Animation and Alienation Bergson’s Critique of the Cinématographe and the Paradox of Mechanical Motion

Cinematic animation could be defined as the technological production of images in motion. Thus all cinema can be approached as animation.¹ Over time, the novelty of mechanical motion, so central to film’s first reception, declined to the point where “animation” became a specialized genre within cinema, referring to films that endowed the apparently inanimate (drawings or objects) with motion. Today the novelty of new media has once more foregrounded technological motion, as the “moving image” asserts its priority over the more limited entity “film.” But does film theory offer an account of cinematic movement that parallels its traditional topics, such as montage or the ontology of the photographic image? The technical production of motion may form the Freudian repressed subject of film theory.

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “movement-image” would seem to promise a theory of cinematic motion.² However, his concept, carefully examined, deliberately devalues the mechanical production of motion that I am calling animation. It would be a great mistake to equate Deleuze’s movement-image with the moving image. The moving image is first of all a technical concept. It depends on the interrelation of frames or photograms, the movement of the projector and the viewer. This is not at all what Deleuze means by the movement-image, which cannot be explained as a technical or perceptual process and relates rather to larger cinematic figures.

Rather than to the appearance of motion, Deleuze relates the movement-image to the shot: the traditional unit of film theory and practice. Through the movement-image, the shot mediates between its roles as a closed set of elements within a frame and its transformations related to a Whole, a process of change that Deleuze derives from Bergson’s sense of time as duration. The movement-image is not simply a process of abstract movement in space that could be graphed geometrically as a trajectory along a series of points but rather is a fundamental alteration (Bergson’s classic example is sugar being dissolved in water), a creation of something new, which Deleuze calls the Open. More than cinema’s production of movement, the movement-image involves either a sequence of shots, that is, a montage sequence, or a mobile shot, that is, an instance of camera movement.³ Thus, however useful Deleuze’s concept may be to understanding cinema as a Whole, he actually differentiates the movement-image radically from the production of motion I am calling animation. In effect, Deleuze excludes animation from his philosophy of film, based on a critique of mechanical motion that he inherits from Henri Bergson.

Deleuze’s movement-image not only limits the importance of animation, it also creates historical limits to his concept of cinema. His exclusion of the cinematic movement “of people and things,” which constituted the fascination of the first filmmakers and their audiences, explains Deleuze’s lack of interest in early cinema, which he describes as “primitive.” “We can therefore define a primitive state of the cinema where the image is in movement rather than being a movement-image.”⁴ The cinema Deleuze discusses begins only after this primitive state, both historically and theoretically. The movement-image did not emerge with the invention of cinema at the turn of the century but rather evolved during film’s second decade as a consequence of its encounter with narrative. A number of commentators, from Dana Polan in an early review to David Rodowick and, most recently, Eivind Røssaak, have noted Deleuze’s lack of attention to early cinema.⁵ Although I agree that this is a serious lack for someone dealing with film studies, I do not find it inconsistent for a thinker whose interest remains very much focused on the philosophical dimensions of narrative and commercial cinema (and it is important that we do not read Deleuze as if he were either a film historian, something he explicitly denies, or even, broadly speaking, a film theorist). Thus his exclusion of early cinema is not due simply to oversight or ignorance but follows logically from Deleuze’s attitude toward the phenomenon of the mechanically produced motion of animation.

However original Deleuze’s theory may be in some respects, it remains faithful to the traditional view that cinema gained its unique qualities only with the development of editing. I believe a renewed attention to animation in both meanings of its term, as the production of cinematic motion and as the bringing of the inanimate to life, opens more radical perspectives on the theory of cinema, especially in an era of new moving image media. Close attention to the movement animation introduces to the domain of the image opens a different view of the possibilities and purposes of cinema broadly conceived.

Let me amplify what I mean by animation. Deleuze does not truly deal with this sort of movement, not only because of his relative silence on what we call animated cinema (both commercial cartoons and the tradition of avant-garde animation from Len Lye through to Jodie Mack or Janie Geiser) but also because of his bracketing off of the cinematic movement of people and things that defines the nature of the moving image. Referring indifferently to photographic or drawn cinema, animation in this context refers to the creation of the perception of motion through technological means. Let me stress the two key terms: technological and perception. This may sound obvious and even tautological, but I would point out the key term here, technological, as something generally taken for granted, indeed rendered invisible, in realist accounts of the moving image. The technological aspect can be deceptively simple (as in the flip book) or the product of complex technical elaboration (as in computer-generated imagery). It refers to a control of the presentation of images at specific thresholds of speed so as to affect their visual perception. I say producing the perception of motion, rather than the illusion of motion, which carries a tone of denigration and a distrust of perception. In animation the human sensorium is transformed (activated) by its encounter with a mechanical device though a controlled process of perception. The first development of animation devices primarily occurred during the nineteenth century and participated in a new era in which perception became deliberately shaped by technology. Henri Bergson critiqued such mechanical production of movement in his discussion of the cinematographic method in his 1907 work Creative Evolution.⁶ As ambiguous as Bergson’s response to the cinematograph was, it tackled the contradictions that cinematic motion introduced, a complexity that is obscured when some film theorists describe the “illusion of motion” as simply a realistic effect.

The reproduction of motion may have constituted the origins of cinema, but for many theorists (including, I claim, Deleuze), it was an origin to be surpassed and forgotten. For instance, Rudolph Arnheim’s approach to film as art claimed that cinema’s aesthetic value lay in overcoming its initial role of automatically reproducing the motions of life.⁷ From the viewpoint of a theory of animation, the assumption that the creation of motion merely offers a simple process of reproduction constitutes a fundamental aporia. Besides disparaging cinematic motion as a simple illusion, this view stresses its lack of aesthetic value by seeing it as automatic or mechanical reproduction.

Henri Bergson’s critique of the production of motion by mechanical means, however, offers more than this reductive dismissal. For Bergson the “cinematographic method” offered not something new but rather repeated an ancient intellectual error. Bergson’s philosophy strove to overthrow this mode of thought, introducing a new modern philosophy based in our experience of motion. Zeno’s paradox exemplifies the ancient prejudice. Zeno claimed that Achilles could never overtake a tortoise that had been given a head start, because whatever progress the swifter Achilles would make, the lumbering tortoise would surpass by some increment. Zeno’s error involves a false conception of motion that identifies it with the space it traverses. Whereas space can be divided infinitely, motion, as a continuous process, cannot. The error claims that all motion can be reduced to immobile sections, as if motion consisted of a simple process of addition.

As an illustration of this error, by which motion is misconceived and its essential role as transformation is lost sight of, Bergson also drew on the relatively recent (in 1907) technology of cinema. Technically speaking, one cinematic apparatus (the camera) produces a strip of static images, immobile sections, which, when placed in another apparatus (the projector), is propelled by an exterior mechanical motion and produces apparent motion. Bergson declares this motion false.

Ironically, this philosopher of motion, who inspired modern artists (futurists and cubists especially) with an ambition to transform the image through a new consideration of motion, seemed to condemn the new art of motion. This has produced an embarrassment for film theorists and philosophers alike. Deleuze pronounced Bergson’s view of cinema “rather overhasty” and attributed it to the early stage of cinema’s development during which Bergson was writing.⁸ Deleuze’s description of “primitive” cinema, quoted earlier, immediately adds, “It was at this primitive state that the Bergsonian critique was directed.”⁹ Presumably Deleuze believes an awareness of the later stages of cinema would have helped Bergson realize the affinity the cinematic medium held with the movement-image, a term Deleuze took from Bergson’s Matter and Memory.

I previously offered a slightly different attempt to explain Bergson’s devaluation of cinematic motion.¹⁰ First, I speculated that Bergson might have confused chronophotography, Marey and Muybridge’s analytical photographic series of still instantaneous images, with Lumière’s cinématographe, which produced a synthesis of motion in a projected moving image. Passages in Bergson may indicate that he did not fully distinguish these processes. Second, I claimed that Bergson was referring to the cinematic apparatus and its components, its mechanical operation, and not its final effect: filmstrip, camera, and projector, rather than the moving image as seen on the screen.

These points have some validity. Bergson’s involvement with cinema in later years, though never intense, hardly indicates a pronounced antipathy for the new medium. Bergson offered inspiration to later filmmakers and was interested in cinematic projects such as Albert Kahn’s Archive of the Planet (detailed in Paula Amad’s excellent book, which shows how Kahn relied on Bergson for advice and screened films for him).¹¹ And in a later interview, Bergson indicates his interest in cinema, especially the time-lapse films that so fascinated French cinéastes.¹² The mechanism of cinema and its frozen frames of movement had supplied Bergson with a vivid analogy that illustrated how movement could be misconceived as a transition along a series of static points, an accumulation of static frames rather than a continuous sweep of consciousness. He condemned a view of motion that cinema could represent rather than the new medium itself.

However, I now feel that there is more to be excavated in Bergson’s and Deleuze’s common devaluation of primitive cinema and the production of motion than a misunderstanding or lack of familiarity. Bergson’s description of the artificial motion supplied by the cinematic apparatus makes it clear that the cinematic image does bear the brunt of his critique. “In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus.”¹³ Here lay the core of Bergson’s concern about the cinema: an artificial mechanical motion achieved through technology. Furthermore, this was not merely a premature impression. Although Creative Evolution remains the source that Deleuze and others cite most often for Bergson’s account of the cinema, his discussion is repeated with little modification in the introduction to his 1934 book La pensée et le mouvant (translated as The Creative Mind ), which Bergson wrote especially for this later publication. There he continues to contrast true motion with the succession of images that make up the cinematographic illusion.¹⁴

Thus Bergson’s critique of the cinema is not merely a denial of the ability of still images to produce motion but a condemnation of cinema’s motive force as inherently mechanical. Central to this critique is Bergson’s deep suspicion of the machine, which also forms the basis of his analysis of laughter in his famous essay from 1911.¹⁵ Laughter, Bergson claims, expresses a social derision of what he calls mechanical in-elasticity: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.”¹⁶ According to Bergson, the mechanical is antithetical to life, to the sense of vitality on which his understanding of movement rests. If Bergson had seen the films of Chaplin and other silent comedians, one could imagine him finding a perfect match between the mechanical nature of their physical miming and the film medium in which they played. Cinema provides the perfect medium for Bergsonian comedy, exposing an inelastic mechanical rigidity. Animated cartoons, especially early examples such as those of Emile Cohl or Otto Messmer, would also seem to demonstrate Bergson’s understanding.

The deep suspicion Bergson and Deleuze share of the production of motion by the cinema relies on the Bergsonian conception of change that Deleuze understands as a relation to the Whole conceived of as the Open. The mechanical as understood by Bergson cannot achieve this fundamental effect of duration and movement, which he describes as “unceasing creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty.”¹⁷ Thus for Bergson the limit of the cinematographic illusion lies in its fixed and rigid nature. The problem comes not simply from its succession of still images but from the fact that its trajectory of movement remains fixed and predetermined and therefore unopen. Cinematic images may move, but it is a false movement, because it offers no real possibility of change. Let me illustrate this with a story told about a man who went to see a certain Greta Garbo film more than a hundred times. When asked about the nature of his obsession, he explained that he returned because, in one scene, Garbo undresses in front of a window, and right at the crucial moment, a train rushes by, obscuring the desired body from the viewer. “I figure,” the man explained, “that one time that train just has to be late.”

Like all good fables, this story allows more than one reading. On one hand, it exposes the cinema’s inability to actually achieve novelty, an error Bergson illustrated not only by the cinematograph but also by the unfurling panorama embodying the belief that “the future is there, rolled up, already painted on the canvas.”¹⁸ Does this poor guy’s repetition compulsion expose a pernicious illusion, or does his hopeful return reveal something unnoticed by Bergson about the true fascination cinema holds, the promise of animation, and the openness of movement itself? Can the synchronization of the image of desire and the mechanical rationality of train schedules and cinematic succession ever align (or misalign)? Deleuze argued that a Bergsonian cinema would be possible if we were to go beyond the primitive mechanical aspect of animation and follow the movement-image and time-image toward a Whole.

However profound I find Bergson’s suspicion of cinematic motion, it ultimately expresses a fear of the machine that poses a constricting inheritance for film theory, which I do not believe Deleuze, with his scorn for primitive cinema, truly overcomes. Just as Bergson misses the delight of laughter that ambivalently transforms its social derision into a jovial embrace of the world and its absurdities, I believe he mistakes the possibilities of an evolving human relation to the machine. Like silent comedy, like the plasticity (rather than the rigidity) of animated cartoons (celebrated by Sergei Eisenstein in his term plasmatic),¹⁹ the very technical process of cinematic motion, the root of animation, conveys the possibility of enlivening—indeed, animating—the mechanical, of blurring the dichotomy between animate and inanimate, of recognizing human responsibility to the machine, and vice versa.

Despite their insight, I find that both Deleuze and Bergson close off the resources of the very process of animation, its miming of the openness of the élan vital (the vital spirit that Bergson named) through the device of the machine. Bergson correctly points out that film images have been inscribed in advance. Yet they offer, in the animation of their images, the promise of an unforeseen future. The effect of the cinema lies not only in the perception of motion but also in the sense of that motion, unfolding in a present that moves toward a future not yet seen. Despite the undeniable historicity of the filmed image, we experience its animation in the present tense—how much more so in the genres of film in which the act of animation is foregrounded, in which an impossible coming-to-life is given to drawings, objects, or even still photographs?

Animation depends not simply on the transformation of still images into motion—which Bergson declared impossible (one cannot derive motion from immobilities)—but rather on a transformation of perception, a melding of the human sensorium and the machine. We cannot will or unwill this perception. Perceptual psychologists still strive to explain it. Its enacting constitutes to my mind an upsurge of Bergson’s “radically new and foreseeable,” using the machine to undo the fixity of our perception.

Rather than viewing the machine as the process of endless repetition of the same, the process of animation invites us to follow the lead of thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon to see technology as a means of transforming our environment, not instrumentally, but in Bergson’s sense, creatively. Bergson expresses the alienation between man and machine. Simondon, on the contrary, claims, as Muriel Combes puts it, that “reducing alienation means showing that technical objects are not the Other of the human, but themselves contain something of the human.”²⁰ Instead of laughing with derision at the mechanical rigidity encrusted on a living being, we may delight in recognizing, with what Donald Crafton has appropriately described as “infectious laughter,” the animation that cinematic movement triggers through the participation of human perception and technology.²¹