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Movements of Thought
Author: Ils Huygens
Published: September 2007
Abstract (E): Early film theorists like Epstein, Canudo or
Balazs were already fascinated by the idea of cinema as
automatic thought-machine, producing purely mental
images. The relation of cinema and thinking is the object
of study of Deleuze's cinema-books. In the foreword to
theMovement-Image Deleuze writes that great movie
directors can not only be compared to painters, architects
or musicians but also to thinkers and philosophers, only
they do not think in concepts but in 'affects' and
'percepts'. Like Nietzsche and Foucault Deleuze thinks of
artists and philosophers as doctors that keep society
healthy and cinema takes up a special place since our
contemporary lives have become more and more
dominated by the moving image. Cinema for Deleuze is
what poetry represented for Heidegger: a medium wherein
new forms of thought manifest itself for the first time.
Abstract (F): Des thoriciens du cinma des premiers
temps comme Epstein, Canudo ou Balazs taient fascins
par l'ide du cinma comme machine penser
automatique, productrice d'images purement mentales. Le
rapport entre cinma et pense est au coeur des livres de
Deleuze sur le cinma. Dans la prface L'imagemouvement , Deleuze crit que les grands cinastes ne
doivent pas seulement tre compars aux peintres,
architectes ou musiciens, mais qu'il faut les comparer
aussi aux penser et aux philosophes, cette diffrence
prs qu'ils ne pensent pas en concepts mais en " affects "
et " percepts ". A l'instar de Nietzsche et Foucault, Deleuze
pense les artistes et les philosophes comme des mdecins
qui aident maintenir la sant de la socit. Le cinma
occupe une place spciale dans cette perception du rle de
l'art, vu le rle de plus en plus important de l'image
mobile dans la vie contemporaine. Pour Deleuze, le cinma
est ce que la posie tait pour Heidegger : un mdia dans
lequel de nouvelles formes de pense se manifestent pour
la premire fois.
keywords: Image of thought, auto-movement, percept,
affect, nooshock
To cite this article:
Huygens, I. Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements of
Automatic thinking
Before looking deeper into the relation between cinema and
thinking it is important to understand the way Deleuze
conceptualizes thinking as machinic, the machinic being
defined by its autonomous and automatic nature. On its most
primary level thought is automatic because it is formed out of
psychological and physiological automatisms that lie at the
basis of conscious thought. And as recent neurobiology
(Daniel Libet, Joseph Ledoux) has proven, these molecular
automatisms can process information and perform thinking
autonomously, without interaction of conscious thought or
cognition. It is only in second instance that the conscious
mind and rational thought step in to act as an ordering
principle that linearizes and hierarchizes the unformed mass
of information that is produced by these automatic sub- and
unconscious thought-processes.
Automobilization
1/ Automovement - psychological
automatism
In the history of film theory the early theories on the link
between cinema and thought were soon abandoned by
psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches to film, which
reduced the cinematic image to its representative, signifying
elements, a sign working through recognition and analogy.
Deleuze's cinemabooks can be read as a critique on these
textual approaches to film.
thought.
Auto-temporalization
Cinema however not only produces an auto-mobilization of
the image but also an auto-temporalization, meaning that it
creates its own specific sense of time. The way time is
represented is crucial to understand the difference between
the regime of the movement image and the time image. The
movement image is based on classic continuity montage and
linear narrative, which tries to overcome the cuts and gaps
inherent to montage by creating a fluid movement from one
image to the other. The movement-image shows us an image
of time in its empirical form, time derived from the
succession of shots, as a linear progression towards the
ending. Time is represented indirectly and quantitatively
through movement.
Works Cited