Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy

The introduction has three printed subheads. Marrati first positions Deleuze between Bazin and Metz, then replaces representation with Bergson's plane of image, matter, light, and movement, and finally shows how cinema leads toward What Is Philosophy? and the modern problem of belief in the world.

1. 01
   pp. 7–8

   Deleuze and film theory

   Cinematic perception has no fixed subjective centre, and images cannot be reduced to linguistic statements. Movement-image and time-image therefore reorganize debates about montage, narrative, and classical versus modern cinema.

2. 02
   pp. 9–10

   Philosophical stakes

   Bergson places image, matter, light, and movement on one plane. Subjective perception forms only when a living image selects useful stimuli; cinema can return to acentred perception or detach perception from action.

3. 03
   pp. 10–12

   The Cinema books within Deleuze's work

   Cinema brings Bergson into Deleuze's lineage of immanence, gives images movement and temporal depth, and recasts the modern crisis from the death of God to the loss of a relation with the world.

Marrati begins with cinema's technology of any-instant-whatever, passes through Bergson's critique of the inner cinematograph, and uses Deleuze's reconstruction of three theses on movement to explain frame, out-of-field, and shot. The printed chapter has no internal subheads; the six turns below are site navigation.

1. 01
   pp. 13–16

   Any-instant-whatever

   Cinema analyses movement continuously through equidistant instants, unlike arts that synthesize movement from privileged poses. This singular experience requires concepts made to its measure.

2. 02
   pp. 17–21

   The cinematographic illusion

   Bergson treats the cinematograph as an external model of ordinary perception, language, and intellect: it extracts stable states and then pretends to reconstruct real movement with abstract time.

3. 03
   pp. 21–26

   Ancients and moderns

   Ancient thought reconstructs movement from privileged instants, modern science from any instants. Both can spatialize creative duration, yet modern science also opens conditions for a new philosophy of movement and for cinema.

4. 04
   pp. 26–30

   The open Whole and mobile section

   The Whole is not a closed set but an Open that keeps changing. Movement both changes the positions of parts within a set and expresses qualitative change in the Whole, becoming a mobile section of duration.

5. 05
   pp. 30–35

   Frame and out-of-field

   A frame provisionally closes a set of visual and sonic information. Relative out-of-field links it to a larger space; absolute out-of-field lets open duration enter the closed system.

6. 06
   pp. 35–37

   The shot liberates movement

   Moving objects within a fixed frontal space remain images in movement. Mobile camera and montage make the shot itself a mobile section, so movement no longer depends on a single carrier.

This unit confronts Heidegger's world-picture with Bergson's acentred universe of images, then follows the living image as it generates perception, action, and affection. Vertov and the close-up show cinema loosening the human centre while creating new perceptions and affects.

1. 01
   pp. 38–40

   World-picture and world of images

   Heidegger's modern subject places the world before representation; Bergson's world consists of images that do not await humans, and cinema is not merely a technical copy of that world.

2. 02
   pp. 40–45

   Image–movement–matter–light

   Images act on one another without pre-given coordinates. Matter is flowing image and light propagates within things; consciousness is not a lamp that illuminates objects but a local opacity in this luminous field.

3. 03
   pp. 46–48

   Living image and interval

   A living image receives only selected stimuli and delays response. Perception arises by subtraction, action by selectable response, and affection occupies the interval between them.

4. 04
   pp. 49–50

   Double system of reference

   The same image can participate as a thing in universal variation or become a subjective perception around a living image. Natural perception is therefore a contraction of complete perception, not philosophy's absolute model.

5. 05
   pp. 51–53

   Carrying perception into matter

   Vertov's kino-eye does not replace the human eye with a machine eye. Montage connects distant images, frees perception from a fixed viewpoint, and makes the eye-in-things visible.

6. 06
   pp. 54–59

   Creation, not ontological duplication

   Cinema is a real practice of images on the same plane of immanence. The close-up extracts an object from spatiotemporal coordinates and turns it into impersonal affect; classification follows images cinema creates rather than copies of a pre-given being.

Griffith and Eisenstein construct two forms of organic montage. One restores a Whole through juxtaposition, convergence, and duel; the other produces a new Whole through internal opposition and qualitative leap. Their difference is sharp, but both let movement compose time, derive narrative from images, and trust action to touch history.

1. 01
   pp. 60–61

   Indirect image of time

   Montage composes movement-images through raccord, cut, and false raccord. As long as each image is treated as present, time must be inferred indirectly from relations between images.

2. 02
   pp. 62–64

   Griffith's organic Whole

   Parallel, alternating, convergent, accelerated montage and close-ups organize differences within an organism that can be threatened and restored. Local actions ultimately join the fate of the Whole.

3. 03
   pp. 64–66

   Narrative derives from images

   Classical narrative arises from the organico-active composition of images. Treating the image first as a statement obscures cinema's singular way of organizing meaning through movement.

4. 04
   pp. 66–68

   Eisenstein's dialectical Whole

   The Whole divides internally through quantitative, qualitative, and dynamic oppositions, then passes by qualitative leap into a higher unity. Time does not surround events from outside but powers their dialectical genesis.

5. 05
   pp. 68–71

   The large form of the action-image

   S–A–S′ lets a character read a determinate milieu, act, and transform the situation. Realism here means determinate milieus, embodied behaviour, and sensory-motor continuity.

6. 06
   pp. 72–73

   The break in historical belief

   Classical action trusts humans to grasp a total situation and advance a people and history. Marrati treats fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and war as an irreversible break in that belief.

Rossellini makes characters see what ruins, factories, and ordinary environments no longer let established uses contain. Bazin explains this through ambiguity and temporal depth; Deleuze turns it into an event of thought: sensory-motor linkage breaks and pure optical and sound situations, weak links, and any-spaces-whatever emerge.

1. 01
   pp. 74–76

   Rossellini and the unreadable face

   Edmund's face in Germany Year Zero does not supply an emotional verdict. Meaning must form through event and time rather than being closed in advance by montage.

2. 02
   pp. 76–78

   From realism to the seer

   Bazin stresses that the shot preserves the ambiguity of reality; Deleuze stresses that a character learns to see after practical recognition fails. In Europe '51, the factory is no longer recognized as a workplace but becomes something that must be seen.

3. 03
   pp. 78–80

   Pure optical and sound situations

   Characters can still run, wander, or speak, yet cannot close perception into an action that resolves the situation. Seeing and hearing acquire independent pressure.

4. 04
   pp. 80–81

   Any-space-whatever and weak links

   Dispersive events, chance encounters, and ruined spaces replace determinate milieus fitted to action. Space no longer guarantees one use, and relations can begin again from disconnection.

5. 05
   pp. 81–83

   Cliché and new connection

   Stopping movement does not suffice to make a new image. Fixed shots and empty spaces exceed cliché only when they connect with time and thought.

6. 06
   pp. 84–85

   Historical rupture within taxonomy

   The postwar is not a date imposed on natural classification but the event in which belief in universal history collapses. Once teleology recedes, time, becoming, and event become new conditions of classification.

This unit removes the premise that images always occupy the present tense. Changes of speed, false raccords, disproportion, and decentring already make images bear time. Bergson's attentive circuits, pure memory, and inverted cone explain the coexistence of actual and virtual, while Welles makes that structure cinematic.

1. 01
   pp. 86–89

   Aberrant movement releases time

   Measurable normal movement makes time its metric; aberrant, decentered movement breaks that subordination. Direct time does not require movement to stop.

2. 02
   pp. 90–92

   Habitual and attentive perception

   Habitual perception moves horizontally to the next useful object; attentive perception returns to the same object, forming paired circuits of expanding memory and deepening reality.

3. 03
   pp. 93–95

   Description recreates the object

   Descriptions by Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Godard, and Rossellini extract different singular lines each time. Object and thought are recreated together in an open circuit.

4. 04
   pp. 95–98

   The smallest actual–virtual circuit

   The actual present strictly coexists with its own virtual past. The two remain distinct but exchange positions in the crystal, making any stable assignment of an original impossible.

5. 05
   pp. 98–100

   The past preserves itself

   Memory does not store the past in a psychic container. The present S connects at every instant to virtual sheets of the past at different contractions, making subjectivity an interiority of time itself.

6. 06
   pp. 100–101

   Characters move within sheets of the past

   Depth of field in Citizen Kane is more than a technical achievement. As Kane walks toward his friend, he enters the sheet of the past in which their relation breaks; movement becomes subordinate to time.

Classical cinema joins action, people, and revolution into a belief that the world can be understood. Propaganda exposes the double power of images and historical purpose loses credibility. Modern cinema reduces the issue to its sharpest form: can humans still form a relation with this world? That cinematic problem finally rewrites the plane of immanence and the image of thought.

1. 01
   pp. 102–104

   Classical cinema's belief in a people

   Action can read the world, a people can become the subject of history, and a future world can orient present struggle. American and Soviet cinema share this structure through different contents.

2. 02
   pp. 105–107

   The double power of images

   The power of images to move masses can also serve fascism, Nazism, and state propaganda. A simple art–propaganda split cannot absolve cinema's own power.

3. 03
   pp. 107–110

   Resisting opinion and the present

   Rejecting historical purpose cannot mean accepting the present. Thought begins under the impact of an unfamiliar force and resists opinion, stupidity, servitude, and the intolerable.

4. 04
   pp. 111–113

   The human–world relation

   Modern doubt does not concern whether the world exists but whether we can participate in it. Belief precedes renewed seeing and turns the broken relation itself into an object of creation.

5. 05
   pp. 114–118

   Immanent belief and the missing people

   Belief shifts from proof of knowledge to a choice of mode of life. It waits for neither an afterlife nor a future state; a people ceases to be a pre-unified subject and becomes minor, divided, and unfinished.

6. 06
   pp. 119–123

   Cinema rewrites immanence

   Cinema brings Bergson's plane of movement, matter, and light into the lineage of immanence. Philosophy no longer makes thought without image its sole task but creates plural images of thought with infinite movement and temporal depth.

The conclusion returns to the paradox at the end of Cinema 2: philosophy creates cinematic concepts, so they do not lie ready-made in films; yet they must belong precisely to cinema and cannot be replaced by arbitrary external categories. The encounter leaves open the question of what philosophy is, which What Is Philosophy? continues.

1. 01
   p. 124

   Cinema thinks in images

   Cinema, filmmakers, spectators, and critics can think in their own right. Philosophy neither grants cinema the status of thought nor reduces images to theoretical material.

2. 02
   pp. 125–126

   Philosophy creates concepts

   Philosophy becomes philosophy of cinema only by creating concepts that did not exist before and that concrete cinematic problems force into being. The two practices retain their difference and meet at the level of problems.