False Movements: Or, What Counts as Cinema for Deleuze?

Abstract

IIn Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze argues that movement of cinema is real movement and not an illusion or an effect. Cinema, he says, not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.1 This can be taken as a foundational axiom of Deleuze's diptych on cinema. At first glance, claim may not seem particularly surprising or controversial. But by proposing in 1983 that movementimages of cinema are real indivisible movement, not imaginary or illusory movement, Deleuze placed his conception of cinema in opposition to dominant currents of film theory time.Here, for example, Deleuze's quarrel with Christian Metz's semiological paradigm is already implicit. Metz, as Deleuze explains, takes film to be something that consists of utterances and at very point that image is replaced by an utterance, image is given a false appearance, and its most authentically visible characteristic, movement, is taken away from it.2 Similarly, any attempt to read cinema as being premised on certain absences or effaced mechanisms-as in Jean-Louis Baudry's essays on the apparatus or Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni's influential statement of purpose on goals of ideological criticism-can be seen as further attempts to immobilize image by seeing cinema's movement and time as effects produced by means of apparatus.3 By affirming identification of image and movement and offering cinema as actualization of this identification, Deleuze treats as a false problem problematic of representation that much film theory in 1970s revolved around.4So, does Deleuze merely return us to phenomenological perspective that had been target of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist paradigms that dominated era? One might think so, to read some of current appropriations of Deleuze that assimilate his work with a return to a phenomenological emphasis on embodied spectators in contrast to an emphasis on codes and significations. But Deleuze's conception of movement-image is equally a critique of phenomenology. As he explains, phenomenology must grasp images as images of objects and therefore as representation, locating movement not in image itself but as a Gestalt which organizes perceptive field as a function of consciousness.5 A movement-image, on other hand, according to Deleuze-and here is where he locates radical novelty of cinema-accomplishes in itself what modern science and philosophy have sought to demonstrate: that there is no opposition between psychological and physical. Due to its automatism, it produces a self-moving image. Physical movement and mental image are one.6As anyone who has read Cinema 1 knows, origin of this claim that movement and image are equivalent is attributed to Henri Bergson's in Matter and Memory (1896).7 But to make claim that cinema consists of movement-images, Deleuze must also take up an argument with Bergson himself. In Creative Evolution (1907), published eleven years after Matter and Memory, Bergson described cinema as very model for false movement, commonsensical if mistaken notion that movement can be recomposed from immobile sections in time.8 According to Deleuze, Bergson's mistake, his failure to recognize cinema as an ally, could be explained by fact that in first decade of cinema when he was writing, cinema was not yet cinema, or rather, it concealed its essence that would only emerge with development of montage and mobile camera. This idea of a primitive cinema that precedes discovery of editing is by no means unfamiliar-indeed, it can be found in most traditional histories of cinema-but for Deleuze it has a specific meaning that he derives from Bergson. According to Deleuze, movement in earliest films does not inhere in image as such. The origins of cinema disguised its true novelty by aligning screen with a view. …