On Cinema — Deleuze
I. Movement and Duration
Bergson's three thesis on movement include qualities, forms of essences, and acts. Deleuze summarizes them as "movement and instant," "privileged instants and any-instant-whatever," and "movement and change." Qualities represent the characteristics of matter: "Color succeeds to color, sound to sound, resistance to resistance, etc." (Bergson, p. 326) These qualities contribute to the apparent immobility of matter. Instantaneous immobile sections can be understood as an image, an action, or a form — each abstract in itself, identifiable only through the qualities of the matter it presents. "Forms or ideas which are themselves eternal and immobile." (Deleuze, p. 4) These discontinuous instants, compiled into a concrete duration, form movement — a qualitative whole assembled from static fragments.
Marey's photographic series attempts to capture a sequence of actions in a single image, recording the translation of a body through space. This places his work within Bergson's second thesis: the privileged instant, which selects a significant pose from a continuous process. "Form is only a snapshot view of a transition." (Bergson, p. 328) But Deleuze argues that privileged instants remain instants, sharing the same qualities of discontinuity and immobility as any other frame. "Movement always relates to a change." (Deleuze, p. 9) Movement is the translation of space or the metamorphosis of matter — from sugar in water to sugared water. It belongs not to any single instant but to the duration as a whole.
Durée (duration) refers to the continuation of the past into the present (Bogue), a mobile section consisting of immobile sections, or a container for movements. Duration is the whole process of metamorphosis of matter, in which the form is constantly adapting. "Movement will always occur in a concrete duration [durée]: thus each movement will have its own qualitative duration." (Deleuze, p. 1) The duration can be thought of as the length of a film, such as sixty seconds. Movement is the film's content, consisting of a series of immobile sections or images. In Bergson's case, it will be twenty-four frames per second. Each frame is static, but the compilation of these fragments can be edited by adding or shuffling the sequence of frames.
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