Abstract
It is extraordinary how quickly film attracted theoretical, and indeed, philosophical attention. In a remarkable passage in his book of 1911 on evolutionary theory, Creative Evolution, the French philosopher Henri Bergson analyses what he describes as the “cinematographical method”. That is, the way in which a film takes a series of static images and unrolls them in continuous sequence so “that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility”.1 Linking the contrivance of the cinematograph with that of our knowledge, Bergson describes it as a reconstitution of “the individuality of each particular movement by combining his nameless movement with the personal attitudes”. The movement exists, but it is only in the apparatus of the cinema and its techniques, an artificial recomposition of “becoming”.
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Notes
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London, 1911) pp. 321–3.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; London, 1987) ch. 29: “Movies: the Reel World”, pp. 284–96.
Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (Manchester, 1993).
Jorge Juis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth, 1970) p. 274.
Quoted in William Boddy, “’Spread like a monster blanket over the country’: CBS and television, 1929–33”, Screen, vol. 32 (1991) 178–9.
John R. May, “The New Generation of American Directors and Cinema’s Subversive Art”, in Robert Detweiler (ed.), Art/Literature/ Religion: Life on the Borders, JAAR Thematic Studies 49/2 (Chico, 1983) p. 113.
O. B. Hardison Jr, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1965) p. 271.
John Simon, quoted in Halliwell’s Film Guide, 7th edn (London, 1989) p. 428.
See also Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London, 1981) p. 22.
See Stanley Cavell, “Naughty Orators: Negation of Voice in Gaslight”, in Sanford Budick and Wofgang Iser (eds), Languages of the Unsayable (New York, 1989) p. 357.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks, trans. and ed. David Breazeale (New Jersey, 1979) p. 84.
Iren Makarushka, “Decomposing the American Dream: the Ambiguity of Evil in Blue Velvet”, Religion and American Culture, vol. 1 (1991) 31–46.
Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978) pp. 31–63, esp. pp. 31–2.
Cavell, “Naughty Orators”, p. 363, quoting from S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, 1976) p. 21, n. 19.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1973).
Stephen D. Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives (New Haven, Conn., 1992) p. xviii.
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© 1995 David Jasper
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Jasper, D. (1995). Living in the Reel World: The Bible in Film. In: Readings in the Canon of Scripture. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376083_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376083_6
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