Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World by Allan Thomas

Author:Allan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

From ‘Primitive’ Cinema to Real Movement

Deleuze makes it clear that the cinematographic illusion as Bergson describes it does indeed describe the conditions of the ‘primitive’ cinema and remains at the very least implicit within all cinema – the film strip and its static frames are not conjured away by an argumentative sleight of hand on Deleuze’s part. Rather, the attention Deleuze gives to the role of montage in breaking cinema from the conditions of natural perception reproduced in the primitive cinema enables him to define the terms of a cinematic thought which is non-human in principle – a thought which is no longer constitutively separated from being – on the very same basis by which Bergson accounts for the epistemological limits of all-too-human thought.

In other words, he shows that the cinematographic illusion, far from proffering a critique of the cinema, is deduced on the basis of the cinema in strictly Bergsonian terms, without that illusion defining the possibilities the cinema offers to philosophy. And Deleuze does so in terms that apply equally to both Bergson’s characterisation of the cinematographic illusion in Creative Evolution and to Deleuze’s own ‘reformulation’ of that illusion in the more complex terms implied in Matter and Memory. The capacity of the cinema to separate the point of view of the camera from that of the projector (and thus of the viewer) offers cinematic thought the means to overcome or escape those limits and illusions in both cases. I would argue that Bergson’s use of the cinematograph to illustrate the illusion in question has been something of a red herring and has led commentators astray when exploring the relation between cinema and that illusion, since within the cinema itself (whether primitive or post-primitive) it arises and is overcome in terms not of the still frames of the film strip, but in those of the identity or disjunction of the point of view of camera and projector. And it’s worth noting that Bergson coins his cinematographic metaphor at a time when the cinema was largely characterised by the coincidence and identity of camera and projector as one and the same piece of equipment. Had the mobile camera been commonplace earlier, he may have framed his metaphor differently.

One of the consequences of Deleuze’s argument is that the cinema is in a sense both cinematographic and cinematic at the same time – both abstract and real movement may ‘appear’ on screen simultaneously, because they are produced by distinct means that nevertheless both belong to the cinema. The ‘correction’ the cinema offers of the cinematographic illusion does not take the form of a replacement, effacement or even negation of that illusion. Rather, the cinema presents us with both illusory and real movement at the same time. As we have seen, Bergson accounts for both the objective character of being and our subjective experience of it in terms of a double system of articulation of one and the same reality: the objective reality of the movement-for-itself of being on the one hand,

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