Guide to Reading Deleuzes The Movement-Image, Part

I: The Deleuzian Notion of the Image, or Worldslicing as

Cinema Beyond the Human

Crystal-image-eye: Deleuze's Worldslicing

What precisely does Deleuze mean by cinema, and with it, the image? And why should a
philosopher, or filmmaker, care? It seems to me that his radical notion of the image,
straddling both philosophy and film, is so incredibly powerful, if often misunderstood.
Many find his cinema books impenetrable, but once one understands precisely what he
means by the term image, these books just open up. Its like putting on glasses, or at least,
for me it was. What does it mean, for Deleuze, to do cinema, to image an aspect of the
world?
For the start of the reading guide, skip a few paragraphs down to the section called The
Deleuzian Notion of the Image, but first, a little context.
The Strange Case of the Cinema Books: Some Context as an Introduction
Im currently teaching Deleuzes Cinema I & II, once again, to my students. And I think
part of the reason I keep teaching these books, aside from the fact that at an art school they
are so incredibly relevant, is that they are so incredibly, polymorphously fertile texts.
I find also that I am drawn to texts that are singular, so odd that one wonders how they
came to be in the first place, even as these texts are too brilliant to be ignored. Texts like
Leibnizs Monadology, Spinozas Ethics, Batailles early essays, Bergsons strange
phenomenology, etc. In order to even begin to understand how they came to be, one often
has to do arduous work of reconstructing the situation of the philosopher-artist who put
them together. And I find this research to be of such a fruitful nature, it forces you to
reconstruct the gesture behind a text, and in the process, come to understand what might be
at stake to give birth to something singular as well.

Few know exactly what to make of Deleuzes two volume Cinema I & II. Philosophers
often ignore them as being about film, and film-makers are often baffled by their dense,
philosophical prose. Straddling genres, Deleuzes cinema project is truly a queer beast (and
I use both terms here lovingly, and with all potential meanings!). And these books are texts
Ive written about before, including here and here, because, well, Im fascinated.
Despite the fact that they are often overlooked, for being difficult, strange, and between
familiar genres, in so many ways, it nevertheless seems to me that this two volume monster
is the crowning work of Deleuzes late philosophy. For philosophers to overlook these texts
is to overlook the culmination, in many respects, of his life-work.
And for filmmakers to ignore these books because they are forbidding is just sad. Even if
one doesnt understand fully what he is getting at philosophically, Deleuze always argued
his books were meant to be used, put into assemblage with other modes of production. Its
not a matter of getting them right, its a matter of being affected by them. Deleuze wanted
his books to spur novel becomings, creativities on multiplie levels of scale, breaking up of
psychic and social blockages.
And this is why these texts are so fundamentally in-between. For they ask the question what
it might mean to think of philosophy cinematically, and cinema philosophically, and each
as one and the same yet also different. Deleuzes project is a becoming-cinema of
philosophy, and becoming-philosophy of cinema.
But even if you dont get all that, these books can still serve as a source of endless
inspiration for philosophers and filmmakers alike. The random insights on each page spill
off in every direction, even as the global structure lies under it all in its incredibly slippery
brilliance. Whether you come for the surface insights or the deep-structure, these are great
books, ones I never tire of spending time with, a source of continual inspiration, continually
between the categories in which we traditionally divide our lives, and hence, perfect tools
for thinking-outside.
Anyway, what follows is much of the content of what I teach my students to help them with
these books. Hope its helpful!
The Deleuzian Notion of the Image: From Image to Imaging
So, lets dive into Cinema I: The Movement-Image. One of the greatest difficulties in
understanding Deleuzes massive text, a difficulty that often makes it difficult to understand
even a single sentence or phrase, is that his notion of the image often confuses people.
What does he mean by the image?
Deleuze gets his notion of the image from Bergsons Matter and Memory, itself a difficult
text. In the process of explaining Bergson, however, he radically expands the potential of
Bergsons original idea. He spend several pages describing what he means by this notion
(starting on pg. 57 in the Univ. of Minnesota version of the text). And while these pages
present us with glimmering, inspiring prose, they are not necessarily clear. Poetic, yet not
always accessible.

The entire universe is interconnected, but any individual aspect, any part of it, is an image.
My body, a single atom, the planet Earth, the Sun, a dog, these are all images. This may
seem like an odd usage of the word, but whenever confused, you can replace this word in
your head with its verb form to image. For each of these individual entities my body, the
Earth, an atom, etc. these all depict or image the rest of the cosmos. They are refractions
of the rest of what is.
This is why whenever I teach these books to my students, I explain to them the translation
issues presented by the terms Deleuze uses such as movement-image, or perceptionimage. Due to the ways in which adjectives are used in French, it would be equally as
correct to translate these terms as image-OF-movement, image-OF-time, image-OFperception. Ive found that whenever the meaning of what Deleuze is getting at in a
passage baffles me, I can simply replace the version in the English translation with this
equivalent, and usually it becomes so much clearer. Better yet, I try to remind myself that
he means image as a verb, as an imaging. So, replace the word movement-image with
IMAGING-OF-movement, and you see what hes getting at.

A very famous perception-image from the news: A Congressman's self-photo in the mirror
which loses him his job. His perspective is foregrounded, framed in the frame, a
perception-image of a perception-image.
Namely, that anything in the world my body, the Earth, a dog these are imagings of the
movement which is our cosmos. Even that which stands still, like a book on a table, is
actually continually moving at the quantum level, as well as hurtling with the rest of us on
Earth around the Sun at an incredible pace. Any entity or object is a slice of the movement
of the universe. And it is an active slicing, because anything that appears solid to us is
actually a verb, a continual action that repeats itself while things stay the same, and
modifies when things become different. Deleuze argues elsewhere in his works that we

need to think of all nouns as verbs, a green thing as a greening, a tree as a treeing. The
same goes with the term image, it is an imaging.
A Slice of the World
And so, an image is a slice, a slicing which gives us a slice of the cosmos. And there are
many ways to slice up the world. Everything in the world is a slice of it. But there are
different ways to slice the world, giving us different types of slice.
Deleuze says that an IMAGE=FLOWING MATTER, and since all that is is flowing
matter, an image is nothing more than a world-slice, a cosmos-slice, a universe-slice. But
some ways of slicing emphasize some aspects of the universe over others.
Some ways of slicing the universe do so in a way which display the moving aspects of the
universe, and these are called movement-images. To make it easier for ourselves,
however, let us replace this with imaging-of-movement, or even better, movement-slice.
Sounds strange, but it can really be helpful in understanding this text. Try it on a passage, I
swear it works!
And so, if you emphasize the perceptual side of the world when you slice it, you produce a
perception-slice. Slice the world so as to emphasize its temporal dimensions, and you
have a time-slice.
World-Cinema, or Cinema-As-World: Or, Cinema=Worldslicing
And here we start to see the sheer power of Deleuzes concept of cinema. Any time the
universe is sliced, we are imaging, and hence, doing cinema. When I grab a handful of dirt
from the ground, by separating out a handful from the rest of the Earth, I am framing that
handful, cutting it from the background, an hence, imaging. For each aspect of the world is
a reflection-refraction of all the rest, for all is ultimately interconnected. The handful of dirt
in my hand could not exist were it not for the gravity and other forces exerted upon it by the
rest of the cosmos. This handful of dirt IS the rest of the cosmos, or at least, a reflectionrefraction of it. And hence, it is a foregrounding of some parts of the universe over others, a
framing. Just as one would move a camera to present a slice of the world to viewers, when I
grab a handful of Earth from the ground, I am doing cinema, I am slicing the world,
imaging the whole cosmos in one part.
A Walk Through my House as Deleuzian Cinema
Cinema=worldslicing. It is framing a part of the flowing matter of the universe, and then
connecting that with others. Each of our days, as we go through life, is a film, a slicing,
framing, and connecting of aspects of the universe. I leave my computer, walk into my
bedroom, and the flowing matter presented to my vision changes. I move from the close-up
of staring at my screen, to the medium shot of my bed. I am slicing up the world by means
of the framing devices of my eyes, so similar to that of the camera which was abstracted
from it.

And then I sit down to watch TV. I watch an image presented to me in another frame, a
frame within the frame presented by my eyes. The TV news is on. They present me with a
clip of video taken by an eye witness. I realize I am seeing an image seen from the
perspective of another. I am viewing an image which is an imaging of perception, a slice of
the world which emphasizes, by its relation to other images, its perceptualness. I am
viewing a perception-image.
I then find myself wanting a cup of coffee. I put a pot of water on the stove. I begin to see
how the fire impacts the water, how the bubbles begin to emerge in the whole pot of water,
how parts and wholes begin to interact, negotiating, which will boil off, which will settle
down, which patters of bubbles will emerge, all as the fire affects the water, causing it to
change amongst itself. I see the agony of decision ripping apart the water, forming new
wholes, new parts, distorting, warping it. The perception of the flame by the water creates
an attempt at motion, an attempt to flee the pot into a gaseous state, a consideration of an
action. But between perception and action, there is affection. The pot of water as it starts to
boil presents to my eyes an affection-image.
We must not think that each slice is only one thing, however. For the view of the boiling
water presented to my eyes as affection-image is also clearly viewed from my eyes, and
hence, represents me, if indirectly, my perspective on the world. It is a perception-image
OF an affection-image. And both are movement-images, because they are images of the
world which represent a transition, a movement, in the world. Any image, ultimately,. is a
movement-image, that is, an image of the movement of the world. Perception, affection,
and action images are simply types thereof.
As the water begins to boil, I see wafts of steam rise from the water. Rather than the
framing of a perception-image, or the intertwined warping of an affection-image, I see a
separation, distinction, as gas separates from liquid, one goes one way, one the other. I now
have before me an action image. I pour the boiling water into my coffee cup, I see it mix
with my (admittedly patheticly instant coffee) grinds, filling the cup, I see the volume of
the cup is now full of dark liquid, all these are images of action in the world.

An affection-image, an imaging of the way in which heat affects water.

I mix milk now into my coffee. I see the strands of milk intertwine slowly with the coffee,
patches of light and dark. I see before me that some of these strands last longer than others.
The relative differences present a slice of the world which images the ways in which some
processes of change endure longer than others. I am presented with an image of change, or
difference, intertwined with duration, or sameness. I am presented with an image of time, a
time-imaging, a slice of the universe which images time. This is a time-image.
This time-image reminds me of a similar scene in a Godard film. I see the image from that
film, reconstructed in my minds eye. I have a recollection-image.
And then I am yanked back into my everyday life by the perception-image presented to me
by my tongue: the coffee is too hot. I am reminded, not all images are visual! The heat felt
by my tongue is a condensation of all the universe into a single sensation, framed from the
rest of the universe by the perspective on it provided by my body, the tip of which is my
tongue. The tip of my tongue is like the frame provided by my eye or a cinema camera, it
slice up the world based on its perspective on it, and in doing so, allows certain
sensations, certain slices of the world, to be foregrounded over others.

Another famous affection-image cited by Deleuze: imaging how pain affects a face in
Dreyer's 'Passion of Joan of Arc'
As I am still reeling from the heat of the coffee, I hear a bird chirp out the window. A
perception-image provided to me by my ears, based on how they frame the world, slice it,
the perspective on the world they provide me. I feel an emotion well up in me in response
to that bird-song, I feel the waves of emotion, an affection-image, which calls up to my
mind a memory of other birds at other times, a recollection-image.

A complex action-image: An image of movement, yet also an imaging of perception (the

camera's, the human who took the photo's), an imaging of affection (the face of the man
being hit, for example), and an imaging of the action of the body of one man on another.
A Deleuzian Typology, or the Crystal of the Universe
The universe is nothing but a crystal of images, reflecting and refracting each other. Each
entity, by slicing the universe up in its own way, produces its own cinema, framing and
cutting, slicing and imaging, producing perception-images of movement-images. When
these lead to negotiations between multiple potential states, these perception-images lead to
affection-images, which can lead to distinctions, or action-images, images of actiondistinction. For if a perception image layers images as the same(yet different) by virtue of
being in the same frame, and affection-images show images colliding, transforming into
each other as powers or qualities impacting each other, the same yet different by virtue of
negotiating the same part-whole, then action images show differences being actually
distinct, becoming distinct, acting up each other distinctly, etc. Difference has now come to
the fore. And as Deleuze argues, as we get closer to time-images, we see how difference in
the image is precisely what time is, the more difference present directly in an image, the
more it captures time, the more it directly images not merely spatial movement, but the
radical differing relation of movement to itself that humans have called the passage of time.

The tree-rings from Hitchcock's 'Vertigo': The trees rings are an image of time, of
time/change/difference in the image, which I've remembered to use here because of the
image of recollection of this scene I experienced earlier which made me think to make use
of it.
Any movement-image has the potential to be any of the other types of images Deleuze
describes. Any perspective allows any movement-image to become a perception-image, and
from there, all the other are possible, depending on the manner in which they are
intertwined.
Deleuzes cinema of the universe is post-human, he believes the universe is cinema, a
continual self-refracting producing radical difference from within it, continually producing
new perspectives upon its ever changing self. This does not mean that humans are perhaps
not particularly adept cinematics. For we are a particularly complex intertwining of images,
our bodies allow us to recognize, say, a given image as similar to another in the past, and by
linking them together via our memory, despite the fact that they are radically separated in
terms of their contexts, we produce a very abstract form of image, a recollection-image.
And yet, we are hardly the only entities in the universe with images of time. Deleuze makes
clear analogies between the ways in which human brains work, and the ways in which the
complex of cinema screens in the world are like a giant brain, each screen like a neuron,
helping cinema view itself in its world-thinking. And each screen is like a mini-brain,
linking together all the cameras and humans that produced it, like its neurons in turn
helping it think one larger film-thought.
And yet cinema screens are created by humans. But what about the natural world? View the
rings on a tree. Each ring links up all the growth in a tree which happened in a given year.
Slice open a tree and you see an image of time presented in the rings. But it takes
something as complex as the human mind to associate these rings with the time that
produced them. The tree may have a direct image of time, but a relatively simple one. A
tree has rings, and yet, isnt able to use them to link up with different time periods, because
it doesnt know that it has an image of time. Only animals, as far as we know, and
potentially some computers, can combine time images like this via recollection-images, and
produce complex circuits such as recognition, association, dreaming, etc.
A Relational Image-Cosmos
It should not be thought that any particular image, however, means any particular thing.
Take any clip of film, say, the image of my coffee cup on my table. Surround it in a film,
before and after, with a shot-reverse-shot of my face, and the image of the coffee-cup on
my table becomes a perception-image. Now take the same slice of film, and surround it by
a different set of images. Show me asleep, then show the same clip of the coffee cup on the
table, then me waking up. And now that clip of the coffee cup on the table, simply by being
surrounded by different other images, becomes a dream-image, a variant of a recollectionimage.

Images become different, become other than what they are/were, simply by being woven
together differently. And this is why, for Deleuze, we must learn to believe once again in
the world, and cinema can show us how to do this. For Deleuze firmly believes that the
universe is not, like Nietzsche argues in some places, like a set of legos, made up of finite
parts, and hence with a finite number of combinations. No, for Deleuze, there are infinite
potential recombinations of our world, because entities, or images, are not like legos. They
can be infinitely divided and redivided. And hence, there are infinite potential combinations
and recombinations.

For Deleuze, the world is much more than just legos, it is infinitely divisible and
redivisible, which is why we must always relearn, via cinema in all its forms, to believe in
the world, believe in its potential to be radically new, and infinitely so. With infinite
divisibility, there is infinite recombination and hence possibility . . .
Cinema is the practice of world dividing and redividing. The more intricate the relations,
the more variety of ways we can relate and rerelate to our world. Cinema on screen can
help us see new ways to view our world. It rearticulates the world, and in doing so, shows
us potentially new ways to live life. For life and cinema are two sides of the same. Cinema
is life, and life is cinema.
And it can always be done differently, in an infinite potential number of ways.

Guide to Deleuzes The Movement-Image, Part II:

From the Affect-Image to the Relation-Image

A perception-image: the image of perception as seen by a fly.

Today I was teaching the second half of The Movement-Image, from the second half of the
affection-image through the impulse and action to relation-images. And there are certain
things that trip up my students, and my own attempts to explain these images that, when
worked through, can make the text so much eaiser. So heres some things to keep in mind . .
.
- There are no solid bodies for Deleuze. No objects in Deleuzes world (cinema books, yet
also beyond) are ever fully real. That is, they are always temporary conglomerations of
forces in balance. What looks like a real objects, say, a coffee mug on my table, is really a
careful balancing act between the forces acting to implode it and explode it, tear it to bits,
shred it, etc. What appears to my eyes as a concrete object is a balanced binding together of
disparate sub-molecular quantum particles that can fly off into space at any moment,
dissolve before my eyes, and which eventually will decompose and separate out. A concrete
object is a temporary aggregate, only the slowness of its decomposition makes it seem real
to my eyes. Let us call any such entity, a temporary balance of forces that move together a
BODY.
- Bodies are surrounded by backgrounds, and composed of forces. All bodies exist against a
background, and are composed of balances between forces. Different images in The
Movement-Image will then modulate these in a wide variety of way, each explained below.
- Perception-images are about perspective. All images in our world, and all those which are
capturable by cinema, come from a particular perspective. When this happens, we say they

are perspective-images, images of the perception of a slice of the moving universe, such
that our perspective/perception shows up in the image in the very form it takes. When I
view the coffee mug on my table from my chair, it looks different than when I view it
sitting on the floor. The shift here is a shift in my perspective, and it shows up in the form
of the perception image of the mug.

An Affection-Image: a scene from the opening of Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which we see

ripples in the water, and the movement of the reeds under the water. A leaf floats by. While
more than just an affection-image, this image most definitely captures the rippling of the
water and reeds, and thus it is an affection-image (if also, in this film, much more!)
- Affection images are images of entities in the process of being altered by qualities. When
a quality, anything you can describe by an adjective (ie: wetness, redness, hardness,
angryness, etc.), plays itself out over the surface of a body, that body acts as an image of
affection. Deleuze in many places describes an affection as the ability to receive or exercise
a power. Light affects my eyes, just as my eyes can be affected by light. Not only bodies
can be affected by qualities but also locations (ie: scene slowly fading to red, a face
contorting in pain), by also scenes (ie: the light in an entire scene dims, an entire street gets
windy). Just as Deleuze says that any entity that is affected is a type of face (he calls this
faceity), a face-like surface which is composed of singularities which determine the
possibilities of its affection by a quality which if exceeded it ceases to be what it is (ie: a
face has eyes, nose, mouth, a mug has a handle, etc.), when a scene serves as more of a
vehicle for an affect (ie: a street which isnt important in itself, but in being a windy street),
then that scene becomes an any-space-whatsoever, a space-whateverish, a space which
serves merely as a vehicle for an affect. Lets keep in mind that affections are ways in
which entities impact or modulate or warp others. Affects are the ways in which one entity
expresses the impact of another entity upon it. In Deleuzes famous reading of Dreyers
Passion of Joan of Arc, we see the accusations made against Joan impact her and mix with
her own self-affections (emotions) on the surface of her face. The little bits of space shown
around the super-closeups of her face are what Deleuze calls disconnected spaces, which
are types of any-spaces-whatsoevers. We should keep in mind, however, that you could
easily have an affection image in the ripples a stone causes to form on the surface of a pool
of water. That pools ripples are its affections. A pool like this likely has no singularities,
because it is flat, but put a lily-pad and a small island in the pool, and instant singularities.
Its not necessarily important in an affection image to show the source of an affect. Even if
the pebble is case into a pool in part of the pool that is offscreen, we can still see the

ripples. If an entire scene fades to red, like they often do in Bergmans Cries and Whispers,
the affect comes from nowhere, as it were, but we still see its effects. If at any point we
freeze the film, we get a static state of a given affection, which is what Deleuze calls a
quality, while an entire series of such frames, a set of ripples in a pool, or the contortion of
a face in anger, expresses a power. Sometimes films present several distinct domains,
locations, characters, etc., which are dominated by a given affect, like Heaven and Hell.
When this happens, Deleuze says we see lyrical abstraction at work, slightly different from
the more rigidly coded affectively charged spaces of expressionism.
- Impulse-images are attempts to image forces in a film. Sometimes something in a film
seems as if animated by a force that seems to give it power as if from beyond. Crucifixes
and religious relics may ward off evil spirits in a film, magicians may create explosions
from saying words or particular gestures, fetish objects or particular body parts may seem
to incite others to lust as if they were inspired by magic forces, products and commodities
may make people desire them wildly, etc. In these cases, objects or actions seem to express
a force from beyond. In these cases, the objects or actions image a force or drive (pulsion,
in French). The poorly translated impulse-action (limage de pulsion) is an attempt to
image a force or drive. Because these are abstract notions, however, we can only see their
effects, and rarely the force itself. A magic wand may seem to possess force, a naked body
may seem to draw people to it, a vampire may lust after blood as if the blood had a power
over it, food may seem to draw the hungry to it, a neurotic may be convulsed with a
symptomatic action by their unconscious. In all these cases, a force (pulsion) seems to
make an object (Deleuze calls this a fragment, which come in several varieties) or an action
(Deleuze calls this a symptom) express a force which derives from an originary world
(otherwordly source of the force, always outside of the world of the scene). The chapter on
the impulse-image is Deleuzes attempt to outdo Lacan, for the unconscious here can serve
as an example of an originary world, but it is not reducible to it. Deleuze also speaks of
derived milieu in this chapter, these are locations which are permeated by forces, magical
forces which may emerge from the very fabric of the location in question. The inside of the
spaceship at the begining of Ridley Scotts Alien is an example of this. The realm of the
part-object of psychoanalysis, this is the domain of fragments and wholes that dont
correspond, a world of H.G. Giger. Impulse-images (perhaps better translated as images of
force) rarely show us the force in question directly. However, when lightning shoots out of
a magicians fingers, this is perhaps a rare example of a force shown directly in an image.
Deleuze also describes how it is that forces may arise from the repetition of scenes, bodies,
actions, etc. A repeated gesture can manifest a compulsion, a repeated scene can unleash
magic powers, a repetition with a difference can change the meaning of the original, or
cement it in place. Thus, a second coronation in a film may be either a bad repetition, or a
liberating one, depending on which sorts of forces it unleashes into the world. Deleuze says
that time first creeps into the movement-image in a semi-direct form in this manner.

The impulse-image, or image of force: Deleuze's 'derived milieu' are worlds suffused by
forces, in which parts and wholes may switch relation at any time, like in an image by H.G.
Giger
- Action-Images are all about shifts in the balance between bodies, forces, and their
environments. When a film clip shows an action, like the sweep of the blade of a samurai,
we see the movement of a body, and yet, a body can only move when there is a shift in the
balance of forces within it, in its environment, and the relation between the two. This is
why Deleuze believes that an action and its situation are intimitely intertwined. The
tension in the air between two samurai, within their bodies, and between them, is then
released when the bodies go into motion and convulse, moving us from one relatively
stable state of bodies, environments (encompasers), and forces (Deleuze calls balanced
pairs of forces in a duel a binomial), which come together as a situation (a set of entities
which Deleuze calls a synsign), into a new situation. Situation, Action, new Situation, or
SAS. Films in which the situations are relatively well understood in relation to actions take
this form, which Deleuze calls the large form, and include films like traditional westerns
and samurai films, traditional documentaries, traditional comedies, monumental history
films (ie: how Rome was founded), and most other types of action films, and even dramas
(words exchanged in dialogue are still actions!). There is also the small form, ASA, in
which an action occurs outside of a clear link to a situation. This situation is slowly
revealed, and then there is another action to throw everything out of balance again. Films
dominated by this form show us actions but only explain these actions slowly, if at all. We
see these in the film of manners and court intrigue, non-traditional documentaries (ie: Erol
Morris), subversive comedies (ie: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplain, in which an action
occurs yet the situation is then never right for it), history films of intrigue, detective films,
etc. Sometimes the task of a film is to discover the situation lurking beneath appearances,
that which will allow for actions to not misfire (many of Kurosawas films are about
extracting the question beneath a situation). Deleuze also speaks in this section about
connected and disconnected lines of action (line of the universe and broken or wrinkled
line), and connected and disconnected spaces in which actions take place (Breath

Encompasser versus skeleton or dispersed spaces). Here Deleuze compares actions in a

scene to the breathing of the action-situation complex, and lines of action as either
complete or broken, just like spaces may be organically connected, semi-connected, or truly
disconnected.

The Relation-Image: What makes this key different from others? The relations it
condenses . . .
- Relation-images show the way an image relates aspects of a film beyond a given scene.
When we see the scene in Hitchcoks Notorious (Hitchcock is the primary director
discussed by Deleuze in this chapter) in which Ingrid Bergman holds the key in her hand, at
her husbands ball, Hitchcock begins the shot by giving us a wide-angle view of the entire
ball from above, only slowly closing in to end the show with a close-up of Bergmans hand
holding the key. The message is clear: all that is happening at this ball is meaningless in
comparison to the significance held in the fact that Bergman possesses this key in her hand.
For in fact, Bergman plays a US spy who has married a Nazi agent living in Brazil, and she
has stolen this key to help her contact, Cary Grant, get enough evidence on her husbands
activities. She has to get that key to her contact before her husband realizes it is gone from
his key ring and suspects her. By showing us the closeup of the key, Hitchcock isnt
showing us just a key, he is condensing a whole set of abstract relations in the film into a
key which represents them, if indirectly. The relation-image is the imaging of relations in a
film. Of course, its impossible to show relations (ie: shes a spy, married to a husband that
doesnt know, she needs to figure out her husbands Nazi plot before she figures out shes a
spy) directly. But the key can show them indirectly. This is why Deleuze calls the relationimage an attempt to image thought, for these abstract concepts are what unite together
objects, actions, plots, actors, etc. The relation image is the first attempt to image a type of
thought, and what we see here is the simplest form of thought that Deleuze will describe as
being imaged in film. The significance of a relation-image is in the images before and after
it in the film with which it is related. This is why a relation-image is simply a normal
perception-image, or any other type of image, which has more meaning to it because of its
relations to others. In this sense, it is like a word love, which gains more meaning when
paired with other words, and that meaning can change, depending on whether or not we
pair love with words in the form I love you, or You love him, or She loves you, etc.
Relation images are images whose significance lies outside of themselves, in relation.When
an entity reveals relations by being a part of a series (ie: when you see my signal again,

shoot!) or set of relations (ie: drop the money off with the man in a raincoat and bowler
hat), Deleuze calls it a mark, while that which evidences that something is wrong or out of
place is called a demark (ie: hey, theres not supposed to be a boat over there!).
And from here, Deleuze moves forwards to The Time-Image . . .

Guide to Reading Deleuzes Cinema II: The Time-Image,

Part II: Towards a Direct Imaging of Time to CrystalImages

An early crystal-image in Welles' 'Lady from Shanghai'

If the greatest impediment to understanding Deleuzes concepts in The Movement-Image is
confusion over what he means by the word image, then a similar roadblock occurs in The
Time-Image in relation to his use of the word time. Understand what he means by the word
image, and Cinema I is a massively easier read; understand what he means by the word
time, and the same thing happens for Cinema II.
Bergsons Critique of Clock-Time
Deleuzes conception of time in Cinema II is taken almost directly from Bergson, and with
Bergson, its easiest to start out by describing precisely what time does not mean for both of
them. Bergsons philosophy finds its genesis in the critique of clock time, and in favor of
the lived time of duration. Clock-time, for Bergson, is a way of spatializing time, and as
such, it really isnt time, its a form of space. When we think of the time captured by clocks,
we think of each moment as a self-contained entity, complete unto itself, separate from the
others. Time is then best diagrammed as pearls on a string, with each pearl a separate
moment. With each tick of the clock, we move from one pearl to the next.

Time is not like this: Bergson and Deleuze critique clock-time

For Bergson, this is a highly misleading and ultimately false image of time. Lived time,
time that endures, is time that flows, time in which the past and future penetrate into the
present in the form of memory and desire. Time stretches when it seems to move more
slowly (ie: when bored), and compacts during moments of crisis, and we seem to dip
deeper into memory at some points (ie: moments of dreaming, fantasy, reverie), and more
shallowly during moments of action.
Between Virtual and Actual
For Bergson, the present is a dynamic interpenetration of past and future. The aspect of our
lived world that is here for us right now, in the present moment as that which feels most
real to us, is what he calls the actual. When I hold an object in my hand, say, a coffee mug,
it feels more real than the memory of a coffee mug, or an image of a coffee mug on a TV
screen. That feeling of being more real is what allows us to tell an actual coffee mug from
one which is less real, so to speak, or more virtual. An image of a coffee mug in memory,
or in a film, is thus a virtual image, while the one we hold in our hand at any given moment
is an actual image (and remember, everything is an image for Deleuze, because when he
says image it is, for him, and following Bergson, a way of saying a slice of the world).
Worldslices, or images, come in many shades of actuality, and some are more actual and
less virtual, or more virtual and less actual, than others.
During periods of stress, in which we are focused on action, we find ourselves immersed in
the present moment, its needs and exigencies. At this point, we exist mostly in the actual,
there is very little virtuality in our world. Since the past and the future, represented in our
present as memory and desire/fantasy/anticipation, are relatively weak at this moment, we
can say that when concentrating on action, we exist mostly in the actual.
But as we dive deeper into memory and/or fantasy, that is, the realm of the virtual, we leave
the present and its needs ever more behind. This is why it is perhaps best to equate the
actual with the present, and the virtual with the past/future, or future/past, whichever you
prefer. Because the actual will always feel more real, more present, than aspects of the

past/future (except for in cases of hallucination). So, at least for humans and in relation to
issues of time, the virtual is the past/future, and vice-versa. This isnt to say that there may
not be other examples of the virtual. For example, for Deleuze, an actual coffee mug
produces a virtual image when reflected in a mirror. But as we will see, for Deleuze, images
in a mirror have a peculiar temporal relation to the actuals they reproduce, more of which
will be said in a bit.
Why Time is Freedom
Here we also see why it is that Bergson and Deleuze equate the virtual with freedom. For
my dog, a creature of instinct, the actual almost always leads directly to a preprogrammed
action. But for me, an actual impression may lead to an instinctual action, or reverie or
fantasy or recollection, and with a much greater degree of latitude than my dog. When my
dog sees his food, he is unlikely to be thinking of Proust the moment afterwards, while
humans have this happen all the time. Which is why we only sometimes do what our
instincts tell us, because the past may interrupt the present, and present novel ways of
reading the present which may influence our future. Likewise, we may have all sorts of
desires which draw particular aspects of our past into contact with our present in ways that
disrupt the chain of instinct. The virtual past/future infused into the actual is what produces
freedom from being enslaved to the moment. If rocks are fully enslaved to the moment,
plants slightly less so, animals a little freer, only humans, as far as we know, can gain
significant freedom, and this is because of our complex brains. Brains which store our
futurepasts so as to use them to increase our options.
To sum up, the present is more or less the actual, and the past/future is more or less the
virtual. Thus, there are two axes to time, not only. Yes, time presses ever further into the
future, and we know this because our stores of memory increase over time. This could be
thought of as the movement of time horizontally. Such movement, however, isnt like
moving from one pearl to another along a string of pearls, but rather, as a sort of increase in
the memory store of the past as the future flows into it via the doorway of the present.
However, in addition to a horizontal axis to time, there is also a vertical axis. The closer one
is to the present, the closer one is to what in math would be the x-axis, the line of horizontal
movement along which past, present, and future are distributed. But the further one dips
into the virtual, the past/future, the more one expands upon the y-axis.
Let us say, for example, that in the middle of an action, for example, a morning walk, you
encounter some animal youve never seen before. What is that, you wonder. As you dip into
past memory to search for something that resembles this, you finally find some memories
that seem to fit. This is the process of recognition. Recognition that is relatively automatic,
and becomes habit, requires less depth of digging around in the past, but when you need to
dig more deeply, there is a greater degree of the virtual in the present (more expansion on
the y-axis). While it may also take more time to dig around in memory like this (and hence
expand on the x-axis), this is not always necessarily the case.
Three Basic Time-Images: Recognition, Recollection, and Dream

Recognition is the lowest level of digging into the depth, so to speak, of the present, and
into the future/past. Recollection is the next level of depth, in which one keeps a more
tenuous connection to the present, but dives into memory to reconstruct a scene from
yesterday, or last year. One is less present in the present moment, so to speak. And finally,
when one is dreaming, or fantasizing, one has barely a connection to the present at all. We
get lost in reverie, for example, and we may trip as we walk because we are caught up in
our memory-fantasies. Or when we get totally involved in a dream, we find that we are
sleeping, with barely any connection to the present at all. Bergson even hypothesizes that
perhaps death is what happens when the cord is fully disconnected, breaking the link
between virtual and actual completely.

Such images of negation are perhaps on the cusp, in between images of movement (and all
things in the universe are these) and time-images.
Its important to note that the virtual is not merely the past, and memory, but also the future,
and fantasy. For when we fantasize about something, say, we imagine what food we want
for dinner, we do so by assembling memories into aggregates. I imagine a wonderful
dinner, but the image I have of this that anchors my fantasy is composed of bits and pieces
of memories hauled from the past. Likewise, when I recollect something, this is as much a
recreation, and hence, full of fantasy and the future and present as much as the past.
Memories wouldnt distort were this not the case. Furthermore, even the present moment of
recognition is infused with the future. For when I recognize something in front of me, I use
not only memory, but desire, namely, the desire that impels me to action. When I walk
down the street, my desire is what impels me, what reaches into my store of memory to
retrieve images to meet the present and help me recognize what is in front of me. The past
cant be activated without the future dipping into it. The virtual is this interpenetration of
the past and future by means of the present.
It is for this reason that Bergson and Deleuze also describe the virtual as the potential for
difference, for creation, for the radically new. The actual is in a sense dead, it can only be
what it is. But the virtual is the opening of what is onto the possibility to be different in the
future, to have been different in the past, and for desire and memory to impact the present
so as to alter its relation to itself and the world around it.

Thus, we can come up with a semi-equation to help us.

The virtual=past/future=freedom=the new/creation=difference=time,
The actual=the present=necessity=the same=repetition=space.
Now as any whove studied some Deleuze know, the distinction between difference and
repetition is essential to him. The virtual is associated with difference, pure difference, and
the actual with that which repeats, which stays the same, with repetition.
What is a Time-Image?
What then is a time-image? A time-image, for Deleuze, is an image which is infused with
time. That is, it is an image which is different from itself, which is virtual to itself, which is
infused with past/future. What types of images are these?
Humans use time-images all the time. We call up images in our memories or fantasies to
help us navigate the world. We dont think these images are as real as those provided by our
senses at the present moment, but they exist for us nevertheless. When I recognize a coffee
mug on my table, I do so by pairing it up in my mind with virtual images of mugs and cups
past. Recognition is the pairing of virtual and actual images. Habit occurs when this process
becomes semi-automatic, but whenever I encounter something new or different, the process
becomes more extended. Any image I draw from the past and/or synthesize with others so
as to help me with my process of recognition is called by Deleuze, following Berson, a
recognition-image. Were I to drag fragments of memory out of my past to reconstruct an
entire scene, for example, of what I did when I last saw my friend two years ago, the image
I created of the past, a flashback, essentially, would be a recollection- image. And were I to
dream of that meeting, and perhaps then have fantastic things happen, like we meet a
cartoon character for dinner later that night, we would have a dream-image.
Such images are never merely images, for Deleuze, That is, they are images which stand
for, or in relation, to other images. This is why these images also function as signs, virtual
signs of actual images from the present which calls them up in the first place. This is why
in Cinema II we see, for the first time, images referred to as signs. Deleuze calls
recognition and recollection images forms of mnemo-signs, basically, memory signs. And
he calls dream-images types of oneiro-signs. (It is worth noting that relation-images, prototime-images discussed towards the end of Cinema I, show relation but not via
consciousness, and are in a sense ancestors of op- and son-signs . . . )
In film, we often see the process of recognition, recollection, or dream depicted for us. If
someone in a film sees something, and then we see a memory of the past flash on screen,
followed by an act which shows that now the character recognizes the object in front of
them, the image drawn from the past functions in the film in question as a recognitionimage. When a flashback occurs in a film, it provides us with recollection-images. And
when someone falls asleep and dreams, or hallucinates, we have dream-images.
What distinguishes these three types of images from the more actual images of Cinema I is
that they are always not fully what they are. That is, they are virtual, they function as signs.

An image of an object in a dream is not fully real, because it is just a dream. We know it
is just a dream because in some other part of the film, we are told this, or this is somehow
indicated. When we see the person wake up from the dream later in the film, or go to sleep
before, this context is virtually present in the dream-images, and this virtual presence
makes these images feel less real to us. Thus, the images in a dream are more virtual, and
less actual, than others, because they are suffused with context, with that which is not
themselves. That is, they are suffused with difference, otherness, they are only partly there.
And here we see why it is that context, difference, time, representation, and relation are all
linked to the notion of virtuality for Deleuze.
Any image which functions like this, which helps us recognize, recollect, or dream, is a
type of time-image. And there were time-images before WWII, in the period of cinema that
was dominated by the movement-image. But after WWII, time-images become ever more
prevalent, particularly in avant-garde or non-mainstream, non-Hollywood film. Hollywood
film remains stuck in the action-image, while film that really explores new potentials for
both filmic and human consciousness began to explore the time-image directly. For the
time-image in fact showed itself in two forms before WWII. The first is in prewar
recognition, recollection, and dream-images. But there was also the indirect imaging of
time via montage. Attempts to capture and image movement used cuts, and cuts indicate a
form of pure difference which registered and impacted the images they connected. This is
why Deleuze says that montage is an indirect image of time, a version that speaks through
the movement-image. Pre-war recollection, recognition, and dream images are direct
images of time, yet weak ones. For in fact, they are filtered through human forms of
consciousness. They are in a sense cloaked or clothed (to use terms employed by Deleuze
in Difference and Repetition) by the sensory-motor schema that dominates the cinematic
image before World War II. Thus, we see flashbacks, and dreams, but they are always
clearly demarcated. The only odd exception, for Deleuze, are films which depict fantastic
worlds that are like dreams, but arent dreams as such. The prewar musicals of Busby
Berkeley and Vincent Minnelli are prime examples of the world as dream (a form which
takes off in the immediate post-war period with the uber-trippy Powell and Pressburger
opera-spectacle film from 1951, Tales of Hoffman).
The Post-War Context, and the Direct Image of Time
But after World War II, non-mainstream cinema begins to explore direct-images of time in a
manner which is free from the relation of time to action. Films depict dreams and fantasies
and memories in abrupt fashion, often not indicating to us we are in dream or fantasy till
much later in the film, suspending our ability to tell what is actual or virtual until later. But
then there are time-images which simply arent tied down to human consciousness. Such
direct time-images are uncloaked, so to speak.
We see these first, Deleuze argues, in two early non-Hollywood contexts, namely, the films
of Italian neo-realism, and the films of Ozu. In neo-realist film, we often see the camera
linger on the scenes of destruction which serve as the setting for many of these films. It is
as if the camera is attempting to process these images, but it cannot, so it lingers, and
registers the trauma of the image in its pure form, the difference of the image from our
ability to integrate it into our world. In Ozu, we often see his famed pillow shots, in which

we pull away from one of his domestic dramas, and Ozu provides us with an image which
seems to metaphorically comment upon the scene at hand, but which floats, as it were,
outside the direct consciousness of any particular character. Such images which seem to lift
up out of the consciousness of the characters in the film, but which also are beyond the
traditional establishing shot, are examples of what in literature would be called freeindirect discourse, namely, something between the voice of the narrator and of the
characters. Deleuze taps this term, and uses it to describe these moments of what can
ultiamtely be called free-indirect camera or vision. These moments Deleuze describes as
those of opsigns and sonsigns, or optical and sound images which cannot be integrated into
either pure objective or subjective frames.
Deleuze is a bit unclear as to whether or not traditional recognition, recollection, and
dream-images should be considered direct images of time (though he does refer to them as
time-images, hence my use of the term cloaked to make a distinction here). But he is very
clear to say that if montage indirectly imaged time via the movement-image, then the opand son-signs give us direct images of time.
Mirror-Images: From Hyalo-signs to Image Crystals
Beyond this, however, there are also time-images which are further removed from the
sensory-motor schema whereby the perception, affection, and action of human bodies in
movement dominated film. There are films in which we see mirrorings of various sorts.
Mirrors provide us with virtual images of actual entities. A person seeing their actual face in
the mirror sees a virtual image of their face. What is the temporal status of their face? It
seems as if the time of the mirror exists in a perpetual past-future, or future-past of the
present of the actual image if reflects. From here, we see Deleuze develops his notion of the
hyalo-sign, or glass- or mirror-image.
Deleuze doesnt limit hyalo-signs to mirror images in film. Rather, two characters which
are similar to each other, that resemble each other, are often referred to as mirror-doubles,
particularly in psychoanalytic film criticism. And here we see Deleuze take on
psychoanalysis, and show that he is able to outflank it. Mirrorings in film disrupt the
otherwise linear flow of time in a film, they create temporal short-circuits. For if time is
generally marked by entities like clocks, which use the difference physical difference
presented by the world around us to mark relative degrees of change in space, what happens
when space starts to resemble itself? Mirrors disrupt time. And when there is a hall of
mirrors, which Deleuze calls a crystal (for a crystal is little other than an object made of
many little shards of reflecting surface), then we have an entity in which notions of before
and after start to literally break down. Films in which parts of the film mirror each other,
which are full of short-circuits of this sort, he calls image crystals, or crystal-images.
Time travel films of all sorts are image crystals, as are films which literalize fantasy,
hallucinations, and dreams so as to create repetitions of various sorts. Films full of mimicry
and doubling might not have overt time-travel in them, but they produce odd temporal
short-circuits nevertheless. These are all, for Deleuze, crystal-image films.

Ive discussed image crystals in several other posts, so Ill stop here. But needless to say,
crystal-images are the way in which Deleuze is able to emphasize the aspect of the virtual
which is truly that of difference, beyond any human notion of time. The virtual is difference
as such, becoming, and time, particularly human time, is merely one of its forms.
This is why Deleuze says that time-images bring montage into the image. They are pure
difference inside an image. When we see crystal image films, we very often will not know,
on first viewing, what exactly an image means. One thing you learn watching image
crystals is to suspend your judgment of images, because you will never know which aspect
of an image will be selected for radical reworking later in the film. In this manner, each
image becomes suffused with past/future, time, context, relation, and difference. It becomes
virtual, less directly present, pure difference lurks between the very pores of the aspects of
the image. What is present is an imaging of time, a depiction of time, of pure difference, in
the image itself.
A direct imaging of time.

Guide to Reading Deleuzes Cinema II, Part III: From

Image-Crystals to the Powers of the False

Max Ophuls massive technicolor spectacle as an image as perfect crystal: Lola Montes
Transition to the Powers of the False: Crystals, Peaks, and Sheets
Today Im going to tackle what Deleuze calls the powers of the false. He addresses these
after the crystal image, discussed a bit in my last post, but which I want to expand on a little
before going into the powers directly.
Deleuze says that there are four types of crystal (and he adds a fifth type in his discussion).
These are films which give us perfect crystals, cracked crystals, forming crystals, and
decomposing crystals. The perfect crystal he aligns with the films of Max Ophuls, in which
copies proliferate with seemingly no end in sight (for example, in a film like Lola Montes,
in which the circus act and the memories of her life mirror each other back and forth at the

expense of chronological narrative). The cracked crystal he identifies with the films of
Renoir, in which there is often a play of mimicry between characters which is finally
disrupted by one event which creates a line of flight out of the hall of mirrors (like the
gunshot at the end of Rules of the Game). Fellini is the filmmaker of the crystal in
formation, for example, in a film like 8 1/2, anything the main character Guido sees in his
real life can act as a seed to crystallize the medium of his inner world to produce
extended flights into memory or fantasy. Deleuze argues that in later Fellini, we often see
spaces (like the rooms in the housing projects in ancient Rome in Satyricon) represent
separate pathways in time, forming a giant spatial crystal of time. And finally Deleuze
describes Visconti as the filmmaker of the crystal in decomposition. Viscontis films often
show us the fall of the wealthy and powerful. These are figures who have been able to make
their worlds resemble, mimic, and mirror them in a variety of ways. But in Viscontis films,
everything his formerly powerful figures touch begins to disintegrate, decrystallize.

The turning crystal of the Solaris ocean: without what came before and after, this would
simply be a movement-image . . .
Tarkovsky, however, takes pride of place in this chapter, and Deleuze describes his work, in
some beautiful passages, as films of the turning crystal. We see particular scenes, like the
reeds or chemical oceans in Solaris, that seem to try to image the process of crystallization
of time itself, as a constantly churning self-differingness. This is what Deleuze calls the
turning crystal.
Deleuze then begins to discuss filmmakers who present us with shatterings of more human
forms of time-image. Remember that he presents us with the human versions of the time
image, namely, mnemo-signs (recognition and recollection-images) and oneiro-signs. But
then he moves to hyalo-signs (mirror images) and image crystals. Just as image-crystals
blast apart human notions of time from the outside, seemingly, outflanking human notions
of time with mirrors and crystals, he then examines filmmakers that explode human time, as
it were, from within.
Some filmmakers present us with a series of present moment, present moments which never
seem to line up in any sort of progression, and seem to contradict each other, as if they
came from parallel universes in which different things occur. For example, it is simply not
possible to both go to the movies and not go to the movies this afternoon. Or to go to the

movies, get on a plane to Europe, and go swimming in the ocean, all at 3pm today. These
are what Leibniz would call incompossible events, they cant all happen at the same time,
at least not in the same universe or world. In parallel universes, each with a copy of you,
however, if would be possible (if you believe in, or if there are, parallel universes, of
course!). For Deleuze, some films present us with incompossible presents, each of which
then feels less real (deactualizes), due to the presence of others.
For example, in Last Year at Marienbad, the female lead at some points seems to remember
certain events happening last year, while at other points, she insists they couldnt have
happened. And rather than not being sure, she seems fully sure each time. It is as she is
living in two parallel dimensions, one in which she is sure something did happen last year,
and in the other, is sure it didnt. Deleuze sees this as a breakdown of the notion of the
present moment itself, and hence, a film with multiple, rather than one, peak of the present.
Deleuze also sees multiple peaks of the present in the films of Luis Bunuel, particularly in a
film like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie, in which the ensemble of characters seems
to jump from setting to setting, each time about to have dinner, and then each time
interrupted. It is nearly as if they were trying to do one event, namely, have dinner, yet it
gets interrupted in multiple worlds all at the same time. The present becomes dissociated
into multiple incompossible milieu, thereby providing us with another approach to the
multiplicity of the present.

Fellini's powers of the false in 'Satyricon'

Deleuze then describes at length the films of Orson Welles, in which the investigation of
the past is an essential concern. In a film like Citizen Kane, Welles displays the past often
as layers within the depth-of-field of the film itself. Often we will see the older Kane
inhabit a different visual plane in the same film frame as his younger self. For Deleuze
these characters inhabit different sheets of the past. In Welles early films, these sheets all
can be sewn together, so to speak, to produce a coherent, single past. But in Welles later
films, like Mr. Arkaddin or F for Fake, the past becomes unstable, and the sheets dont line
up. We have multiple pasts, and find it difficult to tell which is necessarily true. From here,
Deleuze makes his transition to the powers of the false . . .

Before going there, however, one essential thing to keep in mind. Simply showing the
Solaris ocean does not a time-image make. If Tarkovsky had simply shown the ocean, or
Fellini Roman apartment buildings with different things happening in all the rooms, these
would be movement-images, not time-images. It is only the linkages between these crucial
images and the others in the film that allow us to say that they represent not merely
movement, but also time. The Solaris ocean is a representation of the way time manifests in
the film, its formal structure, just as Fellinis Roman apartments are a differing form of the
same. Time images represent the structure of interrelations between movement-images. This
is why montage was an indirect way of representing time, but in something like the Solaris
ocean or Fellinis apartements or Resnais hotel in Marienbad, we see an attempt to
visualize within a movement-image the time-structure of the film itself, which is what
makes these attempts to directly image time.
The Powers of the False

Orson Welles as the forger in 'F for Fake'

Ive written about this section of the Cinema books before, if in slightly different contexts,
and Im convinced the transition to the powers of the false represent as massive a shift in
the Cinema books as that between Book I and Book II. If you notice, Book II is so much
thicker than Book I, and honestly, I think the second half of Book II shouldve been its own
book, because honestly, its a different creature. In my mind, there is Book I: The
Movement-Image, Book II: The Time-Image, and Book III: The Powers of the False.
The third part of the Cinema books is really where Deleuze articulates his vision for
cinema. Some of Deleuzes most beautiful, powerful, and evocative passages are here. Also
some of the most difficult. I also think this section is less clearly organized than what
preceded it. So in what follows, Ill try to present what Deleuze is really up to, and in a
logical, relatively straightforward fashion.
There are four primary powers of the false. These powers correspond to what Deleuze calls
the crystalline regime in film, as opposed to the more traditional organic regime. The four
primary powers of the false, which roughly correspond to the following four aspects of
traditional film, which Deleuze then proceeds to explode in his own way, are as follows: 1)

CHARACTER (subject), 2) OBJECT (bodies/gestures/series), 3) GENRE (categories/metaseries/topology/unconscious), and 4) PLOT (narrative/meaning/reading). Ill explain each
in turn.
Character: From the Man of Action/Truth to the Forger
Traditional cinema before WWII, or dominant cinema after WWII, presents us with the
cinema of action, either in crisis mode, or in denial. These films are dominated by two
primary types of character, namely, the man of truth, and the man of action. The man of
truth wants to know, and at the end of the film, generally does know the answer to some
sort of big question, there is resolution to some sort of crisis, etc. The man of action, on the
contrary, solves problems via action. Bruce Willis is a classic man of action, while a
detective or scientist that can figure out the truth behind appearances, like a Perry Mason, is
a traditional man of truth. Deleuze oppses this to his hero of the powers of the false,
namely, the forger, the one who tells tall-tales, spins yarns, the storyteller. This character
may have a sinister side (like Welles sinister Mr. Arkaddin), one who sadistically glorifies
in fooling others (and hence has similarities to the anal-imaginary father in psychoanlaysis),
or may be more of an artist (like the character Welles plays of himself in F for Fake).
While forger has a sinister edge to it, I prefer the term artist, and the artist is the one who
glorifies in the power of art to create new worlds. While the forger delights in destroying
the certainties of those who long for truth, and represent the destructive side of this power
of the false, the artist is the one who loves creation and its limitless possibilities for its own
sake.
Objects: From murder weapons to the powers of unknown bodies
We all know classic cinema objects, from murder weapons to the clues tracked by
detectives, to the bodies of characters that are lusted after from afar (which are subjects
treated like objects). For Deleuze, anything presented by a film can become a body,
anything can be extracted from the situation presented in a film and become significant. If
in traditional cinema only certain things are reocgnized as bodies, and are carved out by the
powers of cliche under the dominance of the ultimate cliche, namely, the sensory-motor
schema, then the powers of the false want to create new bodies in cinema. He sees this
happening primarilly in what he calls the cinema of bodies (which he sometimes calls the
cinema of gestures) which carve a body out of space via the powers of film. In this section
of Cinema II, Deleuze examines the manner in which in the gritty proto-reality TV realisms
of filmmakers like Cassavettes and Clarke, bodies seem to secrete the narrative from
them. Cassavettes would semi-improvise stories from characters invented in workshops
with his main actors. The bodies come first, the roles and stories afterwards, and always a
blurring between them. This is the cinema of the everyday body. But Deleuze also
examines the cinema of the ritual body, in films by avant-garde filmmakers like Andy
Warhol, Yoko Ono, etc. He doesnt mention Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, but I think these
two really give us great examples of cinema as a space for new rituals which make the
human body, and the bodies of objects, function in new and different ways. For Deleuze,
what carves a body out of the world of a film is always the series, a series of events which
make the body significant.

For example, in Smiths Flaming Creatures (1961), the act of putting on lipstick becomes
highly ritualized, and by showing many mouths putting on lipstick, the lips become an
object in their own right, they leap out of the film and become objects able to dominate a
whole section of the film. Series present powers, and here we Deleuze bringing the cinema
of bodies into contact with the notion of powers presented in the affection-image from
Book I. While there are some similarities between the cinema of the forger (along with
other subjective categories presented in Book II such as op/son-signs, peaks/sheets) and the
perception-image of Book I, and the cinema of bodies and the affection-image, the link is
somewhat tenuous. More synthetic work would need to be done to make these linkages,
which I dont think Deleuze really explicitely makes himself. That said, its clear that much
of what he attempts to do in Book II is to explode the categories of Book I, and show how a
cinema beyond the movement image is possible, so it seems to me that Deleuze easily
couldve gone down this road if hed chosen to do so (and which we can if we choose as
well).
Ok, Ill cover the final two powers of the false, which are much more complex, and are
expanded by Deleuze in several chapters of Cinema II, in my last and final blog post in this
series . . .

Reading Cinema II, Part III: Noosigns, Lecto-signs, and

the Cinematic Worldcreating for a People Yet to Come

Jean Rouch: Cine-fabulationist, Creator of Languages of New Worlds

[Final installment of my series on reading Deleuze's Cinema I & II. I'm planning to
hopefully turn many of these posts into part two of my future book project The Networked
Image, but first I need to finish the other network books which come first. But I wanted to
write these thoughts down between now and then so I don't forget!]

If Orson Welles is in many ways the hero of the first part of the sections on the powers of
the false, Jean Rouch is in many ways the hero of the second part, and with that, of the
Cinema books as a whole. The trick is understanding why. Lets start off where we left off
in the preceding post, discussing the powers of the false, picking up with the third power,
namely, the cinema of thought.
The Cinema of Categories: From Genre to Noosign
Deleuze begins his analysis of the third power of the false with a discussion of what he
calls the cinema of categories in the films of Godard. From his discussion of series of
objects in the cinema of gestures (second power of the false), we move to that which
connects powers represented in series into categories. Thus, a tree blowing in the breeze (a
cinema-body exhibiting a power over time) is recognized as a member of a category of
objects, for example, images of nature. But how are cinematic categories, that which helps
us recognize objects, characters, actions, etc., produced?
In traditional cinema, we have the issue of genre, and there are genres of many types of
things, genres of kisses, guns, entire film types, etc. Thus we have the Hollywood car
chase, the Western, the slasher, the vampire, all these are genres, cliches, if you will, which
can help us to recognize images as belonging to a category.
Godard is the cine-thinker, however, who plays with categories more than any other. Some
of his films are devoted to producing a parody of a given genre, some of his scenes parody
those of other films. Some of his films use intertitle cards to announce a category, and then
show us a series of images that seem to only vaguely relate to the category just announced.
Godard liberates categories from cliche, shows us the process of linkage underneath them,
shows us the maleability of cinema-categories.
And in doing so, Godard presents us with a true cinema of thought. Deleuze describes
cinema-thought as truly inaugurated by Eisenstein. Eisenstein, for example, in the famous
section On God and Country in October, shows us how a series of images could link
together to produce a visual argument, simply by what was linked together in sequence, to
produce a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For Deleuze, what unites these
images in series is ultimately the film-spectator, not shown on screen. But this spectator
experiences the shock produced by these images, and must think, is forced to think, about
what links them together.
Thus film can force us, as spectators, to think. When this happens, what we think is partly
determined by the film (hence the force and shock aspects), yet part of it is also free. This
conjunction of freedom and necessity puts us in a state like that of a trance, in which we
have freedom (spirituality) and compulsion (automation), converting us into what Deleuze
calls a spiritual automaton. Film spectators in the process of thinking are precisely this,
spiritual automatons. And since cinema is simply, for Deleuze, a special case of what it
means to exist in the world, this is what we all are when we think. Each one of us in the
world experiences a series of images on any given day, and the shock of the images we
encounter forces us to synthesize them. We find ourselves between compulsion and
freedom, we are spiritual robots. We think.

For Deleuze, there is a two-way motion here. Images in series are linked together by
montage horizontally, yet thought which unites them comes to be on a higher level,
vertically, so to speak. Thought can be extracted from a series of images in this manner.
However, thought can also come before the images, such as we see when a filmmaker has
an idea first, and then decides to try to find images to match them. This creative action
shows in the ingression of thought in the world. And here we see how it is that Deleuze
attempts to recast the sensory-motor schema of perception, affection, and action, yet
outside the limitations of the human. Film-thoughts and film-actions. Yet is it possible to
think a film-body, namely, that physical entity which does the thinking and acting?
Sometimes a film will not only show us images, but also show us that which thinks a series
of images. When this happens, we have a representation, via an image, of a physical body
which synthesizes other images as a spiritual automaton, that thinks. A thing that thinks, for
Deleuze, is what he calls a brain. Cinema can depict thought in two ways. It can have
thought off-screen, in the form of an implied spectator, which presents us with one indirect
imaging of thought, or noo-sign. But cinema can also present us with a body that thinks,
and image thought as a noo-sign by means of this body. Thus, we have characters in many
films that seem to think, that is, to process other images and synthesize them. Traditional
film characters are, in this sense, brain-signs, or noo-signs.
But not all direct noo-signs of this sort are human. Deleuze describes how it is that nonhuman thought can be presented to us in film. In many of Kubricks films there are nonhuman actors that seem to think. For example, in The Shining, it is as if the mountains seem
to think, to have an ability to process the world in a non-human manner, such that the
architecture of the hotels corridors become like the twisting of the folds of a human brain.
The same with the obelisk in 2001, which contains multiplicities of images inside it. These
are noo-signs which are brain-signs. And the ultimately brain-sign, of course, is the cinema
screen itself. This is why Deleuze says, famously, that the brain is the screen. For the
screen is an object, a regular object, upon which many images can be projected which are
then synthesized by us, this brains neurons. We are the neurons of the giant cinema-brain
which is the screen, just as the complex of screens in the cinematic apparatus spread across
the world are neurons in this larger, global cinema mediascape brain.

Exploring a giant Cine-Brain: One of Kubrick's Noosigns in 'The Shining'

Brains are always topological, for Deleuze, and here we see an engagement with Lacan.
Non-orientable figures in the mathematical discipline of topology indicate shapes that
contain paradoxes within them, that make sense mathematically, and can even be
sometimes physically constructed, and yet, disorient our normal sense of what it means to
be a shape in some manner or other. The Moebius strip and Klein bottle are two classic
examples, and Lacan uses them both pretty extensively to describe how it feels to
experience time, as well as the continual whac-a-mole we play with our unconscious
(basically, it is always already wherever our conscious thoughts are not).
Deleuze isnt one to let Lacan get away with any cool insight without warping it to his own
ends, exploding it from within, making it multiple. Thus, for Deleuze, a brain-image is an
object which is the obverse, so to speak, of the thought which it performs. It is the container
for the process of thought, and when we image it we can image either the images which
produce the thought itself (ie: Godard) or the thinking object (ie: the monolith), but it is
nearly impossible to image both without some sort of trick, a split screen or something to
this effect. For in order to image both the thinker and thought, there would need to be a
topological twist, for the two are like two sides of a Moebius strip. Certainly if one wanted
to image the brain within a flow of images being synthesized by it, then it could only
emerge as a stain or gap, in the manner theorized in Lacanian visual theory. For the brain is
what is missing from thought, and yet also what allows it to occur. This means that the
brain is closely related to the notion of the unconscious in Lacan. Deleuze works hard to
show his models can do everything that Lacans can, but then also more.

M.C. Escher's wonderful 'Moebius Swans'

How does he do this? In many senses, the brain is an attempt to image the unconscious, that
which forces thought to come into being, and in some sense, twist the brain on a Moebius
strip, and you get a series of images, twist this, you get unconscious thought, twist this yet
again, you get conscious thought. A moebial Moebius strip, perhaps? A four-dimensional
moebius strip. Deleuze doesnt quite systematize things like this, but he implies much.
Either way, it seems pretty obvious that in his discussion of topology and the outside of
thought, he is aiming at Lacan, trying to imagine how it might be that there could be
thought beyond the human, yet without giving up the insights provided by Lacanian theory,
when properly exploded and made multiplicitous from within. In the section on the cinema
of thought, some of the most complex in the cinema books (and thats saying a lot!), we see
Deleuzes most intense engagement with Lacan since Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense,
even though he fails to mention Lacan by name in these passages.
He does, however, mention films in which characters seem to speak in a voice from
beyond, act like zombies or mummies, vessels for a thought beyond the human. And this
seems to be Deleuzes dream. Not to destroy the human. But rather, to go beyond it. Might
we be able to imagine a thought from beyond, new types of brains, new types of cinethought? More on what this would be below . . .
Lecto-Signs, Disjunctive-Synthesis, and the Cinema of Reading
The fourth power of the false is what Deleuze calls the cinema of reading. What does it
mean to read an image in a film? We read film images all the time, we see an image in a
film and we say, oh, that is a bad guy, thats a car, thats an ocean. We carve aspects of the
film image into meaningful parts. We do this by means of language, and in the section of
the book in which Deleuze discusses lecto-signs (from the ancient Stoic notion of lekta),
images of reading in films (images which can be read, are read, or demand to be read), he
discusses dialogue, music, and noise. But this should not be interpreted as meaning that he
feels one needs sound to read images in film. For in fact, it is an accident of history that we
have used sound as the material to anchor our reading of the world of images, as signlanguages have demonstrated beyond doubt. And it is for this reason that Deleuze describes
in depth the manner in which we read silent films before the advent of sound. For entities

still had meaning before the advent of sound. Verbal language was indirectly present in
silent film, encoded in the ways actors acted in relation to things.

You can still read this guy quite well without sound: an early lecto-sign, or image which
can be read, is read, or demands a reading
What does it mean to read an image, in film or beyond? It means to see it as something, as
something other than merely what it is. It is to see a knife and see it not only as shiny,
metallic, sharp, but also as a weapon of potential murder. It is to link objects beyond
themselves in relational series beyond those presented by the physical world. It is to see
object beyond the way they are seen by (most) animals, and see them as more complexly
meaningful, as united by a system or complex code which can function in the manner of
language.
What Deleuze is getting at here, though it is quite difficult to tell from the way he writes
about it in his chapter on the lecto-sign, is that hero of so many of his other books, the
concept known as disjunctive-synthesis (also sometimes referred to as double-articulation).
For in fact, as one reads the lecto-sign chapter, there are increasingly Hjelmslevian qualities
to his statements, even if Deleuze only provides us with hints as to the fact that this is
where hes going with this. For Deleuze, double-articulation, also known as disjunctivesynthesis, is the means whereby layering of entities in a systematic manner can give rise to
meaning. Group a bunch of sounds together according to divisions marked by graphic
squiggles, and you get letters in the alphabet. Take sets of letters and group them together
according to a series of rules, and you produce a new layer, words. Group sets of words
together according to sets of rules, and you get meaningful sentences, or language. In each
case, carve up the world into sections, use rules to put these together, and youll get a
second layer that produces meaning from the first. Layer this up enough times, and you get
language, or meaning, from matter.

From such a perspective, we can begin to see, how disjunctive synthesis was on Deleuzes
agenda all the way. Link bodies together and you get meaningful series. Link series
together and you get genres, or categories, which can give meaning to objects, subjects, etc.
And link these categories together (ie: the car chase, the murder weapon, the romantic kiss),
and you end up with a master-genre, a master-category, which is able to structure an entire
film. Such a meta-category is generally called a films plot. Plots give meaning, and derive
their meaning, from all the other aspects of a film. They are the category of categories in a
film, so to speak.
Film plots, for Deleuze, come in two primary forms. There are films in which the we know
how the film will end after seeing just a few scenes, films in which everything is
predetermined. Of course, we cant know for sure, because some films cite genre
conventions precisely to subvert them. But when you see a film start with a standard
Hollywood style car chase, you can generally tell that at the end of the film, the hero will
likely dispense with the bad guy (usually after giving him some sort of last chance to
redeem himself), and then get the girl. These are films that proceed as if deducing a
theorum. These film-theorums are like solving math equations. Given an equation, theres
only one, at most two, possible answers.

What does this man see? 'It's only stars', a noo-sign which shows us why the brain is the
monolith is the screen.
But then there are films which present to us film-problems. These films search for their
own structure, create their own plot-genres, as they go. Such films are sui generis, they
create problematics, fields upon which new problems, new questions, can be asked of the
universe. Such films teach us how to read differently. For they do not employ pre-made
film meanings, but create a language of meanings all of their own. A gun may be a murder
weapon, but it may also be a message from the gods. No meanings are predetermined
before the film starts. Everything can and must be read by the immanent criteria developed
in the film itself. A new film-language is necessary to understand such films. Watching such
films, one needs to always ask oneself when presented with an image, but what am I really
seeing? I know that I am seeing, but what could it mean?
The lecto-sign, for Deleuze, is an image that can be read, is read, or demands to be read.
Some lecto-signs present themselves without a premade reading provided, such that we

must search the film for the immanent categories whereby to give the image in question
meaning. We can perhaps call these fabulatory lecto-signs, signs which demand to be read,
but which require the film itself to give birth to new meanings in order for this to occur.
While Deleuze uses films which experiment with sound to discuss these issues, such that he
advocates experimentation with various aspects of film-sound and noise in these chapters, it
seems to me that he is going after much, much more. For in fact, the production of new
film-meanings, new film-language, has been what his goal has been since the start of his
discussion of the powers of the false.
Giving Birth to New Film Worlds as a Image-Language for a People Yet to Come
This is why it seems to me that the final power of the false, the production of a cinema of
reading, must be tied not only to his reflections on the cinema of reading in his lecto-sign
chapter (Chapter 9: The Components of the Image), but Deleuzes reflections on political
cinema and language earlier in Cinema II. Deleuzes writings on political cinema towards
the middle of Cinema II are possibly the most powerful and poetic in both books. They hit
me as the climax of these books, and hence, the insights that really belong towards the end.
And they are, as I argue here, the end of his conceptual development, in both senses of the
word end, for a new political cinema, it seems to me, is Deleuzes true goal in writing
these books. That is, Deleuze seeks to free cinema from the sensory-motor schema of
human action, and even from the time-images that present human types of thought. What he
wants is a post-human cinema. But the reason for this is because he wants to unleash the
powers of the world, in order to produce, as he calls it, a language for a people yet to come.
In his discussion of minor cinema, and Jean Rouchs films in particular (above theres a clip
from his collaboratively produced 1967 film, Jaguar), we see all the powers of the false
employed. We see characters that go beyond the individual forgers of the late Welles, and
which engage in a form of radical collective storytelling which he calls fabulation. Such
collective becoming is like a sort of radical reality-television, in which reality is altered by
the collective process of producing new legends in film. The process of making a film puts
into action a process of collective becoming, a process which can then model this sort of
process for others. Thus this collective becoming can act as a collective myth which can
give rise to new ways of looking at the world, new meanings, new actions, new ways to
produce meanings. As such, film can act as a new language to articulate new desires, new
worlds, and it can do so for a collective audience, beyond those depicted in the original
film. For a people yet to come.
In a film such as Jaguar, for example, we see Rouch teach people who had never used a
camera before how to document their lives. He helped them tell their story. Together he and
the storytellers sat watching the film they had recorded, and developed a collective
soundtrack somewhere between narration, fictional storytelling, commentary, and legendmaking. Rouch gave the power to world-make to people who didnt have that power before,
and in return, they gave him a new vision of the world. Mutual co-becoming, and with
radical implications.

Do I know how to read what I see? The power of a fabulatory disruptive lecto-sign in
Cronenberg's 'Existenz'
Thus we see the production of a people yet to come produced in a radical between. Rouch
engages in cine-becomings as way to unlearn his western prejudices which he was raised
in, to learn new ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, meaning, and collective acting in the
world. His co-creators, from West Africa, engage in cine-becomings to produce new ways
of seeing, hearing, thinking, meaning, and collective acting in the world which may be able
to help them imagine ways out of the domination which Rouchs culture have imposed
upon them. Together, beyond the privilege-disprivileged binary, we see a potential for
radical collective becoming. Cinema becomes a practice of which the production of films is
simply a byproduct. The goal is collective becoming, and cinema becomes a way of acting
which can give rise to new meanings, new language, to a people yet to come. And in fact, it
can bring that people about, as subject-object of its own auto-production, its self-imaging
into the world. Here we see a proto- yet hyper-radical reality TV, an improvising with
reality, between fiction and documentary, in which the camera makes the world itself a
laboratory for new ways of living, and in a manner that can be shared with others. The
camera is passed around, it becomes difficult to tell who is observer and who observed,
roles reverse continually, mutate, the anthropologist becomes the subject of study, jokes,
new tall tales, and in the process, everyone learns, and changes. Mutual collective radically
democratic multi-transformation becomes the story we watch unfold in Rouchs
deconstruction of the ethnographic film. And in this, we see a potential for a radical
political cinema of the future, a reality-TV in which the whole world becomes laboratory
for an attempt to imagine a path to a more egalitarian, democratic, and anti-oppressive
future.
The cinema of reading as political cinema, the world-making powers of the false, that
which is able to reimagine subjects, objects, thoughts, and meanings, is that which is able to
create the world anew, and in a more radically democratic way, in a way that unleashes the
democracy of the universe. This, it seems to me, is the dream of the cinema books. Now we
merely need to go out into the world and do this.

Final Thoughts on the Cinema Books: Rereading the

World (and Film) as a Layered Network of Images
and Signs

Deleuze on Film, literally! A still from 'L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze'

A Network of Images and Signs: Bringing it All Together in an Imaginary Film
So much complexity, so many layers. But can we bring it all together? What might it be like
to watch a film through Deleuzian eyes?
Imagine a scene in a film in which we see a man walking down the street in medium shot.
What we see are movement-images, for in fact, all that exists in the world is a movementimage (an imaging-of-movement), and some special ones exist on screens. This particular
image on screen is in fact a perception-image, an imaging of the perception of the camera.
However, now we see a shot-reverse-shot, we realize our man walking down the street is
being watched by another person peering at the street, hidden, from a window. Suddenly
the perception-image of the camera is also the percpetion-image of the woman, for the
perception of both the camera and the woman are encoded, if by their structuring absence
of their point-of-view, in the scene, the fact that we only see the scene from a particular
angle, etc.
How do we know how to read all this from the flickering light on the screen? My dog just
sees flickering light, but I read patterns in this light to indicate a man, a street, a woman,
etc. These images are all lecto-signs, because I read them, they call out to me to be read,
and I read them with my pre-made significations. A more avant-garde film might require
me to develop my own readings, but not this film so far.

When I see the shot-reverse-shot, and see the face of the woman, I realize she is a stand-in
for me. She processes the scene, her face takes in the images and synthesizes them, just like
I do. Her face is therefore not only a representation of a face, but also of an off-screen
process of thought, one which is both inside the film and beyond it. Her face is thus a noosign, an imaging of thought, what we have called (ever so-slightly modifying Deleuzes
terms for purposes of clarity) a brain-sign.
Her face ripples in fear at seeing this man on the street is he coming to kill her?! The
ripples of fear are affection-images, for they show us qualities and shifting of qualities
which indicate powers which ripple across this face. We see the woman pick up the phone
to call the cops. Such movement, just like that of the man walking across the street, these
are all action-images, convulsions of the filmic space around particular sections thereof,
shifts in the balance of forces between the environment and focal objects in our view.
Suddenly, we see the womans head on a pillow, and a confused look on her face. All that
we have just seen has been recast as a dream. We realize that all the images above were not
only complexes of intertwined and layered perception, affection, action, and movementimages, yet they were also more than that. They existed in a particular relationship to other
images which indicate that they are shot through with memory, fantasy, time. Thus, these
images were signs of dreaming, oneiro-signs, as well as all the other types of images and
signs they are.
Our female protagonist now leaves her bedroom, and goes to the bathroom, splashes water
on her face in the mirror. She sees her reflection in the mirror, and in the mirror, we see a
man that we can read (another lecto-sign!) by his body language to be a husband or lover,
move in behind her, and kiss her neck. And we realize that this man is the same one she
feared as he walked down the street in her dream!
The image the woman sees in the mirror and her face itself are mirror images of each other,
and hence, are forms of hyalo-signs, just as the image of the husbands face outside the
dream and inside the dream are mirror-images of each other. These similarities short-circuit
the linearity of the time of the film, create new circuits of resemblance that thwart the
dominance of linear time in the film, of the resemblance of one moment with the next so
pressed upon our brains by the strange mirroring devices we call clocks.
Let us leave our imaginary film here. Were this film more avant-garde, it may involve some
of Deleuzes more abstract signs from the end of the cinema books, such as peaks and
sheets, but here we see how even the simplest of traditional Hollywood films can be re-read
in Deleuzian terms as a complex of images, some of which mean more than themselves and
hence function as signs. Ultimately, all images are signs, but Deleuze calls those images
signs which demonstrate this most radically by having a relation to memory/fantasy,
past/future, disjunctive-synethesis, that is, time.
Its important to keep in mind that an image presented in a film may be many images and
signs, all at once. Thus, a man walking down the street is a movement-image because it
images movement, yet it is also a perception-image because it is captured by a camera, and
an action-image because we see defined bodies shift their relation to each other and their

environment. As we watch the film, we realize that this image is a layered perception-image
(because we learn that the man is watched by the camera and the woman), yet also a dreamimage. We dont have evidence that the man is synthesizing images, so we cant say he
represents an imaging of thought, but since all humans have the potential to think, we can
say that his body implies thought, and hence, is also a noosign, if a weak and indirect one.
And the fact that we can read any and all of this proves that these are also, all, lecto-signs,
images that are legible as meaningful, related to the world of words, meanings, concepts,
discourse, etc.
Being any one of these types of images or sign does not make it any less of the other. And
many signs are always included in others there are no affection-images which are not also
perception-images, also movement-images. What Deleuze gives us is a way to see any
slicing of the world, whether on screen or in everyday life, as a networked layering of
filters and lensings. These lenses each carve the sensible into chunks that we then use to
orient ourselves in the world. And each chunk is then carved in turn by other lenses, layered
on top of other chunks. What we actually perceive is always already carved and layered this
way. Were it otherwise, swift action in the world would be impossible.
Deleuze works to separate out as much as is possible the differing layers of carving,
lensing, warping, and recompositions which makes our everyday existence in the world
cinematic, and which makes cinema such a powerful tool for world-imagining.
By showing us how we humans do this (mostly in Book I) in our everyday lives, he shows
us precisely how closely linked cinema and our everyday lives actually are. In the first half
of Book II, he then shows us how our inner experience and cinema are closely linked as
well. And in the second half of Book II, he shows us how cinema can exceed the limitations
of our current forms of perception, affection, action, memory, dream, fantasy, thought, and
meaning. Cinema can therefore act as a radical tool for going beyond our current
limitations. Cinema can act as a radically powerful prosthetic device for imagining new
worlds. And as we saw with Rouch, cinema can act to also begin to create new worlds,
create cine-becomings, in which the production of the film creates a set of actions which
happen to be captured on film, but which would never have happened without the process
of making a film to bring them about. Cinema can therefore be a way of changing the world
directly and indirectly.
Post-script on C.S. Peirce
It may seem odd to some readers of the cinema books that Ive gone this far, and not
mentioned C.S. Peirce (pronounced purse). Along with Bergson, Peirce is Deleuzes
second guiding light in these books. And I certainly dont want to downplay the importance
of Peirce as an influence on these books. However, it is completely possible to read these
books and largely understand them without having to understand Peirce first. The same
cannot be said with Bergson, for getting Bergsons critique of clock time is essential to
understand at all what Deleuze means by a time-image. However, its worth saying a few
words on Peirce before the end.

Peirce believes that the world is composed of intertwined layers of signs, and he spends
much of his mature work delineating a complex hierarchy of signs of various sorts, nearly
all structured as threes within threes. For Peirce, there is no distinction between the world
and signs, and the world is an evolving and dynamic interplay of signs whose logical
relations give structure to the universe.
Much of the internal structure of the cinema books can be seen as directly inspired by
Peirces typologies. In particular, the distinction between a pure quality, binary duel, and
tertiary abstract relation (which Peirce calls firstness, secondness, and thirdness) provide
structure for the Deleuzian transition between affection, action, and relation-images. There
are many more ways in which Peirce provides inspiration for Deleuze, and there is one
particular chapter in Cinema II where Deleuze lays all this all out.
I havent concentrated on Peirce, however, because while Deleuze couldnt have written the
books without him as inspiration, it is not necessary to know Peirce to begin reading the
books. Peirce is a powerful philosopher, and tragically overlooked. I dont like contributing
to this, but a more thorough discussion of the links between Peirce and the cinema books
will have to wait for another time.
Final Thoughts
In summation, let us catalogue, now, what Deleuze has accomplished with these books. He
provides us with a new way of viewing cinematic images, and the images which comprise
our world. He shows us how cinema can become a tool for moving beyond the current
limitations of our relations to our worlds and others, both by showing us precisely how
cinema can imagine new worlds, but also create actions that directly bring them into being.
Philosophically, Deleuze also provides a running critique of traditional forms of human
subjectivity, and thus, indirectly, the Cartesian legacy in philosophy, as represented by
Descartes, Kant, and the subjectivist side of Lacan. He also reworks aspects of Hegelian
dialectic and psychoanalysis so as to make their attempt to blast apart the Cartesian subject
via history and the unconscious truly multiplicitous. Aspects of Deleuzes cinema books
take on, if often indirectly, Hegels Logic, as well as Lacans notion of the unconscious. In
the process, Deleuze gives us a post-dialectical, post-subjective, post-human version of the
world.
Whats more, Deleuze provides us with a pedagogy. Deleuzes cinema books have been my
textbook for teaching myself the history of film. While they stop in the mid-1980s, and are
slightly stronger with French film than other traditions, and have a few curious oversights,
Deleuzes history of film is pretty damn comprehensive. Supplemented a bit, it is an
amazing introduction to the history of film. It also shows us what it means to put
philosophy into practice, to bring philosophy out of itself into the world, to make
philosophy and some other area of the world truly come into contact so that neither is fully
the same afterwards. We also see how Deleuze takes on previous thinkers and concepts
from the history of philosophy, explodes them from within, reworks them to fit the
multiplicitous model which not only fits the times, but perhaps provides a radical way out
of the impasses that continue to oppress us.

Deleuzes cinema books are some of the most important works of philosophy, and film, and
ethico-politics, of the second half of the twentieth century. What they are not, however, is
easily accessible. My hope is that after reading these posts, readers will feel empowered to
take on these books themselves. There is so much more there than I could ever explain in
such a short space, each page is bursting with insights.
But now, they will hopefully be easier to grasp for a first time reader.