Living Images

The book begins from the absorption produced by powerful cinema and returns agency to the film. Xu then uses Bergson's matter-image universe and Deleuze's automatic movement and automatic temporalization to build two levels: each image may be studied on an actual movement level and a virtual time level.

1. 01
   pp. 1–5

   The image has agency

   Viewing is redescribed as an encounter between cinematic force and a spectator. The image is no longer passive material for human consciousness to represent the world.

2. 02
   pp. 5–10

   All things are images

   Persons, things, and cinema share a matter-image plane. Cinema is distinctive because its apparatus can reorganize movement and render this plane perceptible.

3. 03
   pp. 11–16

   Taxonomy follows signs and levels

   Movement-image and time-image form two dimensions; perception, affection, impulse, action, recollection, dream, and thought receive their names from the strongest vital sign at a given moment.

Perception is not a monopoly of human viewpoint. The mobile material universe is first a decentered universal perception; the shot then produces a relative centre. Affection occurs in the interval between stimulus and action, carrying faces, close-ups, light, colour, and any-space-whatever toward pure qualities and powers. Xu makes both image types the basis of cinema's sensation.

1. 01
   pp. 17–49

   From universal perception to framing

   The camera creates a temporary centre through selection and fixing; signs of flow and memory traces return the frame to becoming. Vertov's cine-eye therefore names an eye in matter rather than an enhanced human eye.

2. 02
   pp. 50–84

   From face to any-space-whatever

   The close-up suspends action and makes the face a surface for pure qualities and powers. Once faciality loosens, any spatial fragment can carry this affective intensity.

3. 03
   pp. 85–104

   Light, spiritual choice, and any-space-whatever

   Expressionism, lyrical abstraction, and colour cinema release light, darkness, white, black, and colour from objects so they become choices, intensities, and means of spatial disconnection.

Impulse lies between affection and action. Naturalist cinema tilts the determinate milieu to expose an originary world of predation, decay, and repetition. Realist action-image retains perceptual-motor belief: a character can read a situation and alter it through action. Large and small forms move respectively from situation to action and from action toward an inferred situation.

1. 01
   pp. 106–128

   Originary world and elementary impulse

   The determinate milieu and real behaviour are tilted to release originary world and impulse. They form an autonomous naturalist block, yet still bind time to milieu, behaviour, and decay.

2. 02
   pp. 129–143

   Large form: situation shapes action

   The large form treats milieu as an encompassing situation and passes through secondary duels, whole-part relations, gaps, and preparation toward action that changes the situation.

3. 03
   pp. 144–156

   Small form: action discloses situation

   The small form begins from ambiguous or minute acts and generates situations through indices, inference, and difference; gaps between act and result produce comedy, suspense, and adventure.

Reflection-image lets situation and action communicate indirectly through a problem, speech, or third term. Relation-image then makes natural and abstract relations themselves visible; Hitchcock's marks and demarks enlist spectators in inference. The chapter's end drives the crisis into a purely optical and sound situation: the image sees, hears, and feels its way without closing perception through action.

1. 01
   pp. 157–179

   A problematic world turns action into reflection

   Kurosawa and Mizoguchi push large and small forms to their edges. Problems, lines of the universe, and social blockage prevent a particular act from directly repairing the situation, so the image begins to articulate its predicament.

2. 02
   pp. 180–193

   Natural and abstract relations

   Relation-image foregrounds comparison, contrast, symbol, and inference. An anomalous term within a normal series forms a demark, making relation visible before any single object.

3. 03
   pp. 194–220

   Crisis of action and pure optical-sound situations

   Five crisis symptoms and the intolerable suspend effective action. Fixed shots, jump cuts, audiovisual intensity, and tactile exploration carry the image beyond movement and connect it to reading, time, and thought.

After the perceptual-motor chain breaks, the image first uses recollection to recognize the present object. Successful recollection restores action; failure lets the virtual field continue to unfold. Dream expands the circuit through sensory metamorphosis and world movement, yet remains an image undergoing actualization. Xu therefore shows that recollection and dream disclose time without yet becoming direct time-images.

1. 01
   pp. 221–238

   Forks of recollection and the pure past

   Flashbacks and multiple narration use temporal forks to enter different layers of pure memory. The recollection-image actualizes an old present; it is not the pure past that remains virtual.

2. 02
   pp. 239–248

   Failed recognition and dream circuits

   When attentive recognition fails, the actual image no longer reconnects to action but extends toward virtual factors such as déjà vu, dream, and hallucination.

3. 03
   pp. 249–264

   World movement remains actualization

   Nested dreams, dance, and world movement expand circuits without limit, but do not remove actualization. Direct presentation of time still requires the crystal-image.

The crystal is not a static object but a process in which crystallization and dissolution occur together. Xu traces exchanges of actual/virtual, limpid/opaque, and seed/environment, then moves through coexistent sheets of past, simultaneous peaks of present, and serial becoming of time. The thought section moves from Eisenstein's organic whole to the fractured brain of modern cinema: film no longer delivers a thinkable totality but lets outside, fissure, body, and the unthinkable force thought into being.

1. 01
   pp. 265–281

   Discovery, structure, and genesis of the crystal

   The most contracted recollection opens the minimal circuit: actual and virtual, limpid and opaque, seed and environment exchange while the present generates its own past.

2. 02
   pp. 281–311

   Order and series of time

   Films such as Citizen Kane make sheets of past coexist; multiple peaks of present and Godard's boundary-crossing figures render time as an ongoing series of becoming.

3. 03
   pp. 312–345

   From classical thought to the modern brain

   Classical cinema leads image toward concept through shock, totality, and internal monologue. Modern cinema rewrites the conditions of thought through broken totality, perceptual-motor rupture, and the body without organs.

4. 04
   pp. 346–366

   Thinking the unthinkable

   The mummy-brain, outside, and domain of death place thought in an endless struggle between inside and outside, forcing thought to emerge from its encounter with the unthinkable.

The conclusion raises the living image from a taxonomic umbrella to a cinema concept. Cinema becomes a sensible model of the universe-image, while theory creates concepts alongside artworks. Xu gives them parallel tasks: filmmaking produces experiential images of life; theory produces speculative ones.

1. 01
   pp. 367–368

   Concept and work are both creations

   Film theory takes concepts called forth by cinema as its object; thinker and artist let the problem of life appear respectively in speculative and sensible forms.

2. 02
   p. 368

   Cinema models the universe-image

   The cinematic living image is understood as a sensible model of all things and the universe itself, with life identified as pure time in ceaseless becoming.

3. 03
   p. 369

   Creation and meaning remain open

   The author explicitly leaves the creation and meaning of cinema-images for later studies, keeping the image of life an open theoretical task.