Concept dictionary

The movement-image is a regime in which movement differentiates into perception, affection, impulse, action, reflection, and mental relation to organize the image directly, while time appears indirectly through movement and montage. The relation-image is a decisive realization within the mental-image's problem-field, not an additional source-level rank parallel to it, and films need not pass through one fixed action-chain.

▶

Criterion

Which differentiation—perception, affection, impulse, action, reflection, or mental relation—governs the shot, and how does it alter connections among parts so that the whole changes qualitatively?

Distinction

Historical scope: the movement-image persists alongside the time-image.

Primary source

Cinema 1; Cinema 2, ch. 1–2

The impulse-image stands between affection and action. Deleuze divides its naturalist structure into four terms arranged in two pairs: originary world/derived milieu and elementary impulse/real behaviour. A historically, geographically, and socially determinate derived milieu remains present while elementary impulse penetrates real behaviour from within; impulse seizes object-fragments from that milieu and thereby exposes an uncoordinated originary world. Symptom and fetish are not additional structural terms but two classes of signs: a symptom is the appearance of impulse in the derived milieu, while a fetish is the appearance of the seized object-fragment itself. Stroheim realizes this structure through decay, descent, and entropy; Buñuel through repetition, cycles, and restart. These are distinct realizations, not cumulative thresholds that every example must satisfy.

▶

Criterion

Within a specific shot, first distinguish how the four-part structure operates: how an originary world appears within a derived milieu, and how elementary impulse penetrates real behaviour while seizing object-fragments. Then identify which of the two types of signs makes this operation visible—a symptom, or a fetish as the appearance of an object-fragment—before determining whether the film follows Stroheimian descent/entropy, Buñuelian repetition/cycle, or another demonstrable realization.

Distinction

Strong desire, violence, animality, sexuality, or a character 'losing control' is insufficient. Analysis must demonstrate how the four structural terms—originary world/derived milieu and elementary impulse/real behaviour—work together and identify the sign-function of symptom or fetish. The two classes of signs need not both appear, nor do decay, entropy, repetition, and cycles form a cumulative checklist; impulse must not be reduced to an ordinary action that has simply not yet succeeded.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 8, pp. 123–140 (Minnesota 1986)

The large form of the action-image follows S–A–S′. A milieu, collective, historical pressure, or danger first composes an encompassing situation S; that pressure leaves an internal imprint upon the character and concentrates itself in action A as effort, duel, or collective coordination; action then carries the milieu into a situation S′ different from the initial one. Its decisive question is how a situation demands action and whether action actually reorganizes that situation.

▶

Criterion

Specify the encompassing pressure of S, trace how it contracts through bodies and groups into A, then compare the institutional, spatial, and force relations of S with S′. If only a task is completed while the situation remains unchanged, the circuit has not been demonstrated.

Distinction

Spectacle, production scale, long or wide framing, feature length, and heroic protagonists do not define 'large.' The term names the structural direction in which an encompassing situation precedes action, not a film's size, budget, or value.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 9, pp. 141–159 (Minnesota 1986)

The small form of the action-image follows A–S–A′. It begins from an action A already underway whose meaning remains equivocal; indices of lack or ambiguity progressively disclose the situation S in which that act is embedded, forcing a revised action A′. The situation is not given in advance as a known whole but inferred through local gestures, misrecognitions, clues, gags, and the consequences of action.

▶

Criterion

What initially unintelligible act does the shot give us? Which index of lack or equivocity makes its situation inferable, and how does that inference rewrite the next action? If the situation is fully established from the outset, A–S–A′ is not the most precise account.

Distinction

A minor character, low budget, short film, local framing, or trivial event does not define the small form. 'Small' means that analysis begins from a local act through which a situation is disclosed; the world of the image need not itself be small.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 10, pp. 160–177 (Minnesota 1986)

Following Cinema 2, pp. 32–33, which retrospectively revisits the first semiotics, the atlas gathers the figures developed in Cinema 1, chapters 10–11—attraction, inversion, and discourse—under reflection-image. All three still transform the situation–action relation from within the action forms: attraction uses a substitute or rehearsal to miniaturize, prefigure, or stage another situation or act; inversion exchanges large and small powers; discourse makes an implicit problem into an audible and visible object of thought. Reflection-image must not be prematurely equated with chapter 12's relation-image.

▶

Criterion

Identify the third term introduced between situation and action, then demonstrate shot by shot whether it transforms the prior S–A or A–S direction through substitution and prefiguration, inversion of large and small powers, or discourse that makes an implicit problematic relation into the image's object.

Distinction

A mirror, reflection, symmetrical composition, a character's self-reflection, or a line of commentary is insufficient. The reflection-image remains bound to the action-image and must show a third term transforming the direct correspondence between situation and action.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 10, pp. 171–173 (discursive figure), ch. 11, pp. 182–187 (attraction and inversion) (Minnesota 1986); Cinema 2, ch. 2, pp. 32–33 (retrospective sign classification) (Minnesota 1989)

In Cinema 1's strict usage, the mental-image first names a problem-field: images take relations, symbolic acts, and intellectual feelings as their objects rather than representing states inside a character's head. Relations are external to their terms and irreducible to the attributes of any one term; symbolic acts and intellectual feelings must likewise become operations of image, sound, and editing rather than plot content. The atlas gives mental-image and relation-image separate pages only as reading interfaces for this problem-field and its Hitchcockian realization through Thirdness. The source does not rank them as parallel levels or make the former a superclass of recollection- and dream-images.

▶

Criterion

First determine whether the shot takes a relation, symbolic act, or intellectual feeling as its object. Then ask how camera, editing, and sound distribute that operation among character, film, and spectator rather than merely supplying psychological information; a further diagnosis of relation-image requires separate evidence of Thirdness at work.

Distinction

Character psychology, interior monologue, subjective shots, dream subject matter, or complex narration is not sufficient. If relation, symbolic act, or intellectual feeling remains plot content rather than an image-object capable of reorganizing perception, affection, and action, the mental-image has not been established.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 12, pp. 197–205 (Minnesota 1986); Cinema: The Classification of Signs and Time, lecture 12, 1 March 1983

The relation-image is the decisive Hitchcockian realization within the mental-image's problem-field: it makes relation itself the image's object and specifies its signs through Peircean Thirdness. A mark sustains a natural or habitual series, a demark redirects that series through an anomalous term, and a symbol makes a concrete term bear an abstract relation; Hitchcock further composes director, film, and the spectator who must enter the inference as a triadic apparatus. The separate atlas page is an explanatory interface, not evidence that the source ranks mental-image and relation-image as parallel levels.

▶

Criterion

First list the habitual series, then identify the demark that makes it deviate or contradict itself, or the concrete symbol that bears several relations or variations of one relation. Finally show how the film lets spectators know or discover the relation ahead of a character and incorporates that response into framing, editing, and suspense rather than merely making them wait for a solution.

Distinction

Relations among characters, three people in a frame, multilinear narration, suspense clues, or a twist ending do not automatically constitute Thirdness. Relation must become the image's object and frame, transforming perception, affection, action, and the spectator's position.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 12, pp. 197–205 (Minnesota 1986)

The crisis of the action-image is not the disappearance of movement but the loss of a credible bond among situation, perception, and action capable of changing the world. Cinema 1 lists a constellation of five surface symptoms: dispersive situations that replace a totality with gaps; deliberately weak links among events; wandering that displaces goal-directed travel; consciousness of clichés, as figures and spectators begin to recognize how ready-made schemata obscure real relations; and the exposure or denunciation of conspiracy—the network of control behind the plot. These are external negative conditions for a new image-regime, not a checklist that every film and every sequence must complete.

Criterion

Identify the symptoms actually present and how they combine, without forcing all five into the sequence. Then explain how these surface features deprive action of its power to integrate the world, and whether that failure produces a new optical or sound relation or remains a plot setback.

Distinction

This crisis is one historical and semiotic condition under which direct time-images can emerge, not a sufficient condition of the time-image. Failure, slowness, passive characters, open endings, or any one of the five symptoms alone does not prove that time now directly organizes cinematic connection.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 12, pp. 205–216 (Minnesota 1986); Cinema 2, ch. 1, pp. 1–13 (Minnesota 1989)

The sensory-motor schema is not the definition of the movement-image but one specific body-world organization within it. A body receives movement from its milieu, selects perceptions according to its needs, retains what it cannot immediately discharge as affection, and answers the milieu through action. Its crisis does not mean that characters cease moving; the link from perception and affection to an action capable of changing the situation comes loose.

▶

Criterion

Record what the figure perceives, how the body is affected, and what action follows; then ask whether that action alters the milieu and supplies usable cues for the next perception. At which link does the circuit break?

Distinction

Silence, waiting, slowness, or a failed act is insufficient by itself. Movement need not stop during the crisis, and a local circuit may reconnect. The movement-image also includes perceptual, affective, impulse, and relational types that cannot be reduced to this schema.

Primary source

Cinema 1, chs. 4–10, 12; Cinema 2, chs. 1–2

A visual or auditory situation acquires a duration autonomous from cues for action or narration. Unable to translate what is seen or heard immediately into an effective response, the figure becomes a seer, listener, or witness. This is a threshold of the time-image, not direct time by itself.

▶

Criterion

Can action use up this sound or image? What does the remainder compel us to notice?

Distinction

Scope: an opsign or a sonsign may hold independently. Chapter 9's audio-visual disjunction and lectosign are later relations and must not be folded back into this definition.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 1–2

The agent loses mastery over the situation and sees what habitual action concealed. The seer is a body struck by something too strong, too beautiful, terrible, or intolerable.

▶

Criterion

Does the character’s inability to act produce a more powerful seeing?

Distinction

Criterion: suspended agency must produce intensified perception.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 1

A space stripped of stable coordinates, total continuity, and practical use: ruins, empty lots, fractured streets, waiting rooms, or virtual spaces built from light, colour, and fragments. Relations can be recomposed within it.

▶

Criterion

Does the space contain action, or dissolve the coordinates action requires?

Distinction

Dual location: in Cinema 1 the any-space-whatever first belongs to the affection-image and qualisign; in Cinema 2 it can also become a spatial condition of the postwar sensory-motor break. Empty shots and ruins are only possible forms.

Primary source

Cinema 1, ch. 7; Cinema 2, ch. 1

The actual is a formed and locatable state. The virtual consists of fully determined and fully real differential relations, singularities, memories, and tendencies. It is not a possible future or a blurred copy of the actual. The virtual is actualized through differenciation: actualization creates a solution rather than making a pre-existing model resemble reality, and the formed actual continues to carry the virtual problem to which it responds.

▶

Criterion

Identify the unactualized yet already operative relations, memories, or tendencies that constrain the shot, then show how they differentiate into this actual composition, performance, sound, or narrative form. Merely imagining a possible future does not pass the test.

Distinction

Virtual/actual is not a distinction between false and true or between possibility and realization, and not every memory, reflection, or imagined role is already a crystal. A crystal additionally requires the actual and virtual to form a smallest reciprocal circuit and attain objective indiscernibility.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 4, pp. 68–97 (Minnesota 1989); Matter and Memory, chs. 2–3; Bergsonism, ch. 3 and ch. 5; Difference and Repetition, ch. 4, pp. 168–221

A crystal-image forms when an actual image and its own virtual image coalesce in the smallest internal circuit. The two faces pursue, feed back into, and exchange with one another. They preserve their difference in kind, yet the stable assignment of one face permanently to the actual and the other permanently to the virtual becomes undecidable. This objective indiscernibility makes visible the present's continual split into an actual present and a coexisting virtual past.

▶

Criterion

Name both faces of the circuit and track how each reflection, recollection, performance, or copy acts back upon the supposed original. Can the faces continue to exchange while the analysis still specifies their difference in kind?

Distinction

A mirror, reflection, dream, flashback, or play-within-a-film is insufficient. If the actual remains a fixed original and the other face merely supplies information, the circuit is still one-way. Indiscernibility is not subjective viewer confusion but the failure of stable assignment within the relation itself.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 4, pp. 68–97 (Minnesota 1989)

As one face of the crystal becomes a clear actual image, the other recedes into opaque virtuality; then the two exchange. Their relation produces visibility.

Criterion

Which face is momentarily clear, how does it darken the other, and where do they reverse?

Distinction

Criterion: limpid and opaque exchange with the actual and virtual.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 4; Deamer, 2016

A seed triggers crystallization within an as-yet amorphous environment, while that environment must itself possess a virtual crystalline structure. Seed and milieu reciprocally individuate one another, making the crystal a world in formation.

Criterion

What world is a local form crystallizing, and how does that world act back upon it?

Distinction

Criterion: local form and environment reciprocally individuate one another.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 4; Deamer, 2016

Sheets of the past are not former presents stacked in chronological order but virtual regions in which the pure past exists at different degrees of contraction; the whole past coexists virtually with every present. Recollection does not retrieve a ready-made copy from storage. Starting from a present problem, it leaps into a region, searches along a sheet, and actualizes a recollection-image; the search may also change sheets, misrecognize, or fail.

▶

Criterion

Identify the present problem that triggers recollection, then trace how the figure enters, changes, or fails to reach a region of the past. If a flashback merely supplies causal information and returns to one timeline, it remains a causal flashback.

Distinction

An archive, old footage, childhood scene, or nonlinear order is not by itself a sheet of the past. Analysis must show how the past as a whole coexists with the present and why recollection enters this region rather than another. Ordinary information retrieval can still serve action.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 5, pp. 98–125 (Minnesota 1989); Bergson, Matter and Memory, ch. 3

Peaks of the present make several mutually incompossible presents persist as present and thereby deactualize the single continuous and decidable 'real present.' This is not a set of viewpoints upon an already settled event. The image sustains mutually exclusive present worlds without an external master version that can reduce the others to errors.

Criterion

List the figures, events, and audiovisual relations altered by each present version, then ask whether the film finally restores one adjudicating master present. If every difference can be explained by missing information, deactualization has not occurred.

Distinction

Multiple viewpoints, cross-cutting, conflicting testimony, loops, or repeated scenes are insufficient. They may instead belong to sheets of past, falsifying narration, or ordinary suspense. Peaks require incompossible presents to remain operative.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 5, pp. 98–125 (Minnesota 1989)

Chronosign is the superordinate classification used when temporal relations directly organize the connection of images rather than merely measuring or resulting from action. Chapter 5 distinguishes two branches that are distinct and non-interchangeable: sheets of past make the virtual past coexisting with the present into regions of recollection-search, while peaks of present sustain incompossible presents and deactualize the single present. Both are signs of direct time, but they answer different problems.

▶

Criterion

First decide whether the connection comes from recollection-search or a fork of the present: do images change regions within the pure past, or sustain incompossible presents? Then remove the action-goal and test whether that temporal relation still organizes the shots.

Distinction

A clock, countdown, slow motion, long take, flashback, or nonlinear narration does not automatically produce a chronosign. If a task and final causal order still govern the connections, time remains subordinate to action; the analysis must also name the branch it uses.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 5, pp. 98–125 (Minnesota 1989)

Deducible continuity among shots, sounds, and images gives way to an irreducible interval between series. Thought is forced to happen within it.

▶

Criterion

Does this cut conceal an ellipsis, or produce an irreducible relation?

Distinction

Criterion: technical discontinuity must produce an irreducible relation.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 7–9

Narration abandons a recoverable model of truth and lets characters, testimonies, memories, and worlds mutate through a series of falsifiers. The false gains creative power by freeing itself from a model of truth.

▶

Criterion

Does the film expose a lie to restore truth, or alter the rules by which truth and falsity are produced?

Distinction

Scope: powers of the false transform the production and creative force of truth and falsity.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 6; Cinema seminar 1983–84

Characters and narrative positions escape calibration by an omniscient centre. Each falsifier refers to another, while identity and past mutate according to degrees of power.

▶

Criterion

Who can adjudicate among versions, and is that position itself drawn into the series of falsifiers?

Distinction

A twist ending may still serve a final truth.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 6

The noosign marks a crisis in the relation between image and thought. Classical cinema's promise that an organic whole and shock would automatically reach thought fails; the image instead confronts thought with the Outside, the unthought, and its own powerlessness, reopening the problem of belief in the world.

▶

Criterion

Does the image merely present a puzzle, or does it undo an established whole of thought and force thinking to face the Outside, the unthought, and its own powerlessness?

Distinction

Criterion: bodies, ceremonies, audio-visual gaps, and brain-like mise-en-scène are possible mechanisms only. Difficulty, philosophical dialogue, or brain-shaped décor is not itself a noosign.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 7–8

Everyday attitudes and gestus sediment time in the body; cinema of the brain turns space, light, colour, and connection into a map of thought. Body and brain form two distinct cinematic mechanisms of thought.

▶

Criterion

First state whether the analysis concerns body or brain: how does an attitude bear time before story, or how do cinematic connections organize space, probability, and disjunction into a map of thought?

Distinction

Term scope: cinema of the body and cinema of the brain are two mechanisms. Expressive gesture, neurological subject matter, subjective camera, or labyrinthine décor cannot substitute for the branch-specific test.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 8

The time-image tends toward an image that must be read: picture, sound, text, data, and invisible relations form strata. Viewing becomes an ongoing work of comparison, recomposition, and concept formation.

▶

Criterion

Beyond showing objects, which invisible relations does the image ask you to read?

Distinction

Criterion: viewing must recompose image, sound, text, data, and invisible relations.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 9

Characters and filmmakers jointly remake reality through narration, performance, and re-enactment. Story no longer serves a prior truth; it creates a speaking position for a collective still in formation.

▶

Criterion

Does narration change the actual relation among speaker, filmmaker, and collective?

Distinction

Criterion: fabulation produces subject and collective positions through narration and leaves observable relational changes.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 6; ch. 8

The storytelling speech-act crosses private affairs and politics, produces collective utterances, and prefigures the people who are missing.

▶

Criterion

Who speaks, to whom, through which path, and which conditions, responses, and consequences does the image show?

Distinction

Criterion: speech and image produce new collective utterances while retaining the gap of a people not yet formed.

Primary source

Cinema 2, ch. 8