Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Cinema 1: The Movement Image is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image . Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of matter and mind.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze specifies his classification of the movement-image through both Bergson's theory of matter and the philosophy of the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce. The cinema covered in the book ranges from the silent era to the late 1970s, and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, G. W. Pabst, Abel Gance, and Sergei Eisenstein from the early days of film; mid-20th century filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Alfred Hitchcock; and contemporary – for Deleuze – directors Robert Bresson, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, and Ingmar Bergman. The second volume includes the work of a different series of filmmakers.
Claire Colebrook writes that while both books are clearly about cinema, Deleuze also uses films to theorise – through movement and time – life as a whole. David Deamer writes that Deleuze's film philosophy "is neither the site of a privileged discourse by philosophy on film, nor film finding its true home as philosophy. Neither discipline needs the other. Yet together philosophy and film can create an atmosphere for thought."
Toward the movement-image
The first four chapters of Cinema 1 concentrate upon and create correspondences between Henri Bergson's philosophy of movement and time and the basic compositional concepts of cinema: the frame, the shot, and montage.Bergson and cinema
Deleuze begins Cinema 1 with the first of four commentaries on Bergson's philosophy. That Deleuze should begin with Bergson can be seen as rather curious. In the first place, as Christophe Wall-Romana states, while 'Bergson was the first thinker to develop a philosophy in which cinema played a determinate role', the philosopher's position on cinema is also widely interpreted as 'negative'. In the second place, as Mark Sinclair explains in Bergson, despite the philosopher and his philosophy being very popular during the early years of the twentieth century, his ideas had been critiqued and then rejected first by phenomenology, then by existentialism, and finally by post-structuralism. 'Against this background', comments Sinclair, 'Gilles Deleuze's return to Bergson in the 1950s and 1960s looks all the more idiosyncratic'. As Sinclair goes on to explain, over a series of publications including Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze championed Bergson as a thinker of 'difference that proceeds any sense of negation'. In this way, 'Deleuze's interpretation served to keep the flame of Bergson's philosophy alive' – and Deleuze returned to Bergson again and again throughout his later work, nowhere more so than in the Cinema books.Deleuze, commenting on Bergson's philosophy in his most well known text, Creative Evolution, challenges Bergson's conception of cinema as an illusion formed from a succession of still photographs. Instead, he invokes Bergson's earlier book Matter and Memory to argue that cinema immediately gives us images in movement. Images are not described in a unique moment; rather, the continuity of movement describes the image. In this respect, cinema embodies a modern conception of movement, "capable of thinking the production of the new", as opposed to the ancient conception of movement as a succession of separate elements where all is given, exemplified by Zeno's arrow. The capacity for thinking the production of the new is a consequence of "modern science", which requires " philosophy" which Bergson sets out to provide, and with which Deleuze concurs. However, asks Deleuze, "can we stop once we have set out on this path? Can we deny that the arts must also go through this conversion or that the cinema is an essential factor in this, and that it has a role to play in this new way of thinking?"
Deleuze illustrates such claims by turning to the birth of the cinematograph, to the Lumière brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Whereas the Lumières saw no future in filmmaking, Chaplin saw its capacity for giving the world a new kind of artform. This new capacity was also arising in painting, dance, ballet, and mime, which "were abandoning figures and poses" to be open to "any-instant-whatever" and "any-location-whatever". Deleuze, citing film writer Jean Mitry, sees Chaplin as giving "mime a new model, a function of space and time, a continuity constructed at each instant instead of being related to prior forms which it was to embody" as well as happening "in the street, surrounded by cars, along a pavement".
Frame
That which is within the frame is a relatively closed system, and can be treated as a purely spatial composition. However, it can never be completely closed. Deleuze writes: "The frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen. It is legible as well as visible if we see very few things in an image, this is because we do not know how to read it properly". The implications of this are most apparent in the relation between what is in-the-frame and the out-of-frame. All framing determines an out-of-field, but for Deleuze there are "two very different aspects of the out-of-field". One aspect is what can be intuited ; the other is a "more disturbing presence" in that it does not really exist in the space of the frame - it is time, thought, emotion, life, the whole." The whole is "the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit rather content and to space." This is particularly apparent in the films of Dreyer which gives us spirit, Michelangelo Antonioni which gives us emptiness, and Hitchcock which gives us thought.Shot
Deleuze defines the shot not only that which captures and releases the movement of data but also through the movements of the camera. The mobile camera thus acts as a general equivalent to forms of locomotion. These two aspects of the shot are similar to the two conceptions of the out-of-field in the frame. The great moments of cinema are often when the camera, following its own movement, turns its back on a character. In this way, the camera acts as a mechanical consciousness in its own right, separate from the consciousness of the audience or the characters within the film. The shot is change, duration, time. For instance, Kurosawa "has a signature which resembles a fictitious Japanese character such a complex movement relates to the whole of the film". Shots can be composed using depth of field, superimposition, and tracking – and all of these aspects embrace multiplicity which is the hallmark of time.Montage
Montage connects shots and gives even more movement. Different conceptions of duration and movement can be seen in the four distinct schools of montage: the organic montage of the American school, the dialectic montage of the Soviet school, the quantitative montage of the pre-war French school and the intensive montage of the German expressionist school. The American school, exemplified in Griffith, relies on oppositions, but attempts to give to them the unity in a whole. The Soviet school, in particular Eisenstein, sees montage as developmental and revolutionary: opposite ideas giving birth to something new. Pre-war French montage puts the emphasis on psychology through superimposition and flowing camera movements. German expressionist montage emphasises dark and light and is essentially a montage of visual contrasts. Deleuze concludes: "The only generality about montage is that it puts the cinematographic image into a relationship with the whole; that is with time conceived as the Open. In this way it gives an indirect image of time" – this is the movement-image. We can see there must be different types of movement-image each giving us different values, meanings, conceptions of time, being, becoming, life and the world. The question becomes how can these different types be specified and differentiated?Types of movement-image
The second part of Cinema 1 concerns Deleuze's classification of types of movement-image. Bergson's thesis of movement is that of an entangled human body and brain in the world of matter where perceptions cause affects and where affects cause actions. The body and brain is thus an accumulation of habitual memories. However, at one and the same time, for the human, habitual memories are multiple, contradictory, and paradoxical. This means that perceptions no longer wholly determine affects, and affects no longer wholly determine actions. The body and brain becomes a "centre of indetermination".Deleuze sees a correspondence between Bergson's philosophy of movement and the cinematic medium. There are thus four types of cinematic movement-images:
- perception-images
- affection-images
- action-images
- mental-images