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Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph

Elie During (Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Translation by Franck Le Gac

To be published in : F. Albera & M. Tortajada (eds.), Cine-Dispositives. Essays in Epistemology across Media, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

We know how Gilles Deleuze turned the commonplace inside out: Bergson, so it went, had missed cinema, contenting himself with a critique of its dispositivethe mechanism of the projecting appliance called cinematograph, to be specific. Before the critique of the cinematographic illusion, developed for the most part in 1907 in Creative Evolution,1 there was indeed the doctrine of real movement, whose touchstone was the pure perception of movement as act or progression rather than as relation distributed in the spatial order. Movement unfolds in time, not in space. This bold thesis, exposed in Matter and Memory, opened onto a very singular thought of the plurality of rhythms of duration within an evolving universe. That Bergson thereby offered precious resources to think cinema or the cinematographic experience was what Deleuze applied himself to showing in the brilliant analyses of Time-Image and Movement-Image. In so doing, he sanctioned another commonplace conveyed by critics and philosophersnamely, that cinema was, in essence, a Bergsonian art. Everyone may see how far back the idea goes by looking at debates between Paul Souday, Marcel LHerbier and mile Vuillermoz in the late 1910s, at later texts by Elie Faure, Jean Epstein and Bla Balzs, or even at this pronouncement by a young Sartre in 1924: Cinema provides the formula for a Bergsonian art. It inaugurates mobility in aesthetics.2 More fundamentally, the assessment points to the musical paradigm that drives certain discourses on the flow of cinematographic images, but also on the contrapuntal or symphonic composition involved in editing. Deleuze stepped in the second direction and took issues on a metaphysical ground, irreducible to any aesthetic of the flow. On the way, however, the dispositive was lost: it was about cinema, or rather about images and ideas in cinema, but no longer at allor barelyabout the cinematograph.3

Beyond Deleuzes reappropriation, it may be useful, questioning Bergsons actual contribution to the thought of cinema, to go back to the point of view that was originally his, starting with a few obvious elements. First, Bergson never had as an ambition to think through cinema, which in fact he did not know very well, besides attending it like everyone

1 In fact, the cinematograph was mentioned a first time in the 1902-1903 Collge de France lectures devoted to the history of the idea of time, alongside other optical appliances such as the magic lantern. 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, crits de jeunesse, Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) 389. 3 On this paradoxical relay between Bergson and Deleuze, see Paul Douglass, Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes? in The New Bergson, ed. J. Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), as well as my entries, Bergson and Travelling, in Dictionnaire de la pense du cinma, Antoine de Baecque and Philippe Chevallier, eds. (Paris: PUF, 2012).

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else, so to speak.4 This comes as no surprise for a philosopher generally prone to take metaphysical inquiry on the side of contemporary sciences rather than artistic creation. A simple consequence ensues, which should be kept in mind as a kind of methodological safeguard. In the analogy introduced in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution, the cinematograph is in the position of a comparing element, not that of an element being compared. Accordingly, it does not make sense to wonder which dimensions Bergson missed in real cinema, in the actual uses of its dispositiveif the said dispositive may even be referred to in the singular and univocally over the very first years of the twentieth century, which remains to be established. Bergson may just as well be criticized for not writing a book on cinema! In truth, it is exactly the opposite: what Bergson did not note of the actual situation of cinema should instead be ascribed to the remarkable work of invention that presided over the development of the cinematographic analogy.5 With this appliance, the philosopher availed himself of a kind of precision optical tool, a speculative instrument liable to raise anew certain questions that had seemingly nothing to do with the art of animated views soon to be known as cinema. To see clearly through this and attempt to recount the specific problem motivating the resort to the image of the cinematograph, it may not be vain to set things straight at once to understand in which direction that image may operate and suggest new paths for research.6 Indeed, as Bergson evoked the operation of the cinematograph, he sought to bring to light a much more fundamental mechanismin his viewthan the one he was emphasizing in the comparing element organizing the analogy. In fact, the cinematograph was to allow the identification of the workings of an inner cinematograph that spontaneously directed the thought of movement, down to its most elaborate constructions. This thought was already at work in natural perception: in that respect, equipped perception only effected a passage at the edge of natural perception. Its full expression was achieved in the representation of movement by physics.

From this standpoint, it appears more clearly that Bergson did not content himself with an ingenious metaphor; it is barely an exaggeration to say that he literally invented the cinematograph as we know it today. The cinematograph he was dealing with was primarily a philosophical or, more precisely, a conceptual objectnot a cultural object to which philosophical reflexion would be applied from the outside, on the model of interpretation or analysis, but an instrument, a catalyst for a thought which to some extent could have tapped into starkly different domains to achieve the same end. Neither concepts nor the tools of thought are found ready made; they have to be tailored to suit particular purposes. In the end, even an analogy has to reconstruct the fulcrums it relies on in reality. And on closer examination, Bergson manifestly built out of this cinematograph an object which, on one decisive aspect, differs from most of the devices for the projection of animated views that were in use at the time he was writing. 4 On this aspect, see Michel Georges-Michels testimony, En jardinant avec Bergson (Paris: Albin Michel, 1926) 13-14. See also Les Grandes poques de la peinture moderne, de Delacroix nos jours (New York: Brentanos, 1945) 47-8. 5 The analysis is so precise and follows the development of the image so closely that the term analogy seems fully justified in this instance. 6 On the function of the image in the work of defining issues, see the interview with Bergson reprinted in Lydie Adolphe, La Dialectique des images (Paris: PUF, 1951) 4.

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This point generally went unnoticed: there is every indication that the apparatus described in Creative Evolution is completely automatized, with the hand magically absent. However, at the time Bergson was writing Creative Evolution, dispositives for the projection of animated views were still massively operated by hand, with operators skilled at turning the crank, slowing down and speeding up the run of the film to enhance the action, intensify a given dramatic moment, exhibit the details of a particular movement or condense an entire scene in a flurry of images. Almost no projectors were fitted with an electric motor in the projection sites that began to appear. In France, the professional model produced by Path, which was the most widely used in the 1910s, still required projectionists to turn the crank at a pace of 16 to 20 images per second. By and large, this was actually still the case after the war, until the advent of synchronous sound and the generalization of the electric motor imposed the constant speed of the famous 24 images per second.7 To be sure, as early as 1901, Path catalogs advertised the merits of some automatized devices for domestic use, equipped with a multiple-speed motor capable of maintaining a regular run of images. Yet these were clearly meant to relieve projectionists of an effort of attention rather than replace them outright. Cinema overwhelmingly remained an art of the crank.8

One may certainly wonder about the part played by the high-precision techniques of chronophotography or scientific cinematography in the elaboration of the Bergsonian image. Bergson and Marey were colleagues at the Collge de France, and this is not an insignificant fact.9 Other contemporary apparatuses may have served as modelsEdisons kinetoscope in particular, with its electric motor. But basically, what Bergson may or may not have seen matters little. The cinematograph as he describes it is his own invention and conforms to his method. The nodal point of the analogy, what drives it from beginning to end, is the uniform character of the film run made possible by the automatization of the apparatus. Bergson did not even need to evoke the presence of a motor explicitly to suggest uniform motion. The decisive element was that the mechanism of the cinematograph only had to be set going.10 Once the movement was launched, the hand no longer had anything to do with it and the mind of the operator could attend to something else, indifferent to the variety of real

7 As a reference, let us mention Georges Sadouls Histoire gnrale du cinma: In 1920, the largest French movie theaters still used hand-cranked projectors for film screenings. The rhythm of the projection could thus be adjusted, and even appliances equipped with an electric motor could be slowed down and speeded up thanks to a rheostat. See Georges Sadoul, Histoire gnrale du cinma, vol. 5, LArt muet, 1919-1929 (Paris: Denol, 1975) 84. 8 See Benot Turquetys text, Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement, in this volume. 9 The ambivalence of Mareys chronophotographical experiments makes them all the more interesting from a Bergsonian perspective. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Limage est le mouvant, in Intermdialits 3 (Spring 2004): 11-30; Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni, Mouvements de lair: tienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides (Paris: Gallimard/Runion des muses nationaux, 2004); Pasi Vliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010); Maria Tortajada, valuation, mesure, mouvement: la philosophie contre la science et les concepts du cinma (Bergson, Marey), in Revue europenne des sciences sociales XLVI.141 (2008): 95-111. 10 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: McMillan, 1911) 323. (online version available at http://www.archive.org/stream/creativeevolu1st00berguoft#page/n7/mode/2up, last accessed on February 13, 2013)

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movements which the machine, left to its own mechanism, reproduced on the screen by running film frames before a beam of light.11

Thus, the emphasis was on the artificial continuity of the uniform run and on the idea of time such continuity commanded, rather than on the discontinuity linked to the fragmentation of film frames and their stroboscopic (intermittent) reproduction. I already elaborated in detail upon this point elsewhere,12 and will therefore limit the present argument to the main insights which an attentive reading of the texts featuring a cinematographic reference in the Bergsonian corpus may very simply yield.

But what is meant by the term uniform, to begin with? In the case in point, the run of the celluloid strip of film at a rigorously constant speed proves rather secondary. As has already been pointed out, Bergson did not explicitly mention a motor though the description he gave of the apparatus clearly seemed to integrate the principle of the automatic run. What really matters here is that the movement should be mechanical, that is, indifferent or arbitrary. This intrinsic indetermination implies that arbitrary speeds may be applied to it, that it may be speeded up or slowed down without affecting in any way what is projected on the screen.13 In a sense, the appliance represents a system isolated from the movements it is supposed to reproduce, a system that owes nothing to the variations in intensity singularizing these movements. The speed of the films run may well be modified at will through a rheostat; for all that, the nature of the projection will remain radically different from a hand-cranked projection. Notwithstanding the variations tied to tiredness, the natural lack of precision of the gesture or economic pressures to cut screenings short, the projectionist clearly speeded up or slowed down the run of the film strip according to what took place in the projected scene or the action whose unfolding he accompanied and scanned. The automatic appliance, on the other hand, did not need to be set to the durations whose artificial synthesis it presented; it uniformly subjected them to its own duration, that of a mechanical system artificially isolated from universal becoming and over which time could only glide, as Bergson wrote in the first pages of An Introduction to Metaphysics. Indeed, this system conformed to patterns of repetition in which duration was

11 In that respect, a rather illuminating approach consists in situating the cinematograph within the larger context of a kind of generalized cinema where, alongside the best-known optical dispositives, one would find all sorts of cinematic machines developed in the field of artistic techniques and methods, including literature. See Maria Tortajada, Machines cinmatiques et dispositifs visuels. Cinma et pr-cinma luvre chez Alfred Jarry, 1895 40 (2003): 5-23; Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009. 12 See Elie During, Vie et mort du cinmatographe: de Lvolution cratrice Dure et Simultanit, in Bergson, ed. C. Riquier (Paris: Cerf, 2012). 13 This holds of course only if one assumes the position of the screen, not as an exterior spectator but as an observer involved in the nexus of relations organizing concrete becomings. The motif of a proportional increase of all speeds in the universe was an experience of thought often discussed in Bergsons time. Built on the model of geometric transformations by similarity, it aimed to bring out the relative character of measured time to better emphasizeby contrastthe absolute character of lived duration. Pushing this line of reasoning to its limit, Bergson contemplated an infinite acceleration, where everything would be given at once: as he observed, nothing would be fundamentally altered for the purpose of scientific analysis. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution 9-10, 357; Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999) 40-41; and La Pense et le mouvant, published in English as The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (1946; New York: Citadel Press, 2002) 13.

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stripped of any efficiency. This neutralized duration, it should be noted, is a natural medium for the arbitrary cuts represented by the film frames.14

Uniform, then, connotes not so much the literal constancy or invariance of speed as the homogeneity of a time indifferent to what takes place in it. In short, what the cinematographic mechanism of thought performssince this is what mattered to Bergson, after allis the extraction of a single representation of becoming in general15 out of the variety of effective becomings. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless.16 In the analogy of the cinematograph, this becoming in general (Bergson sometimes uses the expression duration in general in the sameunfavorablesense), this indefinite becoming which is not the becoming of anything in particular (except precisely of an outside mechanism, indifferent from the standpoint of images) corresponds to a movement, always the same, [] hidden in the apparatus.17 The section to which one should always return, because it provides the key to reading Bergsons montage, is the following: The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph.18

Indeed, to what does the cinematograph owe its remarkable effectiveness, if not to the fact that, subjecting the film strip to a global run of instantaneous photographs, it recomposes and reproduces in one piece the varied movements that make up the filmed subject, the content of animated views? There lies the essence of its process. Transposed to the level of the operations of thought, the cinematographic mechanism can be defined by two complementary substitutions: 1) the substitution of a pure mechanical movement, an analogon of movement in general, that is, a universal equivalent for all concrete movements, for the infinitely diverse movements of the real; 2) the substitution of an absolute timea frame-time meant to coordinate and link together all the temporal fibers into a homogeneous form of representation, laying out relations of simultaneity by and far

14 See Franois Albera, Pour une pistmographie du montage: le moment Marey, in Arrt sur image, fragmentation du temps, Franois Albera, Marta Braun and Andr Gaudreault, eds. (Lausanne: ditions Payot, 2002) 40-41. 15 Bergson, Creative Evolution 324. 16 Bergson, Creative Evolution 321. Incidentally, this should stop us from identifying, without further precision, Bergsonism to a sort of Heracliteanism celebrating the flow or becoming in general. In contemporary analytic philosophy, Heracliteanism takes the form of a rather abstract defense of the irreducible dimension of the passage of time. No doubt Bergson would have been greatly amused to find himself counted in the ranks of the proponents of this A-time, as it has been customarily referred to after McTaggart. On the continental side, Heracliteanism finds a different expression in the Deleuzian celebration of lines of becoming. But the multiplicity of these lines is more important in Deleuzes view than the general attachment to becoming as such. As for Bergsonism, it is primarily a philosophy of durationsof the coexistence of durations, and that is our concern here. 17 Bergson, Creative Evolution 330. 18 Bergson, Creative Evolution 322.

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across space19for the web of proper durations, the multiplicity of singular, differentiated becomings.

From the standpoint of the scientific representations of the timeand this is ultimately what Bergsons analysis as a whole is directed atthe promotion of cinematographic time amounts to a shift from a parameter-time for local use, liable to follow change at least superficially, surveying its nuances and inflections step by step, to a rather particular use of dimension-time known as coordinate-time: a time capable of identifying two arbitrary instants and providing a measure of their temporal gap, but in a way that makes this measure indifferent to what occurs in the interval itself.20 It is through the cinematograph that time became for good a fourth dimension of space, in an operationally clear sense. Bergson had announced this promotion of spatialized time as early as his Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience.21 Yet beyond the metaphors assigned to suggest the spatialization of time, it is only with coordinate time that the distribution of time over space is effectedand this implies coordinating heterogeneous durations associated with movements that can be brought together on one single plane of simultaneity regardless of their separation in space.

This frame-time, it should be noted, corresponds very precisely to the scheme of four-dimensional space-time analyzed in chapter 6 of Duration and Simultaneity.22 In this sense, the cinematograph appears as the technical allegory of the false movement by which we picture becoming as made of instantaneous spatial configurations. Going even further,

19 The substitution evidently meets a principle of economy as well: in Creative Evolution, before introducing the cinematograph, Bergson evoked another way of rendering the extensive becoming, one more faithful to the diversity of real movement and flows of duration, but also much more painstaking. Positing the movement of a parade of soldiers, Bergson explained that one could cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, give to each of them the movement of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual, and throw the whole on the screen. (Bergson, Creative Evolution 321) This possibility corresponds to the local or dynamic approach mentioned in the paragraph that follows the passage. In the language of physics, we may say that each line in the flow of movements can be described through a parameter of evolution homeomorphic to an open interval in the totality of real numbers. This parameter finds a natural interpretation as the proper time measured between events affecting a single portion of matter. Let us note that, in practice, variations affecting the coordinates associated to a system of axes used to identify the different moments in an evolution may always be expressed according to this kind of parameter. This points to the fact that, between the local and the global approaches, there is more of a duality of tendencies, or a difference in orientation, than a systematic incompatibility. On these questions, see Peter Kroes, Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985). 20 See Bergson, Creative Evolution 9, 23, 348, 355-358. What does it mean for time to be indifferent to what occurs in the interval? The formula may seem imprecise. It is useful to view it in relation to a specific mathematical concept Bergson did not necessarily have in mind, that of an exact differential whose expression results solely from the datum of extremal terms. Relativity theory thus distinguishes between the concept of proper time, always relative to the space-time path connecting two successive events, and the concept of coordinate time, relative to a system of referenceyet capable of providing, from that standpoint, a direct expression of the temporal difference between two dates corresponding to two events, and of doing so independently of the infinitely diverse movements which are liable to connect them in the interval. The famous twin paradox associated with Langevins name only draws the conclusions from this disjunction between two uses of time in physical theory. 21 The essay appeared in English as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1910; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1995). 22 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity 103-4 ff. See During, Vie et mort du cinmatographe and Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (Paris: PUF, 2012).

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one might say that the cinematograph provides the operating condition for this artificial recomposition of becomingby giving an account of the constitution of those instantaneous sections of becoming in which a class of events or simultaneous states can be said to coexist in the same instant. The sections are global: they define planes of simultaneity as vast in principle as the universe itself. Still, the whole interest of the cinematograph lies in its suggestion that, far from being self-sustained (who has ever seen the scene represented on a film frame?), these ideal sections have no existence independently of the milieu in which the succession of planes is ordered, no reason to exist outside the cinematography of the universe23 as a whole. This temporal milieu is made up of a foliation of states or configurations of the universe. We call it frame-timeor framed timebecause it cuts only by framing, that is, by coordinating events or synchronizing clocks, which in the end always comes down to establishing relations of distant simultaneity. Our reading hypothesis may then be summed up simply: frame-time is what the cinematograph aims at. What is at stake in this particular figure of time is a principle of equivalence for all durations, rather than the familiar linear time-dimension which servesin Kant and othersas the homogeneous milieu of succession in general, dotted with instants analogous to points.

Bergson probably happened to stress things out differently in other contexts. The cinematographic illusion would then translate in two ways, depending on what was underlined: the run of the film strip, which implies a prior winding of recorded and fixed views on the reel; or the fact of discontinuity itself, expressed in the juxtaposition of instantaneous images and the imperceptible fits and starts of an appliance that has the film strip jerk forwardwe may remember here that the original cinematograph projector was occasionally compared to a sewing machine. In the first case, what is at stake is the ready made nature conferred on becoming by spatialized time: everything is virtually given and only has to unfold, like the film strip or the reel featuring the successive phases of a development.24 The illusion then consists in thinking that the succession marks a deficit, a weakness in our perception, which is forced by this weakness to divide up the film image by image instead of grasping it in the aggregate.25 In the second case, the illusion takes the form of an inversion of the real genesisin an attempt to recompose what moves, out of immobile elements,26 just as instantaneous views give the illusory impression of a continuous movement when projected at sufficient speed.27 It may seem at times that the cinematographical method28 amounts to just that: the desperate attempt to regain mobility from static snapshots. However, Bergson did not wait for the revelation of the cinematograph to develop these motifs: they started appearing in his philosophy with the 1889 Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience29 and were supported by a whole array

23 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity 108. 24 Bergson, Creative Evolution 357. 25 Bergson, The Creative Mind 18. 26 Bergson, Creative Evolution 163, 325 ff. 27 See Henri Bergson, Confrence de Madrid sur la personnalit, in crits (Paris: PUF, 2010) 513. 28 Bergson, Creative Evolution 323. 29 See Bergson, letter to mile Borel, August 20th 1907, crits 340. The passage deserves quoting in its integrality: In Time and Free Will [Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience], I insisted on the necessity for intelligence to consider only moments in time, only states in becoming, only positions in movement, and

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of images, some of which may in fact be more directly suggestive. The examples that come to mind are those of the fan snapped open30 and the pearls strung into a necklace connecting them.31 These are two ways of expressing the same fundamental fact: we tend to think of the successive stages of becoming as so many images placed side by side along the strip of film, waiting to be unrolled. But what is the use of the cinematographic analogy if the fan and the necklace already convey the idea?

As we seek to find out which singular dimension the cinematographic analogy brings with it when compared to this series of competing images, the idea of mechanical movement inevitably resurfaces: undetermined movement, movement without quality, capable through its very abstraction to make the most heterogeneous durations commensurate, to make them coexist in the form of the simultaneous.32 Hence, in the image of the pearl necklace, the problem does not lie with the pearls, but with the string. The simultaneous states assume a consistency only through the temporal weft supporting them. Let us be quite clear about this: it is true that the motif of the uniform movement concealed in the appliance is in fact inseparable from the stroboscopicor kaleidoscopiccondition figured in the series of instantaneous images. In the famous passage of Creative Evolution which serves as our guide here, the image of the kaleidoscope very quickly relays that of the cinematograph: it points to its phenomeno-technical condition, equivalent in that respect to the process of photographic recording on which the whole cinematographic apparatus depends.33 But from Bergsons standpoint, following the logic of the analogy, the cinematograph comes first with respect to photography because it opens the transcendental plane where the issue of the coexistence of durations may be formulated, although in a way that is paved with illusion. Some time later, in Duration and Simultaneity, Bergson was to refer to the same issue as the simultaneity of flows, pointing to a different path towards the extensive weaving of durations. Contrary to what an analytical understanding of the matter may lead to think, the analysis of movement effected in the recording phase (section, capture, immobilization) presupposes, and in that sense anticipates the mechanical synthesis effected by projectioneven though the latter actually comes second in the technical evolution of

then reconstitute mobility artificially, combining immobilities with one another. I did not qualify this process as cinematographic at that point, but the cinematograph had not yet been invented. Regardless, and whatever the name given to it, this mechanism inherent in our intelligence is, in my view, the true cause for our tendency to eliminate concrete duration from the real, to take into account only mathematical time, to see only arrangements, derangements, and rearrangements of parts there where an undivided and irreversible becoming exists. This just shows how I put to use the second remark, like the first, to demonstrate the artificial character assumed by mechanistic schemas when they serve to represent the evolution of consciousness and life. 30 Bergson, The Creative Mind 20. 31 Introduction to Metaphysics in Bergson, The Creative Mind 185. 32 I could mention by way of example a given shading in the gradual transition from green to blue (qualitative change), a given step in the process of transformation of the flower into a fruit, or the larva into a nymph (evolutive change), a given phase in an activity such as drinking, eating, fighting (extensive change). See Bergson, Creative Evolution 320. 33 Hence the proximity of the whole issue with the discussion of Zenos paradoxes on movement. On this tangle of questions, see Maria Tortajada, Photography/Cinema: Complementary Paradigms in the Early Twentieth Century, in Between Still and Moving Images, Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon, eds. (Herts, UK: John Libbey, 2012) 33-46.

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the dispositive. The historical dissociation of the recording appliance and the projector, the resulting autonomization of the moment of projection, mark a decisive step in the purely mechanical rendering of movement. They also indicate that, where photographic shots could still paint from life, cutting out, so to speak, from the subjectone may recall that photographic impression already served as a template for the operation of perception in Matter and Memorythe images fixed on the cinematographic strip are just abstract units, two degrees removed from the real and condemned to be imparted movement from the outside, through a kind of artificial animation.34

This slightly paradoxical relation of presupposition between photography and cinematography may be better understood if one remembers that Bergsons concern is not so much homogeneous and mathematical time, the abstract dimension underlying the uses of time as a parameter. Nor is it length-time (temps-longueur) or spatialized time in general. Rather, Bergson is interested in the particular intellectual illusion on which the scientific mind must rely to make the coordination of flows effective: it is frame-time as distinct from fiber-time; it is universal time as distinct from the plurality of interlocking local durations, with their particular rhythms or degrees of tension. Thus, cinematographic motion logically comes prior to the photographic image, just as frame-time is presupposed by the cutting out of frames as abstract units of becoming. The nature of the question, the order of reasons underlying the cinematographic analogy, suggest that we give up the common sense maxim that rules out synthesizing anything not previously reduced through analysis. It is only in retrospect that synthesis seems to presuppose analysis. In the present case, the artificial synthesis of movement (the false movement par excellence) comes first and the elements of the synthesis (the still frames as putative fragments of motion) turn out to be artifacts of the very attempt to obtain movement through recomposition in the first place.

No movement is to be produced out of the immobile: so goes the Bergsonian leitmotiv. But there would be no talk of illusion here if we were not convinced of the contrary in practicebetter still, if we did not ceaselessly do the opposite.35 The theoretical illusion would not be so powerful if it could not be substantiated by operations which prove to be effective and hinge on reality in some sense. Whatever else may be said of the cinematographic method, it does the trick. The method may rest upon a fundamental illusion, it is nonetheless a method. Its active component, as we saw earlier, is the abstract movement encapsulated in the idea of frame-time. For if actual movement is to be reconstructed out of still views sampled from it, there is no other choice but to introduce movement surreptitiously somewhere in order to get the process started36: [I]f

34 These observations should be tempered or complexified by Andr Gaudreaults insightful comments on the intrinsically serial character of the film frame. In ordinary circumstances, one never deals with single frames in isolation. The moving image presents itself as a sui generis unit. See Andr Gaudreault, Du simple au multiple: le cinma comme srie de sries, Cinmas: revue dtudes cinmatographiques 13.1-2 (2002), especially 38-42. Still, keeping these points in mind, the general line of my argument holds. 35 Likewise, pure duration may not be measured, and yet we do measure something which we call time. 36 Similarly, for us to measure anything beyond space, our measuring operations have to be supported by some real time participating, in some sense, in the lived duration of a concrete consciousness. This is a recurring theme in Duration and Simultaneity.

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we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus.37

Yet it is also necessary to check that the operation may indeed be generalized, and notably that it makes it possible to represent together a diversity of movements in their parallel unfolding, following an order of simultaneities that allows them to be brought together in their very dispersion. That is what the cinematograph accomplishes, subjecting photographic sections to the law of uniform run. In other words, it indexes them to a homogeneous time that is not reducible to any of their proper durations or even to any of their spatialized idealizations (timelines, local parameter-times), and allows them to be held together and compared from the standpoint of measurement. Zenos paradoxes would seem to us mere mathematical speculations, they would lose much of their grip if they did not consistently rely on such a global framing of the situation. It is because the local movements of Achilles and the tortoise are first projected and seized in the framework of a global, undifferentiated time that makes them commensurable that they may then be treated as space, that their paths may be described as an indefinite series of stages, etc.

As far as the chronophotographic method is concernedand Mareys experiments arguably provided a host of models for devising the Bergsonian cinematographit is essential to acknowledge that in setting the temporal variable of the photographic shot, that is, frequency, Marey imposed the fundamental temporal basis with respect to which the uniform movement of the mobile or the variations of its speed may be measured.38 However, in the cosmological perspective that prevails in Creative Evolution, the main function of this temporal basis is to ensure that a diversity of movements, of durations singularized by specific rhythms, find something like a common denominator that enables them to be treated in extension. Absolute time and its uniform flow, introduced by Newton in the General Scholium of his Principia, provided the metaphysical formula of a method commonly adopted by classical mechanics: in the absence of a direct access to absolute space, an ideal clock and a privileged system of reference tied to fixed stars made it possiblein principle at least to frame the world and describe its universal course. The Bergsonian cinematograph and its associated figurative methods (the graphs and space-time diagrams discussed in Duration and Simultaneity) prove instrumental in laying bare the mathematical and conceptual assumptions that make this kind of representation of extensive becoming possible in the first place.

Now the orientation of Bergsons critique will not particularly surprise those who are a little familiar with his philosophy: the problem with frame-time is, very simply, that it does not lastit does not retain anything from the hesitation and unpredictability inherent in real change. Yet again, it does not last, not because it is constituted of immobilities, but more deeply because it is not the time of anything in particular. An absolute movement is 37 Bergson, Creative Evolution 322. See Henri Bergson, La Pense et le mouvant (Paris:PUF, 2007) 7 fn (this footnote has been omitted in the English translation, along with all others!). 38 See Tortajada, valuation, mesure, mouvement: 104.

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necessarily an undetermined or undefined one, as Bergson puts it.39 If it appears to be discontinuous, or if it may be arbitrarily decomposed ad infinitum (which amounts to the same thing), it is in virtue of its being abstract and unreal in proportion. Leibniz intended something similar when he observed that the continuity or infinite divisibility of mathematical time was a sure mark of its ideal character. But in Bergsons case it is the very form of the problem that leads to this abstraction: cinematographic time appears as sciences answer to the question of knowing by which means a diversity of durations associated to heterogeneous changeswhose local movement is only the most superficial manifestationmay be represented and thought together. After Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze identified this issue of coexistence as central to Bergsonism and showed that cinema could take it up, this time positively, provided that one focused on the moving image projected onscreen rather than on the mechanical functioning of the appliance. For Bergson himself, the cinematograph appeared in its mediating function, at once a foil, a negative image, an epistemological obstacle in Bachelards sense,40 and an instrument of conceptual precision designed to bring attention to the fine differentiation between two senses of time, in conformity to a duality of tendencies running through the heart of the scientific view of the universe: global time (homogeneous, absolute, generic) and local time (differentiated, relational, individual).

39 Bergson, Creative Evolution 321. 40 I elaborate upon this idea in During, Vie et mort du cinmatographe.