iv.] FORM AND BECOMING 305 



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 to 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 

 on the screen. We should need to spend on this little 

 game an enormous amount of work, and even then we 

 should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its 

 best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, 

 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 reconstitutes 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 

 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 be- 

 cause 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 mobil- 

 ity; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible 

 movement of the film. The process then consists in ex- 

 tracting 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 move- 

 ment by combining this nameless movement with the per- 



