The Three Theses on Movement

The drama of thought presented in the Cinema books begins in a fashion Horace would surely approve of: as Flaxman points out, ‘to read the cinema books is to lapse, almost in media res, into Deleuze's assurance that “Bergson does not just put forward one thesis on movement, but three.”’ This is, as Flaxman says, a somewhat disorienting beginning: immediately we ‘begin to lose our bearings, thrown from one strange milieu – what was billed as a philosophy of the cinema – into another: the theses of Henri Bergson.’ The disorientation, of course, comes from the fact that we don't know how we got there: looking for an answer to the question ‘why Deleuze and cinema?’ we are thrown instantly instead into the question ‘why Bergson and cinema?’

The importance of Bergson's work to Deleuzian philosophy is well attested, but equally so is Bergson's critique of cinematographic movement as an illusion constructed out of abstractions. An apparent act of perversity by Deleuze then, or perhaps even a paradox: two volumes on cinema built on the theses of a philosopher who rejects it. Deleuze fully accepts both this critique of abstraction and the terms in which it is offered. However, he suggests that, although thought and philosophy do indeed suffer this illusion, Bergson's choice of the cinematograph as a metaphor for it is misguided. In fact, Deleuze argues, the movement we see on screen at the cinema is real, not abstract: in some sense, the cinema serves to ‘correct’ the cinematographic illusion.

Although the secondary literature is sometimes critical of the arguments Deleuze offers to justify this claim, such commentaries by and large content themselves with noting the paradoxical or problematic nature of the conjunction of Bergson and cinema that Deleuze presents, and then move on to issues that seem more pressing. The effect of this is that the cinematographic illusion is often treated in practice as peripheral to the primary concerns of the Cinema books. By my reading, such an approach is almost entirely wrong. In fact, the cinematographic illusion and its relation to both thought and cinema are central to the project of the Cinema books and to the philosophical problems they respond to, in ways that I will discuss in detail further on in this book.