A SHORT HISTORY OF CINEMA

1924. The classic cinema has perfected its geometry of forms, its logic of spatiotemporal exposition, and its "laws" for the linking of actions through montage. In Sherlock, Jr., Buster Keaton plays a young projectionist who divides from himself in lap dissolve, entering the rectangle of the screen as the space of his own dream. The action following is exemplary of the logic of (paradoxical) sense informing the classical Hollywood cinema in its silent phase. In this series of shots, Keaton's moving figure provides a stable foreground against a shifting background of increasingly unlikely and dangerous locations: a garden, a busy street, a cliff side, a jungle with lions, train tracks in a desert. When Keaton finds himself on a rock by the ocean, he dives, only to land headfirst in a snowbank. Keaton's movements from one shot to the next link incommensurable spaces through what modern mathematics terms a "rational" division. The interval dividing any two spatial sections serves simultaneously as the end of the first and the beginning of the second. In Keaton's film, every division, no matter how unlikely and nonsensical, is mastered by this figure of rationality where the identification of movement with action assures the continuous unfolding of adjacent spaces. The consequence of this identification is the subordination of time to movement. Time is measured only dynamically, as a process of action and reaction rebounding across contiguous spaces through match-cutting.

This geometry of action and movement expands by levels as well as by linear development. The moving whole of the film is assured by the continuous linking of one shot to the next, as well as by the embedding of photograms into the shot, shots into sequences, sequences into parts, and parts into the moving whole of the film as one great clockwork mechanism. The dynamics of the classical film function like a Newtonian universe where laws of motion function independently of time. This subordination of time to movement has philosophical consequences.

1962. The modern European cinema, as well as the New American cinema, has displaced the Newtonian conception of space that characterizes the classical period. Chris Marker's La jetée depicts a not-so-distant future where a prisoner of war is subjected to a series of painful experiments that enable him to "travel" in time. Whether this passage is actual and physical, or mental and spiritual, is ambiguous. Movement, drained from the image and divorced from the representation of action, has relinquished its role as the measure of time. In La jetée, the image of time is no longer reduced to the thread of chronology where present, past, and future are aligned on a continuum. The painful binding of the subject–physically stilled no less than movement is frozen in the image–liberates him briefly in time, just as the imaging of time is released from its subordination to movements linked with physical actions. Once chronology is pulverized, time is fragmented like so many facets of a shattered crystal. The chronological continuum is flayed, shaving past, present, and future into distinct series, discontinuous and incommensurable. The 'narrative sections of the film are disconnected spaces, divided into blocks of time linked in a probabilistic manner: the park, the museum, the quay at Orly. The spectator's apprehension of what comes next is equivalent to a dice throw. Time no longer derives from movement; "aberrant" or eccentric movement derives from time.

With both action and movement absented from the image, there is now only linking through "irrational" divisions. According to the mathematical definition, the interval dividing segmentations of space is now autonomous and irreducible; it no longer forms a part of any segment as the ending of one and the beginning of another. Image and soundtrack are also relatively autonomous. While referring to each other, they nonetheless resist being reconciled into an organic whole. As a result, there is no totalization of space in an organic image of the whole and no subordination of time to movement. Inside and outside, mind and body, mental and physical, imaginary and real are no longer decidable qualities. This is another theory of mind and another logic of sense, defined by a decisive break with the earlier model.

My two examples illustrate how Gilles Deleuze conceives the history of cinematic signs in his volumes, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. Deleuze himself would demur from characterizing his books as historical works. Still, I would argue that they are informed by a historical idea adapted from the German art historian Heinrich Wöfflin. In his Principles of Art History, Wöfflin argues for classifications of style based on historical modes of "imaginative beholding" (vi). The task of the history of aesthetic forms is to understand the specific set of formal possibilities–modes of envisioning and representing, of seeing and saying–historically available to different cultures in different times.

Equally important for Deleuze is the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in the history and philosophy of science. In their book, Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers characterize the evolution of science and philosophy as one of "open" systems that incessantly exchange information with their cultural environment and never cease altering that culture as they themselves change. Strategies of observation, representation, and conceptualization–of modeling nature–are no less historically based than Wöfflin's modes of imaginative beholding. These two references are important. For Deleuze's larger objective is not to produce another theory of film, but to understand how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific modes of understanding converge in producing cultural strategies for imagining and imaging the world.

Reduced to its simplest form, the question informing Deleuze's cinema books is this: How does a sustained meditation on film and film theory illuminate the relation between image and thought? With respect to our recent history, Deleuze argues, the development of cinema provides a privileged site for comprehending a decisive shift in strategies of signification, understanding, and belief that is no less true for aesthetic thinking than it is for philosophical and scientific thinking. This shift concerns the question of time. For example, Prigogine and Stengers argue that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the study of thermodynamic systems, and then probability physics, reintroduces time to science's image of the physical world. This is an image of irreversible Becoming in contrast with the static and eternal image of Being depicted by Newton's universal laws of motion. At about the same time, Henri Bergson produces his Image of thought as internal movement and of Memory as complex duration. Among aesthetic practices, Deleuze argues, cinema...