Recon-Figuration: Revisiting Modernity and Reality in Deleuze's Taxonomy of Cinema

It is said that, "everyone knows, primitive people fear that the camera will rob them of some part of their being." ¹ Such kind of certainty about "primitive people" is explained and exemplified by (means of) Honoré de Balzac and his realism:

[E]very body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films. Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from an apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object--each Daguerreian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the layers of the body on which it focused. ²

Balzac's explanation, according to Nadar's memoir published in 1900, is quoted by Susan Sontag in describing "primitive people ['s] fear" concerning the camera's robbing of their being. As a representative nineteenth century realist novelist, Balzac's "double-quoted" thesis, in fact, depicts a "primitive fear" rather than "primitive people['s] fear." In the age of technology, representation is the "primitive" crisis that fashions the definition of "primitive people." Conceiving the body as "a series of ghostly images," Balzac takes these images as "something material" that originate creativity. Photography, as the operation that "detach[es] and use[s]" up these layers one by one, crystallises the epitomes sustaining the Balzacian representation of reality. Balzac, like the so-called "primitive people," is in fear of Daguerreotypes, as they materialize "what is most original in his procedure as a novelist." ³ Balzac's re-presented version of fear reveals a realist assumption in which life and signs can be conjoined in a reflective chain of appearances. And cinema is a modern medium that exemplifies the possibility of Zeno's paradox as a form of momentary appearances in motion--how the sum of static moments can equal movements.

In Cinema 1, Deleuze draws upon Epstein's concept of the shot as "a mobile section, that is, a temporal perspective or a modulation" ⁴ and Bazin's concept of moulding to articulate the difference between photography and cinema.

The difference between the cinematographic image and the photographic image follows from this. Photography is a kind of 'moulding': the mould organises the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant (immobile section). However modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached, and constantly modifies the mould, constitutes a variable, continuous, temporal mould. This is the movement-image that Bazin contrasts from this point of view with the photo: 'The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast. [But] the cinema realises the paradox of moulding itself on the time of object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.' ⁵

The passage manifests two problematics of seeing: one is the power of moulding within the photographic frame/space, the frozen plane; the other is the paradox of moulding with regard to time as the ambivalent object that disrupts and fashions existent mouldings. Cinema is exactly the medium that performs the paradox of moulding via its techno-based ability to "bringing-forth" and "leaving-out" in connection with "the imprint of its duration." These paradoxical realms are also potentialities that simultaneously authenticate and problematise mimesis.

It is exactly mimesis, as a problematic, that can potentially initiate the reconfig- uration of the concepts of reality and modernity as moulding and out-moulding respectively in relationship to a specific medium. In Deleuze's cinema project, cinema indicates various breaks that illuminate heterogeneous planes of reality and modernity. The classical and the modern, the sensory-motor schema and the optical and sound situations, the time-image and the movement-image, etc., are all taxonomies that specify different frames of reality...