Duration Actualized

There is other without there being several; number exists only potentially. In other words, the subjective, or duration, is the virtual. To be more precise, it is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized is inseparable from the moment of actualization.” (Deleuze 42).

After yesterday’s discussion about duration I found myself wondering about the various components of the concept (multiplicity, possibility vs. potential, intuition etc.) and how these topics can be applied cinematically.  Would it be wrong to say that duration might be a part of the documentary filmmaking process? For example, if a director had more or less shaped an idea about what they wanted the film to be about without actually pinning down the specifics? He or she would have rented the equipment, assembled the crew, and traveled to the location where they would hope to capture some footage that co aligned with an idea that had not yet actualized. It would be possible for them to record something (whatever happened to spring up) but the potential of what might happen could not begin to be imagined. Hypothetically the filmmaker’s intuition could play a role in what they filmed and how they locate their subject matter. Is this analogy too simplistic? Can duration be realized in a classical narrative sense (or is the concept bigger then that)?  I think I understand how duration works in a cosmic/virtual sense… I am just curious about exploring more concrete examples that can better illustrate what Bergson and Deleuze were talking about. 

Duration

I think an important aspect of the movement-image in cinema is that it happens in duration. Deleuze says that duration is change, that it changes and does not stop changing. Cinema gives us a movement-image because it expresses a duration which changes, producing a qualitative change in the (open) whole. Such a qualitative change suggests to me something made new – a newness that is its own movement, not simply a reconstituted movement reproduced on a screen. In this way I also think that the movement of a film is never trapped but is always in relation between the various sets, objects, the viewer, etc. I have trouble with the idea of duration though, because I don’t know where to find its end. A film has an identifiable length, but it also continues with me after the reel has stopped. But what continues? Does the movement-image of cinema occur only in specific duration outside of myself or can the duration be stretched out beyond the identifiable time-length of the film?