The Necessary Illusions of Practical Life

We can start this chapter with a preliminary problem. As should be clear by now, Bergson's primary concern in positing his cinematographic metaphor has little to do with criticising the cinema. Indeed, he has very little interest in the cinema as cinema and is certainly not in any sense presenting a theory of the cinema. Bergson's critique of the cinematographic illusion is aimed at a far larger target than the cinema: it critiques mechanistic science, Platonism and indeed the Western metaphysical tradition itself. Far from being derived from or targeted at the cinema, the cinematographic illusion is, as Ménil puts it, ‘in fact so ancient that it is co-extensive with the entire history of Western thought’. Deleuze adopts this evaluation wholeheartedly and articulates it in his own terms in his critique of external conceptions of difference within philosophy. However, even if we accept these arguments, the question remains: why does philosophy suffer this illusion so pervasively?

In Creative Evolution Bergson tells us that thought, perception and language are all cinematographic in their orientation: ‘Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us … the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.’ On this basis it would certainly follow that philosophical thought, too, suffers this illusion. However, this simply kicks the can down the road. What is it that necessitates that thought, language and perception are cinematographic in nature? Bergson hints at an answer when he notes in passing the fundamentally practical character of this orientation. But to find a full account of what this means, we have to look not in Creative Evolution, but in Matter and Memory.

The role of Matter and Memory in the Cinema books is a complex one. The resources Deleuze draws on to propose his Bergsonian characterisation of the cinema come primarily from that work, rather than Creative Evolution. He argues that the movement we are given by cinema presents us with mobile sections of duration, or movement-images, ‘the discovery of which was the extraordinary invention of the first chapter of Matter and Memory’.