Cinema 1 Chapter 1 Page 1 Paragraph 1

Bergson does not just put forward one thesis on movement, but three. The first is the most famous, and threatens to obscure the other two. It is, however, only an introduction to the others. According to the first thesis, movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering.

What Bergson is saying here is that movement is distinct from space. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement and displacement is only one type of movement (and not the only type of movement). The words actually say it when we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place” as in taking up space or “covering space” as if covering a bed with a blanket. In this conception of the universe, space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it. It is a 2-D metaphor applied to a 3-D phenomenon: as if a point was moving alongside a flat plane. The movement happens within the space but not as a part of it, not constitutive of it. So, what is space? As Bergson would have it in M&M p. 206, “Abstract space is nothing but the mental diagram of infinite divisibility.” The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided. From a classic perspective, space is divisible and movement is indivisible: space is a referenced three dimensional system where time exists as a fourth dimension independent of the space. Space in itself is an empty yet solid entity which is homogeneous and has no temporal dimension within it. Movement or change cannot be reconstituted from static sections (slices), beca use continuity would be absent from the sequentiality. In classical mechanics, we would say that the momentum and speed have been removed from within the section thereby rendering each section indeterminate in terms of the completion of the movement. The continuity is singular, unitary, and cannot be decomposed into constituent elements or parts. Every constituent part would create a discontinuity at the start of the segment and at the end of the segment, a halting balkiness which the movement’s continuity-as-a-whole does not have. Constituting movement from static images, each having a velocity of “zero”, is impossible because the summation of zeros will always amount to zero. I cannot excise a portion of movement, i.e. a transversal moving image at a particular instant, because each instant of now must integrate the dynamic evanescence of pastness and incipience of futureness inherent in the covering of space. Likewise, we cannot constitute movement out of static slices because we cannot imbue them with a continuity the slices do not have. I can intercalate an infinity of static images between two immobile plates but these will be just as immobile. We cannot add movement to a static image. In the same way that Achilles would never reach his destination, he would have been unable to start, because the distance between him and the first point is infinitely divisible and therefore unreachable.