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Inverted identification: Bergson

and phenomenology in Deleuze's
cinema books
a
Boaz Hagin
a
Department of Film and Television , Tel Aviv
University , Tel Aviv , Israel
Published online: 09 Apr 2013.
To cite this article: Boaz Hagin (2013) Inverted identification: Bergson and
phenomenology in Deleuze's cinema books, New Review of Film and Television Studies,
11:3, 262-287, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2013.779794
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2013.779794
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New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2013
Vol. 11, No. 3, 262–287, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2013.779794
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Inverted identification: Bergson and phenomenology
in Deleuze’s cinema books
Boaz Hagin*
Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Deleuze’s cinema books are often understood as adopting a Bergsonian
framework while rejecting phenomenological accounts of film experience

for equating ‘cinematographic perception’ with ‘natural perception’; or,
alternatively, simply as being a phenomenological inquiry. Reading
Deleuze’s comments on, and references to, phenomenology in the cinema
books (especially Merleau-Ponty, Laffay, and Dufrenne), this paper argues
that while not following a phenomenological logic in general, at certain
moments the cinema books’ Bergsonian account intersects with phenom-
enology. Moreover, in the books, the existence of movement-images in the
cinema depends on the spectator’s experience of watching films. The logic
explaining this encounter is indebted to the account of the experience of art
and cinema in phenomenology which Deleuze combines with the discussion
of ‘real’ movements in Bergson’s Creative Evolution. This reliance on a
specific ‘passive’ viewer’s experience can explain the books’ limited interest
in early cinema and in television, video, and the digital image.
Keywords: Gilles Deleuze; Henri Bergson; phenomenology; perception;
movement-image
Introduction
Within film studies, there are conflicting accounts of Deleuze’s relation to
phenomenology in his two cinema books. One camp brands Deleuze’s cinema
books as ‘phenomenological’, but often offers little explanation to support this
assertion.1 Conversely, a second camp views the cinema books as rejecting
phenomenology and adopting a Bergsonian framework instead.2 While writers
in this camp often cite passages in which Deleuze distinguishes between a
Bergsonian approach and phenomenology and seems to prefer the former,
they ignore places in the cinema books in which Deleuze does take up
phenomenological concepts or avers that Bergson mischaracterised cinema and
that ‘phenomenology is right’ (Deleuze 1986, 2).
Contributing to the confusion are works that have attempted to combine
Deleuze’s work with phenomenology or have noted a similarity between them,
*Email: bhagin@post.tau.ac.il
q 2013 Taylor & Francis

New Review of Film and Television Studies 263
but have done so ambivalently or without expounding on their position. For
example, in her work on cinematic experience, Jennifer M. Barker suggests, very
briefly, various ‘intersections’, ‘possible convergences’, or a ‘possible overlap’
between Deleuze and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger
(Barker 2009, 14, 165n21, 166n40, and 178n27). However, she also adds that
‘any easy alignment’ between the approach of existential phenomenology and a
Deleuzian one is ‘impossible’ (165n21).
An additional example can be found in the first chapter of Vivian
Sobchack’s seminal Address of the Eye. She claims that Deleuze asserts the
significance of cinematic movement and images ‘phenomenologically’
(Sobchack 1992, 31) and that his work ‘bears some relation’ and stands ‘as
parallel’ to her own phenomenological study ‘in many respects’ (30). Yet she
devotes only one paragraph to this discussion, concedes that Deleuze criticises
phenomenology, and finds differences between the two projects that seem to
greatly upstage any similarity. According to Sobchack, Deleuze’s rejection of
phenomenology is based on a claim that ‘rigorous phenomenological description
need never argue’; Deleuze cites only a few early works in phenomenology
and ‘misses the dialectical and dialogic character of Merleau-Ponty’s later
semiotic phenomenology’ which is the basis for Sobchack’s project; and his
‘philosophical mentor’ Henri Bergson asserts that questions relating to subject
and object should be put in terms of time, whereas in her book it is space that
grounds the response (Sobchack 1992, 31). Sobchack’s aim seems to be to dismiss
Deleuze’s critique of phenomenology and show that it bears no relation to her own
project. She never elaborates what value Deleuze’s work might have for a
phenomenology of cinema and Deleuze is never mentioned again in Address of the
Eye and is extremely marginal in her later phenomenological work.
Laura Marks (2002) does manage to shift elegantly between Deleuze’s
work, phenomenological insights, and other theoretical ideas, but she is clearly
committed to not drawing out the theoretical implications that this methodological
diversity implies. She argues that her ‘haptic’ or ‘erotic’ criticism tries to be open
to new ideas and does not incorporate them into a totality (Marks 2002, xvii).
While she acknowledges that her work is ‘deeply theoretical’ (xiv), she says that it
is far from ‘the rigor of sound scholarship’ (xvii). Haptic criticism does not place
itself within ‘predetermined critical frameworks’ and does not lead there – she
dislikes the idea that her engagements with objects and ideas need to ‘eventually
give way to a coherent and removed critical structure’ (xiii). Averse to theoretical
frameworks that she fears would lead to totalising, she does not account for the
fact that she can work with Deleuze’s concepts in one paragraph and then work
with phenomenological texts in the next.3
This paper will suggest one possible theoretical framework for understanding
such links between the cinema books and phenomenology and will argue for the
importance of a phenomenological perspective to supplement Deleuze’s
Bergsonian theses. There clearly are passages in the cinema books where
Deleuze distinguishes his own approach, partly stemming from his reading of
264 B. Hagin
Bergson’s work, from a phenomenological study of the cinema, so that labelling
them as phenomenology seems unwarranted. However, the books also include
additional commentaries on, and explicit and implicit references to,
phenomenological works, which are far from a complete rejection. I will try to
clarify some of the rather obscure statements Deleuze devotes to phenomenology
in the cinema books, particularly in the first and fourth chapters of Cinema 1, and
argue that although the overall organising principle of the cinema books does not
follow a phenomenological logic, at certain moments it does intersect with
phenomenology, and moreover, that in a specific sense the cinema books are
indeed phenomenological.
The second section of this paper shows that phenomenology does not need to
be, and indeed is not, absent from Deleuze’s Bergsonian taxonomy of images.
The following sections argue that phenomenology also serves an important role
at the beginning of the cinema books, where Deleuze discusses the viewers and
where he claims – combining a phenomenological argument about the passivity
of the spectators with a Bergsonian understanding of movement – that cinematic
viewers are not prey to the ‘cinematographic illusion’. Here, as elsewhere in the
books, Deleuze’s remarks about phenomenology are succinct and allusive. In
order to unpack them, the subsequent sections will look at Deleuze’s commentary
on phenomenology and the distinction between ‘natural perception’ and
‘cinematographic perception’ in Chapter 4; his understanding of the viewers in
the transition between the two cinema books; and, in light of these readings, his
use of phenomenology together with a Bergsonian approach when he discusses
movement in Chapter 1.
The opposite of what phenomenology put forward

In Chapter 4 of Cinema 1, Deleuze claims that Bergson begins with a regime or
system in which there are no objects or subjects, no viewers, and in which
perception is objective and undifferentiated. As has often been noted, this non-
human system or perception is where the cinema books differ radically from
phenomenology (e.g. Hughes 2008, 23; Marrati 2008, 29– 32; Pursley 2005,
1194– 1196; Rodowick 1997, 32– 33; Rushton 2012, 27– 28). In so far as
phenomenology describes the consciousness, perception, or experiences of
subjects, a system in which there are no subjects indeed seems to be radically
different. In this section, I will nevertheless argue that Deleuze’s elaboration of
the Bergsonian system does not sever all ties with phenomenology. This non-
human perception is only the beginning of Deleuze’s reading. He follows it by
arguing that Bergson’s wish was ‘to reconstitute the order of consciousness with
pure material movements’ (Deleuze 1986, 56). In the system in which there were
no subjectivities, it was necessary to show how conscious perception was
‘produced’ (Bergson 1991, quoted in Deleuze 1986, 226n5) or underwent
‘deducing’ in the first place (Deleuze 1986, 58). While the Bergsonian regime
initially has no subjects, Deleuze shows how subjectivity can be produced within it.
Deleuze proceeds by positing an identity of matter, movement, and what he
and Bergson call ‘images’. He writes that he would like ‘to make an inventory’ of
the varieties of images, and he claims that it is easy to recognise certain kinds of
images which pass across the screen (Deleuze 1986, 69).
Deleuze presents a double system or regime of reference of images. In the
first system, there is a gaseous world of universal undulation or rippling, without
centres or axes, without objects or subjects, in which the images are
indistinguishable from their movements, actions, and reactions (Deleuze 1986,
56– 59). The set of all of these movement-images is the plane of immanence, the
machine-assemblage of movement-images (59). Movement-images act on others
and react to others on all their facets and in all their parts at once (58 and 61). This
material universe is entirely made up of ‘light’, which is not reflected or stopped,
but is diffused without resistance, and things ‘are luminous by themselves

without anything illuminating them’ (60).
In the second system, the material aspects of subjectivity are brought into
account when a special type of images, ‘living images’, is identified. A living
image is defined by a gap or interval between the received and executed
movement. Living images form ‘centres of indetermination’ which allow
analysis and selection. The world takes on a curvature and becomes organised to
surround the living images which form centres within it, with perception on one
side, delayed action on the other side, and affection occupying the interval but not
filling it up (Deleuze 1986, 64 – 65). All perception ‘is primarily sensory – motor’
and is inseparable from action (64). Thus, the movement-images undergo a
process of ‘specification’ (Deleuze 1989, 26 and 29) and divide into three sorts
(or ‘avatars’) in relation to the centre of indetermination: perception-images,
action-images, and affection-images. These are the three ‘material aspects’ of
subjectivity.4
The chapters in Cinema 1 are organised around such types of images and
signs (a sign for Deleuze [1986, 69; 1989, 32] is a particular image that represents
or refers to a type of image from the point of view of its composition or genesis).
In Cinema 2, due to various factors, the material subjectivity described in the
book suffers a crisis that results in new types of images and signs, which, when
combined with other forces, allow the movement-image to grow ‘in dimensions
or powers which go beyond space’ into a time-image, a readable image, and a
thinkable image (Deleuze 1989, 22). The images and material aspects of
subjectivity are therefore an important organising principle of the two books.5
Indeed, as Joe Hughes (2008, 25) shows, ‘it seems that Deleuze’s study of cinema
is just as much a study of subjectivity’. Within this logic, the cinema books can be
read not as a collection of dominant images from the history of film, but rather as
a theory of the images and signs determined by these moments of material
subjectivity (15).6
Deleuze (1986) explains that each one of us, as a special living image or
centre of indetermination, ‘is nothing but an assemblage [agencement ] of three
images, a consolidate [consolidé ] of perception-images, action-images and
266 B. Hagin
affection-images’ (66; all italics in quotations are from the original). But then
why would a discussion of this material subjectivity in the cinema books be so
radically different from phenomenology? Contrary to human subjectivity,
Deleuze maintains that the mobility of cinema’s centres and the variability of its
framings always lead the cinema ‘to restore vast acentred and deframed zones’
and return to the first regime of the movement-image: ‘universal variation, total,
objective and diffuse perception’ (64). Instead of going ‘from the acentred state
of things to centred perception’, cinema ‘could go back up towards the acentred
state of things, and get closer to it’ (58). This according to Deleuze is ‘the
opposite of what phenomenology put forward’ (58). The cinema can go back and
forth between subjective perception and the acentred regime of objective
perception; it ‘travels the route in both directions’ (64).
Thus, while subjectivity is neither an origin nor an end in the cinema books,
travelling the route of the production of subjectivity in both directions would
suggest that at some moments the books can come closer to dealing with
subjective perception while at other moments they are far from that and closer to
the objective perception of the first regime of movement-images. In the former, a
philosophy that deals with subjectivity, such as the descriptions of experience and
consciousness offered by phenomenology, can offer productive concepts for the
cinema books.7 Indeed, Deleuze does make use of phenomenological concepts
and writings in various places in the cinema books. Heidegger’s Mitsein (‘being-
with’), for example, is employed to discuss the status of the perception-image in
relation to the perception of the characters (Deleuze 1986, 72 and 74). When
dealing with the ‘cinema of behaviour’ which involves action-images with strong
sensory –motor links (which according to Deleuze can be found in realist
violence, in the systemisation in the Actors Studio, and in Kazan), Deleuze refers
to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Film and the New Psychology’ (Deleuze 1986,
155), which makes a connection between cinema and phenomenology.8 While
there is a fundamental difference between the Bergsonian approach of the cinema
books and phenomenology, at specific moments the two can intersect and in fact
they do so explicitly.
Ambiguous allies
Phenomenology serves as more than a tool kit for the taxonomy of images offered
in the cinema books. It is additionally used at the beginning of Cinema 1 to
consider the experience of film spectators. In order to understand this use, we
will first look at Deleuze’s understanding of phenomenology expressed in
his commentary at the beginning of Chapter 4 of Cinema 1 and then at his
understanding of cinematic spectatorship found in the transition between the two
books.
In an oft-cited discussion in Chapter 4 of Cinema 1, Deleuze describes an
almost mythological twin birth of Bergson’s theory and Husserl’s phenomen-
ology, as both attempted to overcome the conflict between materialism and
idealism which, according to Deleuze, had reached a crisis. It is in this context
that Deleuze offers his brief commentary on phenomenology and cinema. After
misleadingly suggesting that Husserl never mentions the cinema at all,9 and
incorrectly claiming that Sartre does not cite the cinematographic image in The
Imaginary (Deleuze 1983b, 84; 1986, 56– 57),10 Deleuze considers movement in
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and in Albert Laffay’s Logic of
the Cinema, which Deleuze (1983b, 85n3; 1986, 226n3) characterises as a
‘complex theory, which is phenomenologically inspired’.11
The movement that interests Merleau-Ponty in the section cited by Deleuze is
that of the gaze focusing on an object (or a part of it) which he compares with the
movement of the camera as it comes nearer to an object to give a close-up view.
In normal vision, according to Merleau-Ponty, when my gaze plunges into an
object, its inner horizons become an object while the surrounding objects, over
which my gaze earlier hovered, recede into the periphery and become a horizon.
The objects which are now a horizon, however, do not cease to be there and with
these objects ‘I have at my disposal their horizons, in which there is implied, as a
marginal view, the object on which my eyes at present fall’. The horizon thus
ensures the identity of the object and I do not need to explicitly remember,
compare, or conjecture what the object was in order to identify it when
concentrating on one of its details since its identity is implicit in its horizon. In the
cinema, however, when the camera moves nearer to an object, the surrounding
objects are no longer visible in the periphery of our gaze. The screen, according to
Merleau-Ponty, ‘has no horizons’. We therefore do not actually identify the
object being shown in close-up but can at most explicitly remember what the
object is or what it is a part of (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 78). As Deleuze (1983b, 84;
1986, 57) explains, while the cinema can bring us closer to things, take us farther
away from them, and revolve around them, it still suppresses ‘the horizon of the
world’. Cinema’s movement is never like that of our gaze in natural perception
which has horizons. Perception in the cinema and natural perception are different
and therefore Merleau-Ponty ‘sees the cinema as an ambiguous ally’ (Deleuze
1986, 57). Perhaps Deleuze means that in some aspects (the ability to move
nearer, farther, or around objects) the two perceptions are similar while in other
aspects (such as horizons) they are not. Alternatively, perhaps he means that
within phenomenological studies, cinema can help in clarifying certain
characteristics of natural perception, but only by being contrasted with it in
certain aspects.
As for Laffay, Deleuze discusses his work, and particularly his notion of
narrative (récit), and accuses phenomenology of having an attitude embarrassée,
a ‘confused’ or ‘embarrassed’ attitude, which stems from the privilege it accords
to natural perception in its understanding of movement (Deleuze 1983b, 84– 85;
1986, 57).12 According to Laffay, the world always remains open and everything
in it is ambiguous and capable of changing meaning; things always escape us and
we always have both too much and not enough at the same time. Narrative is
contrary to the world. It is a type of revenge that people take on the world,
268 B. Hagin
a fending off of the lack of style of events in it (Laffay 1964, 66). In contrast,
photography brings us the world and does not narrate anything (60). In
photography the world is beyond my will and intention, it does not ask my
permission, it exceeds my spirit (54).
Cinema, unlike photography, responds to two contradictory demands,
because ‘the film’s movement transforms everything’ (Laffay 1964, 65). While
photography is the material of cinema, in cinema there is also a virtual narrative
which encompasses and penetrates the flow of images. It decides what we will see
and at what rate we will see it and functions as a sort of ‘master of ceremonies’,
‘great image-maker’ (grand imagier) (81), or exhibitor of images (montreur
d’images), who takes us from one position to the next (77).13 This, perhaps, is
what Deleuze (1986, 57) is referring to when he writes that instead of natural
perception, cinema involves ‘an implicit knowledge and a second intentionality’.

This narration of moving photography differs from movement in natural
perception. In reality, I have no such narration. I am either an agent, carried away
with my active participation in the world and unable to stand back and view it, or
a witness of events that are not narrated, and therefore only able to see incoherent
fragments. In the cinema, in contradistinction, I am guided and given privileged
points of view and I become a witness who is detached and who saves the view on
things from incoherence (Laffay 1964, 169).
Film thus offers a union of narrative as its form and photography as its
material. Cinema’s exceptionality, difficulty, and glory, lie in constructing a
narrative which is photographic (Laffay 1964, 83). Its spectators are disposed to
view a narrative which introduces progress, coherence, and composition into
what has the appearance of natural disorder (134 – 135). It is both the world that
escapes human will (photography) and human intervention (narrative, the
revenge of people on the world). It is in this sense, perhaps, that Deleuze can
accuse phenomenology of having a confused or embarrassed attitude. He argues
that phenomenology exalts the new narrative capable of drawing close both to the
world (presumably, Laffay’s understanding of photography) and to perception
(presumably, the virtual narrative of the grand imagier), that is, both to the
perceived and to the perceiver. However, phenomenology also condemns
cinematographic movement for being unfaithful to the conditions of natural
perception (Deleuze 1986, 57), since, as we have seen, the ordered cinematic
narrative is not the same as our perception of movement when being in the world
in reality, when we are either carried away by our action or are witnesses to what
is not narrated by a subjectivity. Deleuze’s sophisticated formulation shows how
taking natural perception as a model can lead to some tension, or a confused or
embarrassed attitude, and indeed Laffay (1964, 111) himself describes cinema
within his account as a paradox verging on the surreal. However, accusing Laffay
of an embarrassed attitude is hardly a damning critique or an all-out rejection of
phenomenology.
I would like to underline two aspects of Deleuze’s discussion of
phenomenology here that will be helpful when we deal with the beginning of
Cinema 1 later on. The first is that for Deleuze both Merleau-Ponty and Laffay
very clearly distinguish between natural perception and cinematographic
perception and in this aspect at least cinema is not a problem for their
phenomenological accounts. Several works written in the wake of Deleuze’s
cinema books have criticised a phenomenological study of cinema and have
particularly pointed out that human experience is incommensurable with
perception by or through film, assuming that a phenomenology of film argues
otherwise. Steven Shaviro (1993, 30), citing Chapter 4 of Cinema 1, chastises
prominent film critic André Bazin for taking for granted ‘the anthropocentric
structures of phenomenological reflection’ and contrasts him with ‘radical
theorists’ who insist that ‘film dislodges sensation from its supposed “natural”
conditions’.14 Garrett Stewart (1999, 266), in a book that frequently refers to
Deleuze’s work on cinema, claims that the roughening of the representational

surface in modernism is, ‘first of all, an affront to the phenomenological model.
Our eyes don’t see the world that way’. Jean Ungaro explains that the way we
perceive things according to Husserl, which is presumably the natural
phenomenological model, is at odds with the way we perceive things in the
cinema. According to Husserl, my perception of a thing is through a flux of
different adumbrations (esquisses, Abschattungen) which I experience or
apprehend during perception. In the cinema, however, the adumbrations no
longer belong to me, but are rather created by the film’s director (Ungaro 2000,
52– 53). According to Husserl, I can go around a table which will give me
different successive adumbrations. In the cinema, however, I am alone in the
dark, and the external world only exists through the images on the screen; I cannot
go around the thing and take different points of view (55 – 56). This, he claims
citing the same reference to Chapter 4, is a difficulty which Deleuze highlights
when he compares phenomenology with Bergsonism using the cinema (56).
Quoting Ungaro and citing the same page in Deleuze, Dominique Chateau (2010,
103) similarly argues that a conflict between Husserl’s phenomenology and
certain theories of the cinema is a consequence of, among other things, the fact
that film does not offer things ‘in the conditions of their natural apprehension’,
but rather in a way that conforms to the medium, and particularly stems from the
fact that the director presents things to us from a given point of view.
This common claim seems valid. I fully agree that there are differences
between humans and film cameras and seeing a table on the screen is not the same
as being in the world with a table. Jean Mitry, whom Deleuze frequently cites in
the cinema books, had already made this cogent claim two decades before
Deleuze’s cinema books were published, albeit referring to a chair not a table
(Mitry 1997, 30– 31).15 However, as a reading of Deleuze’s cinema books it is
not very convincing and the crux of Deleuze’s argument lies elsewhere. As we
have seen, according to Deleuze, phenomenologists maintain that ‘natural’ and
‘cinematographic’ perceptions differ and they do not attempt to collapse this
distinction. Cinema is not an affront to their models and there is no difficulty or
conflict between the cinema and their analyses, which do take into account the
270 B. Hagin
differences between the two types of perception. Significantly, already in the first
pages of Cinema 1, Deleuze makes it clear that phenomenologists do not try to
impose natural perception upon film or its viewers and it is Henri Bergson who
misguidedly believes that cinema reproduces the same illusion as natural
perception. According to Deleuze (1986, 2), ‘phenomenology is right’ in this
respect and it was Bergson who misunderstood the true nature of cinematic
viewing (3).
The second aspect I would like to emphasise is that in this commentary
Deleuze continually focuses on movement, even if in quite different ways – that
of the gaze or camera moving toward an object for Merleau-Ponty and that of the
moving cinematic image in contradistinction with immobile photography and
with movement in reality for Laffay. In fact, the entire discussion of
phenomenology leads to Deleuze’s elaboration of the deduction of subjectivity

in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, where movement and matter are equated. It is
preceded by the comparison between Bergson’s and Husserl’s reactions to the
crisis due to the conflict between materialism and idealism, which Deleuze
relates to movement. Thus, he describes the duality between idealism and
materialism as a ‘duality of image and movement’ and repeatedly includes
movement within materialism (as opposed to images in consciousness), and
writes about ‘movements in space’, movements that are ‘extended and
quantitative’, voluntary action as an example of movement, and ‘pure material
movements’ (Deleuze 1986, 56). This concern with movement is needed for
completing a claim Deleuze briefly makes against Bergson’s Creative Evolution
in the very first pages of Cinema 1. To understand it we will first look at what
Deleuze tells us about cinematic spectatorship.
Broken schemata and aesthetic perception

One key moment when the cinema books come close to phenomenological
thinking occurs in the transition between the two books, which will give us some
idea about Deleuze’s understanding of the spectators. According to Deleuze’s
reading of Bergson, the living images in the second system, that of subjective
perception, isolate certain images from all those that act in the universe in an
operation that he describes as ‘framing’ (Deleuze 1986, 62). Living images
provide a ‘black screen’ so that the image of light now runs up against an opacity
that will reflect it so that it can no longer diffuse and propagate in all directions.
This reflection by a living image is called ‘perception’ (62). Perception is
inseparable from action and is primarily sensory – motor. In Bergson’s (1991,
233) words, our perception ‘indicates the possible action of our body on others’.
According to him, it is only due to an adaptation to ‘the interests of practice and to
the exigencies of social life’ that we break up the undivided continuity of pure
intuition into elements, including objects (183). Objects are recognised, indeed,
torn out of the continuity of reality, only when they are useful and practical. ‘This
is so true’, Bergson insists, ‘that early observers gave the name apraxia to that
failure of recognition which we call psychic blindness’ (93). Not only does our
perception chop up reality into things, it also obscures some aspects of reality and
thereby diminishes it. As Deleuze (1986, 61) explains, living images ‘only
receive actions on one facet or in certain parts and only execute reaction by and in
other parts’, whereas other images act and react at once, on all their facets and in
all their parts. Thus, living beings suppress ‘those parts of objects in which their
functions find no interest’ and isolate as perceptions only the external influences
to which they are not indifferent (Bergson 1991, 36). We do not then normally
perceive the thing in its entirety; we always perceive less of it, only what is in our
interest to perceive. Perceptions of things ‘are incomplete and prejudiced, partial,
subjective prehensions’ (Deleuze 1986, 64). Perception is ‘subtractive’: ‘We
perceive the thing’, Deleuze maintains, ‘minus that which does not interest us as a
function of our needs’ (63).

This sensory – motor schema allows Deleuze (1986, 70) in the first cinema
book to deal with major groups of films as assemblages of movement-images and
signs structured around perception, affection, and action. Yet at the end of the
first cinema book, with Hitchcock, and at the beginning of the second cinema
book, with Ozu, and especially after the Second World War, with Italian neo-
realism and the French new wave, he identifies a crisis in these types of images
which leads to a new cinema. The sensory – motor link, upon which classical
cinema’s action-image is based, no longer functions after the war with the rise of
situations in which the characters no longer know how to react. Already with
Hitchcock, he notes, the usual identification of viewers with active characters is
inverted: it is the characters who are ‘assimilated to spectators’ due to their
similar passivity (Deleuze 1986, 205). This inability to act in the new cinema
results in pure optical and sound situations where the characters gain in an ability
to see what they lost in action or reaction (Deleuze 1989, 272). The new cinema,
in which seeing replaces action and whose characters were accused of being too
passive (19), is a cinema of pure optical-images and sound-images and ‘a new
breed of signs, opsigns and sonsigns’ (6).
According to Deleuze (1989, 3) there is ‘a necessary passage from the crisis
of image-action to the pure optical –sound image’. Recalling his reading of
perception in Bergson, Deleuze explains that when we make use of sensory –
motor schemata we do not perceive the thing (or ‘image’) in its entirety, but rather
perceive less of it because ‘we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving,
or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests,
ideological beliefs and psychological demands’ (20). He argues that if ‘our
sensory –motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear:
a pure optical –sound image’ that ‘brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its
excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character’ (20).
However, if we follow Deleuze’s Bergsonian formula and agree that
perception is primarily sensory –motor and subtractive, then a crisis in which
characters are passive means that the subjectivity the cinema books are studying
should perceive less, not more. It is far from obvious that passivity should result
272 B. Hagin
in pure optical –sound images that bring out the thing in itself, in its excess of
horror or beauty. In the new cinema, without interests and without practice, we
should perhaps return to perceiving an undivided continuum, without objects, or
perhaps not perceive anything at all.16 While the pure optical – sound image
might be a necessary step on the way to deducing a time-image, a readable image,
and a thinkable image, which are central to Deleuze’s taxonomy of images in
modern cinema in the second cinema book,17 in itself, this initial step is quite
puzzling and does not seem to have been suggested by Deleuze’s earlier
discussion of perception in the first book. Perhaps he is merely suggesting that
Bergson’s mechanism has broken down and should no longer be taken into
account; but then what exactly is the new logic according to which lack of action
leads to a gain in an ability to see?18
While not clearly in agreement with Deleuze’s previous reading of Bergson,

the idea that increased perception will result from an inability to act is not
arbitrary. It can be found in two books that are cited by Deleuze and labelled by
him as phenomenological in Cinema 1. Both can be utilised for formulating the
idea that when characters become passive like spectators the result is enhanced
perception.19
Laffay’s Logic of the Cinema, mentioned above as part of Deleuze’s
discussion of phenomenology and cinema, argues that cinema offers us a type of
perception that differs from our everyday practical engagement when being in the
world. Indeed, Laffay claims that the simplest and initial joy of early cinema,
before it told stories, was in extracting a quality that direct vision could neither
seize nor suspect from quotidian elements – flowing water, stirring leaves, the
interchanging of sunlight and shade on a face. Early cinema, he claims, restored
virginity to everyday things (Laffay 1964, 51).20
As in reality, in the cinema we also have a world. However, cinema,
according to Laffay (1964, 36), conjures up a world that is shifted in relation to
our own.21 The world of the cinema, Laffay writes, ‘is in no way imaginary
without being, for all that, entirely real’ (28). As Deleuze claims, when
commenting on Laffay, the world in the cinema is made ‘something unreal’
(Deleuze 1986, 57).22 The world appears at a distance from the spectators who
are seated and motionless and who do not believe themselves to be in the midst of
the things that appear on the screen (Laffay 1964, 93). The spectators agree to
enter a sort of game with the images on the screen and treat them as a quasi-
reality. In reality, according to Laffay, the significance of what I perceive arises
from the way in which I am engaged in the world (93). In contrast, the motionless
film spectators do not participate in the quasi-reality of the cinema; they remain
outside of the game (111). The world in the cinema, according to Laffay, appears,
but is rendered inoffensive (25). It does not threaten its viewers (24). While the
world’s hardness and depth are evoked, they are also immediately denied by an
agreed upon disinterest and passivity. It is no more solid than mummies which
crumble into dust at the slightest touch (28).
This shifted world opens up other forms of perception which are not possible
when being active in the world that can threaten us. According to Laffay (1964,
134– 135), the disposition to accept the quasi-real world of the cinema makes
the things that appear on screen a spectacle. The kaleidoscope of cinema, as the
‘poetry of extension’, allows us to contemplate from a remote view what the
project of living does not give us the leisure to enjoy (170).
The enterprise of living does not permit me to draw back; my action absorbs
me so much that I am lost in it like water in the sand (Laffay 1964, 168); and in
acting I am absorbed in things as ink is consumed by blotting paper (169). For
example, Laffay asks what the people who lived through the liberation of Paris
saw or felt and suggests that it was the brief roaring of the tank’s gun as people
dodged behind the sandbags or the weapon as they were nervously pulling the
trigger. The former group could be summed up in this gesture of diving behind
the parapet and the latter’s being is concentrated at the point where their index
finger pulls the trigger. They were absorbed in their action without being able to
pull away and without the leisure to savour the project of living (168).
The cinema in contrast allows me to be a detached witness and to contemplate
as spectacle what I ordinarily live as engagement (Laffay 1964, 170).23 Instead of
the universe in which we are lost and which is animated by our projects, on the
screen we look at ‘a panorama which detachment has rendered aesthetic in
the etymological sense of the word’ (135). Laffay is presumably referring to the
Greek aisthetikos (of or relating to sense perception) and claiming that the
detached viewing of the quasi-real world, which does not threaten us and in
which we are passive, renders it a spectacle we can perceive, that is, view and
listen to, without being absorbed in it as part of our project of living and without it
being possible to reduce our being to action, such as dodging bullets or pulling
the trigger. The distance from the world is tied with an ‘aesthetic’, that is,
perceptual, experience which allows me to see and understand what I do not have
the leisure to contemplate in the world in which I am engaged. This
phenomenological account can better explain Deleuze’s claim that the ‘inverted’
passive characters (like the film’s spectators) gain in an ability to see what they
lost in being passive than the Bergsonian framework he avowedly espouses.
Mikel Dufrenne’s 1953 The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is
similarly cited in Cinema 1, where it is identified as an example of
phenomenology (Deleuze 1986, 231n16).24 Its interest is in the experience of
the aesthetic object which, according to Dufrenne (1973, 541), is different from
ordinary experience, which reveals a world in which the subject utilises and
explores objects. Ordinary perception, Dufrenne claims, leads to action or
to gaining useful knowledge and surpasses the sensuous or perceptible element
(le sensible) toward a pragmatic signification of the object (225).25 Ordinary
objects ‘present themselves through impoverished sensations, dull and transient,
and promptly hide themselves behind a concept’ (226). Their perception
disappears behind the knowledge it leads to and is ‘attentive to the sensuous only
in the sense that it is instructive in character’ (226).
274 B. Hagin
The experience of the aesthetic object, however, is different. The aesthetic
object ‘does not solicit the gesture which uses it but the perception which
contemplates it’ (Dufrenne 1973, 92). The subject is alienated in the object or
even bewitched and haunted by it (56). Dufrenne argues that in the aesthetic
experience, I forbid myself any active participation in the aesthetic world.
‘[I]nstead of anticipating action and trying to make the object submit to it’, he
claims, ‘our body submits to the object’ (57). In aesthetic perception, ‘I must
surrender to the enchantment, deny my tendency to seek mastery of the object’
(231). I am within the aesthetic world, ‘but only to contemplate it’ (58). The
aesthetic object ‘expects of me only the tribute of a perception’ (92).
In the new cinema according to Deleuze, characters gained in an ability to see
what they lost in action; similarly, for Dufrenne, passivity in the face of the
aesthetic object is correlated with an enhanced perception of the ‘sensuous’, the

object’s perceptible element. The sensuous is not grasped as if it ‘had to be
immediately interpreted or surpassed toward a pragmatic signification’
(Dufrenne 1973, 225). Aesthetic perception ‘is never rushed and never hurries
outside of its object’ (542). The being of the aesthetic object consists in
appearing; it is grasped as valid for itself (225). The aesthetic object does not
pretend to refer us to an external world or propose action in that world (515).
What Dufrenne realised in 1953 and Deleuze would leave unacknowledged
three decades later is that this inactive perception is at odds with Bergson’s
‘pragmatic theory of perception’. Dufrenne specifically names ‘the famous
formula of Bergson’s Matter and Memory’ according to which recognising an
object consists above all in knowing how to use it. According to Dufrenne (1973,
343) disinterested perception, like that of the aesthetic object, cannot be
explained by Bergson’s reduction of gnosis to praxis. Dufrenne’s phenomen-
ology thus not only offers a possible account for the passive seers of the second
cinema book, but also shows that in so far as perception for Bergson depends on
action, Deleuze’s explanation in the transition between the books is puzzling. The
‘inversion’, in which the passive character ‘has become a kind of viewer’
(Deleuze 1989, 3), is also one in which the cinema books intersect with
phenomenology.
The cinematographic illusion

The spectators also have an important role at the beginning of Cinema 1, where
Deleuze argues that cinema, despite Bergson’s claims to the contrary, gives us
movement-images. Melinda Szaloky (2010, 50) calls it ‘Deleuze’s foundational
claim’ and writes that it appears to be ‘vague’. D.N. Rodowick (1997, 23) writes
that in it Deleuze makes use of ‘a curious statement’ and that his ‘reasoning is
certainly weak’. Richard Rushton (2012, 13) ominously claims that ‘To call
the opening pages of the book “daunting” is something of an understatement’.
I would like to offer an interpretation of Deleuze’s difficult argument in the
beginning of Cinema 1 with the help of our reading of Chapter 4 and the ‘inverted
identification’ in the transition between the two books. I will argue that Deleuze
combines a phenomenological insight about cinematographic perception with the
Bergsonian notion of real movements in order to claim that the cinema gives its
viewers movement-images and undoes the cinematographic illusion, which only
applies to natural (not cinematographic) perception.
Deleuze begins Chapter 1 by introducing Bergson’s well-known distinction
between space (which is homogenous and divisible) and real movements (which
are heterogeneous and indivisible). Each real movement has its own qualitative
duration and cannot be reconstituted with homogeneous abstract time copied
from space which is added to immobile sections (Deleuze 1986, 1). According to
Bergson, the becoming or movement of going from yellow to green is not the
becoming or movement of going from green to blue; and the becoming or
movement of the action of eating is not like the becoming or movement of the
action of fighting. These varied movements or becomings are profoundly
different and there is no single abstract becoming in general (Bergson 1911, 304).
Our natural perception, thinking, and expression in language make the mistake of
replacing these different becomings or movements with abstract becoming or
time in general and distinguishing them by means of definite states. As Bergson,
quoted by Deleuze, clarifies: ‘We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing
reality’, and string these immobile characteristics of reality to an abstract
becoming ‘situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge’ (Bergson 1911,
quoted in Deleuze 1986, 2). Thus, according to Bergson (1911, 273), ‘[o]f
becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants’. This error can be
found in ancient philosophy which conceives of movement as a regulated
transition between poses or privileged instants, and, in a different way, in modern
science, which aspires to take time as an independent variable, as in the laws of
Kepler and Galileo (Deleuze 1986, 4).
According to Bergson, the same incorrect formula of attempting to
reconstitute becoming or real movement by adding abstract movement or
abstract time to immobile snapshots also characterises cinema. Bergson even
dubs the formula ‘the cinematographic illusion’ in his 1907 Creative Evolution.
Cinema gives false movement by means of instantaneous sections called images
and an impersonal, uniform, abstract, invisible, or imperceptible time or
movement which is ‘in’ the apparatus (Deleuze 1986, 1). It thus repeats the
illusion of natural perception (as well as that of thinking, expression in language,
ancient philosophy, and, in a different way, modern science).
Deleuze rejects Bergson’s analysis of cinema and claims that cinema gives us
movement-images and not immobile sections together with abstract movement.
Cinema therefore does not repeat the illusion of natural perception and in this
respect phenomenology is correct – cinematographic perception breaks with the
conditions of natural perception. One type of reason that he gives for his
disagreement with Bergson is historical: at the time Bergson wrote Creative
Evolution, he was only familiar with early cinema and things and people are
‘always forced to conceal themselves [ . . . ] when they begin’ (Deleuze 1986, 2 – 3).
276 B. Hagin
However, with cinema’s evolution, with its conquest of its own essence or
novelty, the section became mobile, the shot temporal, and cinema discovered the
movement-image of Matter and Memory (3).
Immediately before this historical account, Deleuze also gives another type of
reason for disagreeing with Bergson. He contends that the technical means by
which cinema works – 24 or 18 immobile sections per second – are not what is
given to ‘us’ or ‘for a spectator’. We never see the individual immobile
photograms, but rather an intermediate image to which movement belongs as
‘immediate given’. What appears to us, or for the spectator, is ‘a section which is
mobile’; cinema ‘immediately gives us a movement-image’ (Deleuze 1986, 2).
This recourse to what is given to the spectator is surprising and not only
because the cinema books do not seem to have much interest in spectators.26 No
doubt, usually humans who watch a typical movie projected at regular speed do
not perceive the individual frames that this film consists of and indeed perceive
movement. However, Bergson’s argument is that even when exposed to
movement in reality, it is our perception that brings about the cinematographic
illusion; it is humans, regardless of the cinema, who take as it were ‘snapshots’ of
reality. Even if we agree that cinema produces real movement, why would it be
given to us as viewers? Why would our perception of this movement be any
different from our perception of real movement in reality, which is
cinematographic?
Deleuze argues that in natural perception the illusion of false movement ‘is
corrected “above” perception by the conditions which make perception possible
in the subject. In the cinema, however, it is corrected at the same time as the
image appears for a spectator without conditions.’ It is here that he adds that
phenomenology is right in assuming a qualitative difference between natural
perception and cinematographic perception (Deleuze 1986, 2). How does this
combination of Bergson’s discussion of false movement and phenomenology’s
two perceptions lead to the correction of the cinematographic illusion in the
cinema?
When dealing with phenomenology in Chapter 4 of Cinema 1, Deleuze
defines the ‘conditions’ of natural perception as the anchoring of the perceiving
subject in the world with horizons. Movement for phenomenology is related to
this anchoring and therefore to existential still poses, that is, ‘a sensible form
(Gestalt) which organises the perceptive field as a function of a situated
intentional consciousness’ (Deleuze 1986, 57). However, even if we agree that in
cinematographic perception, which differs from natural perception, the viewers
are not anchored in the world shown on screen and are in this sense ‘without
conditions’, why would this ensure the appearance of movement-images? We
saw that for Merleau-Ponty and Laffay, movement in the cinema is indeed
different from movement when being in the world and in natural perception
(because the screen lacks horizons when the camera moves in to a close-up and
because in the cinema the movement of the photographic material adds narration
to the world unlike our incoherent perception of it when anchored in reality).
However, why would this undo the cinematographic illusion?
The commentary on phenomenology in Chapter 4 is placed within a
comparison with Bergson. According to Deleuze, the Bergsonian deduced
subjectivity not only leads to a perception that tears things out of the continuity of
reality and is subtractive, as we have already seen, but also creates the false
movement of natural perception. The centres that are formed ‘impose fixed
instantaneous views’ (Deleuze 1986, 57 – 58) and Deleuze repeats here the
quotation from Bergson’s Creative Evolution stating that in natural perception,
intellection, and language, we take snapshots as it were of passing reality
(Deleuze 1986, 57). He claims that it is the material aspects of sensory –motor
subjectivity – the action-images, affection-images, and perception-images,
which are part of his reading of Matter and Memory – that replace movement
with the assumed end or result of an act, states of bodies, and subjects, objects,
and vehicles (59 – 60 and 65). Like natural perception in phenomenology which is
related to existential poses, Bergsonism’s action-oriented subtractive perception
has no interest in real movement. Rather, it takes characteristic snapshots of
reality, immobile sections, and adds abstract time to them. This addition of
abstract time is presumably the correction ‘above’ natural perception that
Deleuze refers to at the beginning of Cinema 1.
As we know from the transition between the two cinema books, for Deleuze,
being a spectator also means being passive. Similarly, for Laffay and Dufrenne,
phenomenologists he cites, perception of an aesthetic object (such as in cinematic
viewing) is contrasted with being actively engaged in the world.27 Cinemato-
graphic perception of the world on screen, which is perception ‘without
conditions’, is also passive, and it can therefore break with the cinematographic
illusion. As Bergson (1911, 306) states, there is no doubt about ‘the altogether
practical character’ of the cinematographic illusion of natural perception. For
him, ‘while action only is in question’, we are right to ‘pluck out of duration those
moments that interest us’ (273). The ‘snapshots’ are a result of our orientation
toward practice and action. This orientation, however, is suppressed in
cinematographic perception in which we are not active in the world that we
are perceiving on the screen. Without action, Bergson argues, if our intellect and
senses ‘could obtain a direct and disinterested idea’ of matter, then instead of
taking instantaneous views, they would show us that reality is a perpetual
becoming, that duration is the very stuff of reality (272). Obtaining such an idea is
not an easy endeavour according to Bergson. It requires ‘a painful effort which
we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but cannot sustain more than
a few moments’ (237). It goes against ‘the most inveterate habits of the mind’ and
cannot be achieved in one stroke. It is, he maintains, ‘necessarily collective and
progressive’ (192).
When Deleuze argues with phenomenology and against Bergson that
cinematographic perception differs from natural perception, he is suggesting that
cinema is a machine that can take part in this philosophical enterprise. Cinema can
278 B. Hagin
give the spectator ‘without conditions’ movement-images at the same time as the
image appears because it gives her or him a disinterested perception of a world.
Our passivity during cinematic viewing, our break with action-oriented natural
perception, allows us to perceive movement-images instead of reducing it to
instants with abstract time. It is in this sense that Deleuze (1986, 2) can claim that
the movement-image, which is discovered in Matter and Memory ‘beyond the
conditions of natural perception’, is also available to the spectators of the cinema.
Bergson apparently was unable to imagine this option for the cinema, and
Deleuze therefore had to turn elsewhere, to the ideas of phenomenology, in order
to show how a break with the action-oriented subjectivity described in Matter and
Memory can resolve the ‘cinematographic illusion’ described in Creative
Evolution. Nor could phenomenology itself have reached this insight, because
according to Deleuze it takes natural perception as its model and hence thinks of
movement only in relation to existential poses, leading to its confused attitude
when dealing with cinematographic movement. Phenomenologists can describe
our enhanced sense perception in the aesthetic experience of things. When
dealing with movement, however, because they take natural perception and not
the Bergsonian universe of duration and becomings as their model, they cannot
conceive real movements even when noting that cinematographic perception
goes beyond the habits of our mind or our nature in so far as these are oriented
around action. A mere phenomenological account lacks real movements and
cannot explain how the cinema gives them to viewers. By combining Bergson’s
notion of real movements with phenomenology’s insight on passive cinemato-
graphic perception, Deleuze can argue that cinema itself overcomes the
cinematographic illusion and immediately gives movement-images to its
spectators who are without conditions.
Overeager to enlist Deleuze in a feud about phenomenology, many accounts
in film studies have insisted on either labelling his work as phenomenological or
characterising it as using Bergson to oppose phenomenology. The few attempts to
combine Deleuze and phenomenology have remained ambiguous and hesitant
about the very possibility of theoretically justifying such a union. In contrast, this
paper has suggested that we should read Deleuze’s commentary not as a critique
which sets out to reject phenomenology, but as an elucidation meant to adopt
some of phenomenology’s insights while distinguishing it from Bergson’s
approach and pointing out the latter’s shortcomings. Far from mentioning
phenomenology merely to criticise it or creating a straw man that misses much of
its potential, Deleuze refers to phenomenology in order to use it to explain how
cinema, pace Bergson, gives us real movements.
While the overall organising principle of the cinema books does not seem to
follow a phenomenological logic, at certain moments it does intersect with
phenomenology. In addition, the movement-images are given through the
unnatural perception of spectators. In this sense the cinema books are a
phenomenology – the access to movement-images depends on the spectator’s
experience, not on the mere existence of strips of celluloid or a meditation on
Bergson’s philosophy of images in Matter and Memory,28 although the logic
explaining this encounter is as much indebted to the account of movements in
Bergson’s Creative Evolution as to that of the experience of art and cinema in
phenomenology. The cinema books’ Bergsonism is neither phenomenological
nor is it entirely averse to phenomenology as has often been argued. The two
approaches can and do meet and forging additional connections between them
can be a theoretically sound project.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude by dealing with an additional ramification of this reading
of the cinema books that has to do with whether the books can be extended to
contemporary cinema and filmmaking. Can we (and do we need to) extend the
books and add an ‘interactive-image’, ‘digital image’, ‘silicon image’, or a third
volume, Cinema 3.0?29 As we have seen, for Deleuze the inactive spectators are
essential for the appearance of movement-images, since it is their passivity that
ensures that their perception of cinematic movements will not be reduced
to immobile instants with abstract time. However, while Deleuze, following
phenomenology, believes that spectators are both ‘without conditions’ (not in the
world depicted on screen) and passive (not active in the world shown on screen),
there is no necessary connection between the two. One could certainly be passive
in reality, in the world in which one is in, and, more importantly to us, actively
intervene in an on-screen world without being in that world. Deleuze however
does not deal with such screen practices. The cinema books are an extremely
limited study of moving images and screen practices. They only deal with
viewing in which the spectator cannot intervene in the on-screen world.
Deleuze shows little interest in other moving-image media that allow greater
viewer intervention. He takes great care to clarify that certain modes of viewing
films are not cinema as he understands it. He claims that Bergson’s invention of
the movement-image in 1896 happened ‘before the official birth of the cinema’
(Deleuze 1986, 2), so that pre-1897 devices are not officially cinema. These
include early manually operated peepshow moving-pictures devices like the
Kinetoscope and the hand-cranked Mutoscope (see Burch 1990, 233n25 and
Williams 1995, 18). Presumably, the spectators who actively operated these
machines were too active for their experiences to be included within the category
of ‘cinema’ as Deleuze understands it.30 Similarly, Deleuze (1989, 265)
maintains that an analysis of the ‘electronic image, that is, the tele and video
image, the numerical image coming into being’ is ‘beyond our aims’ and that
these new images ‘either had to transform cinema or to replace it’. The electronic
images, he argues, ‘will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet
unknown aspects of the time-image’ (266). Although these media are mentioned
in the cinema books, their role is carefully circumscribed and mainly focuses on
filmmakers; it does not include interactive viewer experiences.31 Deleuze seems
to have no interest here in the way these new media might alter the viewers’
280 B. Hagin
experiences and allow them to actively change the images and movements
perceived. He never mentions switching channels on television, or slowing down,
accelerating, skipping, repeating, and pausing the flow of images on video,
which, as Laura Mulvey (2006, 101) writes, introduce ‘the spectator to a new
kind of control over the image and its flow’, a process which has ‘its own visual
pleasures and rewards’ (149).
To be sure, the viewers who used a Mutoscope in the 1890s or the viewers
who switched channels or fast-forwarded a video cassette in the 1980s are not
viewers who experience themselves as being in the world that appears on screen.
However, they are also not the passive viewers whose actions are in vain since
they can act and affect the images on screen. Manipulating what we hear and see
on screen is in these cases part of our engagement with the world in a way that is
similar to our use of other tools such as giving orders on the phone and pressing a
button to unlock a door in another area of a building. Unlike in Laffay’s account
of cinematographic perception, these interactions with the image do not give us
the leisure to draw back from our action in the world. When viewers can turn the
volume up or down, fast forward the movie, or switch channels, they do seek
mastery, unlike their relation with Dufrenne’s aesthetic object which bewitches
and haunts its viewers who do not try to make the object submit to them. While
the viewers are not in the world on screen, the screen is not beyond the viewers’
action and engagement either.
It is no surprise that Deleuze does not consider early moving image
technologies as cinema and that he writes that the new tele and video (and digital)
images are beyond the aims of the books and would either replace or transform
cinema. These screen practices do not offer the same break with natural perception
and its conditions that cinema offers and which allows Deleuze to argue that the
passive viewers, who are not oriented toward action, are given movement-images.
This certainly does not foreclose a philosophy that would create the concepts that
these and future interactive screen practices give rise to (perhaps making use of
Deleuze’s concepts in the cinema books or elsewhere). However, the cinema books
themselves are based on a passive spectator and their extant framework cannot be
extended into these media. By not enabling their extension into interactive media,
the books make sure that for those following Deleuze future exploration of these
screen practices will require the invention of new concepts.
Acknowledgements
For their helpful suggestions and insightful comments, I would like to thank Nir Kedem,
the participants of the 2011 Deleuzian Futures conference in Tel Aviv, Warren Buckland,
and an anonymous reviewer for the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Notes
1. In a work from 1988, Gaylyn Studlar simply mentions that in Deleuze’s recent (at the
time) work on film he ‘rejects psychoanalysis and turns to a phenomenological
approach’ (Studlar [1988] 1992, 196n2). Vivian Sobchack (1992, 30) reports that
Deleuze’s cinema books have been ‘generally identified as a phenomenology of
cinema’ and Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010, 157) state that ‘Deleuze
has often been labelled a phenomenologist’. Neither Sobchack nor Elsaesser and
Hagener give any references to those who have made this assertion about Deleuze’s
work and both realise it is not an easy connection to make.
2. It has been claimed that in the books Deleuze ‘does not refer himself to
phenomenology’s founding figures’ and ‘instead turns to the vitalist life philosophy
of Henri Bergson’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 158); and that at first glance
‘Deleuze’s relation to phenomenology appears as a strict refusal of the traditional
phenomenological model’ (Guillemet 2010, 96). Indeed, Deleuze’s marked aversion
to phenomenology, which he dubs ‘our modern scholasticism’ (Deleuze 1983a, 195),
is found throughout his writings. For example, he wonders whether phenomenology
is not a prisoner of common sense and the doxa of the traditional Western image of
thought continuing its model of recognition (Deleuze 1994, 137 and 320n6); and,
with Félix Guattari, he attacks ‘Husserl and many of his successors’ for reintroducing
transcendence to the plane of immanence (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 46 – 47).
Outside of film studies, some writers have characterised Deleuze’s relation to
phenomenology in a more nuanced fashion. His work has been described, for
example, as a ‘radicalisation of phenomenology’ (Colebrook 2002, 60), as an
extraction and transformation of certain isolated moments in it (Toscano 2005), and
as one in which phenomenology functions as a friend/enemy in a perpetual, incessant
sadistic game (Beaulieu 2009).
3. For a further, critical, discussion of her departure from Deleuze into phenomenology,
see Perkins (2004) and Elsaesser and Hagener (2010, 125).
4. There is also a ‘relation-image’ which functions as closure of the deduction and
‘reconstitutes the whole of the movement with all the aspects of the interval’
(Deleuze 1989, 32).
5. They are not the only one. The cinema books obviously also deal with films and not
just with Bergsonian images. Even if we take Bergson to be ‘the great regulator of the
system’, references to him are practically non-existent after Chapter 5 of Cinema 2
(Ropars-Wuilleumier 2010, 16). Moreover, despite Deleuze’s (1986, ix and xiv)
protestations to the contrary, the books seem to offer some kind of historical account
of images, their relations with other historical factors, and images of history. There is
however little agreement about the logic and cogency of the historical aspects of the
cinema books and their relation to the taxonomy of images and signs (see, for
example, Bordwell 1997, 116–117; Deamer 2009; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 160;
Kovács 2000; Marrati 2008, 64 – 65; Rancière 2006; and Rodowick 2001, 170– 202).
6. This could leave us wondering whether Deleuze needs films. For Hughes (2008, 26),
it remains unclear whether the cinema books are a theory of cinema at all. As I will
argue later on, our very access to movement-images does depend, in the cinema
books, on our experience of the cinema. Deleuze’s Bergsonian account of
movement-images is not merely a rehearsal of ideas already given in philosophy, but
indeed the concepts that cinema ‘gives rise to’ (Deleuze 1989, 280).
7. However, even in the cases in which the images are closer to the first regime, an
account of subjective perception is not necessarily useless. It can serve as a standard
against which the break with everyday human perception (or ‘natural perception’)
can be evaluated or appreciated. For example, when dealing with the ‘semi-
subjective’ perception-image, Deleuze (1986, 72) adds that ‘it is difficult to find a
status for this semi-subjectivity, since it has no equivalent in natural perception’.
8. The connection with phenomenology is not mentioned by Deleuze here but it does
appear in Merleau-Ponty’s (1964, 58 –59) text.
282 B. Hagin
9. Deleuze (1986, 56) writes that ‘as far as we know’ Husserl never mentions the
cinema. In a collection of Husserl’s posthumous texts published in German in 1980,
moving images are mentioned several times (Husserl 2005, 66, 584n3, 645, and 646).
10. Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (published in English as The Imaginary) does refer to cinema.
It mentions ‘the letters of a cinema advert forming themselves on the screen’, which
Sartre (2004, 76) likens to tracing ‘a figure of eight with the tip of my index finger’,
thus interestingly drawing an analogy between natural perception/imagination and
the cinema. Later on, Sartre again invokes the image of the cinema, when discussing
the temporalities of the flux of consciousness and the dream image, and claiming that
‘we are here not in the cinema, where the projection of a film shot more rapidly gives
the impression of “slow motion”’ (130), thereby underlining the differences between
the cinematic image and the dream consciousness/image.
11. The English translation misspells Laffay’s name.
12. The English translation renders Deleuze’s ‘récit’ inconsistently as both ‘story’ and
‘tale’.
13. Laffay’s notion of the grand imagier is perhaps best known through Christian Metz’s
(1974, 21) elaboration; see also Gaudreault (2009, esp. 5 – 6 and 204 n7).
14. Furthermore, Shaviro (1993, 30) contrasts the monstrously prosthetic cinematic
perception both with Husserlian bracketing and with sublation and denial by Hegel’s
dialectic, thus forging a connection between phenomenology and Deleuze’s worst
philosophical enemy.
15. Although it might seem trite, this argument is worth making, since there have been
theorists who did maintain that a close connection between natural and cinematic
perception exists or should be strived for. André Bazin has been understood as
making the claim that neo-realism is similar to regular perception, for example by
Amédée Ayfre, who according to Deleuze (1989, 281n1) ‘takes up and develops
Bazin’s thesis to give it a pronounced phenomenological expression’. Ayfre (1964,
67 – 68) suggests that there is a similarity between the way viewers interpret what they
see on screen in a film that conforms to ‘phenomenological realism’ and the way they
bring out the signification of facts in life. Similarly, Hugo Munsterberg can be read as
proffering an analogy between film and mind (Carroll 1988).
16. Or perhaps this passivity should result in ‘affection’, insofar as it is defined as an
effort that replaces action that has become impossible (Deleuze 1986, 66).
17. Deleuze (1989, 20) calls the sensory – motor image of the thing, that is, perceiving
only what is in our interest to perceive, a ‘cliché’. The jamming of the sensory–
motor links and the rise of pure optical –sound images are not enough to break away
from clichés. The image constantly sinks to the state of cliché and the optical-and
sound-image can itself become a cliché. In order to challenge the cliché the optical –
sound images need to be combined with other forces which will allow the movement-
image to grow in dimensions or powers which go beyond space into a time-image,
readable image, and thinkable image (21 – 23). My focus here is not on the shift to
thought and time, but on the very appearance of the pure optical – sound images.
18. This new logic is not yet the one leading to his discussion of recollection, dream, and
time, which Deleuze only reaches later on in Cinema 2. There, he acknowledges a
discontinuity with the previous discussion, when he notes that whereas in Cinema 1
he dealt with the first chapter of Matter and Memory, at this stage, he will deal with
the second chapter, which, he writes, ‘introduces a very different point of view’
(Deleuze 1989, 288n1). This suggests that the earlier discussion, in the transition
between the two books, is still meant to be understood as related to Chapter 1 of
Matter and Memory with its account of subtractive sensory –motor perception that is
inseparable from action.
19. They are not however the only possible source. The idea can for example be reached
following existential phenomenological thinking, such as the early work of Martin
Heidegger. In Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time, he claims that the kind of dealing
with things which is closest to us is not ‘bare perceptual cognition’, but rather the
kind that manipulates things and puts them to use, for example, using a latch when
opening a door, or things as equipment when writing, working, sewing, and
transportation (Heidegger 2004, §15, 96). Their being, according to Heidegger, is
that of ‘readiness-to-hand’ and the less we just stare, the more we seize, hold, and
use, the more unveiledly are they encountered as that which they are (§15, 98).
Determining the nature of something not as ready-to-hand, but as present-at-hand by
observing it, is possible but requires that there be a ‘deficiency in our having-to-do
with the world concernfully’, a holding back ‘from any kind of producing,
manipulating, and the like’ (§13, 88). In such a mode of ‘holding-oneself-back from
any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is
consummated’ (§13, 89). Moreover, the presence-at-hand of things can also

‘announce itself’ and their worldhood can become ‘lit up’ in certain modes of
everyday concern as well: when a thing is unusable, missing, or stands in the way
(§16, 104). Whereas for Bergson perception depends on use and whatever has no
function for our needs is suppressed, for Heidegger a thing is more explicitly and
fully perceived when it is not used – when we withdraw from our concernful
dealings with things, or when our concern is in some way deficient and things fall
from use. Heidegger is closer than Bergson to Deleuze’s idea that an inability to act
leads to a gain in an ability to perceive.
Significantly, given Deleuze’s analogy with film viewers, the idea can also be
found in writings about the experience of encountering art, such as Emmanuel
Levinas’s 1948 article ‘Reality and its Shadow’ (1987). Deleuze’s argument about a
broken action-image bringing about purer perception combines two familiar tropes: a
detached or disinterested ‘aesthetic attitude’ that serves no extrinsic practical end
(Danto 1986; Kneller 2012); and a different, perhaps fuller or enhanced, form of
perception in the making or experiencing of art or amusement, such as the ‘innocent
eye’ of painters (Ruskin, n.d., 235– 236n), a deautomatised or defamiliarised
perception in literature (Shklovsky 1988), or intense stimuli and thrills in
amusements that break through the everyday blunted perception of an audience
exhausted by, or shielding itself against, the overstimulation and shocks of modernity
(Singer 2001, 118– 124). Any of these, or early Heidegger, seem to me to offer a
more convincing framework for Deleuze’s argument than his reading of Bergson.
20. These ideas can also be found in André Bazin’s (2005) famous ‘The Ontology of the
Photographic Image’. It is perhaps no coincidence that his work has also been
occasionally labelled as phenomenological.
21. A ‘world’ for Laffay (1964, 36) is ‘a full set in which things hold each other, in which
there is no vacuum, and in which it is impossible to change anything in an instant’.
22. Laffay uses the same term – ‘irréel’ – throughout his book and it is most likely
borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s (2004) The Imaginary. On the meaning of this
term in Sartre’s work and its relation to Husserl’s ‘irreal’, see the translator’s notes
(Sartre 2004, xxviii). Laffay (1964, 148) explicitly cites Sartre’s book when
discussing actors and his book especially resonates with Sartre’s (2004, 188– 194)
consideration of the work of art.
23. As noted above, for Laffay one can also be a witness in the world, but then one
merely sees partial and evasive events, never continuity and the whole picture.
Cinema, through narration, can rescue the appearance of things from incoherence.
284 B. Hagin
24. Dufrenne’s The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is also mentioned within a
discussion of phenomenology in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,
231n17).
25. On the ‘sensuous’ see the translators’ comment (Dufrenne 1973, xlviii n3).
26. I agree that ‘Deleuze has no explicit conception of the cinema spectator’ and that
nevertheless ‘an implicit theory of spectatorship can be found in the Cinema books’
(Rushton 2009, 47). The previous section sought to tease out aspects of spectatorship
from the transition between the two books.
27. To be precise, Deleuze is not claiming that the spectator is inactive in general. When
describing the inverted identification in which the character becomes a kind of
spectator, Deleuze does not describe the character as immobile; rather he writes that
the character ‘shifts, runs and becomes animated’ but that this is ‘in vain’ and that
what the character sees and hears is no longer ‘subject to the rules of a response or an
action’ (Deleuze 1989, 3). Similarly, throughout the cinema books, spectators are
described as engaging in cognitive and bodily activities: we are told that they know
and discover (Deleuze 1986, 201), judge (Deleuze 1989, 139), tremble (Deleuze
1986, 136), and laugh (149). The spectators are active in the world in which the film
is screened, and we can even imagine them talking, eating popcorn, making out, or
leaving the movie theatre. However, the spectators are not in the world perceived
through the cinema in a way that would enable them to be active within it, to make
movements, to act. In this sense, the spectators are passive. Deleuze therefore is not
following the notion of the immobile ‘passive spectator’ from 1970s theories which
described spectators trapped in their seats like helpless children or the prisoners in
Plato’s cave, such as Baudry (1985).
28. Moreover, as already noted, Deleuze immediately proceeds with a historical
explanation for what he takes to be Bergson’s incorrect critique of the cinema. This
emphasises that the experience of the viewers is not abstract and universal and that the
very existence of the cinematograph certainly does not yet determine what will
become of cinema. One concrete viewer – a man named Henri Bergson – watching
specific films within the specific screening practices of the early 1900s – did not
understand that cinema gives movement despite being aware of movement-images
which he had invented a decade earlier and seemed to have forgotten (Deleuze 1986,
2). The films and the viewers, then, change historically. The cinematograph’s
movement-image was ‘a potential contained in the fixed primitive image’, a tendency
which still needed to be realised, that is, ‘acted out’, by the mobile camera and
montage (25). This again emphasises that films do play a major role in the creation of
concepts in the cinema books and that they are not just abstract theorising based on
concepts already found in Bergson and other philosophers. Similarly, it might be
possible to argue that Deleuze needed Hitchcock’s actualisation of the potential of the
movement-image in order to come up with his theory of passive film viewing.
29. For attempts to deal with these images, see, for example, Rodowick (2007), Daly
(2010), Rushton (2009, 51– 53; 2012, 120ff).
30. Moreover, Deleuze even seems concerned that the action of projecting a film was too
similar to the action of shooting it at the early stages of the cinema when some
apparatuses, such as Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 Cinématographe, were used
for both. He writes that at the outset, when cinema still concealed itself and was
forced to imitate natural perception, the cinematic apparatus for shooting was
combined with the apparatus for projection ‘endowed with a uniform abstract time’
and that part of cinema’s conquering of its essence involved the emancipation of the
shooting apparatus which became separate from projection (Deleuze 1986, 3).
Perhaps his fear was that with these devices, which doubled as cameras, projectionists
would be prone to influence the film, for example, by stopping, slowing down,
accelerating, or reversing its movement in response to the audience’s reaction, thus
giving viewers too much control (see Tsivian 1998, 52 – 65; Sklar 1994, 17).
31. Video and electronic imagery can be used by filmmakers, as is the case with
Godard’s use of ‘electronic processing introducing mutation, recurrence and
retroaction’ on written words (Deleuze 1989, 186; on Godard’s ‘electronic
transformations of the scriptural’ see also 246). Additionally, television made a new
stage of the talking film possible (252) and thus had an effect on cinema, as many
other external factors had according to the cinema books (such as the Second World
War). However, even in these cases, Deleuze often insists on the primacy of cinema
and its great auteurs over television and new technologies. He claims, for example,
that ‘television abandoned most of its own creative possibilities, and did not even
understand them’ and therefore needed cinema and its great authors ‘to give it a
pedagogical lesson’ (Deleuze 1989, 252; on the contribution of cinema and its
great directors to television, see also Deleuze 1986, x and Deleuze 1989, xii-xiii).
Moreover, he claims that there is a dependence on an aesthetic before a dependence

on technology and shows how Godard moved in a direction of a screen which
functions as an instrument panel ‘even before starting to use video methods’ and that
the autonomy of sound which characterises the new image was already achieved by
others through the use of ‘cinematographic methods, or simple video methods,
instead of calling on new technologies’ (267). Similarly, Deleuze mentions a method
used by Godard in a film, which is ‘afterwards transferred to television’ (179). In
addition to the role of these images in filmmaking, Deleuze notes cases in which
television (as well as other media) appears within films, as part of their content (see,
for example, Deleuze 1986, 209 and 210).
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framework while rejecting phenomenological accounts of film experience

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

The opposite of what phenomenology put forward

but is diffused without resistance, and things ‘are luminous by themselves

perception, cinema involves ‘an implicit knowledge and a second intentionality’.

Deleuze’s work on cinema, claims that the roughening of the representational

phenomenology leads to Deleuze’s elaboration of the deduction of subjectivity

Broken schemata and aesthetic perception

function of our needs’ (63).

While not clearly in agreement with Deleuze’s previous reading of Bergson,

aesthetic object is correlated with an enhanced perception of the ‘sensuous’, the

The cinematographic illusion

consummated’ (§13, 89). Moreover, the presence-at-hand of things can also

Moreover, he claims that there is a dependence on an aesthetic before a dependence

Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Translated by

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