the geometrical composition of the frame.
The question of cine-eye is taken up with Vertov: cine-eye couples up any point whatsoever in the universe. Here it cannot be a case of the human eye any longer, but of cinema-vision as montage. What appears as constructed to human eye is “pure vision” to cine-eye. Given our state as sensory-motor subjects, we have to construct the pure vision, it is no natural to us. This takes us towards the “gaseous” form of perception, acentered variation of images. The interval is restored from the realm of subjectivity to “objective” matter itself: decision is not the property of subjects any longer. Here the sign is no longer reume, but gramme (engramme, photogramme): we return to the “pure” movement-image as asubjective perception-image (i.e. without subjective framing).
Free indirect discourse (subjectively framed) | Solid image | Dicisign |
Free indirect discourse (perception that overflows the frame) | Liquid image | Reume |
“Pure” movement-image (objective perception) | Gaseous image | Gramme |
Deleuze claims that Vertov’s techniques of montage create the machinic cine-eye; this eye is no longer subjective (not eye of a fly or an eagle or eye of the spirit) but “the eye of matter” (C1, p. 81). Montage is then elevated to the technique of the interval. Here interval is not a subjective point of view (affective, decisive delay between impulse–reaction) but rather reaction appropriate to any point whatsoever, however distant (i.e. breaking up the subjective frame). Vertov’s style goes here beyond the Soviet Eisensteinian dialectics as it establishes intermediary relations of various distant elements rather than dialectical opposition between defined essences. This tendency was continued by later American experimental cinema (Brakhage, Snow etc.): “to reach ‘another’ perception, which is also the genetic element of all perception (C1, p. 85).
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