Related to D. Sutton, ''The suppleness of everyday life': CGI, the Lumières, and Perception after Photography', in J. Lyons and J. Plunkett (eds.), Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet (University of Exeter Press: Exeter, 2007), pp. 18-30.

Related to H. Bergson (trans. A. Mitchell), Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911).
Description:

The final chapter of this work is titled 'The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion - A Glance at the History of Systems - Real Becoming and False Evolutionism' (viii)

Bergson's text begins by introducing two illusions: firstly, that of 'supposing that we can think the unstable by means of the immobile' (288), and second that 'Just as we pass through the immobile to go to the moving, so we make use of the void in order to think the full.' (289)

It then goes on to discuss the second of these illusions in terms of a critique of conceptions of knowledge as something that 'fills up' a void. This is discussed in terms of what it asserts as the impossibility of replacing a conception of presence with a conception of absence and the presence-dependence of the conception of absence. It also outlines some consequences of this for the consideration of reality. (289-314)

It then introduces the problem of how it is possible to perceive 'true duration', claiming at the outset that 'the function of the intellect is to preside over actions.' (315).

Following this is the claim that 'From our first glance at the world, even before we make out bodies in it, we distinguish qualities.' (317)

Each of these qualities 'resolves itself, on analysis into an enormous number of elements... every quality is change... In the smallest discernable fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality consists in the repetition of movements, as the persistence of life consists in a series of palpitations. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form or quality of a simple state' (317)

Beings 'that vibrate almost in unison with the oscillations of the ether... feel hardly anything but movements', whereas 'those that embrace trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple perceptions... perceive quality.' (318)

Though 'we concentrate a period of... evolution in a stable view which we call a form... in reality the body is changing form at every moment... What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.' [original emphasis] (318-319)

Change, or (more frequently from this point in the text) 'movement', is apprehended not as a kind of sensation, but as a kind of image: 'Examine closely what is in your mind when you speak of an action in course of accomplishment... Whether the movement be qualitative or evolutionary or extensive, the mind manages to take stable views of the instability. And thence the mind derives, as we have just shown, three kinds of representations: (1) qualities, (2) forms or essences, (3) acts.' These three kinds of representation correlate to the basic structure of language. (319-320)

Changes in perceptual states are 'qualitative movements', changes in form are 'evolutionary movements', and 'the action of eating or drinking is not like the action of fighting: they are different extensive movements.' [original emphases] (320-321)

The notion of becoming 'in general, undefined becoming' is a 'trick' that perception, intelligence and language play in which 'these profoundly different becomings' are 'extracted from' to compose 'a specified and definite state'. 'An infinite multiplicity of becomings... [pass] before our eyes: we manage so that we see only... differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow... a becoming always and everywhere the same'. (321)

'Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the marching past of a regiment. There is one way in which it might first occur to us to do it. That would be to cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, to give each of them the movement of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual although common to the human species, and to throw the whole lot on the screen. We should need to spend on this little game an enourmous amount of work, and even then we should obtain but a poor result... [T]here is another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantiations on the screenm so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does. With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is true that of we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is becaus the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive arttitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. Ands such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves ourside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to initiate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, ort express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph going inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.

Of the altogether practical character of this operation there is no possible doubt. Each of our acts aims at a certain insertion of our will into the reality. There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidescopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidescope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation. In this sense we may say, if we are not abusing this kind of illustration, that the cinematographical character of our knowledge of things is due to the kaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them.

The cinematographical method is therefore the only practical method, since it consists in making the greneral character of our knowledge form itself on that of action, while expecting that the detail of each act should depend in its turn on that of knowledge. In order that action may always be enlightened, intelligence must always be present in it; but intelligence, in order thus to accompany the progress of activity and ensure its direction, must begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is discontinuous, like every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore, is knowledge. The mechanism of the faculty of knowing had been constructed on this plan.' [original emphases] (321-324)