Bergson’s Second Thesis: How Cinema Rethinks Movement
Cinema does not understand movement in the same way as older art forms. Drawing from Bergson’s second thesis, the focus here is on how modern cinema moves away from fixed poses and privileged moments, and instead captures movement as a continuous flow of ordinary instants.
Through examples from science, film, and performance, cinema appears as a new way of thinking about time, change, and reality.
Understanding Movement: The Common Mistake
- Privileged instants (key moments)
- Any-instant-whatever (equal, interchangeable instants)
Bergson explains that people often misunderstand movement by breaking it into still moments. For example, to understand walking, they might observe:
- Foot here
- Foot there
- Foot there
Ancient Understanding of Movement:
Ancient thinkers did not understand movement properly. They did not see movement as something that flows continuously. Instead, they thought movement was made of a few important still moments.
They believed that perfect Ideas already exist and never change. Movement occurs only when these Ideas appear in the real world. For them, movement was simply going from one fixed shape to another. The time in between was not important. Only the main or final moment mattered.
Because of this, movement was seen as a series of privileged instants, not as real flowing motion.
Modern Understanding of Movement:
Modern science understood movement in a different way. It does not focus on special moments. Instead, it treats every moment as equal. Bergson calls it any-instant-whatever. Movement is studied by looking at what happens at any ordinary moment, not just the beginning or end. For example, when a person walks, modern thinking observes each small step. In cinema, this is like a film made of many frames: no single frame is special, but movement appears because all frames pass one after another Time is treated as independent and measurable.
Cinema as a Result of Modern Thinking
Cinema is the final result of modern thinking about movement. At one hand humans invented machines to move faster—trains, cars, airplanes—and on the other they also invented ways to show movement: diagrams, photographs, and finally cinema. The camera works as a machine that translates real movement into images.
What defines cinema is that it is made from snapshots taken at equal intervals, placed on a moving film strip. Each moment is ordinary, yet together they create continuous movement. This is movement based on any-instant-whatever.
How Cinema Differs from Older Art
Cinema is different from older art forms that rely on poses or special moments, which Bergson calls privileged instants. Cinema is not about showing one beautiful pose and then another. Older art forms—like painting, sculpture, or even classical dance—focus on special, frozen moments. These moments are chosen because they look perfect or meaningful, and movement is imagined between them.
Cinema works differently. Systems that create movement by transforming one fixed pose into another do not belong to true cinema. True cinema creates movement from many small, ordinary, and equal moments. Each frame of a film is just a normal moment, nothing special by itself. But when these equal moments are shown one after another, real movement appears.
So:
- a. If movement is made by jumping from one fixed pose to another, it is not truly cinematic.
- b. If movement comes from continuous, everyday moments placed in sequence, it is cinema.
That’s why cinema feels alive. It doesn’t depend on “special poses” or privileged instants. It shows life as it flows, moment by moment, just like we experience time in the real world.
Even cartoons follow this principle. Figures are always forming, changing, and dissolving. The focus is on movement itself, not a completed image. Continuity comes from constant change, not from special poses.
Privileged Instants in Modern Cinema
Cinema sometimes seems to focus on special or dramatic moments. For example, Eisenstein highlighted moments of crisis, emotional peaks, and climaxes, which he called the “pathetic.” However, these moments are not the same as the privileged instants of ancient art. They do not come from fixed or eternal forms. Instead, they arise from real movement itself.
A clear example is the study of a horse’s gallop by Muybridge and Marey. They took photographs at equal time intervals, capturing ordinary moments of the horse in motion. Some of these images appear remarkable, such as the moment when the horse has only one hoof on the ground. These are modern privileged instants. They are not planned poses but special moments that emerge from the continuous flow of movement.
Even when cinema highlights such moments, they remain part of the movement itself. They do not interrupt or replace motion. They are simply noticeable points within an ongoing, continuous process.
Key Principles in Modern Cinema
In modern cinema, all moments are treated as any-instant-whatever. Every instant is part of the same continuous flow of time. From this flow, some ordinary moments may stand out and become singular or dramatic.
These highlighted moments are not separate from movement. They arise from movement itself. What appears dramatic or emotional depends on the steady organization of ordinary moments that come before and after it.
This is why Eisenstein’s “pathetic” moments depend on the “organic.” A dramatic peak has meaning only because it grows out of a continuous, ordered chain of ordinary time.
Movement in Other Arts
Artists of the same period noticed similar changes in other art forms. Dance, ballet, and mime slowly moved away from fixed poses and carefully held positions. Instead, they began to focus on natural, flowing movement that could respond to space, objects, and surroundings.
Cinema followed this same idea. In musical comedies, such as Fred Astaire’s films, dance does not stay on a stage. It happens in ordinary places like streets, sidewalks, and among moving cars. Likewise, Chaplin transformed mime in silent films into action-based performance, where movement continues naturally from one moment to the next. Every instant matters, and movement is never frozen into a pose.
Bergson’s Two Possibilities
Bergson explains that cinema clearly belongs to the modern way of understanding movement. Still, he sees two possible ways of interpreting this.
The first possibility is that, even though the ancient and modern approaches are different, they may lead to the same problem. Whether movement is reconstructed from fixed poses or from immobile sections, the real flow of movement is still missed. In both cases, movement is treated as something already given, rather than something that is truly unfolding.
The second possibility opens a more radical path. The modern approach, based on any-instant-whatever, makes it possible to think about the creation of something new at any moment. Singular and remarkable events can emerge from the flow of movement itself, not from pre-existing forms.
Cinema plays an essential role in shaping this new way of thinking, as it trains us to see movement, time, and change as living processes rather than fixed structures.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Bergson’s second thesis suggests that cinema is not merely a tool for repeating old illusions of movement. Instead, it captures movement as it truly unfolds, moment by moment. By working with continuous flow and allowing singular moments to emerge from ordinary time, cinema helps us perceive the new and the unpredictable.
In this way, cinema contributes to a fresh understanding of time, space, and reality as dynamic and ever-changing.
Note
Declaration: This post is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. It provides a simplified interpretation of the concepts from Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and is not meant for commercial use. All ideas, interpretations, and examples are my own, and no copyrighted material from the original text has been reproduced verbatim. All rights to the original work belong to Gilles Deleuze and the publishers. For richer or in-depth studies, readers are encouraged to consult Cinema 1: The Movement-Image directly.