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1 - Movement-images and time-images: Bergson, image and duration

from Section I - First Introduction – Two Regimes of Images

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2019

David Deamer
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

Cinema – for Deleuze – is the movement-image and the time-image. Two regimes of the cinematic image, where the fundamental division is theorised in the wake of the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson explores – and, as the title suggests, asserts – the radical difference in kind between pure matter and pure memory; between image and duration; between the sensory-motor system and spontaneous thought; between the body (its flesh, bone, nervous system and brain) and the mind (as degrees of consciousness). Deleuze's appropriation of Bergson's philosophy and its application to cinema will consist of using the coordinates of the sensorymotor system to designate the movement-image, and an examination of pure memory and spontaneous thought to designate the time-image. In other words, Bergson's philosophy gives the cineosis its fundamental taxonomy. Yet such a taxonomical appropriation must immediately be considered as only a filmic tendency. For all cinema is necessarily a matter-image and an image of matter; and all cinema inescapably – in some way – captures, expresses and engenders memory and thought. Accordingly, while Bergson's division of the sensory-motor system and memory-thought provides the taxonomical coordinates of the movement-image and the time-image, it is the relation between the sensorymotor system and memory-thought that inspires the integrated philosophy of the cineosis. Movement-images and time-images are thus two polarities: the movement-image as a tendency of the cinema to describe ways in which the world and its bodies capture up, organise, and structure pure memory and spontaneous thought through the sensory-motor system; the time-image as a tendency of the cinema to discover means to escape, unground, disrupt and disturb the sensory-motor system through pure memory and spontaneous thought. This double articulation of the two cinematic regimes comes as no critique of Bergsonism, but rather, for Deleuze, is the very essence of Bergson's philosophy. There can be no sensory-motor system without pure-spontaneous thought, and no pure-spontaneous memory without the sensory-motor system; no image without duration, no duration without image. Bergson explicates such a division and relation in any number of ways, including the dimensions of space and time, and the properly philosophical concepts of the actual and the virtual. And it is this division and relation that Deleuze extends into the art of the cinema through the concepts of the movement-image and the time-image.

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Chapter
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Deleuze's Cinema Books
Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images
, pp. 5 - 15
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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