Cinema Book 1 “Movement – Image” is the first volume of the two-volume series by Gilles Deleuze, a famous French philosopher, which explores concepts such as moving image and movement as the essence of cinema.
Gilles Deleuze is a famous French philosopher who, in addition to his research tendencies in the field of Western philosophy, meta-philosophy and metaphysics, has also researched in the field of cinema and music. Deleuze has a two-volume book about cinema, the first volume of which is called “Movement-Image” and the second volume is called “Time-Image”. Gilgamesh Publishing House has published the first volume of this book, Movement – Image, translated by Maziar Islami. Deleuze is famous for having complex prose and naturally translating his works into another language will be quite difficult. But I can promise you that Maziar Islami has really made it possible to understand the concepts of this book in Persian.
Deleuze had a very close friendship with another famous philosopher, Michel Foucault. At Foucault’s suggestion, Deleuze was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of Paris 8 or Vincennes in 1969 and taught at that university until his retirement in 1987. In 1995, while he was 70 years old and suffering from his lung disease, according to his family members, he threw himself out of his apartment window one day so that the death of this great philosopher would remain as eerie as his prose and put an end to his life’s fate.
Foucault famously said in the 1980s: “The next century may be the century of Deleuze.” In the introduction of the book, Maziar-e-Islami beautifully points out that Foucault did not see the century of deadly viruses, the century of openly schizophrenic capitalism and the century of permitted victory over reality and said this sentence. If he had seen it, he would have resolutely discarded that “maybe”.
Now, the book Cinema – Movement, in a deep look, considers “movement” as the essence of cinema and analyzes it from the beginning of the history of cinema. According to Deleuze, cinema does not confront the viewer with “an image to which movement is added”. Rather, cinema offers us the image of movement independently and directly. Even the cut between two views is part of the image and allows the eye to perceive the impact and effect of the movement. Deleuze believes that movement plays a fundamental role before entering modern cinema. But upon entering the modern world, the element of time becomes the focus of movies and forms the second volume of his book.
In this book, Deleuze deals with movement-image and its various forms of perception, which also include the titles of the book. The book has 12 chapters, the titles of which are as follows:
Chapter 1: Theses about movement from Bergson’s point of view
The second chapter: frame and view: framing and cutting
Chapter Three: Montage
Chapter 4: Movement – image and its three types
Chapter Five: Perception – Image
Chapter 6: Impression – Image: face and close-up
Chapter 7: Impression – image: qualities, powers, spaces of any kind
Chapter 8: From emotion to action: impulse – image
Chapter 9: Action – Image: Large form
Chapter 10: Action – Image: Small form
Chapter 11: Bodies or the transformation of forms
Chapter 12: Action Crisis – Image
In this book, Deleuze goes to the important filmmakers in the history of cinema and the key elements of each of them from his own point of view. He talks about the method of inducing emotions through the use of close-ups in the works of Eisenstein and Griffiths. It talks about the unique and spiritual atmosphere creation of Robert Bresson. He considers the power of repetition in the image to be an essential feature in the works of Luis Buñuel, and at the end of the book, he discusses the function of the western genre in the works of Howard Hawks. In the end, he sees the end of the image-movement in a way at the beginning of the era of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, which provide the prerequisites for the emergence of modern cinema and the issue of time-cinema.
If you are interested in this famous philosopher, don’t hesitate to read this book. If you want to think about the nature of cinema from a philosophical point of view, this book is the best choice for you.
Part of the book:
Bergson, who had revolutionized philosophy by posing the question of the “new” instead of the question of “eternity” (how the production and emergence of something new is possible), knew this point better than anyone else. For example, he said that the newness of life cannot be revealed at the beginning. Because in the beginning, life is bound to imitate matter…doesn’t this apply to cinema? Didn’t cinema have to imitate natural perception in the beginning? And after all, what was the position of cinema in the beginning? On the one hand, the angle of view was fixed and therefore the scene was positioned and completely still; On the other hand, the filming device was integrated with the film screening device and had a uniform and identical abstract time. The evolution of cinema, that is, the process of conquering the essence of cinema or its newness, which had to happen through montage. By moving the camera and releasing the angle of view. A camera that was separated from the display process. The view was no longer a spatial category, but a temporal category, and the constituent parts of the view were no longer static but moving.
