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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).


#
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.


$
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.


&
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 general
15
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.


'
across space
19
for 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).


(
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 universe
23
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 method
28
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 conscience
29
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 20
th
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


)
of images, some of which may in fact be more directly suggestive. The examples that come
to mind are those of the fan snapped open
30
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.


*
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 started
36
: [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.


!+
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.


!!
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.