The Unknowing Film Theorist
When Bergson used the analogy of the “cinematographic apparatus” to illustrate how the intellect perceived reality he perhaps did not intend that his premise be the fodder for discussion more than his conclusions. However his acknowledgement of the cinematographic apparatus, used interchangeably with “cinematographic mechanism” and than later as the “cinematographic illusion” has great merit when attempting to explain ancient philosophical paradoxes involving movement and time. To Bergson, the mind (or the intellect) and film approach the perception of reality, which according to Bergson is movement, in the same manner. Both began with the present “real movement,” break it down into a series of single fragmented frames and then put it through a projecting apparatus, for cinema it is an actual projector and for the mind it is a combination of static interpretations the intellect makes. Neither of which are an actual representation of the continuous movement itself.
In Bergson’s words,
Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306)
In other words, to perceive with the intellect, as opposed to the intuition, is to fragment an instance of time, say, of a marching regiment. In doing so we discontinue the continuous, fragment the whole, and stabilize the motion. Any sort of playback is an illusion, according to Bergson, of the original because the original’s duration can never be duplicated, and the copy requires spatiality forced upon it. This goes for the “idea of cinema” and an individual’s intellectual experience of the present.
Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematography inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographically kind. (306)
Or as Professor Gary Zabel summed up so eloquently, “The present we experience is the comet’s tail we drag after us.” One may think of our experience of the present as a love letter becoming obsolete as each letter of each word finds its way from the heart to the paper.
Deleuze believes that Bergson’s “unknowing” film theory goes more to show that cinema is an expression of the fear of this illusion rather party to it. Bergson is emphatic that we cannot duplicate the exact duration a specific instance occurred and Deleuze says that cinema, even in it’s infancy, helps to illuminate that fact more so than other art form. Because it is a combination of movement and a duration, a time-image, and if we agree with Bergson (as with Deleuze) that duration is ceaselessly open it implies that temporal change inheres in things. As in the Odessa Step sequence of a film like Battleship Potemkin images of the Tsar’s Cossacks juxtaposed with victims faces and the baby carriage falling down the steps is an artistic expression that time has been leading up to this pinnacle moment and yet will keep running, changing, and adds to the fluidity of the actual uprising. As the last body falls the audience inherently knows the massacre is not the end of something, nor the beginning, but a continuous social struggle.
The Natural Exterminating Angel
Deleuze attempts to develop his notion of impulse-image by situating between his idea of affect-image and action-image. Affect-images to Deleuze highlight emotion, in them a part is captured in such a way to represent the whole and they are “any-space-whatever.” Action-images highlight the space and geographical/historical environment and are not “any-space-whatever.” It is the “determined milieux” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, 123). Impulse-image comes between the two in the “originary worlds/elementary impulses.” An originary world as Deleuze describes is “not yet an any-space whatever because it only appears in the depths of the determined milieux neither is it a determined milieu, which only derives from the originary world” (123). An impulse is an impression, not an expression, nor does it regulate behavior like emotions (123). Deleuze further develops the impulse image by saying is is not merely an intermediate between the action-image and affect-image, but that it is autonomous (123).
Bunuel, according to Deleuze is quite effective with his treatment of Naturalist Cinema because of its links to surrealism. Deleuze compares Bunuel to Stroheim, who he believes to have missed the mark with naturalist cinema, with regards to Bunuel’s circular views of degradation. Stroheim uses light and dark to show straight degradation over time, but to Deleuze any descent is too much like the action-images and affect-images of the descent down the steps of Odessa.
The circular nature of Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel highlights the whole, and unlike a descent, the necessity for the end of the guests ordeal to become their beginning implies that there is never anyone who is all evil as they will end up being good again. The originary world becomes the drawing room that inexplicably confines the guests there and individuals act in accordance to the severity of the situation. The guests truly do become like animals, “the fashionable gentlemen a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena” (123). Their actions go from wavering social graces to outright hysteria to an almost murder, or sacrifice. All sense of human decency almost lost, until one man stands up for another and slowly composure, or at least an exhausted calm takes over the group. One keen observer notices they are almost in the same position they were the night before they were trapped. The key to salvation for the guests was to, in essence, begin again, and reprise the roles that had earlier doomed them. After their release, the film ends with the group being reunited at a church for a funeral of one lost during the ordeal, and as the mass ends the originary world of elementary impulses starts again with the group, along with the rest of the congregation trapped in the church. We are left with the undeniably symbolic scene of sheep herding themselves towards the church. This break with the dichotomy of good and evil and exploration of process is to Deleuze what makes Bunuel’s film a success in naturalist cinema.