Bergson's Critique of Early Film and Mechanized Motion

ANIMATION AND ALIENATION: Bergson's Critique of the Cinématographe and the Paradox
of Mechanical Motion
Author(s): Tom Gunning
Source: The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists,
Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 1-9
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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animation and
aliEnation
TOM GUNNING
Bergson’s Critique of the

Cinématographe and the
Paradox of Mechanical Motion
gunning 2
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 understand-
ing 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 move-
ment “of people and things,” which constituted the fascination of the first filmmakers
3 animation and alienation
and their audiences, explains Deleuze’s lack of interest in early cinema, which he de-
scribes 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 cen-
tury 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 im-
age. 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 mov-
ing 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
gunning 4
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 Berg-
son’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 es-
sential 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 con-
sideration 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 devel-
opment 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 devalu-
ation 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 me-
dium. 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 excel-
lent 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 con-
demned 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 De-
leuze’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
gunning 6
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 inher-
ently 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 ex-
plained 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 re-
sources 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 cor-
rectly 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 foreground-
ed, 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 mo-
tion—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
gunning 8
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
Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor

in the Department of Art History, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies,
and the College at the University of Chicago. He has approximately one hundred
publications, including The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Moder-
nity (2000).
Notes
1. This claim has often been made; for a recent discussion, see my essay “Ani-
mating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photogra-
phy,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman, 37–53 (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2014).
2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986).
3. Ibid., 22.
4. Ibid., 24.
5. Dana Polan, “Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement,” review of Cinéma 1: L’Image-
Mouvement, by Gilles Deleuze, Film Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1984): 50–52; D. N.
Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1997), 214n6; Eivind Røssaak, “Figures of Sensation: Between Still and
Moving Images,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven,
321–36 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
6. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Lanham, Md.: University Press of Ameri-
ca, 1984), esp. 272–343.
7. Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
8. Deleuze, Cinema I, xiv.
9. Ibid., 24.
10. Tom Gunning, “The Arrested Instant: Between Stillness and Motion,” in Be-
tween Still and Moving Images, ed. Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (London:
John Libbey, 2012), 23–28.
11. Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Ar-
chives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). I have ben-
efitted from discussion of this issue with Amad through the years.
12. Michel Georges-Michel, “Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema,”
Le Journal, February 20, 1914, translated and introduced by Louis-Georges
Schwartz, Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (2011): 79–82.
13. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 305.
14. Bergson, The Creative Mind (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2007), 7. I would like to
thank Michele Menzies for bringing this particularly to my attention and for her
insights into this issue.
15. Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-
bleday Anchor, 1956), esp. 61–104.
16. Ibid., 79.
17. Bergson, Creative Mind, 7.
18. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 341.
19. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull
Books, 1986).
20. Muriel Combs, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividu-
al (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 77.
21. Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-
Making in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 230–46.

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ANIMATION AND ALIENATION: Bergson's Critique of the Cinématographe and the Paradox

Bergson’s Critique of the

Cinematic animation could be defined as the technological production of images in

Ironically, this philosopher of motion, who inspired modern artists (futurists

Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor

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