Inverted identification: Bergson and phenomenology in Deleuze's cinema books

Abstract

Deleuze's cinema books are often understood as adopting a Bergsonian framework while rejecting phenomenological accounts of film experience for equating ‘cinematographic perception’ with ‘natural perception’; or, alternatively, simply as being a phenomenological inquiry. Reading Deleuze's comments on, and references to, phenomenology in the cinema books (especially Merleau-Ponty, Laffay, and Dufrenne), this paper argues that while not following a phenomenological logic in general, at certain moments the cinema books' Bergsonian account intersects with phenomenology. Moreover, in the books, the existence of movement-images in the cinema depends on the spectator's experience of watching films. The logic explaining this encounter is indebted to the account of the experience of art and cinema in phenomenology which Deleuze combines with the discussion of ‘real’ movements in Bergson's Creative Evolution. This reliance on a specific ‘passive’ viewer's experience can explain the books' limited interest in early cinema and in television, video, and the digital image.

Keywords:

• Gilles Deleuze
• Henri Bergson
• phenomenology
• perception
• movement-image

Acknowledgements

For their helpful suggestions and insightful comments, I would like to thank Nir Kedem, the participants of the 2011 Deleuzian Futures conference in Tel Aviv, Warren Buckland, and an anonymous reviewer for the New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Notes

 1. In a work from 1988, Gaylyn Studlar simply mentions that in Deleuze's recent (at the time) work on film he ‘rejects psychoanalysis and turns to a phenomenological approach’ (Studlar [1988] 1992, 196n2). Vivian Sobchack (1992, 30) reports that Deleuze's cinema books have been ‘generally identified as a phenomenology of cinema’ and Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010, 157) state that ‘Deleuze has often been labelled a phenomenologist’. Neither Sobchack nor Elsaesser and Hagener give any references to those who have made this assertion about Deleuze's work and both realise it is not an easy connection to make.

 2. It has been claimed that in the books Deleuze ‘does not refer himself to phenomenology's founding figures’ and ‘instead turns to the vitalist life philosophy of Henri Bergson’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 158); and that at first glance ‘Deleuze's relation to phenomenology appears as a strict refusal of the traditional phenomenological model’ (Guillemet 2010, 96). Indeed, Deleuze's marked aversion to phenomenology, which he dubs ‘our modern scholasticism’ (Deleuze 1983a, 195), is found throughout his writings. For example, he wonders whether phenomenology is not a prisoner of common sense and the doxa of the traditional Western image of thought continuing its model of recognition (Deleuze 1994, 137 and 320n6); and, with Félix Guattari, he attacks ‘Husserl and many of his successors’ for reintroducing transcendence to the plane of immanence (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 46–47). Outside of film studies, some writers have characterised Deleuze's relation to phenomenology in a more nuanced fashion. His work has been described, for example, as a ‘radicalisation of phenomenology’ (Colebrook 2002, 60), as an extraction and transformation of certain isolated moments in it (Toscano 2005), and as one in which phenomenology functions as a friend/enemy in a perpetual, incessant sadistic game (Beaulieu 2009).

 3. For a further, critical, discussion of her departure from Deleuze into phenomenology, see Perkins (2004) and Elsaesser and Hagener (2010, 125).

 4. There is also a ‘relation-image’ which functions as closure of the deduction and ‘reconstitutes the whole of the movement with all the aspects of the interval’ (Deleuze 1989, 32).

 5. They are not the only one. The cinema books obviously also deal with films and not just with Bergsonian images. Even if we take Bergson to be ‘the great regulator of the system’, references to him are practically non-existent after Chapter 5 of Cinema 2 (Ropars-Wuilleumier 2010, 16). Moreover, despite Deleuze's (1986, ix and xiv) protestations to the contrary, the books seem to offer some kind of historical account of images, their relations with other historical factors, and images of history. There is however little agreement about the logic and cogency of the historical aspects of the cinema books and their relation to the taxonomy of images and signs (see, for example, Bordwell 1997, 116–117; Deamer 2009; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 160; Kovács 2000; Marrati 2008, 64–65; Rancière 2006; and Rodowick 2001, 170–202).

 6. This could leave us wondering whether Deleuze needs films. For Hughes (2008, 26), it remains unclear whether the cinema books are a theory of cinema at all. As I will argue later on, our very access to movement-images does depend, in the cinema books, on our experience of the cinema. Deleuze's Bergsonian account of movement-images is not merely a rehearsal of ideas already given in philosophy, but indeed the concepts that cinema ‘gives rise to’ (Deleuze 1989, 280).

 7. However, even in the cases in which the images are closer to the first regime, an account of subjective perception is not necessarily useless. It can serve as a standard against which the break with everyday human perception (or ‘natural perception’) can be evaluated or appreciated. For example, when dealing with the ‘semi-subjective’ perception-image, Deleuze (1986, 72) adds that ‘it is difficult to find a status for this semi-subjectivity, since it has no equivalent in natural perception’.

 8. The connection with phenomenology is not mentioned by Deleuze here but it does appear in Merleau-Ponty's (1964, 58–59) text.

 9. Deleuze (1986, 56) writes that ‘as far as we know’ Husserl never mentions the cinema. In a collection of Husserl's posthumous texts published in German in 1980, moving images are mentioned several times (Husserl 2005, 66, 584n3, 645, and 646).

10. Sartre's L'Imaginaire (published in English as The Imaginary) does refer to cinema. It mentions ‘the letters of a cinema advert forming themselves on the screen’, which Sartre (2004, 76) likens to tracing ‘a figure of eight with the tip of my index finger’, thus interestingly drawing an analogy between natural perception/imagination and the cinema. Later on, Sartre again invokes the image of the cinema, when discussing the temporalities of the flux of consciousness and the dream image, and claiming that ‘we are here not in the cinema, where the projection of a film shot more rapidly gives the impression of “slow motion”’ (130), thereby underlining the differences between the cinematic image and the dream consciousness/image.

11. The English translation misspells Laffay's name.

12. The English translation renders Deleuze's ‘récit’ inconsistently as both ‘story’ and ‘tale’.

13. Laffay's notion of the grand imagier is perhaps best known through Christian Metz's (1974, 21) elaboration; see also Gaudreault (2009, esp. 5–6 and 204 n7).

14. Furthermore, Shaviro (1993, 30) contrasts the monstrously prosthetic cinematic perception both with Husserlian bracketing and with sublation and denial by Hegel's dialectic, thus forging a connection between phenomenology and Deleuze's worst philosophical enemy.

15. Although it might seem trite, this argument is worth making, since there have been theorists who did maintain that a close connection between natural and cinematic perception exists or should be strived for. André Bazin has been understood as making the claim that neo-realism is similar to regular perception, for example by Amédée Ayfre, who according to Deleuze (1989, 281n1) ‘takes up and develops Bazin's thesis to give it a pronounced phenomenological expression’. Ayfre (1964, 67–68) suggests that there is a similarity between the way viewers interpret what they see on screen in a film that conforms to ‘phenomenological realism’ and the way they bring out the signification of facts in life. Similarly, Hugo Munsterberg can be read as proffering an analogy between film and mind (Carroll 1988).

16. Or perhaps this passivity should result in ‘affection’, insofar as it is defined as an effort that replaces action that has become impossible (Deleuze 1986, 66).

17. Deleuze (1989, 20) calls the sensory–motor image of the thing, that is, perceiving only what is in our interest to perceive, a ‘cliché’. The jamming of the sensory–motor links and the rise of pure optical–sound images are not enough to break away from clichés. The image constantly sinks to the state of cliché and the optical-and sound-image can itself become a cliché. In order to challenge the cliché the optical–sound images need to be combined with other forces which will allow the movement-image to grow in dimensions or powers which go beyond space into a time-image, readable image, and thinkable image (21–23). My focus here is not on the shift to thought and time, but on the very appearance of the pure optical–sound images.

18. This new logic is not yet the one leading to his discussion of recollection, dream, and time, which Deleuze only reaches later on in Cinema 2. There, he acknowledges a discontinuity with the previous discussion, when he notes that whereas in Cinema 1 he dealt with the first chapter of Matter and Memory, at this stage, he will deal with the second chapter, which, he writes, ‘introduces a very different point of view’ (Deleuze 1989, 288n1). This suggests that the earlier discussion, in the transition between the two books, is still meant to be understood as related to Chapter 1 of Matter and Memory with its account of subtractive sensory–motor perception that is inseparable from action.

19. They are not however the only possible source. The idea can for example be reached following existential phenomenological thinking, such as the early work of Martin Heidegger. In Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time, he claims that the kind of dealing with things which is closest to us is not ‘bare perceptual cognition’, but rather the kind that manipulates things and puts them to use, for example, using a latch when opening a door, or things as equipment when writing, working, sewing, and transportation (Heidegger 2004, §15, 96). Their being, according to Heidegger, is that of ‘readiness-to-hand’ and the less we just stare, the more we seize, hold, and use, the more unveiledly are they encountered as that which they are (§15, 98). Determining the nature of something not as ready-to-hand, but as present-at-hand by observing it, is possible but requires that there be a ‘deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully’, a holding back ‘from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like’ (§13, 88). In such a mode of ‘holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is consummated’ (§13, 89). Moreover, the presence-at-hand of things can also ‘announce itself’ and their worldhood can become ‘lit up’ in certain modes of everyday concern as well: when a thing is unusable, missing, or stands in the way (§16, 104). Whereas for Bergson perception depends on use and whatever has no function for our needs is suppressed, for Heidegger a thing is more explicitly and fully perceived when it is not used – when we withdraw from our concernful dealings with things, or when our concern is in some way deficient and things fall from use. Heidegger is closer than Bergson to Deleuze's idea that an inability to act leads to a gain in an ability to perceive.

Significantly, given Deleuze's analogy with film viewers, the idea can also be found in writings about the experience of encountering art, such as Emmanuel Levinas's 1948 article ‘Reality and its Shadow’ (1987). Deleuze's argument about a broken action-image bringing about purer perception combines two familiar tropes: a detached or disinterested ‘aesthetic attitude’ that serves no extrinsic practical end (Danto 1986; Kneller 2012); and a different, perhaps fuller or enhanced, form of perception in the making or experiencing of art or amusement, such as the ‘innocent eye’ of painters (Ruskin, n.d., 235–236n), a deautomatised or defamiliarised perception in literature (Shklovsky 1988), or intense stimuli and thrills in amusements that break through the everyday blunted perception of an audience exhausted by, or shielding itself against, the overstimulation and shocks of modernity (Singer 2001, 118–124). Any of these, or early Heidegger, seem to me to offer a more convincing framework for Deleuze's argument than his reading of Bergson.

20. These ideas can also be found in André Bazin's (2005) famous ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. It is perhaps no coincidence that his work has also been occasionally labelled as phenomenological.

21. A ‘world’ for Laffay (1964, 36) is ‘a full set in which things hold each other, in which there is no vacuum, and in which it is impossible to change anything in an instant’.

22. Laffay uses the same term – ‘irréel’ – throughout his book and it is most likely borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre's (2004) The Imaginary. On the meaning of this term in Sartre's work and its relation to Husserl's ‘irreal’, see the translator's notes (Sartre 2004, xxviii). Laffay (1964, 148) explicitly cites Sartre's book when discussing actors and his book especially resonates with Sartre's (2004, 188–194) consideration of the work of art.

23. As noted above, for Laffay one can also be a witness in the world, but then one merely sees partial and evasive events, never continuity and the whole picture. Cinema, through narration, can rescue the appearance of things from incoherence.

24. Dufrenne's The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is also mentioned within a discussion of phenomenology in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 231n17).

25. On the ‘sensuous’ see the translators' comment (Dufrenne 1973, xlviii n3).

26. I agree that ‘Deleuze has no explicit conception of the cinema spectator’ and that nevertheless ‘an implicit theory of spectatorship can be found in the Cinema books’ (Rushton 2009, 47). The previous section sought to tease out aspects of spectatorship from the transition between the two books.

27. To be precise, Deleuze is not claiming that the spectator is inactive in general. When describing the inverted identification in which the character becomes a kind of spectator, Deleuze does not describe the character as immobile; rather he writes that the character ‘shifts, runs and becomes animated’ but that this is ‘in vain’ and that what the character sees and hears is no longer ‘subject to the rules of a response or an action’ (Deleuze 1989, 3). Similarly, throughout the cinema books, spectators are described as engaging in cognitive and bodily activities: we are told that they know and discover (Deleuze 1986, 201), judge (Deleuze 1989, 139), tremble (Deleuze 1986, 136), and laugh (149). The spectators are active in the world in which the film is screened, and we can even imagine them talking, eating popcorn, making out, or leaving the movie theatre. However, the spectators are not in the world perceived through the cinema in a way that would enable them to be active within it, to make movements, to act. In this sense, the spectators are passive. Deleuze therefore is not following the notion of the immobile ‘passive spectator’ from 1970s theories which described spectators trapped in their seats like helpless children or the prisoners in Plato's cave, such as Baudry (1985).

28. Moreover, as already noted, Deleuze immediately proceeds with a historical explanation for what he takes to be Bergson's incorrect critique of the cinema. This emphasises that the experience of the viewers is not abstract and universal and that the very existence of the cinematograph certainly does not yet determine what will become of cinema. One concrete viewer – a man named Henri Bergson – watching specific films within the specific screening practices of the early 1900s – did not understand that cinema gives movement despite being aware of movement-images which he had invented a decade earlier and seemed to have forgotten (Deleuze 1986, 2). The films and the viewers, then, change historically. The cinematograph's movement-image was ‘a potential contained in the fixed primitive image’, a tendency which still needed to be realised, that is, ‘acted out’, by the mobile camera and montage (25). This again emphasises that films do play a major role in the creation of concepts in the cinema books and that they are not just abstract theorising based on concepts already found in Bergson and other philosophers. Similarly, it might be possible to argue that Deleuze needed Hitchcock's actualisation of the potential of the movement-image in order to come up with his theory of passive film viewing.

29. For attempts to deal with these images, see, for example, Rodowick (2007), Daly (2010), Rushton (2009, 51–53; 2012, 120ff).

30. Moreover, Deleuze even seems concerned that the action of projecting a film was too similar to the action of shooting it at the early stages of the cinema when some apparatuses, such as Auguste and Louis Lumière's 1895 Cinématographe, were used for both. He writes that at the outset, when cinema still concealed itself and was forced to imitate natural perception, the cinematic apparatus for shooting was combined with the apparatus for projection ‘endowed with a uniform abstract time’ and that part of cinema's conquering of its essence involved the emancipation of the shooting apparatus which became separate from projection (Deleuze 1986, 3). Perhaps his fear was that with these devices, which doubled as cameras, projectionists would be prone to influence the film, for example, by stopping, slowing down, accelerating, or reversing its movement in response to the audience's reaction, thus giving viewers too much control (see Tsivian 1998, 52–65; Sklar 1994, 17).

31. Video and electronic imagery can be used by filmmakers, as is the case with Godard's use of ‘electronic processing introducing mutation, recurrence and retroaction’ on written words (Deleuze 1989, 186; on Godard's ‘electronic transformations of the scriptural’ see also 246). Additionally, television made a new stage of the talking film possible (252) and thus had an effect on cinema, as many other external factors had according to the cinema books (such as the Second World War). However, even in these cases, Deleuze often insists on the primacy of cinema and its great auteurs over television and new technologies. He claims, for example, that ‘television abandoned most of its own creative possibilities, and did not even understand them’ and therefore needed cinema and its great authors ‘to give it a pedagogical lesson’ (Deleuze 1989, 252; on the contribution of cinema and its great directors to television, see also Deleuze 1986, x and Deleuze 1989, xii-xiii). Moreover, he claims that there is a dependence on an aesthetic before a dependence on technology and shows how Godard moved in a direction of a screen which functions as an instrument panel ‘even before starting to use video methods’ and that the autonomy of sound which characterises the new image was already achieved by others through the use of ‘cinematographic methods, or simple video methods, instead of calling on new technologies’ (267). Similarly, Deleuze mentions a method used by Godard in a film, which is ‘afterwards transferred to television’ (179). In addition to the role of these images in filmmaking, Deleuze notes cases in which television (as well as other media) appears within films, as part of their content (see, for example, Deleuze 1986, 209 and 210).