Delueze: The Movement-Image

[carllooper]

Some musings on Delueze.

Deleuze defines one of the aspects of cinema as that which he calls the "movement-image". It is an image that preoccupied film makers in the early days prior to the world war and remains a part of cinema to this day.

He defines the movement-images as something which is not a set of stills to which movement is added. Rather it is firstly a movement from which stills are extracted. Analysis. Cinematography.

But on it's own this is not yet cinema. On it's own it would be a set of stills eg. in the form of a book by Muybridge. Rather it is the reciprical operation (Flipbook. Projection. Synthesis) - when the film is projected - when the images are restored to movement - that it becomes cinema.

But both operations are necessary for what Delueze calls the movement-image:

Analysis + Synthesis.

Now Deleuze excludes the animated film from such a definition because it does not satisfy the first requirement. It satisfies only the second requirement. But this exclusion is not because an animator isn't capable of carrying out analysis (of movement) and transcribing that through to the projector. Nor is because animation is not real. Rather it is because the analysis is not automated.

And this is at the heart of the Deleuzian movement-image: automatonism.

Indeed it is not even that the analysis and synthesis are automated but that the relationship between the two is also automated. It this which excludes animation. Or rather it this which excludes traditional animation.

Now what Deleuze identifies in the work of the great film makers is the way in which they insert a third component, which is missing from this new fangled machine and it's movement-image, and it is thought.

But right from the beginning of cinema is the idea of a thinking machine. Films such as The Golem, or Frankenstein, or C3PO's grandmother in Metropolis, or zombie movies, or the HAL computer in 2001 - automatons characterised in terms of thought, whether it be absent or disfigured, alien or otherwise. Moon is another great example.

The history of cinema has always provided visions of a thinking machine - almost as if the cinema itself could become such a machine - to take on a mind of it's own - in that automated relationship it had already invented between the analytic and the synthetic.

But apart from special effects (special because they are the exception) thought had to be instilled in other ways - not from within the machine as such, but from the outside in.

This has all changed today because there are now auto-thinking machines that can be inserted into the apparatus. Indeed in many places they have taken up permanent residence within the cinema machine. They are no longer special alterations of the machine.

However these thinking machines have their own livelihood outside the cinematic apparatus, eg. in computer games. The effect of their insertion is to push the two ends of the cinematic machine further away from each other - the analytic and the synthetic. To introduce an additional delay between the two.

Or to sever the bond altogether.

Carl

[etimh]

Caffeine is good.



Tim

[carllooper]

Re-reading Deleuze I note that he doesn't explicitly exclude the animated film from the movement-image (although such films are noteable by their absence).

Indeed, on the contrary, he does include animation - a reference to the "cartoon film". But more importantly: in order to re-inforce a definition of the movement-image. The movement-image represents a paradigmatic shift between movement as constructed in paintings/drawings and movement as constructed in the cinema and/or including animation.

Putting autonomism aside for the moment (which excludes traditional animation) the movement-image is one which can be distinguished in terms of how it differs from earlier formulations of movement. Earlier formulations of movement can be understood in terms of what animators would know as "key-frames" or storyboard frames (much like the frames that Roger pulls from the original tv show he has been reanimating). They are a particular moment. A standin for movement. And in older thought they are more than a representative moment or snapshot. They are a kind of timeless formulation of movement.

The newer form of movement (ignoring automatonism) involves that proliferation of images between key-frames (be it in the form of photogrames or animator's drawings). But in terms of the movement-image proper, the idea of keyframes is unecessary. They are not required. But on the other hand nor is their exclusion necessary. The movement-image is backwardly compatible (to an extent) with ancient formulations of movement. But in the context of the movement-image the ancient form becomes arbitrary. Or fortutious: that privalged moment when one of Muybridges horses has a hoof on the ground - but it is now but one of many moments, each and every one equal to another. The movement-image is something other than that that singular moment a painter might select as the basis for a painting that would otherwise represent movement.

Carl

[nickrapak]

[carllooper]

[S8 Booster]

I like Elvis though....A little less conversation, a little more action please..

shoot.....

[super8man]

He defines the movement-images as something which is not a set of stills to which movement is added. Rather it is firstly a movement from which stills are extracted. Analysis. Cinematography.

Someone should tell Ken Burns this. Ugh... He can make whole "film" simply using iPhoto and moving all around still images....boring...

[S8 Booster]

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.
Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Godard

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Jean-Luc Godard

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.
Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
Jean-Luc Godard

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Jean-Luc Godard

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Jean-Luc Godard

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
Jean-Luc Godard

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.
Jean-Luc Godard

shoot.....;)

[robbie]

im glad to see a somewhat discussion of Delueze writings on this forum and a bunny with pancake on his head as welll. super8 making keeps getting better and better.