Terminus, or, Waiting for a Train

If the path to unfolding the problem that drives this book lies in the examination of the relation between texts, then the proposition of this chapter is that the starting point for this hermeneutic investigation lies in the relation between the two volumes of the Cinema books themselves. In particular, it lies in the relation between the movement-and time-images that dominate the first and second volume respectively. This relation is far murkier than it might at first seem, and constitutes in itself a significant interpretative problem for the reader. It is this interpretative problem and the terms in which it is to be resolved that marks the path I will follow in order to show how, and why, the cinema offers Deleuze the means to resolve a strictly philosophical problem.

We can start this investigation with a fable of origin: that of the cinema itself. Here, then, at the beginning, we are waiting. We stand patiently on the railway platform at Ciotat, at the railway terminus, waiting for the train to arrive. We sit patiently in the audience at the Grand Café in Paris, 1895, waiting for the cinema to arrive, tired, bored, restless, fidgeting, waiting for something to happen. Now, a waiting whose object can be determined and met, that is, a waiting for something that will arrive (a train, perhaps), is no more than a pause or delay in a system of action and reaction. To this extent, this waiting might be understood in terms of the sensory-motor schemata that Deleuze describes as characteristic of the movement-image. Its figure would be that of a railway timetable, measuring only the time it takes until the next train will arrive, constituting or reconstituting time and this time of waiting simply as a function of movement (the regular and regulated movement of trains between stations). Inherent in this waiting, however, is the possibility that its object can always not arrive − not only that the train may not arrive on time, but that it will never make it to the station.