Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

The Cinema books occupy an unusual position between philosophy and Anglophone film studies.

Rodowick credits Deleuze's cinematic knowledge while noting the canonical limits of his film history.

Frames inherited from Screen, Tel Quel, Saussure, and Lacan narrowed Anglophone reception.

The study treats the Cinema books as philosophy and asks why cinema matters to audiovisual culture.

Rodowick gathers objections concerning auteurism, uneven analysis, value hierarchy, and spectator difference.

The book moves from image form to force, becoming, and resistance, measuring concepts by life.

Sherlock, Jr. and La Jetée establish the difference between time subordinated to movement and movement derived from time.

Historical division follows changes in seeing and thinking, not technology or chronology alone.

Peirce loosens a film semiotics centered on language and pre-given meaning.

The shot is a mobile section of duration; set, movement, and open whole form three relational levels.

The classical-modern break lies in a change of belief and linkage.

The irrational interval makes audiovisual series incommensurable while composing them through difference.

The 'time machine' names nontotalizable thought: meaning is produced through bifurcation and falsification.

The problem shifts from cinema copying mental activity to Bergsonian movement and duration.

Static positions plus abstract time cannot reconstruct real movement; Rodowick also marks a weakness in Deleuze's reversal.

Modern science replaces privileged poses with any-instants-whatever, enabling cinematic variation.

Closed set and open whole must be distinguished; movement is both displacement and qualitative change.

Matter equals image places the world on a plane of acentred universal variation.

Two image systems differ according to whether they organize around an indeterminate centre.

Consciousness is a screen selecting from luminous flow, not the source illuminating the world.

Perception forms useful images by subtraction, introducing selection and interest into the image system.

The interval of delayed response combines perception, affection, and action into subjectivity's basic structure.

Still frames conceal the mobility of images and signs; omitting them is methodologically significant.

Peircean semiosis becomes a temporal relation of thought rather than a closed linguistic code.

The relation between cinematic image and object is modulation, not resemblance-based copying.

The out-of-field can point to adjacent space or to the invisible open whole.

Shot and montage relate movement in partial sets to durational change in the whole.

Deleuze derives the affection-image, action-image, and relation-image from the perception-image and treats the taxonomy as potentially limitless.

Free-indirect and fluid perception carry the perception-image beyond a stable subjective/objective divide.

Any-space-whatever releases affective qualities and powers from determinate action coordinates as virtual conjunctions.

Large and small forms of the action-image organize situation-action and action-situation transformations.

Hitchcock's relation-image includes interpreter and spectator in the network and pushes the classical system to its limit.

The postwar crisis is not an absence of action but action's inability to integrate the world.

Pure optical-sound situations, lectosigns, and noosigns open a second semiotics beyond Peirce alone.

The passage to the time-image reverses viewing, narration, and temporal relation.

The second semiotic uses lectosigns, chronosigns, and noosigns to address the problems of description, narration, and thought.

Powers of the false change the true-false relation; they are not plural opinion, nihilism, or historical relativism.

Pure memory belongs to temporal structure, not a stock of recollections inside a character.

The minimal actual-virtual circuit brings both faces to a threshold of indiscernibility.

The crystal exchanges functions across actual/virtual, limpid/opaque, and seed/environment axes.

In Hiroshima mon amour, mutually contradictory yet individually true historical positions lead narration toward the Leibnizian problem of incompossible worlds.

The memory cone explains coexisting sheets of past and the present's contraction of many layers.

Last Year at Marienbad makes characters functions of divergent presents without a single narrating guarantor.

Je t'aime, je t'aime uses a time machine to expose the difficulty of representing the past.

Nonchronological displacements of memory present the protagonist’s past as a nonsubjective, objective yet discontinuous temporal flux.

Subjectivity as time means that time divides the subject, not that the subject possesses time.

The focus moves from formal features of time-images to their force upon thought.

Rodowick gathers duration, memory, the split present, and passive syntheses as models of time.

Three passive syntheses distinguish the living present, virtual past, and ungrounded pure time.

The Kantian fracture of time prevents empirical self and I think from forming a whole subject.

Critique combines interpretation of force relations with evaluation of the quality of wills.

Eternal return selects difference and becoming rather than recurring identical events.

Organic truthful narration relies on stable identity, causal reduction, continuous linkage, and closure.

Powers of the false clear pre-given judgment and make room for values not yet determined.

The chapter asks what time-images do to subjectivity, body, and politics.

The irrational cut becomes a new law of false continuity; relinking no longer restores an organic whole.

Shoah composes present visibility and past testimony as complementary yet incommensurable layers.

The film asks viewers to read the temporal relation of landscape and testimony rather than reconstruct a past scene.

Series and genetic signs recast identity as becoming-other; the absence of a people becomes a political condition.

Minor cinema does not speak for an existing people but calls a people to come through body and collective utterance.

Becoming-other cannot be reduced to a return to identity; bodily capacity opens a line of flight for collective becoming.

Double becoming makes the individual and collective, and the representer and represented, intercessors for one another; fabulation no longer opposes fiction.

Borom Sarret composes an asymmetrical circuit of sound-image, social position, and language.

Postsynchronized sound preserves and transforms griot tradition in the present while refusing the precolonial past as an intact route to the future.

The woman at the ending and the unfinished action keep the future an open problem.

The body's unknown powers meet thought's unthought; belief concerns the mutable relation of world and body.

Philosophy crosses the limit of exhausted thought; critique is measured by new possibilities for life.

Cinematic and philosophical concepts resist thought's commodification by information and marketing.

The spiritual automaton names thought's self-organization, not psychological consciousness or technical automation.

The plane of immanence is thought's self-orienting map upon which concepts form assemblages.

The movement-image’s two noosigns govern rational linkage into sequences and the integration/differentiation of sequences and the whole.

The time-image’s two noosigns are chronogenesis through relinking on irrational cuts and the absolute contact of nontotalizable outside and inside.

Eisenstein constructs the dialectical automaton through shock, internal speech, and organic unity.

The classical whole carries emancipatory ambitions while exposing capacities for propaganda and passive subjectivation.

The threefold retreat of whole, internal monologue, and human-world unity opens the modern audiovisual regime.

Artaudian cinema foregrounds thought's powerlessness and fracture without promising a thinkable whole.

Belief in this world becomes an ethical task: life, body, and thought can still become other.

The conclusion returns the Cinema books to the long line of Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche, and philosophy of difference.

The outside is virtual and relational force, not spatial exteriority; resistance has priority.

Power diagrams organize visible/sayable relations; problematic logic introduces the unthought into thought.

Absolute memory folds the outside into the subject and turns the past toward the future through forgetting and renewal.

Art extracts difference from everyday repetition; the event is a real reserve of unactualized possibility.

Capital also deterritorializes; minor becoming does not represent an already formed people.

Immanent utopia connects present struggles, but cinema and philosophy do not automatically make revolution.

The endpoint is an encounter with an other we have not yet become; the time-image opens possibility without guaranteeing results.