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In a brief but profound reappraisal of Western metaphysics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks that "[a]lone the 'visual quale' gives me the presence of that which is not me, of that which simply and fully is. It can do it because, as texture, it concretizes a universal visibility, a unique Space that joins and keeps apart, that sustains all forms of cohesion (including that of past and future, since this cohesion would not exist if they were not parts on the same Space). 1 Form, according to this view, supplies history's cohesion. Of course, this is not a new-sprung idea. In the medieval European tradition, universal visibility refers to God's absolute perspective on the world and to the creative force of the divine gaze. And the Romantics, who reconstituted this perspective in the godlike boundlessness of the transcendental subject, knew that form is not an empirical given but an interior illumination of the data by the mind's eye. But whereas in the metaphysical tradition the spiritual eye stands for the demiurgic intellect, which confronts and subjects an indeterminate res extensa, Merleau-Ponty considers the gaze constitutive of the time-being continuum. Within this continuum, every moment counts and exists in its visual corroboration.
This idea of history as a "form" sustained by a homogeneous space that is given immediately to perception bears a strong resemblance to Deleuze's definition of the cinema "as the system which reproduces movement by relating it to the any-instant-whatever." 2 It is the screen, of course, that provides the homogeneous space binding each moment to the next and gives coherence to the wraiths of light projected onto it. Intercepting simultaneously the projector's beam and the spectator's gaze, the screen embodies the romantic assumption of an "ideal" present linking (and thereby shaping) perceptual data. Fulfilling mechanically the role of the transcendental consciousness, the screen offers to perception the form of something that would otherwise evade the senses. This something is, at its most basic, the phenomenon that Deleuze calls the movement-image, a technical construct which, although integral to the cinematic experience, is not actually in the photograms themselves. But the synthesis of an illusory causation by technical means opens up one of the most powerful and disturbing uses of film: its application to propaganda purposes.
Cinematic...