Cinema 1: The Movement Image
| File:Cinema1 deleuze french.jpg | |
| Author | Gilles Deleuze |
|---|---|
| Original title | ''L'Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1'' |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Philosophy, Film Theory |
| Publisher | Les Éditions de Minuit |
Publication date | 1983 |
| Publication place | France |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 296 |
| ISBN | 2.7073.0659.2 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
| Preceded by | Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation (1981) |
| Followed by | L'Image-temps. Cinéma 2 (1985) |
Cinema 1: The Movement Image is a book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze combining philosophy with film criticism. It was originally published in French as L'Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983). It was translated into English by Hugh Tomlinson. In the Preface to the French edition Deleuze says that, "This study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs" and acknowledges the influence of the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce and the French philosopher Henri Bergson (p. xiv). The cinema covered in the book ranges from the silent era to the 1970s, and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman. The second volume, L'Image-temps. Cinéma 2 was published in 1985 (translated as Cinema 2: The Time-Image in 1989). Both books are clearly about cinema, but he also uses cinema to theorise time, movement and life as a whole.[1]
The movement-image
Deleuze, commenting on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, dismisses the conception of cinema as a succession of still photographs. Instead, he argues that what cinema gives us is movement-image (p2). Figures are not described in motion; rather, the continuity of movement describes the figure (p5). In this respect, cinema embodies a modern conception of movement, "capable of thinking the production of the new" (p7), as opposed to the ancient conception of movement as a succession of separate elements, exemplified by Zeno's arrow. The capacity for thinking the production of the new, being open to chance and accident, can be seen in the action-mime of Chaplin and the action dance of Fred Astaire (p7).
Frame and shot
That which is within the frame (characters, props) is a relatively closed system, and can be treated as a spatial composition. However, it can never be completely closed, because of the way it can define the "out-of-the-frame". This is particularly apparent in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Deleuze defines the shot (which is dependent on the position and movement of the camera) as the movement-image (p22). The mobile camera acts as a general equivalent to forms of locomotion, for instance walking, planes, cars (p22). The great moments of cinema are often when the camera, following its own movement, turns its back on a character (p23). In this way, the camera acts as a mechanical consciousness in its own right, separate from the consciousness of the audience or the hero (p22). Montage (the way the shots are edited) connects shots and gives movement, even when the camera is not mobile.
Montage
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 (p30). The American school, exemplified in D.W. Griffith, relies on oppositions (rich/poor, men/women), but attempts to give to them the unity in a whole (p30). The Soviet school, in particular Sergei Eisenstein, sees montage as developmental and revolutionary: opposite ideas giving birth to something new. Pre-war French montage puts the emphasis on movement. German expressionist montage emphasises colour and light and is essentially a montage of visual contrasts.
Types of movement-image
There are three types of cinematic movement-images: perception images (that focus on what is seen), affection images (that focus on expressions of feeling) and action images (that focus on the duration of action). These three images are associated, respectively, with long shots, close-ups and medium shots.[2]
The perception-image
“And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the purest vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things.” (p81)
The preception-image resembles the point of view shot of film theory, but Deleuze challenges that notion showing how it can be both subjective and semi-subjective, sometimes adopting the point of view of characters, sometime floating free.[3] Deleuze describes the anonymous, unidentified viewpoint of the camera. He calls this camera consciousness. Some filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, make the camera felt more than others. There are three different types of perception: solid perception (normal human perception), liquid perception (where images flow together, such as in pre-war French cinema), and gaseous perception (the pure vision of the non-human eye). The latter is objective vision, the vision of matter, of the world before man. Dziga Vertov’s images aspire to pure machine vision. Experimental cinema also reaches for this pure perception.
The affection-image
“The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face…” (p87)
All faces are close-ups and all close-ups are faces. All of these are affection-images. Affection-images move between the poles of wonder and desire. Because faces, and close-ups, are wholes that are cut off from the space and time around them, they bring forth the fear of the void and the disintegration of the face itself. However, desire and wonder give them life. The use of close-ups and faces by Griffith and Eisenstein is considered. Deleuze looks at the work of Bresson to explore how affect can be expressed in a face or in an "any-space-whatever" (p110). In horror movies this any-space can be part of shadows. Or, it can be characters making choices. Or, it can be colour. Or it can be the empty, demolished, waste-ground settings of Italian neorealism. Between the affection-image and the action-image is the impulse action. Naturalism, rather than realism, explores the formless, confused worlds of human-animal impulses. In Erich von Stroheim this is associated with entropy and degradation. The animal impulses lead to the exhaustion of never satiated desire. In Luis Buñuel there is the possibility of re-birth.
The action-image
Deleuze defines two forms of the action-image: the large form and the small form. In realism, which “produced the universal triumph of American cinema”, actions transform an initial situation (p141). This is the large form, also described as SAS (situation/action/situation). We get a sense of the action welling up over the course of the film. The main genres of the action-image are the Documentary film, the Psycho-social film, Film Noir, the Western and the historical film. The large form is also fundamental to method acting, where the permeation of the situation into the internal life of the actor is as important as the explosive outbursts. Situations that are derived from actions (rather than actions derived from situations) are part of the comedic, or small, form (ASA). The films of Chaplin , Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd play with the way audiences deduce situations from the action they see. The form is also seen in Howard Hawks’s westerns. Eisenstein, Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa combine elements of the large and small forms.
The crisis of the action-image
“We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it – no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially” (p206).
The categories of affection and action correspond to C.S Peirce's categories of firstness and secondness. Peirce's category of thirdness (the mental) is now invoked by Deleuze (p197). Alfred Hitchcock introduces the mental image, where relation itself is the object of the image. “It is the camera, and not a dialogue, which explains why the hero of Rear Window has a broken leg (photos of the racing car, in his room, broken camera).” (p201) This use of the mental image pushes the movement-image to its limit (p205). After Hitchcock, in part as a result of his innovations, both the small form and the large form are in crisis, as are action-images in general. In Robert Altman’s Nashville the multiple characters and storylines refer to a dispersive, rather than a globalising situation (p207). In Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon characters “behave like windscreen wipers” (p208). Deleuze dates the crisis of the action-image as first occurring in Italy in the late 1940s with Italian neorealism, then in the late 1950s in France with The New Wave and then in Germany in the late 1960s with the New German Cinema. Deleuze ends the book by saying that the crisis of the action-image may be necessary for the development of a new thinking image “beyond movement” (p215).
References
Bibliography
Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze (trans. Hugh Tomlinson), London and New York: Continuum Books, 1986.