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D.C. Ambrose
‘Duree means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the
absolutely new.’1
Duree is neither contained nor represented in space or time, simply because it is the
vital becoming of space and time. Deleuze, in the first part of his ongoing
commentary on Bergson’s philosophy undertaken within the Cinema books2, argues
that duree is perhaps best understood as an open set or an open whole, where the
virtual dimension is both expressed and constructed anew in each actual manifest
movement. This is contrasted by Deleuze with the idea of the closed set of abstract
represented movement, or what he terms ‘immobile sections’:
‘Immobile sections + abstract time refers to closed sets whose parts are in fact
immobile sections, and whose successive states are calculated on an abstract time;
while real movement + concrete duration refers to the opening up of a whole which
endures, and whose movements are so many mobile sections crossing the closed
systems.’3
As Deleuze shows, for Bergson the infinite movement of duree and the finite
movements of represented images were not different in kind, since the latter are actual
expressions of the former once they have passed through the brain. Crucially for
Deleuze the cinema functions in precisely this way – like a type of brain which
constructs actual moving-images as representational becomings capable of
dynamically expressing their real and immanent conditions in duree. For Deleuze the
history of cinema is, in a certain sense, the history of the attempt to express, through
moving-images, manifest changes in duree or in the whole. However, this is precisely
where Deleuze departs from Bergson, since for Bergson when images are understood
as representations of objects moving in space and time they are only capable of
providing ‘a snapshot view of a transition’4. These snapshots cancel the genetic
movement of duree, and only give a frozen image of what ultimately escapes them.
As Bergson insisted, ‘what is real is the continual change of form’5. The snapshot
depends on the abstract mechanism that produces it, i.e. the slow machinery of reason,
which only produces representations of movement by freezing it. According to
Deleuze, despite Bergson’s apparent antipathy towards cinema as merely an artificial
means for replicating reason’s own frozen mechanics of representation, there is within
his work an implicit philosophical elaboration of cinema’s great discovery – the real
moving image of duree. Thus cinema, rather than being consigned to replicating
reason’s limitations, has shown itself more than capable of carving out an essentially
1
H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, (CE) p. 11
2
See G. Deleuze, ‘Theses on movement: First commentary on Bergson’ in Cinema1: The Movement
Image, (C1) pp. 1- 11
3
Ibid, p. 11
4
H. Bergson, CE, p. 302
5
Ibid
successful series of means for both indirectly and directly representing and expressing
duree and for developing Bergson’s philosophical insights in its own directions. By
opposing the idea of cinema as a consisting of abstract photographic snapshots and
concentrating on its capacity for representing and expressing movement, Deleuze
embarks upon a search for the attainment of a real image of duree in the history of
cinema. The attainment of such an image will requires an extraordinarily complex
symbiosis between cinema’s moving-image and new perceptual and conceptual
mechanisms. By providing such a detailed and rich philosophical treatment of that
symbiosis, Deleuze effectively rehabilitates the form of cinematic movement-image
within Bergson’s philosophy, and effectively shifts our perceptual mechanism from
the film projector and its projection of mere abstract photographic snapshots to the
screen. On the emergent ‘brain-screen’ of cinema a new series of images and new
modes of perception and thought – a new form of cine-intuition – emerges. In
response to Bergson Deleuze writes the following about this extraordinary cine-
intuition opposed to natural or normative modes of perception:
‘For Bergson the model cannot be natural perception…The model would be rather a
state of things which would constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of
anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable. On the basis of this state of
things it would be necessary to show how, at any point, centres can be formed which
would impose fixed instantaneous views. It would therefore be a question of
‘deducing’ conscious, natural or cinematographic perception. But the cinema perhaps
has a great advantage: just because it lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon, the
sections which it makes would not prevent it from going back up the path that natural
perception comes down. Instead of going from the acentred state of things to centred
perception, we could go back up towards the acentred state of things, and get closer to
it.’6
6
G. Deleuze, C1, pp. 57-8
7
Ibid, p. 11. For a particularly useful discussion of the notion of ‘spirit’ derived from Bergson, and
how it contributes to understanding Deleuze’s thought as mystic-atheism see S. Zepke’s Art as
Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze & Guattari, esp. chapter 3. This work has been
particularly important in developing my overall understanding of Deleuze’s relation to Bergson in the
Cinema books provided in the first part of this chapter. For a more critically aggressive understanding
of this theme in Deleuze’s philosophy see P. Hallward’s Out of this World: Deleuze and the
Philosophy of Creation.
8
G. Deleuze, C1, p. 10
9
Bergson writes - ‘Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to
matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.’, Matter and Memory, p.
249
cinema-brain – that returns to things their living becoming in duree. As a ‘mystical’
movement Bergson’s ‘spirit’ is immanent to life, as what provides vitalism to life. It is
a type of thought which is materialist, but that takes us beyond the rational limits of
the human. This vital life, Deleuze believes, is the spirit that cinema has consistently
displayed itself capable of discovering as the vital principle and movement that
animates its moving images. Spirit is the immanent and non-organic life of duree,
which is expressed in the perceptive mechanism of the brain as it constructs and
produces the new. The challenge for Deleuze is to show precisely how the cinema-
brain countereffects natural perception and ‘ascends’ to the immanent and virtual
plane of duration duree without transcending or subordinating its actual moving
images, to show, in other words, how the cinema-brain constructs moving images in
such a way as to express their vital spiritual dimension. He begins the difficult task of
explaining how the cinema renders the invisible and spiritual dimension of duree as
something visible by outlining two broad yet distinct historical manifestations which
he terms Movement-Image and Time-Image. The Movement-Image of early 20th
century cinema expresses the open-whole of duree as its immanent cause, but
indirectly, through already given conditions of possibility of moving images. Modern
post-second world-war cinema, by contrast, breaks with these established conditions
and establishes an entirely new set of compositional techniques for linking images
into a moving series, in order that such images become capable of directly expressing
duree in a Time-Image. Much critical attention has been focussed on his treatment of
the direct presentation of time in the modern Time-Image form of cinema, and rather
less time has been spent examining in detail his remarks on much earlier cinematic
manifestations of the indirect presentation of time. In Cinema 1 Deleuze develops a
fascinating account of the power that the early movement-image cinema developed to
produce a sublime shock to thought. Writing of this early cinematic power in the later
second volume he says:
‘It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement image, you can’t
escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you.’10
For Deleuze there is a shock and a form of violence to thought associated with the
evolution of the movement-image. Deleuze identifies this power of the movement-
image as ‘a sublime conception of cinema’, and develops the Kantian insight that
what constitutes the sublime is the shock undergone by the imagination when it is
pushed to its limit, but a shock produced by the new art of cinema as opposed to
nature. We are confronted in these early forms by fundamental challenges to our
normative perceptual apparatus – our natural powers of recognition, association,
knowledge and habits of thought. In the next section I propose to turn my attention to
briefly examining the formal innovations instantiated as a challenge to normative
perception by the early forms of cinematic sublimity.
The Cinematic Sublime in Early French and German Montage: The Abstract
Spiritual Form of the Future
The early French approach to montage, evident in filmmakers such as Abel Gance,
Jean Epstein, Rene Clair, Jean Renoir, Germaine Deluc and Jean Vigo, is described
by Deleuze as a break from organic modes of composition towards ‘a kind of
Cartesianism’ characterised by a controlling interest in ‘the quantity of movement,
and in the metrical relations that allow one to define it.’ 11 Such an approach manifests
‘a vast mechanical composition of movement-images’.12 There is in the French
cinema of the 1920’s and 1930’s an evident obsession with mechanism and automata
(e.g. the presence of mechanical automata in La Regle de Jeu (1939)), which Deleuze
argues it utilises in two ways to attain a certain mechanical mode of movement-image
composition:
From this machinic compositional strategy emerged an entirely abstract art in which
pure forms of movement were extracted, and a new form of cinematic kinetics is
subsequently produced. The fascination with machines and the emergent machinic
kinetics leads eventually, Deleuze claims, to a fascination with water. This fascination
with water is to be understood, however, as a continuation of mechanical composition
and mechanical kinetics. It is, he writes, simply ‘a passage from a mechanics of solids
to a mechanics of fluids which, from a concrete point of view, was to find in the
liquid image a new extension of the quantity of movement as a whole. It provided
better conditions to pass from the concrete to the abstract, a greater possibility of
11
G. Deleuze, C1, p. 41
12
Ibid
13
Ibid, p. 42
communicating an irreversible duration to movements, independently of their
figurative characters, a more certain power of extracting movement from the thing
moved.’14
The emergent non-organic fluid mechanics provided a much more effective strategy
for filmmakers to countereffect the actual or the concrete and elaborate a new abstract
cinematic art where duree could be more effectively communicated to movements in
images. It provided, Deleuze maintains, ‘a more certain power of extracting
movement from the thing moved.’15 This innovation led them to an entirely new
conception of the interval of the variable present in movement as ‘a numerical unity
that produces in the image a maximum quantity of movement in relation to other
determinate factors, and that varies from one image to another according to the
variation of the factors themselves.’16 The interval in this form of montage functions
as a unit of measure for constructing a new type of movement-machine, with each
emergent movement-machine having its own units of motion and standards of
measure. There is also, Deleuze claims, an absolute maximum quantity of movement
at the level of the open whole of duree. The movement-image always has two sides,
one facing the relative movement of the set, the other the open-ended and hence
infinite movement of duree. Deleuze argues that the quantitative numerical units of
the French school, the intervals of the variable present, express an infinite whole that
is similar to the Kantian notion of the mathematical sublime. Indeed for Deleuze the
early French montage creates a cinema of the sublime:
‘Kant said that as long as the numerical unit of measurement is homogenous, one can
easily go on to infinity, but only abstractly. On the other hand, when the unit of
measurement is variable, the imagination quickly runs up against a limit: beyond a
short sequence it is no longer capable of comprehending the set of magnitudes or
movements that it successively apprehends. Nevertheless, Thought, the Soul, by
virtue of a demand proper to it, must understand the set of movements in Nature or
the Universe as a whole. This latter is what Kant calls the mathematical sublime: the
imagination devotes itself to apprehending relative movements, and in doing so
quickly exhausts its forces in converting the units of measurement. But thought must
attain that which surpasses all imagination, that is, the set of movements as whole,
absolute maximum of movement, absolute movement which is in itself identical to the
incommensurable or the measureless, the gigantic, the immense: canopy of the
heavens or limitless sea. This is the second aspect of time: it is no longer the interval
as variable present, but the fundamentally open whole as the immensity of future and
past. It is no longer time as succession of movement, and of their units, but time as
simultaneism and simultaneity (for simultaneity, no less than succession, belongs to
time; it is time as whole).’17
There exists a dualism of matter and spirit in early French montage, hence its apparent
Cartesianism, which consists of the relative mechanical movements of material
elements co-existing with the absolute movement of a conceptual, mental whole. The
ideal toward which relative quantitative movement tends is that of a simultaneous co-
14
Ibid, p. 43
15
Ibid
16
Ibid, p. 44
17
Ibid, p. 46
presence of temporal movements, an infinite comprised of superimposed successive
moments grasped simultaneously as a whole:
‘The interval has become the variable and successive numerical unit, which enters
into metrical relationships with the other factors, in each case defining the greatest
relative quantity of movement in the content and for the imagination; the whole has
become the simultaneous, the measureless, the immense, which reduces imagination
to the impotence and confronts it with its own limit, giving birth in the spirit to the
pure thought of a quantity of absolute movement which expresses its whole history or
change, its universe. This is exactly Kant’s mathematical sublime.’18
Deleuze sees in Gance’s use of superimpressions and the triple screen in Napolean the
logical end point toward which early French montage’s quantitative tendency aspires.
Something is presented here that goes beyond the senses, ‘an image as absolute
movement of the whole that changes’.19 The open whole is conceived as a ‘great
spiritual helix’, a geometric figure of multiple movements grasped as simultaneously
co-present to one another in a single mental reality.
‘It is no longer the relative domain of the variable interval, of kinetic acceleration or
deceleration in the content, but the absolute domain of luminous simultaneity, of light
in extension, of the whole which changes and is Spirit.’20
There is here the production of a new cinematic presentation of time through the
dualism of material numerical units and spiritual simultaneities.
18
Ibid, p. 47
19
Ibid, p. 48
20
Ibid
Gothic line of non-organic life21 and Goethe’s theory of colour22. Movement and light
are understood as forms of intensity, affective quantities that extend into space to
varying degrees and that ultimately generate a dynamic cinematic sublime of
apocalyptic power.
‘Expressionism can claim kinship with a pure kinetics; it is a violent movement which
respects neither the organic contour nor the mechanical determinations of the
horizontal and the vertical; its course is that of a perpetually broken line, where each
change of direction simultaneously marks the force of an obstacle and the power of a
new impulse; in short, the subordination of the extensive to intensity.’25
Goethe observes that as yellow and blue become more intense they are imbued with a
reddish reflection or shimmer. The ultimate result of red-purple is ‘the incandescent’ –
‘flash, brilliance, the turbulence of fire, which is the very excess of the visible’.29
There is a brilliant, blinding and burning light at the very periphery of the visible, an
excess of visual sensation that can scintillate but also burn, and hence a possible
source of pleasure and pain. The effects of fiery brilliance – scintillation, glistening,
sparkling, fluorescence, phosphorescence, shimmers, auras, halos – are manifestations
26
Ibid, p. 44
27
Ibid, p. 49
28
Ibid
29
E. Escoubas, ‘L’oeil (du) teinturier’, Critique 418 (March 1982): p. 241
of the terrible, burning fire of red-purple light, and Deleuze finds such effects
manifest throughout German expressionist film. The burning light appears directly in
such images as the circle of flames in The Golem and in Faust, the phosphorescent
demon’s head in The Golem, the blazing head of Mabuse and of Mephisto, the
silhouetted figure of Nosferatu as he emerges from a depthless luminous space. What
one sees in such images, says Deleuze, is a ‘pure incandescence or flaming of a
terrible light that burns the world and its creatures. It is as if finite intensity had now,
at the summit of its own intensification, regained a flash of the infinite from which it
had parted.’30 Such effects intimate the presence of an infinite non-organic force
animating the natural world, and the images of burning incandescence directly present
the light of infinite intensification as ‘the spirit of evil that burns Nature in its
entirety.’31 Such a terrible, burning light Deleuze regards as an instance of Kant’s
‘dynamic sublime’, a sublime generated not through mathematical number but
through overwhelming force:
‘In the dynamic sublime, it is intensity which is raised to such a power that it dazzles
or annihilates our organic being, strikes terror into it, but arouses a thinking faculty by
which we feel superior to that which annihilates us, to discover in us a supra-organic
spirit which dominates the whole inorganic life of things: then we lose our fear,
knowing that our spiritual ‘destination’ is truly invincible.’32
This is the essence of the expressionist dynamic sublime, ‘it ‘keeps on painting the
world red on red, the one harking back to the frightful non-organic life of things, the
other to the sublime, non-psychological life of the spirit…Expressionism attains the
cry…which marks the horror of non-organic life as much as the opening up of a
spiritual universe which may be illusory’.35 The forces of shadow and light, when
raised to an infinite degree of intensity, become apocalyptic burning fire and
supernatural spiritual light, and it is in this infinity of intensive fire/light we find
German expression’s configuration of the open whole of duree – ‘the blazing has
become the supernatural and the supra-sensible.’36
In the open whole of French montage all the mechanistic movements of individual
configurations of elements are subsumed within a single, infinite dimension of
simultaneous co-present movements. In German expressionism’s open whole,
30
G. Deleuze, C1, p. 53
31
Ibid
32
Ibid
33
Ibid, p.54
34
Ibid As Deleuze notes, for Goethe ‘blazing red is not merely the frightful colour in which we burn,
but the noblest colour, which contains all the others, and engenders a superior harmony as the whole
chromatic circle’. (Ibid pp. 53-4)
35
Ibid
36
Ibid
however, the time of individual movements is not so much subsumed within an
infinite totality as it is destroyed entirely. Light and shadow become dynamic forces,
which when raised to the infinite, becomes an absolutely explosive dynamic power - a
destructive fire or creative light that ceases to have normative temporal coordinates.
The open whole of duree becomes an infinite intensification of force, a concentrated
power that draws time into a single shrinking point, and if there is time at all in this
infinitely contracting and rising point, it is that which ‘passes through the fire’ and
emerges when the whole is able ‘to break its sensible attachments to the material, the
organic, and the human, to detach itself from all states of the past and thus discover
the abstract spiritual Form of the future.’37
For Deleuze montage is always guided by a conception of the open whole of duree.
The whole contracts into a minimum moment of the variable present and dilates into a
corresponding form of the infinite. In the French form a numerical unity is the
minimum, and its corresponding maximum is an ideal infinity of all mechanical
movements simultaneously co-present to one another. In the German, an intensive
degree is the minimum, and its maximum is an ideal infinity of all intensive forces
contracted into a single contraction of force. For Deleuze both of these forms,
together with the empiricist montage of American cinema and the dialectical montage
of Soviet cinema, puts the cinematographic image into relationship with the whole;
that is, with time as duree conceived as the Open. In this way it gives an indirect
image of duree, simultaneously in the individual movement-image and in the whole
of the film. On the one hand, it is the variable present; on the other the immensity of
future and past.
37
Ibid, pp. 54-5
38
See McCall’s remarks in G. Baker, ‘Film Beyond its Limits’, Anthony McCall: Film Installations
(Warwick: Mead Art Gallery, 2004)
There is an implicit critique of certain notions of temporality within much of
McCall’s work that seemingly displays an implicit affinity with Bergson and
Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Time, duration, movement and becoming are very
important aspects in all of McCall’s work. Much of his work, for example, contains
an implicit critique of the hierarchical distinction between so-called atemporal
artforms such as painting and sculpture and time-based artforms such as film and
video. McCall embraces the disruptive insights of Performance, Happening or Event
based artworks, (i.e. the insight that everything that occurs, including the process of
looking and thinking, always occurs within time and that many conventional
distinctions which operate in the artworld are patently ‘absurd’).
‘It is no longer the relative domain of the variable interval, of kinetic acceleration or
deceleration in the content, but the absolute domain of luminous simultaneity, of light
in extension, of the whole which changes and is Spirit.’40
It might seem that the Cinema projector just operates in a manner similar to our
ordinary discursive modes of perception, intellection and language; i.e. we attempt to
39
This filmwork from 1970 consists of a long permutated series of repeated and multiple planar solid
light forms that describe the entire volume of a surrounding space. The film is run simultaneously
through four different projectors, with each section of the film being built from repetitions of one
movement of a tilted plane (line) travelling through the frame.
40
Ibid
comprehend process, becoming and movement by slicing time into an abstract
sequence of static moments, or immobile cuts, and then somehow re-link them back
together into a homogenous systematic and rational order. Rather than grasping each
particular specific movement as an indivisible whole with its own concrete duration,
in which there is no distinction between motion and that which moves (what McCall
calls the atemporal and the temporal), we imagine a single, homogenous space-
container, within which we situate the moments of an object’s movement as so many
static, co-present points, and from this spatial image we develop the concept of an
abstract, mechanical time as a regular repetition of homogenous, interchangeable
moments. Real movement and concrete duration give way to immobile cuts and
abstract time. However, as we have seen, for Deleuze cinema from its earliest
manifestations is in fact capable of going way beyond these discursive tendencies of
thought and perception, in fact it is capable of fundamentally offering a challenge to
them, of countereffecting them and instantiating an aberrant form on cine-intuition.
Cinema has certain implicit resources for rendering real movement and concrete
duration visible, which then subsequently emerge as ‘shocks to thought’.
For Deleuze, as for McCall, the cinema (the cinematic form) is still at a germinal
stage in terms of its investigation of its own resources for ‘capturing’ and rendering
visible certain relationships of time in an image, of painting time with light. There are
new and barely unexplored powers for capturing the ‘invisible forces of time’, and it
is these barely explored powers of sublime cinema that McCall’s film works evoke, it
is these powers that can once again serve to challenge our conventional modes of
thought, that provide a ‘shock to thought’, and that demand the invention and
production of new ways of looking, relation, and thought.