On Cinema — Deleuze

III. Solid, Liquid, Gaseous

Reading notes, Fall 2021

Deleuze distinguishes three types of perception image that correspond to different relationships between subject and object. The solid state of perception is grounded in the organic composition of cinema, where the human body is the reference point. The frame is anchored to the perspective of a character or an implied observer, and the image reflects a coherent, bounded world that is perceived from within. This form of framing reinforces a human-centric vision of space, in which the camera behaves as an extension of bodily perception and the set is organized around human presence and movement.

The liquid state corresponds to the pathetic composition, associated with the French Impressionist school. Here the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity begins to dissolve. The camera is no longer strictly anchored to a body or a fixed observational point. Instead it drifts, floats, and mediates between interior states and exterior environments. Water is the recurring motif because water itself refuses the distinction between inside and outside: it surrounds, permeates, and reflects simultaneously. The liquid perception image is one where emotion and landscape become continuous, and the viewer cannot cleanly separate what belongs to the character's inner world from what belongs to the world at large.

The gaseous state is the most radical departure. Deleuze associates it with a perception that is no longer anchored to any subject at all. The camera becomes an autonomous eye, surveying matter from an entirely impersonal vantage point. This is Dziga Vertov's cine eye: a mechanical vision that cuts across the usual hierarchies of important and unimportant, human and nonhuman, foreground and background. Everything in the frame becomes equally available for attention. The gaseous image dissolves the linear logic of narrative driven by human agents and opens toward a cinema that perceives the world as pure movement and matter, before any subject arrives to organize it into meaning.