immobile sections + abstract time.

This is one half of Deleuze's opening 'formula' and is derived from his consideration of Bergson's thesis that movement is distinct from the space covered. I guess to begin with it isn't a particularly difficult idea, though for someone coming from cinema studies you tend to already feel, well, that there's a precipice you're about to tumble into somewhere round about.

If you approach this via Xeno's paradox, for instance of the archer, the arrow, and the target, it helps. In this paradox the archer shoots an arrow towards a target, and at any point we can easily determine where the arrow will be in the plane of its trajectory at any point in time (velocity = distance/time, for instance). With can divide this point in time so that we can calculate where the arrow is at 3 seconds, 3.3 seconds, 3.33 seconds, 3.333 seconds and so on and so forth.

However, no matter how small or minute we make our time scale, or take our measurements, all we will ever be able to calculate (and 'see') is where the arrow is at that instant (at 3.3 seconds it is, let's imagine, 6.2 metres from the archer). We will never be able to find that moment in time where the arrow actually moves from one point to the next. This is the paradox Xeno described (well, one of them) and is what Deleuze describes as abstract time (mechanical time).

So, simply, even if we measure the time of the arrow's flight to thousandths of a second and its distance to fractions of a millimetre all that we could reproduce is where the arrow is at any instant in time and space, but never the moment at which it moved from one point in space to the next. Nor, for that matter, would we be able to 'see' that movement. In other words, what this reproduces in relation to the flight of the arrow is not the movement of the arrow through that space, but the location of that arrow at any-instant-whatever, which in this example are being defined by our viewing or measuring apparatus - the movement of the arrow from one cartesian point to the next will always appear to have happened between our scales of measurement.

For Deleuze, following Bergson, this paradox only happens because space and time are treated as equivalent to the extent that they're both conceived of as quantities. However, for Deleuze (via Bergson) this is a category error as space may be a quantity but time is a quality.

[Sun 8 Dec 2002]

For Bergson, and very much for Deleuze, space is a quantity, and able to be infinitely divided ("The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible"), whereas movement is a quality, and so to divide movement (real movement), is to qualitatively affect that which is divided.

A simple example (not from cinema yet). Red is a quality, so no matter how big your red balloon is, or how many of these red balloons you have, the 'redness' of your red balloon is unaffected. This is because colour is a quality, not a quantity. You can let down your red balloon to make a smaller sphere, pop several of the other red balloons, but the quality of redness of the red of the balloon remains unaffected, though of course the size or number (a quantity) has varied. Hence any change in 'redness', that is a change in the balloon's quality of redness, affects the whole and is a change of a different categorical type to a change in quantity.

Space on the other hand is a quantity and is homogenous as when I divide it there is not a qualitative change - dividing a metre of timber in half gives me two half metres, but it is still length. However, time is heterogenous because to divide time (time as time not time as distance covered) is to qualitatively affect that which is divided.

[Sun 8 Dec 2002]

real movement → concrete duration

A photogramme is an immobile section. In the cinema usually at the rate of 24 per second. I'm not sure if photogramme is a common term in French writing on cinema or if it is peculiar to Deleuze. Here, and this is the first use of the term by Deleuze in the books, it describes the apparatus of capture and projection and the way each individual frame, as an individual frame, is a still and so appears as an immobile section. Deleuze is quick to point out that there is much more to it than this, but for Deleuze it would seem that the cinema does "proceed" from the photogramme and that the photogramme begins with immobile sections.

[Thu 19 Dec 2002]

Deleuze dismisses the photogramme as the basis of the cinematic image immediately after introducing it. The basis for this appears to be that though cinematic movement appears identical to our phenomenological perception of movement in the world, it is an error to treat cinematic movement as a derived movement in relation to phenomenological perception on the basis that cinematic movement is artificial. That is, recorded and projected via mechanical and chemical (or electronic?) means.

I take this to only indicate not that cinematic movement = phenomenological perception of movement but only very simply that just because cinematic movement is realised artificially whereas phenomenological movement is realised 'naturally' one is not a dependent and/or diluted/derived form of the other. This is an important point for a general Deleuzean ecology as there will be no precedence ever accorded the natural over the artificial. In the instance of the 'cinema' (the idea of cinema qua cinema and not as narrative) this is not because Deleuze will argue and show how cinematic movement is already a natural movement (an argument that could be made using phenomenology for instance) but more profoundly that the division between artificial and natural would be to already introduce a false and external distinction or division into the world and into movement. As we will probably see (and if I don't say it explicitly then this will have to do), cinematic movement is of a part of movement in general and this movement is neither natural or artificial, it is of the world as movement and movement as the world.

In short, cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image. It does give us a section, but a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement. [C1.2]

The cinematic image provides slices of time that are not mechanical, and they are not still images or slices of varying length to which movement is then added via an apparatus. The sections of time that the cinema provides us with are mobile in that they are already qualitative sections where their duration represents or is qualitative change. To cut a section (i.e., via editing) would then be to effect a qualitative change rather than merely a quantitative change, so that a one minute shot that is cut in half is now not just a thirty second shot, but is in fact (at least for Deleuze) a qualitatively different thing in terms of duration.

Clearly cinema is a mechanical process, and so like all mechanical processes is subject to (and its technological development is premised upon) standardisation; 35 millimetre film, 24 frames per second, and so forth. The manner in which this standardises time (rate of recording and rate of projection) is mechanical and abstract and so would appear to be quite distinct from duration as qualitative change. However, even before Deleuze introduces the significance of montage as effecting qualitative change in and between cinematic mobile sections, it is important to recognise that Deleuze has already attempted to establish that cinematic movement is not about the representation of corporeal movement (filming someone walking and representing this on screen) for cinematic movement is an immediate given and not an addition.

A film that I believe may illustrate this is Chris Marker's 1962 La Jetée. Here most of the film (though not all) is made up of filmed photographs, yes the camera sometimes slowly zooms into the photograph, or pans across the image, but broadly speaking it is a film composed largely of stills. Now, then you view La Jetée it is clear that you are watching a film, it is not a slide show, and the experience of the work while you're watching it is dramatically different to what you would experience if it were a slide show, even with dissolves and fades between slides. This is an example I will be returning to, but at this point I would like to simply make the following observation, or claim, that here is a film that is obviously a film, yet there is no movement within the cinematic frame. This needs to be carefully qualified at this point, there is no record or representation of movement of the world (objects, characters) within the frame, so we don't see people walking, talking, leaves, water or clouds moving. But there is movement. That I think it is trivial to agree that there is movement for me begins to provide a concrete way of thinking about what Deleuze is claiming. If there is movement in La Jetée, indeed if we can agree that it is a film and not a slide show, then this movement is not the record or derived from the record or perception of ordinary movement in the world.

Oh, and we should remember, 'abstract movement' is pretty much time being treated as equivalent to distance covered, and while this formula clearly works in all sorts of contexts (to calculate how long a drive may take, or how fast a car is travelling) it is not time as qualitative change, which for Deleuze is genuine time, aka duration. Movement as duration cannot be recovered by rejoining or describing the space covered, movement as duration as a qualitative change happens elsewhere. This is not to discount or remove simple movement as ordinarily conceived, only to recognise that it is inadequate to account for change.

[Tue 7 Jan 2003]

Deleuze concludes the opening section of Chapter One in Cinema One by introducing the three major features that the cinema would develop that are the ways it begins to approach duration as duration. It does this via montage, the moving camera, and a mobile point of view.

Montage begins to establish qualitative relations between shots, and between the shots and the whole film, so that shot change begins to be an expression of a qualitative change.

The moving camera shifts cinema away from the fixed view and frame of primitive cinema and so in its very movement dynamically establishes continuing qualitative relations within the frame.

The mobile point of view provides the camera with some agency so that what it sees, how, and where from, is no longer defined or constrained by an anthropomorphic phenomenology, regardless of how much the colonisation of cinema by narrative may attempt to recover its mobile view into a rationalised real.

[Tue 7 Jan 2003]

Privileged instants are one illusion that misjudges movement as a transcendental pose. Deleuze describes this via an ancient conception of time and movement where the pose is understood to be the pure moment or essence that expresses (and contains) that which is the summation or encapsulation of a pure movement as moment. Things like the piéta immediately spring to mind, don't they? Those sorts of Platonic ideas given a form that though it may never be pure are premised on the ideality of a pure expression of an ideal moment.

The need for such poses (dance is an example that Deleuze uses) is premised on the idea that the material of the world is in flux, a sort of fallen materiality (the Platonism here ought to be obvious) where the potential of the ideal form (or idea?) need material embodiment, yet by being material they of course lose their ideality. Movement in this view then becomes a series of movements, regulated as or by a series of poses (no wonder the Greeks came up with the Olympics) where the transition between poses is subject to regulation.

Early photography, at least portrait photography, would appear to have attempted something like this with its highly mannered poses. Of course much painting and sculpture has also pursued the pose, and I suspect much religious iconography could be thought about in terms of a theological pose. In each case the pose is an abstraction that expresses an ideal and so in its formalism wants to rarefy itself within the aura of that ideal so as to approach a transcendental purity. Or something like that.

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[Mon 10 Feb 2003]