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Transcendental cinema:
Deleuze, time and modernity
Christian Kerslake
In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze claims that cinema
is a repetition, in speeded-up form, of an experience that has already occurred
in the history of philosophy.1 This notion of repetition recalls the biological
notion of the ‘recapitulation’ of phylogeny in ontogeny: individual development
recapitulates, or replays in speeded-up form, the development of the
species. Haeckel noted that this recapitulation was strongly in evidence at the
embryonic stage, so that one can see the human embryo at a certain point
appearing to be on the verge of developing a tail that subsequently disappears
as the embryo develops. So, on this metaphor, cinema, an apparently new and
unprecedented phenomenon in the modern world, nevertheless only develops through
recapitulating an arduous development already undergone elsewhere. Now Deleuze’s
claim is that cinema recapitulates a movement already undergone in philosophy.
Why philosophy, and not visual art, or some other discourse, or perhaps the
history of civilization in general? Why does cinema recapitulate a historical
passage in the life of the mind?
Deleuze says that the development in philosophy that cinema recapitulates
concerns the nature of the notion of time from the Greeks to Kant. Whereas
philosophy before Kant thinks of time in relation to movement, Kant subordinates
movement to time.2 Before Kant, the world was seen as made up of changing,
moving bodies, and time referred to our way of measuring rates of change in the
physical world. The notion of time was thus subordinated to the demand for
measurement of moving bodies. For instance, in the Aristotelian world-view, time
is secondary to the general cosmic movement from potentiality to actuality. In
the Christian world-view, there is an eternal order opposed to a temporal realm,
where time is fundamentally referred to the end of the world, or apocalypse.
Deleuze also has in mind cyclical conceptions of time based on the passage of
the seasons. In all these cases, time is subordinated to an already given
movement of the physical world. Kant, on the other hand, inaugurates modern
thinking about time. Kant makes time the transcendental condition of all of our
experience, so that it is the structure of time itself, as stretched out,
projected and synthesized by a human subject, that in the first place conditions
our experience of moving bodies, and not vice versa. So time conditions
movement. As we will see, however, Deleuze has an unusual reading of Kant’s
conception of time, and his ultimate aim is to bring to light ‘a precise moment
within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by
Kant, much less by post-Kantianism’,3 the consequences of which nevertheless
reverberate within modern philosophy as well as outside it, in domains such as
the cinema. Deleuze’s contention is that we have still not fully realized the
consequences for our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood of the endless,
merciless line of time uncovered in its purity by transcendental
philosophy.
How might this relate to cinema? What is the simplest definition we can
give to cinema? We can say at least that the fundamental unit of cinema is the
moving image. Cinema is composed of images which move, or self-moving images.4
Deleuze is suggesting with his ‘recapitulation thesis’ that cinema develops in
two main phases. In a first phase, time is subordinated to movement. Cinema thus
operates with movement-images, and recapitulates traditional ideas about time.
Deleuze’s privileged example here is Eisenstein, who develops a form of montage
able to express the dialectical totality of the world. In the second phase,
cinema arrives in philosophical modernity and comes to terms with time itself,
not just with movement. Deleuze’s privileged examples here are Welles, Resnais
and Robbe-Grillet (Last Year in Marienbad is the film Deleuze constantly returns
to when expounding the dimensions of the time-image) and Godard. The development
of cinema thus recapitulates in image form the path leading up to a fundamental
moment in philosophical modernity – the realization that time is the condition
of the world, that it has no beginning and end, and we are at the mercy of it.
Cinema for Deleuze is possessed of a singular power in that not only is it a
fundamentally temporal art form, but it is always potentially a mass art form as
well, and thus is in a perfect position to crystallize a nascent human
coming-to-consciousness of the fundamental character of time in the post-Kantian
world.
We should comment on the justice of this apparently entirely
philosophy-centric view of the cinema. Is Deleuze’s claim, then, that cinema is
a kind of spatio-temporal incarnation of ideas that have their pure form in
philosophy? What would it mean to answer ‘yes’ to this question? On the plus
side, if cinema is the spatio-temporal incarnation of a set of ideas about space
and time, doesn’t that mean that cinema, rather than being parasitic upon
philosophy, assumes a powerful autonomy as a realization of philosophy? It would
complete philosophy’s speculation by realizing it in practice. So what
philosophy gives to cinema, it gets back by realizing itself in more concrete
form. However, this may seem to many to give philosophy a ridiculously
exaggerated role in the internal logic of the development of cinema. So Deleuze
qualifies this idea a little. If cinema in its second phase confronts time in
all its purity, and overcomes the traditional ideas about time as movement that
were holding it back, this moment is triggered by a specific set of
socio-historical conditions. Specifically, cinema only enters its second phase
after the Second World War.
The new cinema records the ruins of the old world, and depicts characters who
can no longer rely on traditional, habitual ways of life, who can no longer
react in the way they used to. The period after the Second World War is also
marked by a new phase of capitalist development: not only are people uprooted or
deterritorialized from their traditional forms of life (as in the first phase of
capitalism), but their desires are now manipulated and deterritorialized by the
new consumer society. Not only are old ways of living and working abolished, but
people’s interior lives, their very desires, are deterritorialized. Western
societies become radically cut off from their past. We enter a new phase of
history, governed by the tendency towards absolute deterritorialization. It is
these social conditions that allow the Kantian theory of time to become relevant
for everybody. And cinema is the privileged place where we can become spectators
of the process of this transformation. The darkened space of the cinema
auditorium, populated by bodies whose sensory-motor life is suspended along with
their social being, provides the ideal space for the unfolding of what Deleuze
calls ‘the pure form of time’, a form of time in which the temporal syntheses of
memory and anticipation are permitted to detach themselves from their ballast in
everyday active social experience.
This is the strong central thesis that undergirds Deleuze’s Cinema. It
implies an evaluation, as it implies that films which remain caught up in mere
movement-images must be seen as outmoded. It also has an ethical component in
that it shows that the great modern directors were attempting to come to terms
with, and imagine ways of dealing with, life in a world with a profoundly new
temporal structure. Deleuze’s Cinema is thus a great progressive work of
aesthetics. But we must note it was written in the early 1980s – that is, in
what perhaps now looks like the twilight of the great age of European cinema. So
perhaps here as well the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.
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