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<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered)">
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<div class=WordSection1>
<div align='center'>
<br>
<br>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:18.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0E101A'>
</span><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0E101A'>"Cinamen" :
</span></b><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;line-height:115%;
color:#0E101A'>- From Image-Movement To Movement-Image</span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;
color:#0E101A'> </span></b></p>
<br>
<br>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:16.0pt;line-height:115%;
color:#0E101A'> Devdan Dey</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<div align='center'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='color:#0E101A'>(I)</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>The impression of reality in
cinema experienced by the spectator is vivid.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Films release a mechanism of
affective and perceptual participation in the spectator than any other art form
(like paintings, music, photography, and theatre). </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>"They spontaneously appeal
to the [subject spectator's] sense of belief" as Christian Metz noted.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Furthermore, the device or the
apparatus like camera, lens, films, digital data storage, etc which is used to
reproduce, capture, and "realize" cinema is more mechanical.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>The same may be said of
photography, but not about art.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='color:#0E101A'>Mimetic art</span></i><span
style='color:#0E101A'>, in the Platonic meaning, tries to reflect reality as
faithfully as possible, yet it never entirely captures it due to the presence
of pseudorealist contents that always already exists within it. Bazin argues,
"No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an
inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow
of doubt over the image." The distinction between photography with
(mimetic)art lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For
the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there
intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Still, photography is never as
real as cinema.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Roland Barthes is correct to
point out that, even the most intense photographic "participations"
do not involve the illusion of the real.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Barthes argues, photography is
an <i>illogical conjunction of here and then</i>: space present but time past.
Because of this, photography lacks much projective potential and produces a
purely spectatorial awareness as opposed to an awareness of fictional
possibilities.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>"<i><u>This has been</u></i>"
overpowers "<i><u>Here I am"</u></i>.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<div align='center'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='color:#0E101A'>(II)</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>one of the most significant
distinctions, doubtless the greatest, between still photography and the movies,
that produce a strong impression of reality is motion: movement of characters,
frames, narrative, and so on.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Movement entails a higher degree
of reality, because (most) real-life spectacles involve motion. Further
analysis reveals that movement is associated with "greater"
livingness, given that the "cause" of the movement is concealed from
the perceiver, analogous to <i>encapsulation</i>: the complexities of movement
and the mechanisms that create it are hidden from the subject.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Humans are more real in the
sense that simply the pure motion of the human body appears, rather than the
causalities, such as muscle contraction, propagation of electrical impulses
through motor neurons, free will, and so on, underlying it.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Similarly, in movies, only <i>effective
movement</i> is given, (encapsulating all other complex knowledge such as
projector operation, propagation of frames per second to produce the
persistence of visions, and so on) which provides corporeality to the abstract
shapes of lines and colors, gives volume to the flatness, gives life. </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<div align='center'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='color:#0E101A'>(III)</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Let us take it a step further:
we are confining ourselves to a specific type of movement that is <i>cinematic</i>.
To begin, let us try to identify the type of movement we are not considering.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>In his theses on movements in <i>Creative
Evolution</i>, Bergson stated,</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>(1) Illusion of natural
perception as a <i>false movement</i>. "Instead of attaching ourselves to
the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to
recompose their becoming. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing
reality, and, as these are characteristics of the reality, we have only to
string them on an abstract becoming".</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>According to Bergson, true
movement cannot be reduced to the space covered. Identifying movement with the
trajectory it has drawn leads to intractable contradictions.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>This becomes clear in Zeno's
paradox. If Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise since his first step
gets him to where the tortoise was previously, and so on, this is due to the
incorrect assumption that Achilles' step—and the tortoise's step—are
arbitrarily divisible like the segments of the line. But, of fact, this is not
the case: each stride is indivisible in reality, which is why Achilles has no
trouble catching up to the tortoise in a few leaps.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Movements are both indivisible
and heterogeneous, whereas the space covered are homogeneous. Although
Achilles' step and the tortoise's step may follow the same spatial trajectory,
their movements follow distinct articulations.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Because of the indivisible and
heterogeneous nature of motion, every attempt to recreate them with positions
in space and instants in time is destined to fail.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>According to Bergson cinema
simply reproduces the natural perception of movement, because frames are
instantaneous snapshots, "immobile sections," of positions or states
that have been arbitrarily cut out from the real movement and joined by some
abstract time provided by the apparatus itself. Deleuze, however, disagrees
with Bergson here.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Deleuze, by articulating the
history of the evolution of cinema, posits that in the early days, cinema was a
matter of fixed shots that were immobile(<i>images in movement</i>), and the
technology did indeed combine cameras with projectors endowed with a uniform
abstract time'. But with the advent of technologies and methods( specifically
mobile camera and montage) the shot became a temporal, not a spatial one.
Cinema now offers something more than immobile images. The shot itself becomes
mobile, able to show a generalized movement that can be separated from the
characters. Now they become "<i>movement-image</i>". </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>(2) In the second thesis Bergson
claims, movement cannot be seen as the classical conceptions -- as a transition
from one ideal form to another, 'an order of poses or privileged instants, as
in a [classical] Greek dance', rather as the modern science regards movement as
the function of 'any-instant-whatever'.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Cinema obviously comes under the
latter category. Nonetheless, hardly one agrees that film should be treated as
a science in the same way that physics or mathematics are. Cinema always
achieves a qualitative leap from quantitative or analytical constraints.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>To shed light on this mystery we
must take another entity into account which is solely related to movement:
Time.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>On the one hand, there is the
philosophy of ideas, which is essentially static, and more concerned with
immovable essences where time intervenes as disruption. Modern science, on the
other hand, incorporates time as an independent variable. Bergson observes that
Kepler's question - how to determine the various locations of planets at any
moment, once their position at a given moment is known — has become the ideal
problem of all science. </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>However, Modern science is
always concerned with only one conception of time: the <u>length-time. </u>Modern
science, like <i>Laplace's demon</i>, would be able to predict all future and
past occurrences if it knew the locations and velocities of all atoms in the
Universe.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>What modern science ignores is
one of the fundamental properties of time:<u> invention-time</u>. Time as
duration, incessant qualitative change; Time associated with the
"condition-of-possibility". Nothing new is created without taking
time. We may know an <i>auteur</i>, his way of writing, directing, lighting
editing, and his usage of colors; nonetheless, we cannot foresee what will
appear in his next film, "that unforeseeable nothing which is everything
in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time". It is this
conception that leads Bergson to make the startling assertion that "time
is invention or it is nothing at all".</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>Cinema plays this role of
inventiveness in art and science: developing new ways of thinking. Cinema, as
Deleuze commented, is the organ for perfecting the new reality.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<div align='center'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='color:#0E101A'>(IV)</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>So, which movement is considered
cinematic? The movement of the abstract concept should be considered, as
Deleuze said. </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>One may argue, we started with
the notion that cinema has more vividly "represented" reality, which
is more on the line of phenomenologists who claim, the world itself, the world
as such, has become an image because its essence is to be given to a subject in
representation. The world is as an object of representation of a subject.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>"[W]orld image, when
understood essentially, does not mean an image of the world but the world
conceived and grasped as image."(Heidegger).</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>On the contrary, for Deleuze
cinema is material and immaterial, a form of becoming rather than a mode of
signification or meaning, and he posits for it an immanence of being in which
matter, motion, and consciousness are inseparably intertwined. The film image,
therefore, exists as a special state of matter, neither an object of heightened
perception and enhanced sensations nor a sign whose meaning is hidden in or
behind the image. The absolute coincidence between matter, light, and movement
is called image. The material universe is a universe of moving images, or more
precise <i>movement-image</i>(as Deleuze coined it). He shows no interest in
concepts such as "representation", "subject position", or
"self-reflexivity". </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>How then might we synthesize the
two extremes? For that, we need to consider another aspect of movement: the
"immateriality" of motion which is why it cannot encompass two
degrees of phenomenal reality, the "real" and the copy. The criteria
of "materiality," which is usually present in our minds, separates
the universe into original and duplicate.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>"In truth, one cannot even
reproduce a movement ", Christian Metz correctly points out, "one can
only re-produce it in a second production belonging to the same order of
reality, for the spectator, as the first...In the cinema, the impression of
reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of <i>unsubstantiated</i>
motion."</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<div align='center'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='color:#0E101A'>(V)</span></b></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>But now the question arises, the
theatre also has that attribution of "movement", why then is it less
real than a movie?</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>According to Rosenkrantz, in
theatre, the actor's bodily presence contradicts the temptation of the reality
of a fictitious world.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>The spectator and the actors
share the same space and time in the theatre, but the cinematographic space is
completely detached from the subject viewers’ space. The space of the <i>diegesis</i>
( the fictional universe ) and the movie theatre are independent. They neither
include nor influence one another.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>In the theatrical rendition of
King Lear, even if the character of Lear is absent, actor Soumitra Chatterjee
was present. On the contrary, in the Cinema both Anthony Hopkins and King Lear
are absent. Ontologically, we can say, movement in theatre is associated with
the <i>presence of absence, </i>while Cinema, is an empty play of light and
shadow, with the <i>absence of absence.</i></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'> </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#0E101A'>In this way, cinematographic
movement <i>segregates the space</i>, which is undoubtedly connected to some
"cinematographic network" through which, we can assume, the
assemblage and dispersal of fragments of frames, desires, and complex cognitive
processes all interact with one another and become a hyperbolic space where the
process of creating and depicting experience and knowledge happens
simultaneously to produce a "cinematic" experience.</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal> </p>
</div>
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