Privileged Instants and Any-Instant-Whatevers: Deleuze, Bergson, and the Philosophy of Cinema
Privileged Instants
Privileged instants are special or important moments selected from the flow of life or movement. They stand out because they carry meaning, emotion, or drama. When we describe something as “dramatic”, we are often thinking in terms of the privileged instant, where a decisive or final moment is considered more important than the surrounding flow of events.
In earlier forms of art such as painting, sculpture, or photography, the artist could capture only one moment, so they chose a highlight. For example, in a football match, the instant of scoring a goal, taking a penalty, or the referee showing a red card can be seen as privileged instants. These decisive moments summarize the meaning of the whole game.
Examples:
• In painting, a depiction of a battle does not show every soldier’s hesitation or movement. Instead, it captures the decisive strike, perhaps a general’s sword raised or a soldier’s fall. This instant stands for the entire sequence of the battle.
• In photography, a wedding picture often captures the exchange of rings or the first kiss. That one instant tells the story of the wedding as a whole, even though the event lasts for hours.
Any-Instant-Whatevers
Any-instant-whatevers are the ordinary moments in between, treated as equal and interchangeable. With the invention of film cameras, it became possible to divide time into regular slices or frames. Each frame is simply another instant, none more important than the next. In this sense, time becomes divisible, almost like space.
For example, in the same football match discussed above, the players’ actions—running, passing, waiting—can be frozen at second 15, 27, or 43. Each frame would appear equally valid. Similarly, in a wedding video, thousands of frames are recorded, not only the ring exchange. These everyday moments are all given equal status.
Examples:
• If we film a candle burning, the camera captures 24 frames per second. Each frame is just a slice of time—any instant whatsoever. On its own, no single frame has special meaning. But when projected together, they create the flame’s movement and the passage of time.
• A football match recorded on film is not reduced to the decisive goal. We see players waiting, running, missing shots, and interacting. Time is not condensed into highlights; it unfolds in its full duration.
This is what makes cinema unique. Unlike painting or photography, which must choose a privileged moment, cinema lets us experience time as it flows. The drama is not only in climaxes but also in pauses, build-ups, and even moments of stillness.
A privileged instant and an any-instant-whatever are not the same thing. Privileged instants belong to a logic that highlights decisive moments, while any-instant-whatevers belong to a logic that samples time evenly. In simple words, we can say a privileged instant is a special moment that stands out, while an any-instant-whatever is just one of many ordinary slices of time. Deleuze’s point is that they show two different ways of looking at time: one picks highlights, the other treats every moment as equal.
The Philosophical Shift
The difference between privileged instants and any-instant-whatevers marks a philosophical shift. Traditional art forms represent time indirectly, by isolating a meaningful moment. Cinema, by contrast, reveals time directly through movement itself. This equal treatment of moments reflects Bergson’s idea of duration, where time is not a series of fixed points but a continuous, living flow.
Why Bergson and Deleuze Discuss This
In classical art, the focus was on privileged instants—a single frozen highlight that was meant to represent the whole movement. Cinema is built from any-instant-whatevers, since the camera records every slice of movement without selecting only the special moments. At the same time, cinema goes beyond these single frames, because when they are projected together, we see movement and the flow of time itself.
For Bergson, real movement is not just frozen moments or slices of time, it is a living, unbroken flow. He argued that no collection of isolated instants can truly capture the reality of time. The phrase “any-instant-whatevers” is Deleuze’s term, not Bergson’s, but Deleuze uses it to explain how cinema handles time in relation to Bergson’s idea of duration.
Deleuze takes this further. He says that when cinema projects these frames, it doesn’t just show separate slices—it restores the feeling of real flow. Cinema allows us to experience not just highlights or fragments, but the actual passage of time itself.
Analogy
A privileged instant is like a single wedding photo that captures one big moment. An any-instant-whatever is like the full wedding video, with thousands of ordinary frames. But the true magic of cinema isn’t in the photo or the individual frames—it’s in how those slices come together to make us feel time and movement as they unfold.
The Central Idea
Bergson argued that real movement is continuous and flowing, not a string of frozen images. Classical thought often treated movement as a series of instants, like dots on a ruler.
- Privileged instants appear when art shows movement by choosing only the special, frozen moment. For example, a Greek statue of a discus thrower captures the peak of tension.
- Any-instant-whatevers appear with modern technology like cinema, which divides movement into equal frames, such as 24 per second.
The problem is that neither of these truly captures real movement. For Bergson, movement is an indivisible, continuous flow, not just a collection of separate parts.
Why They Are Important for Cinema
Early cinema worked with any-instant-whatevers because it cut time into equal frames. But when these frames are projected, something new appears: movement itself. Cinema is not just a collection of still images but a direct experience of movement as duration. This is why Bergson and Deleuze saw cinema as revolutionary. It restores our sense of living time instead of reducing it to snapshots.
Cinema still depends on frames (24 per second in film, 60 for digital). However, Deleuze explains that its power lies not in the frozen frames themselves but in the intervals between them, where movement and time become visible. The camera uses any-instant-whatevers, but the art of cinema lies in going beyond them to show us time itself.
Why They Are Important for Cinema
We should not think of cinema as just a machine that records reality in equal frames. Instead, it can be understood as a philosophical tool. It lets us experience real time, makes us reflect on time rather than only follow stories, and reveals how life itself flows beyond snapshots.
In short, cinema is not about privileged instants like climaxes, nor about any-instant-whatevers like frozen frames. It is about giving us a new way to see time and movement directly.
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.