322 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



there 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 instantaneous views on the screen, 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 recon 

 stitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is 

 true that if 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 move 

 ment. 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 because 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 

 attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The 

 process then consists in extracting from all the move 

 ments 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. And 

 such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attach 

 ing ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place 

 ourselves outside 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 



