From the titles of two books that Deleuze wrote on cinema, i.e. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), it is not difficult to understand that French philosopher’s main concern in cinema is image. Beginning with Plato, with different connotations such as representation, experience, phenomenon, consciousness, simulacrum, subjectivity etc., image always happens to be one of the main and crucial topics of philosophy.
Through being both an essential part of cinema and crucial topic of philosophy, image is like a capstone by which Deleuze conjoins his views on cinema with his philosophical claims. For Deleuze, cinema undergoing a transformation from the movement-image to the time-image reveals the true nature of time (Trifonova, 2007, p. 221). At this point the question arises: What is the true nature of the time (at least for Deleuze)? Omitting this grand crucial question for a great while, we can go on saying that according to Deleuze, cinema also transforms philosophy via offering a cinematic form such as time-image. In this way he wants to conjoin cinema and philosophy. By the means of time-image, cinema demands a new mode of thinking for both itself and life. Since the couple of movement and time can be seen as essential for the couple of cinema and life, through that new mode of thinking which cinema demands based on the time-image, new perspectives can be developed concerning the becoming in life. But at this point let’s turn two cinematic forms that Deleuze focus on his books, viz. movement-image and time-image.
The roots of the movement-image can be traced back to early cinema, i.e. the pre-WW2 cinema and archetype of movement-image can be found in the Hollywood genre film emphasizing movement and action. This emphasis on movement is important, because in that type of cinema, time is also conveyed through movement. In other words, time is determined and measured by movement. Via camera angles skimming across a visual field, movement is expressed and via this expression of movement, time is presented indirectly, i.e. determination of time based on the movement itself. So “The movement-image is a form of spatialized cinema” says Totaro, which means that as in the everyday life, time is thought as a grand link connecting movements and it used to track changes (Totaro, 1999 and Colebrook, 2006, p. 29).
On the other hand, image-time is a characteristic of modern cinema, i.e. post-WW2 cinema and roots of it can be found in the European modernist or art film. In this type, time is presented directly. So in the movement-image, characters that are situated in a narrative content, perceive the events around them and take action based on these perceptions. But in the time-image, characters cannot react in a direct way. In other words, in the movement-image which time is expressed indirectly, characters react in a direct fashion, but in movement-image, although time is expressed directly, characters do not seem to react in a direct fashion (Totaro, 1999).
For Deleuze, power of cinema lies in this transformation from the movement-image to the time-image. By the means of time-image as a cinematographic form, a new kind of perception, i.e. acentered perception is offered (Trifonova, 2007, p. 227). In our daily life, we perceive things through imposing concepts on them, which suit our interests. But camera as an eye with no interest, i.e. a camera that does not organize images from a fixed point as a human eye, conveys the image in its entirety. “But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage” acknowledges Deleuze, and montage reminds me the subjectivity, in other words when the montage is taken into consideration, it is not very difficult to talk about a point of view, but Deleuze responds: “And if from the point of view of human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one” (1989, p. 81). So Deleuze seems to secure the disinterestedness of camera. But these two broad concepts, viz. movement-image and time-image, their realization in cinema and how Deleuze secures the disinterestedness of camera are still puzzling for me.
Colebrook, C. (2006). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.
Totaro, D. (1999). Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project (Part 1: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image). Off Screen. [On-line]. Available: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html
Trifonova, T. (2007). The Image in French Philosophy. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
M. Kemal İz