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6 - Henri Bergson

from I - WHAT IS CINEMA?

By
Dorothea Olkowski
Edited by
Felicity Colman
Dorothea Olkowski
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
Felicity Colman
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was appointed Chair of Ancient Philosophy at the prestigious Collège de France in 1900. In 1922 he became president of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (a precursor to UNESCO). His life work includes a paper on observed hypnosis sessions, “De la simulation inconsciente dans l'état d'hypnotisme” (On unconscious simulation in states of hypnosis) (in Revue Philosophique, 1886), Time and Free Will (1889; English trans. 1910), Matter and Memory (1896; English trans. 1911), Laughter (1900; English trans. 1901), Creative Evolution (1907; English trans. 1910), his reflections after a debate with Albert Einstein in Duration and Simultaneity (1922) and The Creative Mind (1946; published in French as La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934).

THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE

For philosophers and film theorists today, there can be no innocent account of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and especially no innocent account of Bergson and film. The latter is due in large part to the two books on cinema written by Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (1983; 1986) and Cinema 2 (1985; 1989). Both books acknowledge Bergson's rich and inventive notion of the image, but simultaneously seek to circumvent Bergson's own so-called “overhasty critique” of cinema, a critique that apparently arises when he characterizes the medium as a model for the forces of rationality that immobilize and fragment time (Deleuze 1986: xiv).

Type
Chapter
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Film, Theory and Philosophy
The Key Thinkers
 , pp. 71 - 80
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2009

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