Living in the reel world

the bible in film

pp. 83-95

in: David Jasper, Readings in the canon of scripture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995

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".