Impulse-image

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.