Gilles Deluze The movement image 1 Theses on movement First commentary on Bergson 1 First thesis: movemet and instant

According to the first thesis, movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided. Thei already presupposes a more complex idea: the spaces covered all beleong to a single, identical, homogeneous space, while the movements are heterogeneous, irreducible among themselves. But, before being developed, the first thesis contains another proposition: you cannot reconstitute movement with positions in space or instants in time: that is, with immobile sections (coupes). You can onlyacheive this reconstruction by adding to the positions, or to the instants, the abstract idea of a succession, of a time which is mechanical, homogeneous, universal and copied from space, identical for all movements. And thus you miss the movement in two ways. On the one hand, you can bring two instants or two positions together to infinity; but movement will always occur in a concrete duration; thus each movement will have its own qualitative duraion. Hence we oppose two irreducible formulas: real movement concrete duration, and immobile sections + abstract time. (: 1) 2. Movement can be perceived as the transitions between a series of arbitrary/important privileged instants. This can be expressed in a time lapse photograph showing both the blur (movement) and the privileged instant (the recognizable image in the photograph). The blur is said to be comprised of anyinstant- whatever moments. Deleuze points out that this notion of movement is different from that in cinema. The movement in cinema is still about transitions between instants but the systematic/graduated nature of the camera makes all of the instants any-instant-whatever instants. Deleuze state that this precisely divided sense of movement called into question cinema as an art form (artist determining the privileged moments vs scientific instrument determining the instants). Another parallel here is to modernism (human determined instants regarded as truly important instants) and postmodernism (no true important instants). In this view each frame can also be thought of as a pixel that is an approximation of a sum that is perceivable, as a signifier, to properly informed viewers as something greater (movement). 3. Movement is a change in a system not a change in an isolated part of a system. Isolation is impossible in this view, small changes affect the whole. This view fits a post modern world that is comprised of competing ideas/memes/ tropes/etc that interrelate constantly as opposed to the notion of set ideas that exist independently of other ideas like big stone temples. This way of addressing change/movement leads to an interesting way of conceiving the universe as a sum/arrangement of elemental particles in any given instant, no two ever exactly alike. (http://jonwolson.blogspot.com/2006/02/bergsons-theses-on-movement_22.html)

3 Third thesis: movement and change Not only is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole, or of a whole. Whoch implies that movemet expresses something more profound, which is the change in duration or in the whole. To say that duration is change is part of its definition: it changes and does not sop changing. Movement is a tnaslation in space. Now each time there is a translation of parts in space, there is also a qualitive change in a whole. (:8)

Framing is the art of choosing the parts of all kinds which became part of a set. This set is a closed system, relatively and artificially closed. The closed system detemined by the frame can be considered in relation to the data that it communicates to the spectators: it is informatic, and saturated or rarefied. Considered in itself and as limitation, it is geometric or dynamic-physical. Considered in the nature of its parts, it is still geometric or physical and dynamic. It is an optical system when it is considered in relation to the point of view, to the angle of framing: it is then pragmatically jutified, or lays claim to a higher justification. Filally, it detemines an out-of-field, sometines in the form of a larger set which extends it, sometimes in the form of a whole into which it is integrated. (:18) 2 The second level: shot and movement Cutting (decoupage) is the determination of the shot, and the shot, the determination of the movement which is established in the closed system, bettween esements of parts of the set. But we have seen that movement also concerns a whole which is qualitaively different from the set. The whole is that which changes it is the open of duration. Movement thus expreses a change of the whole, or a stage, an aspect of this change, a duration or an articulation of duration. Thus movement has two facets, as inseparable as the inside and the outside, as the two sides of a coin: it is the relationship between parts and it is the state (affection) of the whole. On the one hand it modifies the perspective positons of the parts of a set, which are like its section (coupes), each one immobile in itself; on the other it is itself the mobile section of a whole whose change it ixpresses. From one point of view, is called relative; forom the other, it is called absolute. (:19) The shot is like the movement which continuously ensures conversion, circulatio. It divides and subdiveides duration accordin to the objects which make up the set; it reunites objects and sets into a single identical duration. In continuously divides duration into subduration which are themselves heterogeneous, and reunites these into a duration which is immanent to the whole of the universe. Given that is a consciousness which carries out these divisions and reunions, we can say of the shotit acts like a cosciousness. But the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera sometimes inguman or superhuman. (:20) Describing the image of a street demonstration Pudovkin says: it is as if you climbed on a roof to see it, then yom climb down to the first floor window to read the placards, then you mix with the crowd .... it is only as if; for natural perception introduces

halts, moorings, fixed points or separated points of view, moving modies or even distinct vehicles, whilist cinatographic perception works contiuously, ina single movement whose very halts are an integral part of it and are only a vibration on to itself. (:22) ... This was what Bergson wanted: beginning from the body or moving thing to which our natura perception attaches movement as if it were a vehicle, ot extract a simple coloured spot, the movement-image, which is reduced in itself to a series of extremly rapid oscillations and is in reality only amovement of movements. Now, vecause Bergson only considered what happend in the apparatus is in fact most capable, eminently capable of: the movement imaga tha is, pure movement extracted form bodies or moving things. This is not an abstraction, but an emancipation. It is always a great monemt in the cinema, as for example in Renoir, when the camera leaves a character, and even turns its back on him, following its own movement at the end of which it will redicover him. (:23)