Bergson, Deleuze, and the birth of Movement Image
Significance of Bergson’s Three Theses on Movement
Thesis on Movements
Bergson Provided three thesis on movement:
- First thesis – Movement is distinct from the space covered.
- Second thesis – There are two main ways of reconstructing movement: through “privileged instants” (key moments) or through “any-instants-whatever” (equal, interchangeable instants).
- Third thesis – Movement itself is only a mobile section cut from a greater whole — the flow of duration.
The Significance of Bergosn's Thesis
Henri Bergson’s three theses on movement explain the difference between real movement and the way we usually try to represent it. For Bergson, movement is not just a series of separate, frozen moments placed side by side; it is a continuous flow that we live and feel as time passes. For example, when you watch a river flowing, you experience it as a smooth, unbroken motion. But if you tried to show it through separate photographs taken at different moments, you would lose the sense of continuous flow that is present in real movement.
This difference between real movement and its representation is important for cinema, because films create the illusion of continuous motion by showing a rapid sequence of still images. In an old film reel, each frame is a static photograph, but when projected at 24 frames per second, these images blend in our perception to appear as smooth, lifelike movement. For example, when we watch a bird flying in real life, we see a smooth, natural motion. But if we take separate photographs of the bird at different positions and look at them one by one, the feeling of continuous flight disappears. Cinema recreates that flow by putting such still images together very quickly to give the illusion of real movement.
The First Thesis: Movement is different from the space covered
Bergson says that movement is not the same as the distance that has been travelled. When we break movement into still positions, we lose the real flow of motion. In cinema, each frame is like a still position, so what we see is not real movement but an illusion created by joining these frames together.
The “space covered” is divisible and past while the actual movement is a present, indivisible flow (a concrete duration). We cannot rebuild real movement by adding still positions + an abstract ticking time. That’s a “cinematographic illusion.”
Example: Ten photos of a runner don’t give us the run itself; the run is what happens between the photos.
What is an abstract-ticking-time?
An abstract ticking time means time measured as equal, separate units (like seconds on a clock) without considering how it is actually experienced. It treats time as a mechanical count, not as the continuous, flowing experience we live through.
The First Thesis Continues
But before we move forward to accept the cinematic illusion as stated by Bergson, let us understand how Deleuze uses this to explain cinema. The first thesis says that the distances we measure all belong to one single, uniform kind of space that is the same everywhere, but actual movements are different in quality from one another and cannot be reduced to the same type.
For example, when you measure the path of a rolling ball and the path of a flying bird, both distances are measured in the same space, using the same units like meters. However, the actual movements are very different — the ball rolls on the ground in a certain way, while the bird moves through the air with flapping wings. These movements cannot be made identical just because the distances are measured in the same space.
Bergson argues that we cannot truly recreate real movement by relying only on positions in space or instants in time, because these are just static snapshots.
- Positions in space are fixed places an object passes through, like a runner at the start line, halfway point, and finish line.
- Instants in time are frozen moments on the clock, like a photograph taken exactly at 1:00:00, then at 1:00:05, and again at 1:00:10.
These give us where or when something is, but not the actual flow that happens between those points. Movement is something continuous — it’s not simply made of separate “stills” lined up next to each other.
When people try to recreate movement from these slices, they add the abstract idea of succession in time — a kind of time that is:
- Mechanical: ticking regularly like a clock.
- Homogeneous: the same everywhere, without differences in quality.
- Universal: applies equally to all objects and movements.
- Copied from space: can be measured in equal segments, just like distances in space.
We imagine the slices following one another in this uniform time to give the sense of motion. But Bergson says this method still misses real movement in two important ways:
- The missing gap between slices – Even if you bring two positions or instants infinitely close together — for example, two high-speed shots of a hummingbird’s wing taken milliseconds apart — the real movement is in the transition between them, which no single frame can capture. That flowing part “happens behind your back,” unseen in the frozen images.
- The loss of lived duration – No matter how finely you divide and measure clock time, movement always happens in what Bergson calls concrete duration — the lived, qualitative feeling of time passing in a particular action. For instance, the slow stretch of a dancer’s arm and the explosive leap of a sprinter might both take exactly two seconds on a clock, but they feel completely different. Mechanical time treats them the same, but each has its own rhythm, energy, and character that can’t be reduced to equal time units.
In short, real movement is qualitative and continuous, while positions in space and instants in time are quantitative and separate. Real movement exists in the continuity of time and change — it is not the same as the static points or positions that can be measured. There is a gap between the real movement and its representation.
Understanding the Gap Between Real Movement and Its Representation
Understanding the gap between how movement really happens and how we break it down to represent it, is what makes cinema interesting. Deleuze takes this further and says we can think of it as two opposite ways of seeing movement. On one side, there is “real movement in concrete duration” — movement as it actually flows in lived time, like watching a dancer spin without breaking it into parts. On the other side, there are “immobile sections with abstract time” — frozen snapshots lined up in a timeline, like the still frames of a film reel. Cinema fascinates us because it lives right in this tension: it uses immobile frames and abstract time, yet on screen it creates the illusion of real, continuous movement.
Deleuze explains this by using Bergson’s formula: real movement = immobile sections + abstract time.
- Immobile sections: These are the fixed snapshots or positions we imagine in order to analyze or measure movement. For example, if we think of a ball being thrown, we can picture it at point A, then at point B, then at point C. But these are just frozen cuts.
- Abstract time: This is the homogeneous, measurable time (like clock time) that we use to connect those points — for instance, saying the ball took 3 seconds to travel from A to C.
Together, immobile sections plus abstract time give us a way to calculate or represent movement, but they do not capture movement as it actually happens.
The real movement is something else: it is concrete duration, the lived and flowing continuity that we directly experience. In lived reality, the ball does not jump from A to B to C; it moves in one continuous, indivisible flow.
The gap is between these two ways of understanding:
- On one side, the abstract representation (immobile sections + abstract time).
- On the other side, the real movement (concrete duration).
Cinema as an Illusion (Bergson’s View)
Cinema becomes important here: it takes immobile frames (sections) and projects them rapidly in abstract time, creating the illusion of continuous movement. This shows both the power and the limit of the formula — it explains representation, but not the lived continuity itself.
Bergson explains that when cinema shows movement by using a series of mobile sections, (that is still images shown one after another, it is not doing something entirely new. It reconstitutes movement with what he calls mobile sections. It plays fixed images one after another and creates an illusion flow. By “mobile sections,” Bergson means the way cinema breaks real movement into many separate still frames, and then reconstitutes them to create the illusion of motion. In this sense it is no different than what ancient philosophy talks about or what our natural perception does. We unconsciously take fixed snapshots of moving things and then piece them together in our mind to make sense of them. We tend to grasp it as a sequence of moments, “first here, then there”, rather than as one uninterrupted continuity. So Bergson suggests that the mind cuts up continuity into discrete instants, but real movement itself is seamless.
This is why Bergson’s view differs from phenomenology. For phenomenologists, cinema was radically new. It disrupted the normal flow of perception. But Bergson says cinema actually mimics what perception has always been doing. Just as the camera takes snapshots of reality, our mind also takes “snapshots” of the passing flow of life. Passing reality means the continuous flow of change, the way things are always moving and becoming. We freeze these moments into mental images so that we can think about them, describe them in language, or recognize them through perception.
Bergson writes that when we do this, or when we take snapshots of reality, we string them together on an abstract thread of time. This time is abstract, uniform, and invisible: abstract because it is not the lived duration but a mental construction, uniform because it treats all instants as equal units (seconds, minutes), and invisible because we cannot perceive this thread directly; it sits “behind” our apparatus of knowledge. In other words, our perception, thought (intellection), and language already work like a kind of inner cinematograph. taking stills of the moving world and connecting them through abstract time.
Bergson even suggests that whenever we try to think about becoming (how things change), or express it in words, or even just perceive it, we are already running a cinema inside our minds. This raises a deep question: if our perception itself is already cinematic in nature, then is cinema just the projection of a constant and universal illusion we have always lived with — as though cinema existed within us long before the invention of the camera? If so, cinema is not only a machine of representation, but also a reflection of how human perception and thought have always functioned. And this is where the real philosophical problem begins, because it challenges us to ask: what, then, is the true relationship between real movement, its perception, and its cinematic reproduction?
So lets look at it again, Bergson says:
- Real movement = continuous, indivisible flow.
- Ordinary perception/thought = we break it into immobile snapshots (“first here, then there”), then reassemble them in our head.
- Cinema = does the same operation materially (breaks movement into frames) but — because of projection — it gives us back the appearance of continuity.
So cinema is not showing true continuity, but rather a reconstitution of movement that mimics how our perception already works. Bergson suggests that real movement is continuous, not divisible into instance. Our mind tends to slice the time into still positions, which he calls “copied from space”. According to him cinema is the perfect image of this illusion. It strings together immobile frames and gives the appearance of continuity. So for Bergson, cinema is a kind of trick, not real movement.
Cinema as Movement-Image (Deleuze’s View)
While at one hand Deluze agrees that Movement is distinct from the space covered, or movement ≠ space covered, he disagrees with Bergson’s conclusion about cinema. According to Deluze Cinema is not an illusion but instead gives us a new way to understand movement and time.
Deleuze puts forward two questions in response to Bergson’s claim about cinema:
- Is not the reproduction of the illusion in a certain sense also its correction?
- Can we conclude that the result is artificial simply because the means are artificial?
Cinema proceeds with photogrammes, which means the single still images or frames that a camera records. These are immobile sections of reality, captured one after another. In the early days, films used eighteen frames per second, later it was standardised at twenty-four per second. When these frames are projected quickly, we don’t actually see the frames themselves; instead, we see something in between them. This is what Deleuze calls the intermediate image. It is not just a frame plus added movement. Rather, the movement belongs to the intermediate image itself. For example, when we watch a film of a ball being thrown, we don’t see twenty-four still positions of the ball per second. We see one continuous throw. The motion is not something our mind adds afterward — it is already there, given directly in the film itself.
Deleuze further compares natural perception with cinematic perception. In daily life, our perception also cuts movement into parts, but our brain corrects this illusion “above” perception. For instance, when someone waves their hand, our eye receives discontinuous impressions, yet our brain corrects it and gives us the smooth flow of the wave.
However, in cinema it corrects the illusion automatically, at the same time the image appears on screen. That means the correction is not required by the brain anymore. The spectator doesn’t need to do extra work; the film directly offers movement. In this sense, phenomenologists were right to suggest that natural perception and film perception are qualitatively different. In natural perception the correction is at the level of the brain, while in cinema the correction happens automatically. So cinema does not give us an image to which movement is later added. It gives us what Deleuze calls a movement-image, which means movement itself as directly visible. It does cut reality into sections, but unlike static photographs, these sections are mobile. They are not immobile points plus an abstract idea of motion or a mental construction, but motion in itself, given immediately. Motion in this sense is not a set of still positions (points A, B, C) plus some “extra idea” that connects them (an abstract motion). Motion itself is directly experienced as continuous. So, motion is not still images + imagination of movement; it is the movement itself, directly given to perception.
This discussion brings us to the curious point about Bergson. Deleuze notes that Bergson was aware of movement-images much earlier. In his book Matter and Memory (1896), written even before cinema had properly been invented, Bergson had already described how movement could be conceived as mobile sections of reality. The first chapter of that book is where Bergson introduced the idea of the movement-image, beyond the conditions of natural perception, without breaking it into instants. But ten years later, in Creative Evolution (1907), he seems to forget this and treats cinema only as an illusion.
So to summarize this discussion, while Bergson is right in his first thesis, and had even been able to anticipate the idea of the movement-image much earlier, later he calls it an illusion. The whole debate is about how natural perception is both similar and dissimilar to cinema. Deleuze, who accepts Bergson’s first thesis, helps us to understand that cinema does not give us an immobile section to which movement is appended, but rather gives us a mobile section — a movement-image, where movement belongs to the intermediate image as an immediate given where an intermediate image is the in-between frame (photogramme) that connects one still frame to the next — not just a snapshot, but the becoming from one position to another. So, instead of two static points + an abstract “motion,” the intermediate image is that transition itself captured.
Notes on Becoming
Becoming means change that is happening right now, not a finished state.
- A seed is not just “a seed” or “a tree.” When it is sprouting, it is becoming a tree.
- A person walking from point A to B is not only ‘at A’ or ‘at B.’ In the middle, they are not just standing at fixed spots but actually are the movement itself — their being at that time is the act of walking from A to B.
So becoming = the in-between, the ongoing change, not the fixed result.
Lets understand it in terms of Cinema:
In film, a character’s smile forming is not only “no smile” in one frame and “full smile” in the next. The in-between frames show the becoming of the smile. Cinema captures these continuous transformations directly, so that we don’t just imagine movement abstractly; we see becoming unfold as real movement on screen.
Early Cinema and Abstract Time
Bergson once said that when life first began, it could not show its true creativity because it was tied down, forced to imitate matter. Deleuze compares this to cinema. When cinema first appeared, it too could not show its full potential. At the beginning, cinema had to imitate natural perception, which means the way we normally see the world with our eyes. It’s viewpooint was fixed. The means that the camera was stationary. It did not move. The shot therefore was “spatial and immobile,” meaning it just captured a piece of space without moving through it or revealing time in a deeper way.
Also, at the start, the camera (shooting apparatus) and the projector were basically part of the same process. The technology of recording the film was directly linked to the technology of showing it. It means that in early cinema, filming and projecting weren’t separate industries or machines as we know now. The camera and projector were closely linked, sometimes even combined into the same apparatus, so the act of recording and the act of showing were part of one continuous process. Both ran in a strict rhythm: frame after frame, one after another, in equal intervals. This was called uniform abstract time — time measured mechanically, like the ticking of a clock, not lived time or duration.
Early cinema was tied to mechanical, abstract time because the camera and projector were one system. This shaped cinema as an art of movement measured by machines, not by lived human duration. Only after the separation of devices did cinema gain creative flexibility with time.
When we say cinema was tied to abstract time, it means early cinema followed the mechanical, uniform ticking of the projector—frame after frame in equal intervals. Our brains then interpreted this rhythm by filling the gaps between frames, constructing movement and images as lived experience.
Cinema’s Evolution: From Illusion to Essence
Fortunately, cinema did not remain tied to abstract, mechanical time. It evolved and discovered its true novelty — what made it a unique art form. This happened through:
- Montage: editing shots together to create meaning and rhythm.
- The mobile camera: moving through space, following action, and opening new perspectives.
- Freedom of the viewpoint: no longer fixed to projection, the camera could shift angles and positions.
Through these innovations, the shot itself changed. It was no longer just about “capturing space” but about revealing time. The filmed sections of reality ceased to be frozen and immobile; they became mobile sections of time. In this way, cinema moved closer to what Bergson had earlier called the movement-image: reality given as continuous movement, not merely a string of immobile points plus abstract time.
Since then, cinema has come a long way — from imitating natural perception to discovering its own essence: the direct presentation of movement itself.
Disclaimer
This post is a simplified interpretation of concepts taught in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983). It is written for educational purposes, aiming to make complex philosophical ideas more accessible and easier to understand.
The explanations, summaries, and examples presented here are my own rephrasings and do not reproduce the original text verbatim. All rights to the original work belong to Gilles Deleuze and his publishers.
Readers who wish to explore these concepts in full depth are encouraged to consult the original text.