Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image
Chapter 2: Frame and shot, framing and cutting
In the second chapter of Cinema 1 Deleuze presents a consideration of the cinematic elements of the frame and the shot. These correspond to the earlier questions of the relation between closed sets and the Whole (that is, in temporal terms, between quantified time and time as duration).
Frame
Frame is defined here as the determination of a closed system, a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the image – framing. What is present in the image? Sets, characters, props etc. Frame is thus a set which involves a number of elements, which can form sub-sets of their own.
Deleuze notes that even though cinema-theorists can call these parts “signs” or “cinemes” (Pasolini), they should not be considered as analogous to language but rather to an information system. Elements are thus the data of the frame. This data tends towards two extremes: saturation and rarefaction.
Saturated images are made possible by advances in projection (“big screen”) and optics (depth of field): the data in the frame can be multiplied to include several scenes in one frame (Wyler, Altman). Rarefied images, on the other hand, present us with an accented feature within the frame (Hitchcock) or an image emptied of sub-sets (Ozu, Antonioni). Highest degree of rarefaction: the “empty” set of pure black or white screen.
Thus, the frame is 1) legible, as well as visible: it involves legible relations between its elements, one can “read” the frame. In addition, the frame is also 2) geometrical or physical. Geometrical frames form a closed system of elements in relation to chosen coordinates (Dreyer, Antonioni). Physical or dynamic frame varies with the framed (Griffith’s “iris shots” etc.).
Division between geometrical and physical frames occurs also along the line whether the frame 3) separates or brings together elements of the set in the pictorial composition. Geometrical separation: i.e. Griffith’s Intolerance, where the Great Wall of Babylon separates the frame vertically into two distinct geometrical spaces. Other examples: Eisenstein’s studies on the golden section; Dreyer’s exploration of horizontals and verticals, symmetries, high and low, black and white; the Expressionist diagonals, triangular figures of bodies, crowds, masses… (Lang). Light is part of this geometrical schema when it is contrasted with shadow to form halves, rays, spaces. Lines separating elements of nature (Ford’s skies and plains, Le Roy’s water and earth). Frame also contains additional frames within itself (doors, windows etc.) and Deleuze claims that “the great directors” have affinities with certain types of secondary, tertiary etc. framing devices. (C1, p. 13–14.)
Physical or dynamic conception of the frame does not form geometrical separations, but rather “produces imprecise sets” (C1, p. 14). In question is no longer division, but “physical gradation”. Here, the parts of the set are not extensive but intensive. “Degrees of mixing” bring together parts in distinct or confused manner: the set cannot be divided into parts without effecting a qualitative change. It is then not in-/divisible, but “dividual” (cf. 1st Chapter’s discussion of duration/Whole).
Frame is also related to 4) the angle of framing which corresponds to the implicit view (of the camera) onto the frame. The view can be acceptable, even unnoticed in its “neutrality” or it might draw our attention to it (i.e. very “unusual” points-of-view). Then, the frame is in relation with 5) the out-of-field, what it includes but also excludes. The out-of-field is present, even though it is not seen nor understood. It is spatial (“relative-out-of-field”) but also the “absolute-out-of-field” relating to the Whole or duration (i.e. open, qualitative whole). Spatial out-of-field is linked to our common-sense understanding of homogeneous, extensive space and the use of that in framing diminishes the absolute-out-of-field’s pressure of qualitative whole in the image.
Shot and movement
Shot is inseparable from the idea of movement. Deleuze establishes the shot in the following terms: “Cutting is the determination of the shot, and the shot, the determination of the movement which is established in the closed system, between elements or parts of the set” (C1, p. 18).
Ronald Bogue brings up in his commentary a distinction between French and English terms of the shot: in English one can distinguish between “the shot” (referring to the spatial distance of the subject from the camera: long shot, medium shot, close-up) and “the take” (the temporal duration of a single recording). The French word plan originates from the silent cinema and unites these aspects. Deleuze’s interpretation of the shot as plan refers to the unity of movement presented. Plan is therefore something that ensures movement as “conversion” or “circulation”, it divides and reunites elements and in this sense “acts like a consciousness” (C1, p. 20). Yet, this consciousness is not that of us as spectators, or the protagonists of the film, but of the camera – variedly human, inhuman, superhuman… [Deleuze’s example here is Hitchcock’s The Birds.]
The shot is thus comprised of the spatial aspects of composition (elements’ distance to the camera objective) but also of the synthesis of these elements in movement and spatial relations to each other. When considering the shot, then, we come to the conclusion that the shot corresponds with subjectivity – yet, this subjectivity does not necessarily coincide with humanity. Everything is a subject, a synthetic unity of taking-in of various impulses. Consciousness (in this sense) is everywhere. Cinema shows us that, with shots bringing together different movements in their qualitative sense as different durations, different variations of the open whole. [Here Deleuze compares cinema’s power of movement-images with Cubist painting.]
Shot is where the moment-image takes place: in the cinematic shot movement (of the parts inhabiting the frame) is related to a whole, which is constantly changing according to the features of the movement. In commonplace terms, the shot puts moving bodies in relation with each other and synthesizes a common duration among them. That is, the shot yields a certain “feeling” of its internal time.
Mobility
In this chapter Deleuze predicts the transition to the next chapter on montage by pointing out the idea of mobility that is necessarily present in the shot. The shot is, as he puts it, a “mobile section” of duration that “is not content to express [only] the duration of a whole which changes, but constantly puts bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distances and respective positions of the bodies which make up a set in the image into variation” (C1, p. 23). This essential mobility of the shot becomes possible after the primitive cinema’s fixed camera is freed into movement. The movement-image is actualized by 1) the movement of the camera within a particular shot and/or 2) montage, the continuous connecting of shots.
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