Deleuze on Cinema

The introduction defines the book's task: to read with Deleuze and restore sources, examples, and transitions to a compressed argument. It sketches how movement-images differentiate from an open whole and an indeterminate centre, then previews how the sensory-motor crisis leads to crystals, chronosigns, noosigns, and lectosigns.

1. 01
   pp. 1–2

   Explain conceptual work without expanding the corpus

   Bogue specifies films and sources already treated by Deleuze and extracts an overall structure from dense detail.

2. 02
   pp. 3–6

   From Bergson to form and taxonomy

   The open whole, frame-shot-montage, and three movement-images form the progression of the book's first half.

3. 03
   pp. 7–11

   From crisis to direct time and thought

   Pure optical-sound situations, crystals, the orders and series of time, and readable thinking images form the second half.

Chapter One supplies the ontology behind the taxonomy. In Bogue's reconstruction, Deleuze recasts Bergsonian dualisms as differences of tendency, defines movement as a mobile section of an open whole, and uses the living interval to explain the genesis of three movement-images.

1. 01
   pp. 12–24

   Duration, two multiplicities, and actualization

   Countable spatial multiplicity must be separated from durational multiplicity that changes in kind; matter and memory are rhythms of one duration.

2. 02
   pp. 25–33

   Three Bergsonian theses on movement

   Movement cannot be reconstructed from static positions; any-instant-whatever can produce singular points; movement as a mobile section changes both relations and whole.

3. 03
   pp. 34–41

   Image-movement-matter-light

   Things themselves are mutually acting images; a living centre subtracts perception from universal interaction through selection and delay.

4. 04
   pp. 42–48

   Three movement-images

   Incoming movement becomes perception, the interval bears affection, and outgoing movement actualizes action. These are relations between centre and movement, not themes.

This chapter translates ontology into formal analysis. Griffith, Eisenstein, the French school, and German Expressionism are not style drawers but four constructions of the whole: organic, dialectical, quantitative, and intensive.

1. 01
   pp. 49–57

   From frame to shot

   Relative out-of-field extends the same space; absolute out-of-field points to a whole no set exhausts. The shot gives displacement and qualitative change together.

2. 02
   pp. 58–63

   Organic and dialectical montage

   Griffith coordinates differentiated parts; Eisenstein makes conflict produce a new level. Similar techniques carry different concepts of the whole.

3. 03
   pp. 64–72

   Quantity, rhythm, and simultaneity

   The French school uses machines, water, acceleration, and multiple images to maximize and resonate quantities of movement.

4. 04
   pp. 73–79

   Intensity and the dynamic sublime

   Expressionist conflicts of light and dark let nonorganic life pierce finite forms through intensive gradients.

Bogue compares the Cinema 1 glossary with the retrospective table in Cinema 2 to show why the number of signs varies. Each of six image classes can be read through composition and genetic element; taxonomy is thus a natural-historical workbench rather than a fixed codebook.

1. 01
   pp. 80–87

   Peirce and cinematic signs

   In Bogue's reconstruction, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness describe modes of being. Deleuze borrows the categories but lets movement-image genesis rewrite the terminology.

2. 02
   pp. 88–101

   Perception and affection

   Perception selects a world around a centre and may become liquid, gaseous, or molecular; affection releases qualities and powers from determinate action.

3. 03
   pp. 102–114

   Impulse and action

   Impulse extracts an originary world and fragments from a determinate milieu; action reorganizes situations in large or small form.

4. 04
   pp. 115–133

   Reflection, relation, and crisis

   Reflection mediates action through a third term, while relation draws inference and spectator into the image; both push the action-image toward internal crisis.

Opsigns first turn characters into seers. Recollection-signs and dream-signs enlarge actual-virtual circuits but still return through recognition or actualization. The hyalosign directly shows the present splitting into an actual face that passes and a virtual face that preserves itself; four crystalline states then scale this structure to film worlds.

1. 01
   pp. 134–138

   Opsigns and sensory-motor rupture

   Postwar spaces and seer-characters stop perception from naturally extending into action, exposing the unbearable or indescribable within everyday images.

2. 02
   pp. 139–146

   Expanded circuits of recollection and dream

   Attentive recognition connects levels of the past; dream links actual movement to world-movement. Both are transitional forms of direct time.

3. 03
   pp. 147–156

   The crystal's smallest circuit

   Actual and virtual, clear and opaque, seed and environment exchange; neither side can be determined independently.

4. 04
   pp. 157–166

   Four states of the crystal

   Ophuls, Renoir, Fellini, and Visconti construct crystalline worlds that are perfect, cracked, forming, and decomposing.

Resnais, Welles, and Robbe-Grillet make orders of time into narrative matter. Powers of the false, Rouch's ethnofictions, cinema of the body, and cinema of categories make time operate as transformational series. Truth is no longer a model awaiting reproduction; analysis asks what relations, bodies, and collectivities each power creates.

1. 01
   pp. 168–182

   Sheets of past and peaks of present

   The past coexists as differently contracted layers, while irreducible peaks of present occur simultaneously; the two structures support distinct modern narrations.

2. 02
   pp. 183–186

   Powers of the false

   Undecidable truth and falsity break the pre-existing model; a relay of falsifiers transforms every position of authentication in its next passage.

3. 03
   pp. 187–192

   Rouch's ethnofictions

   Filmer and filmed become reciprocal intercessors, co-producing identity, narrative, and reality in cine-trance.

4. 04
   pp. 192–203

   Bodies, categories, and series

   Postures and bodily states replace the action chain; categories of colour, type, or state form transformational series through irrational cuts.

Classical cinema trusts the shock of movement to reach thought of a whole and return to action and world. Modern cinema makes this circuit fail: thought encounters the unthinkable from outside, the spiritual automaton exposes its powerlessness, and sound and image become heterogeneous layers that no longer explain each other. Reading means tracking their reorganization, not decoding dialogue.

1. 01
   pp. 204–209

   Classical thought-image

   Shock of movement, concept of the whole, and internal monologue guarantee one another; sensory-motor unity sustains belief in image and world.

2. 02
   pp. 210–215

   Thought from outside

   Irrational cuts and interstices prevent images from entering a governing whole; thought must begin from incommensurable relations.

3. 03
   pp. 216–222

   Spiritual automaton and powerlessness of thought

   Automatic movement no longer guarantees automatic thought; the image exposes what remains unthought and makes belief in the world a problem.

4. 04
   pp. 223–228

   Readability in silent and sound cinema

   Writing, intertitles, speech, and visual matter enter the image differently; reading changes as sound gains an independent dimension.

5. 05
   pp. 229–239

   Modern lectosigns and audiovisual separation

   Sound no longer belongs to the visible but forms an autonomous continuum of speech, music, and noise; electronic images further demand reading from multiple faces and entries.

The conclusion retraces the book: the interval of the living image produces movement-images; crisis of action releases direct time; crystal and chronosigns lead to noosigns and lectosigns. Bogue ends with Deleuze's project as natural rather than linear film history: taxonomy follows how images differentiate, combine, and transform.

1. 01
   pp. 240–242

   From open whole to action forms

   The living interval bends matter-movement into perception, affection, and action, which acquire cinematic construction through forms and signs.

2. 02
   pp. 243–244

   From crisis to time and thought

   After the action chain breaks, crystals, temporal orders, and series bring thought and audiovisual relation to the foreground.

3. 03
   pp. 245–246

   Intelligible matter, concepts, and natural history

   Cinema has always contained image-potentials awaiting actualization. Filmmakers create images and philosophers create related concepts, so taxonomy becomes a natural history of living forms and a logic of cinema.