Deleuze and Cinema: Moving

Images and Movements of

Thought

Author: Ils Huygens
Published: September 2007
Abstract (E): Early film theorists like Epstein, Canudo or
Balazs were already fascinated by the idea of cinema as
automatic thought-machine, producing purely mental
images. The relation of cinema and thinking is the object
of study of Deleuze's cinema-books. In the foreword to
theMovement-Image Deleuze writes that great movie
directors can not only be compared to painters, architects
or musicians but also to thinkers and philosophers, only
they do not think in concepts but in 'affects' and
'percepts'. Like Nietzsche and Foucault Deleuze thinks of
artists and philosophers as doctors that keep society
healthy and cinema takes up a special place since our
contemporary lives have become more and more
dominated by the moving image. Cinema for Deleuze is
what poetry represented for Heidegger: a medium wherein
new forms of thought manifest itself for the first time.
Abstract (F): Des thoriciens du cinma des premiers
temps comme Epstein, Canudo ou Balazs taient fascins
par l'ide du cinma comme machine penser
automatique, productrice d'images purement mentales. Le
rapport entre cinma et pense est au coeur des livres de
Deleuze sur le cinma. Dans la prface L'image-
mouvement , Deleuze crit que les grands cinastes ne
doivent pas seulement tre compars aux peintres,
architectes ou musiciens, mais qu'il faut les comparer
aussi aux penser et aux philosophes, cette diffrence
prs qu'ils ne pensent pas en concepts mais en " affects "
et " percepts ". A l'instar de Nietzsche et Foucault, Deleuze
pense les artistes et les philosophes comme des mdecins
qui aident maintenir la sant de la socit. Le cinma
occupe une place spciale dans cette perception du rle de
l'art, vu le rle de plus en plus important de l'image
mobile dans la vie contemporaine. Pour Deleuze, le
cinma est ce que la posie tait pour Heidegger : un
mdia dans lequel de nouvelles formes de pense se
manifestent pour la premire fois.
keywords: Image of thought, auto-movement, percept,
affect, nooshock


To cite this article:
Huygens, I. Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements of
Thought. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 18 (2007).
Available: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/thinking_pictures/huygens.htm





The cinematic thought-machine

Already in the early days of cinema, theorists were fascinated
by the link between cinema and thinking. This relation was
conceptualized in many different ways, from seeing cinema
as analogous to the human mind (Hugo Mnsterberg), to the
idea of cinema as a medium capable of visualizing
(unconscious) thought processes (Edward Small, Germain
Dulac, Ricciotto Canudo). However as Daniel Frampton
argues in his recent book Filmosophy (2006) most of these
early theories were not just simply nave, but also reductive
in theorizing filmic thought as an analogy or mirror of human
thought. Cinema can offer much more and if we follow
Deleuze's claims that cinema holds the capacity to transform
thought, this implies cinema has to be able to produce its
own specific filmic ways of thinking.

However there were some early film theorists, especially
those interested in the technological materiality of the
medium, who conceptualized filmic thought in terms of a
nonhuman form of thought. These theorists were fascinated
by the machinic modality of perception and vision cinema
created. Human perception is grounded in the subject, and in
his body. According to our interests we select and organise
the flow of perceptions into distinct objects in space. But
cinematic vision does not have such an anchoring centre, or
organising viewpoint, its perception is completely fragmented
and decentred and produces a purely cinematic and
autonomous reality where movement is not stopped in
thought but proliferates. Secondly they were fascinated by
cinema's capacity to present us with aspects of reality that lie
beyond the reach of the human eye. For Walter Benjamin,
the technology of the camera '.with the resources of its
lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its
extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and
reductions' bring us into contact with a whole new
'unconscious optics' (Benjamin 237).

Benjamin and others took the mechanism of the camera, and
the machinic vision it produces as the starting element for a
theory of cinema as a machine for producing thought. For
instance in the kino-eye theory of Dziga Vertov, or Jean
Epstein's idea of film as 'subjectivit automatique', which
both refer to the fact that the camera produces thinking
autonomously and independently from a human subject. Bla
Balazs believed film, since it is capable of cutting the image
loose from all outside referents, shows us how reality is
reflected in our mind and creates a purely mental image.
However, according to Frampton, these early theorists are
still too much biased by the 'the very rhetoric of the camera'
and the 'artistry of the lens' (Frampton 50). For Deleuze it is
not so much a technological or optical matter but the fact
that the machinic vision of cinema produces images
automatically and autonomously. The machinic production of
images corresponds directly with the machinic nature and
production of thought itself.


Automatic thinking

Before looking deeper into the relation between cinema and
thinking it is important to understand the way Deleuze
conceptualizes thinking as machinic, the machinic being
defined by its autonomous and automatic nature. On its most
primary level thought is automatic because it is formed out of
psychological and physiological automatisms that lie at the
basis of conscious thought. And as recent neurobiology
(Daniel Libet, Joseph Ledoux) has proven, these molecular
automatisms can process information and perform thinking
autonomously, without interaction of conscious thought or
cognition. It is only in second instance that the conscious
mind and rational thought step in to act as an ordering
principle that linearizes and hierarchizes the unformed mass
of information that is produced by these automatic sub- and
unconscious thought-processes.

Secondly, thought is also automatic and autonomous on a
higher level. The ideal of a concept for Deleuze is not a
representation (which is static) but an act of becoming, an
auto-movement of thought. Thinking for Deleuze is
autonomous, since it is not something that is performed by a
subject, it is not something we do, but something that
happens to us from the outside. 'Something in the world
forces us to think.' (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 139)
This refers to the concept of the spiritual automaton of
thought, which will be elaborated further later.

Thirdly there is 'an image of thought' that underlies all of our
thinking, and acts as a kind of presupposition to it. This
image of thought is also constantly moving and varying in
time. The image of thought is constantly challenged precisely
by what lies outside of it, by what is yet to be thought, the
unthought. Thought for Deleuze is thus always correlated
with something outside thought, the 'unthought in thought',
pure difference that cannot be assimilated into something we
know. It is the confrontation with this unthought which forces
us to think and re-think our own thinking, bringing about a
new image of thought. This encounter with the outside of
thought can take place when philosophy confronts itself with
art, which also produces thinking, not by formulating
concepts by creating 'affects' and 'percepts'.

In his cinemabooks Deleuze wants to see whether and how
an encounter takes place between the image of thought and
the cinematographic image, and what this encounter might
be. In our contemporary lives, cinema holds a special interest
for philosophy since it has had such a wide influence on the
way we think and live. For Deleuze it is crucial that
philosophy understands cinema and the concepts it has
produced since it has led to a transformation of the image of
thought, not only for cinema and visual arts, but for the
whole of thinking and for philosophy. In the following we will
look at the connections Deleuze makes between thought,
image of thought and thinking image.

Automobilization

1/ Automovement - psychological
automatism

In the history of film theory the early theories on the link
between cinema and thought were soon abandoned by
psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches to film, which
reduced the cinematic image to its representative, signifying
elements, a sign working through recognition and analogy.
Deleuze's cinemabooks can be read as a critique on these
textual approaches to film.

For Deleuze, the sheer materiality of the medium, in first
instance produces moving audiovisual images and not
narrative utterances. It is the automatic image of movement,
and not narrative what distinguishes cinema from other
visual arts like painting and photography, where movement
can be suggested but is not really present in the image.
Cinema also distinguishes itself from theatre or dance where
movement is anchored in and dependent of the body of the
actor or dancer. The cinematic image is the first image
capable of producing automatic and autonomous movement,
which is not anchored in a subject, or seen from a fixed point
that functions as viewpoint. The cinematic image does not
represent movement but moves itself: 'cinema does not give
us an image to which movement is added, it immediately
gives us a movement-image' (Deleuze, Movement-Image 2)
This auto-mobilization of the image creates a direct link from
cinema to the movements of thought..

"The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I don't believe
that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the
cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain - molecular
biology - does. Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make
up the slow beings that we are. (.) Cinema, precisely because
it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with
self-motion, never stops tracing the circuits of the brain"
(Deleuze, The Brain is the Screen 366 ).

The automatism of cinematic images correlates with the
automatisms of our thinking, the pure material organical-
psychic mechanisms that perform our thinking without
consciousness. The continuous flow of images speeding by
does not leave us the time for critical distance and
contemplation, like when looking at a painting or photograph,
but acts immediately on a pre-reflexive, pre-linguistic level of
thought. The automatic movement is capable of 'producing a
shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex,
touching the nervous and cerebral system directly' (Deleuze,
Image-Temps 156).


2/ Automatic image - spiritual
automaton

This second correlation of the automatism of the cinematic
image and of thinking, concerns not a sub- but rather a
supra-conscious level: the spiritual automaton. The spiritual
automaton is a formal order, it refers to the esthetical form
of cinema, the way cinematic images are perceived and
thought.

The concept of the spiritual automaton originally comes from
Spinoza and refers to the auto-movement of thought; it is
what links one idea to an other, independently from an
object. This Spinozan idea suggests a reversal between the
idea that thought is dependent on conscious thought, on the
contrary, it is our consciousness that is dependent on the
way thoughts are linked with other thoughts.

'Automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in
us, which reacts in turn on movement.' (156) The spiritual
automaton cinema produces does not refer to a form of
thinking that lies at the basis of a film, nor is it a certain
illustration of an image of thought. It is the circuit thinking
enters into with the film, a circuit that is activated by a shock
in our brains ('noochoc').

The cinema as machinic apparatus of automatic images thus
gives rise to automatic responses in the viewer which
touches both a subconscious and a supra-conscious level,
involving both an affective and intellectual shock, which feed
into each other and force the viewer into thinking. 'It is as if
cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image,
you can't escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you.'
(156)


Auto-temporalization

Cinema however not only produces an auto-mobilization of
the image but also an auto-temporalization, meaning that it
creates its own specific sense of time. The way time is
represented is crucial to understand the difference between
the regime of the movement image and the time image. The
movement image is based on classic continuity montage and
linear narrative, which tries to overcome the cuts and gaps
inherent to montage by creating a fluid movement from one
image to the other. The movement-image shows us an image
of time in its empirical form, time derived from the
succession of shots, as a linear progression towards the
ending. Time is represented indirectly and quantitatively
through movement.

However in post war cinema like Italian Neorealism and the
Nouvelle Vague Deleuze notices a breakdown of the classic
action scheme. The new crystalline image that emerges
presents us with a direct image of time, for instance by
putting different time-levels in one image (Antonioni) or by
confusing the limits between images from the past, present
and future (Alain Resnais). In the films of Godard, montage
is no longer a rational association of images but becomes
instead a violent de-association. Images are no longer
dominated by their functionality to the narrative, but become
purely autonomous 'optical-sound images'. Spaces are
disconnected, characters are no longer defined by their
actions but by their visions and narration becomes essentially
falsifying rather than trying to tell us a 'true' story.

However the breakdown of logical and senso-motorical
(action-reaction) connections between images does not mean
that there aren't any connections any more but give rise to
new kinds of connections, 'which bring the emancipated
senses into direct relation with time and thought' (17-18).
The autonomy of the image also means it loses dependency
on its referent, it does no longer claim to show us a true and
actual world (cinema as window), like in the regime of the
movement image but gives rise to 'a seeing function' that can
'replace, obliterate and re-create the object itself' (12; 19).
Film then develops its own specific autonomic thoughts: '.a
camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by
the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the
mental connections it is able to enter into.' (23)


The nooshock: the whole versus
the gap

In the seventh chapter of the Time-Image, 'Thought and
Cinema' Deleuze looks more closely at the transformations
the relation between thinking and the cinematic image has
undergone from the classic movement-image to the regime
of the time-image. For Deleuze the two regimes of the image
each produce a different spiritual automaton. Both produce
thinking in the viewer through an experience of shock, but
the nature of the 'nooshock' is different in the two image-
regimes. He uses the writings of Eisenstein and of Artaud on
cinema to illustrate the distinction he wants to make. Simply
put, whereas Eisenstein's shock is an intellectual shock which
believes in the powers of rational and logical thought, for
Artaud cinema confronts us with exactly the opposite: the
impossibility to think, the powerlessness of thought, which, in
Deleuze's philosophy, lies at the heart of thought.

Eisenstein's shock to thought comes from the conflict
between two shots, which forces us to think its synthesis
(in Strike for instance images of a bull being slaughtered are
contrasted by images of a Cossack killing a child). It is the
confrontation with the contrast between these two images
that forces us to think the Whole, which is a unity, a truth. A
dialectical truth in the case of Eisenstein, but classic
continuity montage moves in a similar way from image to
thought, producing a clear-cut concept or idea in the mind of
the viewer about the image, but also about the relation of
this particular image to the Whole of the film. The viewer
himself simply has to receive the ideas that are given to him.
But, this unidirectional idea of the shock to thought makes
cinema a highly manipulative medium; and as history has
learned us, is all too easily put to use for propaganda; 'Hitler
as filmmaker' ( 266).

Antonin Artaud saw a link between the spiritual automaton of
cinema and automatic writing, 'a higher control which brings
together critical and conscious thought and the unconscious
in thought' (165). For Artaud cinema is not the association of
clear-cut ideas through intellectual montage, but on the
contrary a radical de-assocation, an ambiguous linking of
unclear ideas, a decentred conflation of multiple voices and
viewpoints, that cannot be assimilated into a unified whole.
The nooshock for Artaud is a purely 'neuro-physiological
vibration' brought about by the movement and speed of the
images passing through the projector. Cinema makes it
impossible to think, because before we can interpret one
image it is already replaced by another. Before we can grasp
an image it is already passed, the process of association is
constantly interrupted, deconstructed, dislocated.

So although a similar movement takes place from image to
thought, Artaud's violent nooshock rather than leading us
into thinking a unified whole, confronts us with a
fundamental gap in our thinking, the inability of thought to
think the whole. Cinema reveals our own powerlessness, the
fact that we are not yet thinking, and it is precisely the
confrontation with this 'impower' ('impuissance') of thought
that can produce a new image of thought.


Thought beyond representation:
the time-image

In these passages on the link between image and thought,
Deleuze's distinction between movement-image and time-
image becomes almost prescriptive. Cinema has to free us
from what he calls 'the representative image of thought'. This
comprises metaphysical, metaphoric and dialectical forms of
thinking. The representational image of thought functions by
means of representation and recognition. For Deleuze this
image of thought is dogmatic because it can only re-present
us what we already know. It does not allow to think the
unthinkable, what has not been thought, what falls outside
what we already know. Simply put the representational
image of thought cannot think qualitative change or real
difference. These processes of representation and
recognition, Deleuze also sees at work in the regime of the
movement-image. Classic cinema works through metaphor,
using particular images to refer to a larger idea; montage
associates the distinct units into a unified whole.

So film even in the classic age produces thinking but it is only
when cinema, produces its own auto-temporalization that it
realizes its full capacities for thinking and shows us a logic of
thought beyond representation. The cinema of the time
image with its bifurcations, false movements, disconnected
spaces and autonomous images and sounds does not claim to
show us a true world or a true idea, but in stead recreates
the object in a purely cinematic logic, which is defined by
ambiguities, irrationalities and uncertainties. The
impossibility of giving the film a single and unitary
interpretation makes us think and rethink the image in an
endless chain of possible interpretations, in a continuous
exchange between image and viewer, between brain and
screen.


Thought beyond representation
part two: affective thinking

So the time-image is part of this movement towards the
realm of the unthought, which leads to a new image of
thought. But there is another side to this 'unthought in
thought', which concerns the whole of cinema. And this is the
idea Daniel Frampton's philosophy of film wants to bring us:
'A movement in the film is not by definition metaphorical, it
is immediately affective, bringing the filmgoer to a
knowledge about its subjects without having us think or refer
to ideas outside the film. Film-thinking is there in film .'
(Frampton 93).
This brings us back to our first point, the immediate and
neuro-physiological shock that the brain/screen connection
produces. The linkages between film and the viewer's
thoughts 'is the shock wave or the nervous vibration which
means we can no longer say 'I see, I hear", but I FEEL'.
(Deleuze, Image-Temps 158)

Even for Eisenstein intellectual montage always has a
correlate of 'sensorial thought' and 'emotional plenitude'
which doubles the first intellectual shock. For Eisenstein,
there is an organic relation between the logical and the
prelogical (emotional and sensible) level of filmic thought.
"To be effective, a film must balance between logical and
prelogical forms of thought - between what the film makes
you understand (plots, places, people) and what it makes
you feel (danger, love, empathy)." (Frampton 54)

However in the cinema of the time image, the level of feeling
and affect is not simply there to reinforce the level of
interpretation, but becomes autonomous. In the radical de-
association of autonomous images, purely emotive and
affective intensities break through the level of logical
expectations causing a sudden disruption, a suspension of
the narrative progression. When the cinematic produces a
direct image of time, an image of time in its quality of
duration, the purely affective micro-processes which normally
stay in the realm of the non-conscious become pure
intensities which can linger and grow into a virtual
counterpoint to the actual image. Confronting us like the
direct image of time, with the reverse side of thought, with
'something too powerful, too beautiful or too intolerable for
our mind to grasp'.


Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction."Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York:
Schocken, 1969.
Gardner, Colin. "Thinking the unthinkable: time, cinema and
the brain." The journal of neuro-aesthetic theory, nr. 3,
viewed, 20th april
2007http://www.artbrain.org/journal_3/gardner.html.
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition (1968). Trans. Paul
Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983).
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London:
Athlone, 1985.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Londen: Athlone, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles. "The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with
Gilles Deleuze." (1986). The Brian is the Screen. Deleuze and
the Philosophy of the Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman,
Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. London & New York:
Wallflower Press, 2006.










Ils Huygens was connected to the theory department of the
Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where she developed
her current research on affect and emotion in film studies.
Apart from her theoretical research she also works as an
editor and writer for a Belgian online film
magazine, www.kortfilm.be.