"Cinema 1: The Movement Image", Gilles Deleuze


Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher and author of several monographs on Kant, Bergson, Espinosa, Nietzsche and Proust, and he discussed cinema as a serious philosophical matter. Through his two seminal books The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, Deleuze discusses the changes that have been observed in cinema, in the pre and postwar period, the classical and the modern. 

The images that relate to "the movement-image" are divided into three parts: perception-image (how a character sees an event, mainly exposed in long-shot), affection-image (the emotional experience suffered by a character, close-up) and action-image (how a character interacts with his environment, medium-shot), that is, time is less important than the narrative flow, and each cut, each frame, is part of a constantly moving whole, conveying a simulation of a sensorimotor scheme. The purpose of the montage is to establish a continuous movement. Deleuze also discusses the two structures that dominate the films of this period: SAS’ and ASA’. The first, also referred to as large form, refers to clear situations where an action is required to reach another situation (westerns, documentaries, etc.). The second, also called small form, starts in an action without a well-defined situation and the arrival to a new action that clarifies only a little the situation (detective films). The book contains quick analyzes of classic films inserted in various cinematographic corrents. 

Excerpts: 
“For, in fact, the three moments are the following. In the first, the character O rushes forward and flees horizontally along a wall; then, along a vertical axis, tries to climb a staircase, always sticking to the edge of the wall. He ‘acts’, it is a perception of action, or an action-image (…). The second moment: the character has come into a room and, as he is no longer against a wall, the angle of immunity of the camera is doubled - forty-five degrees on each side, thus ninety degrees. O perceives (subjectively) the room, the things and the animals which are there, (…) the perception-image (…).The character O is thus now seen from the front, at the same time as the new and last convention is revealed: the camera OE is the double of O, the same face, a patch over one eye (monocular vision), with the single difference that O has an anguished expression and OE has an attentive expression: the impotent motor effort of the one, the sensitive surface of the other. We are in the domain of the perception of affection, the most terrifying, that which still survives when all the others have been destroyed: it is the perception of self by self, the affection-image.” 

“There may, of course, be detectives in the crime film, just as there may not be any in the detective film. What distinguishes the two types is that in the crime formula - SAS - one moves from the situation, or the milieu, towards actions which are duels, while in the detective formula - ASA - one moves from blind actions, as indices, to obscure situations which vary entirely or which fluctuate completely, depending on a minuscule variation in the index.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AW65T86F7X7obLSkakAn-bSCIBkzawCl/view?usp=sharing

Gilles Deleuze

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