Deleuze and Horror Film by Anna Powell

Author:Anna Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Bergson's Movement-Image in Deleuze

Deleuze's commentaries on Bergson's elision of movement and image structure Cinema 1. Movement-images, in their actions and reactions, form the ‘universal variation’ of the plane of immanence, which is the infinite set of all images. Deleuze extends Bergson's thesis to cinema via a typography of cinematic movements and their accompanying perceptions.

External images transmit movement and the human living image modifies its own movements in response. We are images, so it is mistaken to locate images in the consciousness. Movement is central to perception and, (p.113) more generally, to life itself. The constantly renewed set of molecules and atoms fits a world ‘of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling’.16 The living microcosm is part of the universal macrocosm and they move in unison, though their paces differ.

In describing how matter moves intensively, Bergson uses the biological image of ‘numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’.17 For Deleuze, too, vibrations are physiological sensations that follow ‘an invisible thread that is more nervous than cerebral’.18 Deleuze validates Bergson's location of fluid sensation in a temporal continuum. Sensation ‘contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume; what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears’.19 The concept of the present moment imposes an illusory stasis on the ongoing flux of time.

Bergson's view of perception is inherently, though unconsciously, cinematic. His description of ‘phenomena of reflection which result from an impeded refraction’ as ‘like the effect of mirage’ is comparable to cinema projection as the white screen bounces back the projected beams of light.20 InCreative Evolution, the term ‘cinematographic’ refers to our illusion of spatialised time. Bergson asserts that if we conceive of time in terms of static ‘snapshots’ strung together by mechanical movement, we lose our sense of inner duration. By turning time's fluid becoming into space-time, we ‘set going a kind of cinematograph inside us’.21 Deleuze, however, reminds us that cinema does not give us ‘an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image’.22

Despite Bergson's apparently negative view of cinema here, Deleuze identifies the more fundamental philosophical embrace of the cinematic in his work. Even with its explicit critique, its implications are ‘startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema’.23 Bergson is the acknowledged precursor of Deleuze's own pivotal identification of ‘movement-image and flowing-matter’.24 He sets out from Bergson's initial insights to explore the philosophical and metaphysical implications of cinema in the unfolding of its forms since Bergson wrote.

Deleuze's ‘naturally’ cinematic eye-brain is based on Bergson's neurological aesthetics of motion. Our eyes ‘frame’ our perceptions of the world, by a central focus, left/right edges and top/bottom thresholds. Moving objects within moving frames, as in cinema, can trigger an optical reflex action. When the eye-brain detects a movement crossing these areas, it stimulates a cerebellum-efferent motor response. This can trigger an instant nervous response without an accompanying thought.

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