Cinema as Brain: Labyrinth of Time and Movement of the Image

Images are not mere images…at least they do not stand alone. Their meanings are entrenched in a process of thinking – a consciousness that occurs in the brain. I only have the faintest idea of the fundamental tenets of Deleuze’s philosophy on film and its link to the perspective of the cinema as brain. Going through the lecture notes and the assigned readings, what I gather is the seemingly long and winding labyrinth of projecting the image interlaced with time and movement.

Film scholar have been asking questions on the philosophical and theoretical ground for the treatment and conveyance of movement and time in film – taking into consideration that reality, unreality, and surreality cannot be totally recorded. How should films control movement? To what extent should or could movement be manipulated in that it stays truthful to the intention of the filmmaker? How can time be squeezed in cinema? How can urgency and the sense of boredom and waiting be represented in front of the screen? I surmise this complex labyrinth intersects with the way the brain work.

As an image is processed in the brain in relation to the network of information that has already in stored in it – the brain as the main organ in the body produces the consciousness – and the mind that subsequently defines reality as we see it. The brain controls movements, interprets movements, perceives, and stirs the body to action. The difficulty in cinema is how to reconstitute time and movement. As Muybridge mentions, “Cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement image…a section which is mobile, not an immobile section and abstract movement.” Thus, movement image departs from the real movement itself. It occurs in relation to things that surround it as we as the position of the image in relation to itself. As such, it is the series of connections and interlinkages that define the precise demonstration of movement – this is true as well if one considers time in cinema. As the movement image captures the image of thought, the time image captures thought without image – both elements achieve the realization of their meaning and occur within the realm of processing.

        In my own reverie, I still do not quite capture what Deleuze means with the screen as the brain. I guess, more than its capacity to enlighten, I would like to bestow the significance of this philosophy of film in its implications in the field of film criticism and film studies – that is, to further explore how the bran processes cinematic image; how film converses with the brain to produce the meaning of images, and how film is limited to represent images that in normal circumstances would actually be filtered by the brain against a series of known information. The cinema as brain is a complex discourse – it travels from the brain into the films and back to the brain again. At this point, what I understand is this: the brain is a tricky organ – it decides, commands, feels, hides, and maintains the body - but even medical sciences have not done a comprehensive understanding of how the brain fully works. Can we apply this dynamics as well to cinema? What are the realms of cinema that we have not explored? Can films decide, command, feel, hide, and maintain the body as well? This is a subject of future research.