insubstantiality of the cinematic image (but couldn’t we question Metz’s as-
sumption that the visual need be non-material?), and it is a price that Metz cer-
tainly seems willing to pays without a second thought.
Third, when Gunning glosses Metz’s transitivity claim as marking a differ-
ence between“reality”and“realism”, he would appear to be engaging in an
effort aimed at reconciling these two points, or rather, more precisely, at affirm-
ing the first while nonetheless preserving the materiality that movement ac-
crues by way of its belonging to the broader depresencing of the world. Thus,
on Gunning’s interpretation, cinematic movement would still be immaterial or
insubstantial in relation to theatrical representation,without ceasing to belong
to the movement of the world or what I will go on to call“movement-varia-
tion”. Such a move on Gunning’s part, I would suggest, anticipates his more
recent position whose ultimate gambit, as his paper included in this volume
attests, is to situate moving images within the ontologically broader movement
of the world.
From Movement to Movement-Variation
With his notion of duration and the method of intuition necessary to experience
it, Bergson makes it possible to extend the operation of movement-impression
beyond the rarified domain of cinema and the other arts. According to Bergson,
we can only experience movement, without artificially dividing it up, by insert-
ing ourselves into it, by fusing our own duration with its duration. In his own
invocation of Bergson, Gunning likens this process to the activity of participa-
tion described by Metz:
Although Metz does not refer directly to Henri Bergson’s famous discussion of mo-
tion, I believe Bergson developed the most detailed description of theneed to partici-
pate in motionin order to grasp it. Bergson claims,“In order to advance with the mov-
ing reality, you must replace yourself within it”(Creative Evolution,). For Bergson,
discontinuous signs, such as language or ideas, cannot grasp the continuous flow of
movement, but must conceive of it as a series of successive static instants, or posi-
tions. Only motion, one can assume, is able to convey motion. Therefore, to perceive
motion, rather than represent it statically in a manner that destroys its essence,one
must participate in the motion itself.What is crucial here is the generality of Bergson’s claims for movement and par-
ticipation, and what holds these two together–what insures that movement is
necessarily correlated with participation through movement–is duration. From
the Bergsonist perspective, cinematic movement (like any concrete movement)
52 Mark B.N. Hansen