I remember my first struggles with trying to read Cinema One. I have read it several times now. When I first opened it I thought I had a solid grasp of many of the key terms and approaches in cinema studies. I certainly recognised and knew many of the films mentioned within the book. However, the writing and ideas did not fit within any theoretical template or schema that I could recognise. It was exciting, intriguing, sophisticated, and intimidating all at once, and certainly seemed to come from a deep appreciation, even love, of film - something which could not always be said for much cinema theory - but what would or could you do with it? I then struggled through Bergson’s Matter and Memory, and returned to Cinema One. I looked for other commentary and found little (haven’t those times changed), and what little there was repeated film theory’s fascination with the pscyhoanalytic and looked past the cinema books to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. 

At some moment during this second reading I found the pattern that helped me to begin to understand how to read this book. Film theory usually works by applying a specific theoretical frame over cinema. From this it generally does one of two things. One is to show how that particular frame provides a rationale by which we can understand the cinema. For instance, the use of semiotics to provide a way of understanding how genre works, and then using this to help define genre in film, which in turn can also be used to further genre studies and semiotics itself. The second, which basically ignores the cinema as cinema, applies a theory to illustrate or understand something that happens in the cinema, but pays little attention to anything outside of what the theory reveals. For example, the sorts of work where Freudian psychoanalysis might be applied to explain that the relation between two characters is ‘Oedipal’. Here the intent of the work is to ‘uncover’ something in the film, but this sort of second order theory does not then return to the originating theoretical proposition (it would never pause to wonder how our relation to the characters might be so framed) and so at heart keeps cinema as something outside of itself.  Both of these approaches, which I have artificially separated here since in practice the best work has always had a hermeneutic to and fro between theory and cinema, work by a logic of similitude and analogy. There is a theoretical proposition which is outside of the cinema which is then used to map the cinematic. Deleuze, for me, radically tosses this out. 

For Deleuze there is cinema first. While he certainly does rely on Bergson to create an explanatory schema this thinking expresses a filiation to the cinema that means Bergson will be melted into the cinematic, rather than the other way around. This was an ecological turn for me, in what is possibly a naive way (I could also frame it as the beginning of my understanding of the posthuman). The implication of an ecological milieu is the deep realisation that we, as a species, are not at the top of anything, and that any such scale or ranking is a reflection of our arrogance as a species, and our ability to anthropomorphise nearly anything. We are deeply implicated in a complex system where we are only one part, and the complexity and sophistication of this system means that we are always implicated and intertwingled into a manifold of relations at a multiplicity of levels to the extent that it appears specious to privilege one aspect or facet over another. In my reading of Deleuze’s conception of the cinema the cinema think us (much like Dawkin’s ‘selfish gene’ argument that we are merely vehicles for the protection and replication of DNA), or perhaps more accurately thinks itself through us. This I find compelling. I see no sensible argument that demands that the structures and systems we find ourselves within in the world must be ours, even where we have apparently made them. Like the example of language, it is intellectual folly to believe think that we speak it rather than the reverse, at best we cohabit, if you like.