Life, Movement and the Fabulation of the Event

Abstract

This article provides a full account of Bergson's vitalist theory of the Event, centring on his concept of Tabulation' first forwarded in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Though the term connotes artifice and fabrication, fabulation is neither unnatural nor unfounded for Bergson. Indeed, the fabulation of events offers a sociobiological explanation to the 'paradox of fiction', to the problem of why we feel real emotions for unreal people and the events that befall them. The answer from Bergson is that fiction makes events come alive for us, not just in make-believe, but at a very present and real level of our perception of movement. Anything that moves (literally or metaphorically) is given life. And this is especially true of the moving-images found in cinema. Filmed fiction is an exemplary instance of fabulation because it exploits the main condition, movement, for such a 'willing suspension of disbelief' in a literal fashion. It is the moving-image, central to the art of cinema, which entices us to turn fiction into a living reality. The article tackles this topic first by introducing Bergson's notion of fabulation (Section One). It then connects fabulation with the concept of the Event, in particular, the event of disaster, which, for Bergson, is another essential pre-requisite for the fabulation of any set of processes into a single, living event: every event has its roots, no matter how distant, in a memory of past, stressful processes, movements of disaster (Section Two). Section Three will then shift to Film Theory to discuss themes (such as Other Minds) that pertain both to the theory of fabulation and to current thinking within Film Theory. The fourth and final section brings these ideas together through a discussion of disaster films and in particular an empirical study of a central scene from James Cameron's Titanic. It discovers that cinema is able to bring events to life through a direct engagement with our own essences as moving beings.