Cinematic Aberration and the ‘Great Kantian Reversal‘

Whether we consider the ‘primitive’ cinema from the perspective of Bergson's characterisation of the cinematographic illusion in Creative Evolution, or from that of Deleuze's reformulation of that illusion in terms of movement-images, that cinema is strictly cinematographic in its orientation. It is the introduction of the formal resources of montage and camera mobility that propels the cinema into its ‘post-primitive’ phase and takes it ‘beyond’ the cinematographic illusion. In doing so, it leads the cinema to ‘the conquest of its own essence or novelty’, and inaugurates narrative cinema, in so far as narration is, for Deleuze, a product of the combination of movement-images effected by montage.

However, for all that these premises lay the foundations of Deleuze's Bergsonian treatment of the cinema, Deleuze is not yet done with the cinematographic illusion, or its consequences for both cinema and thought. As we shall see, narrative – specifically the narrative mode of the classical, pre-war cinema – reintroduces the effects of the cinematographic illusion at a new level: that of the relations between shots, rather than relations between the still photograms of the film strip. The terms in which narrative does so set the scene for the ‘collapse’ of the classical cinema itself, and thus for the ‘impossible’ break between it and the modern cinema (between the movement-and time-image, and between the two volumes of the Cinema books). Unfolding the terms of the classical cinema's trajectory towards this collapse, and this impossibility, is the task of this chapter.

Cinematic narration, as the mode of combination of movement-images, articulates the relationship of the arbitrarily closed set determined by the shot to the whole. In doing so, it also sets the terms of the relationship between the cinematographic, abstract and relative movement of the elements of that set, that shot, and the real, concrete and absolute movement of the whole. And given, as we have seen, that the shot as movement-image is the direct cinematic correlate of the material moments of human subjectivity, narrative in these terms dramatises relations between merely human thought and being, in and by the non-human terms of the cinema itself. In other words, if, as Deleuze suggests, the cinema articulates the ‘relationship between man and world, nature and thought’ then narrative is the means by which it does so.