Cinematic Being

One way of reading the Cinema books is to regard them as a kind of counterfactual thought experiment in the history of philosophy in which Deleuze reads Matter and Memory, first published in French in 1896, as if it were both a book about, and a prefiguration of, cinema (which was in fact only beginning its birth pangs as Bergson's book was being written). Underwriting this experiment is Deleuze's claim that Bergson, in a move ‘startlingly ahead of his time’, and ahead of the cinema as such, conceives of the universe as ontologically cinematic in and of itself, irrespective of any actual cinema. That is, Bergson offers us a vision of ‘the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema’. Read this way, Deleuze's argument goes well beyond the partial conciliation of cinema and cinematographic illusion implied in his claim that ‘Even in his critique of the cinema, [the first chapter of Matter and Memory suggests that] Bergson was in agreement with it, to a far greater degree than he thought.’

If the cinema has a privileged access to being, in particular as a mode of thought of being, it is because being itself is already metacinematic. As we shall see, however, the terms of the genesis of beings (and thus human beings) on the basis of this metacinematic universe are such that human nature is itself constitutively cinematographic. To put the argument in its most condensed form, Deleuze draws on Bergson to argue that being itself is nothing but light, and beings arise on that basis as a ‘screen’ that selectively reflects or reveals that light. Deleuze seeks to demonstrate in the first few chapters of Cinema 1 that the cinema as such has the capacity to both deduce and correct this cinematographic genesis of human being by means of its own strictly formal capacities – its deployment of frame, shot and montage. This double proposition is the basis of the philosophical privilege Deleuze accords the cinema, over and above all other arts and in some sense even over philosophy itself. The cinema has the capacity not only to deduce the genesis of both beings and their abstract grasp of being, but also to articulate or dramatise the relations between them in its own strictly non-human terms.