False Movements: Or, What Counts as Cinema for Deleuze?

Author(s): Nico Baumbach

Source: Discourse , Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 261-270
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/discourse.36.2.0261

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 False Movements: Or, What Counts
as Cinema for Deleuze?

Nico Baumbach

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze argues that the

movement of cinema is real movement and not an illusion or an
effect. “Cinema,” he says, “does not give us an image to which
movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.”1
This can be taken as a foundational axiom of Deleuze’s diptych on
cinema. At first glance, the claim may not seem particularly surpris-
ing or controversial. But by proposing in 1983 that the movement-
images of cinema are real indivisible movement, not imaginary or
illusory movement, Deleuze placed his conception of cinema in
opposition to the dominant currents of film theory at the time.
Here, for example, Deleuze’s quarrel with Christian Metz’s
semiological paradigm is already implicit. Metz, as Deleuze
explains, takes film to be something that consists of utterances and
“at the very point that the image is replaced by an utterance, the
image is given a false appearance, and its most authentically vis-
ible characteristic, movement, is taken away from it.”2 Similarly,
any attempt to read cinema as being premised on certain absences
or effaced mechanisms—as in Jean-Louis Baudry’s essays on “the

Discourse, 36.2, Spring 2014, pp. 261–270.

Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

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262 Nico Baumbach

apparatus” or Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s influential

statement of purpose on the goals of ideological criticism—can be
seen as further attempts to immobilize the image by seeing cinema’s
movement and time as effects produced by means of the appara-
tus.3 By affirming the identification of image and movement and
offering cinema as the actualization of this identification, Deleuze
treats as a false problem the problematic of representation that
much film theory in the 1970s revolved around.4
So, does Deleuze merely return us to the phenomenological
perspective that had been the target of the semiotic, psychoana-
lytic, and Marxist paradigms that dominated the era? One might
think so, to read some of the current appropriations of Deleuze that
assimilate his work with a return to a phenomenological emphasis
on embodied spectators in contrast to an emphasis on codes and
significations. But Deleuze’s conception of the movement-image
is equally a critique of phenomenology. As he explains, phenom-
enology must grasp images as images of objects and therefore as
representation, locating movement not in the image itself but as a
“Gestalt which organizes the perceptive field as a function of con-
sciousness.”5 A movement-image, on the other hand, according to
Deleuze—and here is where he locates the radical novelty of cin-
ema—accomplishes in itself what modern science and philosophy
have sought to demonstrate: that there is no opposition between
the psychological and the physical. Due to its automatism, it pro-
duces a self-moving image. Physical movement and mental image
are one.6
As anyone who has read Cinema 1 knows, the origin of this
claim that movement and image are equivalent is attributed to
Henri Bergson’s “discovery” in Matter and Memory (1896).7 But to
make the claim that cinema consists of movement-images, Deleuze
must also take up an argument with Bergson himself. In Creative
Evolution (1907), published eleven years after Matter and Mem-
ory, Bergson described cinema as the very model for false move-
ment, the commonsensical if mistaken notion that movement
can be recomposed from immobile sections in time.8 According
to Deleuze, Bergson’s mistake, his failure to recognize cinema as
an ally, could be explained by the fact that in the first decade of
cinema when he was writing, cinema was not yet cinema, or rather,
it concealed its essence that would only emerge with the develop-
ment of montage and the mobile camera. This idea of a primi-
tive cinema that precedes the discovery of editing is by no means
unfamiliar—indeed, it can be found in most traditional histories of
cinema—but for Deleuze it has a specific meaning that he derives
from Bergson. According to Deleuze, movement in the earliest

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False Movements 263

films does not inhere in the image as such. The origins of cinema
disguised its true novelty by aligning the screen with a view. As he
puts it, “We can therefore define a primitive state of the cinema
where the image is in movement rather than being a movement-
image.”9 What we get instead is only false movement, a form of cin-
ema that is neither science nor art, and that conceals its potential
because it mimics “natural perception.”10

II

What are the larger implications for Deleuze’s project as a whole of

excluding “primitive cinema” from his conception of cinema qua
cinema? I’ll provide three preliminary answers to this question and
in each case will pose a new corresponding question or questions.
First, Deleuze’s conception of cinema relegates not only cer-
tain theoretical ways of thinking about cinema to the dustbin but
also certain forms of cinema, or rather moving images that are
often mistaken for cinema. In other words, there is cinema that
is not real cinema, moving images that are not movement-images.
Cinema that is not cinema or not yet cinema is first of all the mode
of filmmaking now commonly referred to as “the cinema of attrac-
tions” for its emphasis on the pure act of viewing or display, but
as has been argued by Tom Gunning and others, attractions do
not disappear with what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor schema
but are merely relegated to the margins.11 We may ask, what else
is excluded in Deleuze’s conception of cinema? Once cinema
becomes cinema, in what ways does Deleuze account for the per-
sisting forms of so-called primitive cinema? I’ll return to this ques-
tion at the end of the essay.
Second, cinema must realize its essence not once but twice.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze writes that “the evolution of the cinema, the
conquest of its own essence or novelty, was to take place through
montage, the mobile camera and the emancipation of the view
point.”12 In Cinema 2, Deleuze explains that the direct time-image
found in postwar cinema, an image of time no longer subordinated
to movement, could only be realized “in the course of [cinema’s]
evolution thanks to a crisis in the movement-image. . . . [I]t is never
at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its
essence; what it was from the outset it can reveal only after detour
in its evolution.”13 In each stage the seeds are already there for
the next stage, and the evolution is also a detour, an aberration
that may be as much a return to something left undeveloped in a
more primitive state as it is something truly new. This is the next

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264 Nico Baumbach

question I’ll return to: How do we account for the way the time-
image seems in some respects like a return to primitive cinema and
its false movements?
Third, like the time-image, the movement-image is not a given
of cinema, but it is created. Deleuze is often used as a battering
ram against a theoretical tradition that protested too much—
that sought illusion where there was pleasure, lack where there
was desire, passivity where there was activity, and so on. Cinema,
according to Deleuze, “is always as perfect as it can be.”14 But we
should not mistake this for a democratic approach. Deleuze is
not theorizing about cinema in general, or if he is, then cinema
in general is not all cinema or everything that goes by the name
“cinema,” as it may seem from the first chapters of Cinema 1. Cin-
ema, if we understand it as any moving images whatsoever, does not
give us movement-images any more than it gives us time-images.
No sooner has Deleuze claimed that cinema immediately gives us a
movement-image than he goes on to explain that, on the contrary,
movement-images need to be created. They are not the immediate
given of the effect of the apparatus, hence Bergson’s mistake.
Moving images are, in other words, necessary but not sufficient
for a movement-image. For a movement-image, one not only needs
an image in movement, but that image in movement must be a
mobile slice of a perpetually changing entity, an open whole that
only becomes meaningful through the relations between images
constructed by montage. A movement-image must perform an
operation; it must extract movement from things. Movement is
“decomposed and recomposed” to produce singular movements
that are nonetheless immanent to movement in general, not tran-
scendent poses or forms.15
Movement-images, it would seem, are both immediately given
and created. And cinema is both cinema in general and cinema
restricted to singular instances where cinema touches thought.
This leads to my third question: How do we understand this seem-
ing paradox?

III

I’ll approach the question of how we understand the paradox of

Deleuze’s argument by way of contemporary debates about the
digital. The ubiquity of Deleuze as a reference in film studies today
is often coupled with the gamble that his work contains the key to
our current moment. Some have taken Deleuze to be particularly
applicable to the digital image because his selective appropriation

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False Movements 265

of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics leaves out any question of the

inscription of the profilmic or, in Peircean terms, any of the signs
that refer to the relation to the object. Therefore, Deleuze appears
unconcerned with indexicality or, more specifically, moving images
as indexes for profilmic events, which has been for many a default
candidate for what is being lost as images dissolve into the immate-
riality of information.
But it may not be so simple. If the movement-image for Deleuze
is grounded in any-instant-whatever, it is less clear how a cinema
increasingly defined by postproduction and the logic of infor-
matics would be a continuation of Deleuze’s schema, a schema
that requires cinema to consist of blocks of movement and time.
Indeed, Deleuze himself feared as much, hinting at the dangers of
an image in the age of control that became restricted to “profes-
sional training of the eye.”16
D. N. Rodowick is one contemporary commentator on the
future of cinema who has echoed this concern that the digital
image may be indifferent to the central categories of Deleuze’s
cine-cosmology, movement and time. It is telling to turn to how
this argument in Rodowick plays out. The very thing that Deleuze
claimed Bergson mistakenly focused on, the mechanism of the
cinematographic apparatus, is what is seen by Rodowick today as
guaranteeing duration or involvement in time. For Rodowick, in
The Virtual Life of Film, duration in the image is attributable to the
specific mechanisms of twentieth-century cinema, film consisting
of a succession of photograms.17 In a remarkable historical irony,
it would seem that while Bergson may have been wrong in 1907
that cinema was the very model for reconstructing time from the
abstract accumulation of discrete units, he would have been right
about what digital cinema would do a century later.
This becomes clear when Rodowick chooses Jean Eustache’s
Numero Zero (1971) as a film that involves him in duration, unlike
Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). Sokurov’s film (or “film”),
ostensibly consisting of a single ninety-six-minute sequence shot, is
presumably a film without editing. Since, however, it is shot on a
digital camera and uses digital compositing, it is, for Rodowick, a
digital object and not cinema. The data image, if we can call it that,
is ontologically indifferent to both movement-images and time-
images. For this new kind of image associated with digital cinema,
cinematographic perception persists as only a secondary effect or
application, one among many, and is no longer ontologically deter-
minant. Eustache’s film of his grandmother telling the story of her
life is, on the other hand, an example of cinematic time because
of the way that it anchors our perception in the apparatus itself

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266 Nico Baumbach

through the fixed image and through the drive to capture real time.
In 1971 Eustache shot the majority of the film in “real time” with two
16mm cameras so that he could change the magazine of one while
the other was rolling; the editing was determined by the length of
each magazine, with the length of the film being determined by
the amount of magazines he had. Eustache himself appealed to
the Lumière films to explain Numero Zero and explicitly rejected the
significance of both camera movement and editing. As he put it, “if
you shoot, you don’t need to make a movie, it makes itself. As soon
as the camera is rolling, movies make themselves on their own. . . . I
deny, in cinema, everything that might come from art. What I want
is for cinema to be a pure and simple recording of reality, without
any subjectivity intervening or getting mixed up in it.”18
Of course, we could argue that Eustache exaggerates the
absence of auteur function in his work and that in fact Numero Zero’s
fixed camera and complex temporality established by the past con-
veyed in his grandmother’s narration corresponds to an extreme
version of the break in sensory-motor schema described by Deleuze
as generating the time-image. The return to zero in Eustache might
be identified by Deleuze as part of the new image pedagogy found
in Godard and others. And it could be seen as well in terms of
the “powers of the false” of the direct cinema filmmakers whom
Deleuze admires, such as Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault.19
But the link between Eustache’s idea of cinema as primitive
cinema and Deleuze’s conception of the time-image is no accident.
Indeed, the time-image corresponds at another level to a number
of features characteristic of the primitive image that would be sub-
sumed by the movement-image. The time-image emerges from a
crisis in the movement-image that gives way to what Deleuze calls
false movements. He refers to primitive cinema as false movement
with an opposite connotation—not indirect movement that gives
way to the time-image but merely a movement that is not move-
ment at all because it is only represented, not contained within the
image itself.
It would, of course, be misleading to assimilate the false move-
ments of the time-image with the false movements in early cin-
ema. The aberrant movements of postwar cinema come after the
movement-image—they are a response to a crisis in the movement-
image that gave way to new mutations. The direct image of time
cannot be confused with exhibitionist tableaus before montage
and before the sensory-motor schema had been developed. But
nor is the coincidence of this term—“false movement”—in its two
uses accidental. The time-image of Cinema 2, cinema’s second real-
ization of its essence, is often sought by Deleuze in fixed frames

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False Movements 267

and long takes, whether in Ozu’s still lives or Akerman’s cinema of

gesture. And, if the fixed camera of primitive cinema did not yet
produce movement-images, it was, as we said, because its images
couldn’t alter the open whole made possible by montage. But this
open whole is no longer a constituent of the time-image. Could it
be that “primitive” moving images were never fully subsumed by
the movement-images of classical cinema and returned to hollow it
out and produce the time-image? If so, it would mean that there is
no pure movement-image or pure time-image but always a relation
constructed through operations between image, time, and move-
ment, a relation that refers us back to the apparatus. Why? Because
we have left out another factor.
Numero Zero may in may ways map on to the terminology that
Deleuze uses to describe the time-image, but what would be missing
from this reading is the significance of the presence of the camera
as a way of marking the fact of recording, a refusal in other words
to extract movement from things as Deleuze says all good cinema
must do, but rather to index the copresence of the machine and
the body.

IV

We need to look more closely at what counts as cinema for Deleuze

and what in turn is excluded. For Deleuze, this indexing of pres-
ence betrays the novelty of the cinematic image as an immanent
plane of potentiation or becoming. In his schema, all cinema is
predicated on the any-instant-whatever and yet to be worthy of the
name “cinema” must be properly legible as the work of an auteur
or a will to art. And the signs that testify to that will to art must be
identifiable as consisting of blocks of movement and time.
The exclusion of primitive cinema, then, may be a symptom of
a whole host of occlusions in Deleuze’s two volumes. The first may
be what we find in Eustache, a cinema of the apparatus that Comolli
has called film’s “documentary condition.”20 Raymond Bellour pro-
posed another one. He has suggested that “There is one category
of time not considered by Gilles Deleuze in his dynamic taxonomy
of images: the interruption of movement.”21 A number of thinkers
in the last fifteen years including Mary Ann Doane, Laura Mulvey,
and Garrett Stewart have taken up this question of the photogram
as a repressed component of cinema in a way not easily assimila-
ble with Deleuze’s Bergsonian system.22 Deleuze quotes Hamlet at
the beginning of Cinema 2: “Time is out of joint.” But he does not
quote Hotspur: “Time must have a stop.”

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268 Nico Baumbach

The interruption of movement is only one aspect of the poten-

tial forms of time axis manipulation that become increasingly cen-
tral to regimes of images in contemporary cinema, which seem
hard to think within the terms of Deleuze’s natural history. The
concept of the movement-image would seem to proscribe think-
ing film as remediated photography, but Deleuze also leaves no
clear opening for thinking cinema as remediating cinema itself.
He was well aware of the problems that informatics and the elec-
tronic image pose for the future of cinema, as can be seen from his
concluding chapter in Cinema 2. But the many suggestive passages
defer to the future what was there from the very beginning.
Bellour, while wondering about the interruption of movement
and the photograph, finds the absence of Chris Marker’s La Jettée
(1962) from Deleuze’s Cinema books symptomatic. Indeed, Marker
appears nowhere at all in Deleuze—an absence that may seem
especially peculiar not only because Deleuze was no doubt familiar
with his work but also because what filmmaker, except perhaps for
Alain Resnais, seems more concerned with giving time to us in the
form of a perception? But this absence seems less strange when we
consider not only the photographs that compose La Jettée but also
the centrality in so many other films by Marker of images that he
did not shoot himself and the interrogation of and de- and recom-
position of images from other films or media. They are there too in
certain Jean-Luc Godard films and in the work of other filmmakers
that Deleuze discusses but never addressed as such. Similarly, for
Deleuze, there is no Ester Shub, no Rose Hobart, no Guy Debord.
Even more important for Marker than the interruption of time is
its repetition—what he has called “a free replay.”23
By taking the images of cinema as blocks of movement and
time that are singular, new signs consisting of images in themselves
that do not refer back to an apparatus that produced them and are
not addressed to anyone, Deleuze provides no way of accounting
for the repetition of the same image in a different context except
as what he would call a “bad repetition.”24

I’ll conclude by saying that, of course, there is no way to prove or

disprove Deleuze on primitive cinema. If we make the case that
there are examples in early cinema in which we can grasp the move-
ment-image and qualitative change, then this is merely evidence of
the latent potential of the movement-image that will become real-
ized with the birth of the mobile camera and montage. If, on the

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False Movements 269

other hand, we claim that there is no way to verify the distinction

between these two types of images—those in which what is filmed is
in movement and those in which the image itself is in movement—
we could be accused of once again immobilizing the image.
The question is not whether Deleuze is right or wrong but
rather what he allows us to think. None of this is intended as criti-
cism. There is no reason to necessarily see the points I’m raising
as coming from a blindness or failure on Deleuze’s part. Deleuze
too is always as perfect as he can be. But as Deleuze’s Cinema books
become increasingly influential to ideas of and debates about what
cinema was and is becoming, we need to be attentive to not only
what he allows us to think but also what he doesn’t—and what, if
anything, we wish to salvage from what has been tossed away as a
false problem or rejected as bad cinema. The cinema, Deleuze tells
us, is not so much a form of representation as it is the world itself.
If we are going to continue to believe in it, we may need to think in
a different way of the anonymous images he has left behind.

Notes
1.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 2.
2.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 27.
3.
See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus” [1970], translated by Alan Williams, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited
by Philip Rosen, 281–98 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), originally
published as “Cinéma: Effets idéologiques produits par l’appreil de base,” Cinéthique
7–8 (1970); Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema” [1975], translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand
Augst, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 299–318, originally published as “Le dispositif:
Approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications 23 (1975);
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” translated
by Susan Bennett, in Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/Politics, 2–11 (London: SEFT,
1977), originally published as “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du cinéma 216
(October–November 1969).
4.
Deleuze’s most explicit critique of representational thinking is found in Differ-
ence and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994).
5.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 57.
6.
See, for example, ibid., 59: “The material universe, the plane of immanence,
is the machine assemblage of movement-images.”
7.
Ibid., xiv.

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270 Nico Baumbach

8.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Henry Holt, 1954), 322.
9.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 24.
10.
Ibid., 3.
11.
See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70.
12.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 3.
13.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 43.
14.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, x.
15.
Ibid., 20.
16.
Deleuze, “Letter to Serge Daney,” in Negotiations (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 72.
17.
D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 52.
18.
“Interview with Jean Eustache,” translated by Ted Fendt, MUBI, September
24, 2012, http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/interview-with-jean-eustache (originally
published in French in La Revue du Cinéma, no. 250 [May 1971]).
19.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150–52.
20.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrink-
ers,” translated by Annette Michelson, October 90 (Fall 1999): 36.
21.
Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images, translated by Lionel Bovier (Zurich:
JRP Ringier, 2013), 130.
22.
See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Laura Mulvey, Death
24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Garrett
Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
23.
Chris Marker, “A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo),” in Projections 4½: Filmmakers
on Filmmaking, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 123–30 (London:
Faber and Faber, 1995).
24.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 132.

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