L’Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1
French · Les Éditions de Minuit · 1983
ISBN 9782707306593Verify editionCinema 1: The Movement-Image
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson; Barbara Habberjam · University of Minnesota Press · 1986
ISBN 9780816614004Core question
How does cinema present movement directly? How does the interval introduced by a living centre differentiate one universe of images into perception, affection, and action?
Argument
Deleuze joins Bergson's matter-image, formal analysis, and Peircean semiotics into a genetic taxonomy. Frame, shot, and montage organize changes in an open whole, while perception-, affection-, impulse-, action-, and reflection-images together with the single mental/relation problem field specify different functions of movement. Mental-image makes relations, symbolic acts, and intellectual feelings objects of thought; relation-image then gives the field its semiotic determination through Thirdness. Time appears mainly indirectly through movement and montage, and the final crisis of action already opens the passage to Cinema 2.
Argument structure
Chapters 1–3 develop movement, mobile sections, and the open whole. The middle chapters distinguish perception, affection, impulse, action, and reflection. The closing mental/relation problem field concerns relations, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings, Thirdness, marks, and demarks. Chapter 12 examines the crisis of the action-image, connecting it to the pure optical and sound situations of Cinema 2.
