Palaces, opera, and aristocratic bodies compose an artificial crystal cut off from nature and history. Corruption spreads through desire, bodies, and architecture while war and Prussian power approach off-screen; too late becomes the film's temporal rhythm.
Film atlas
An index of 147 films, with shot analysis, concept explanations, stills, scholarship, and viewing links. Search by title, director, concept, or viewing source, then open a film to read its analysis.
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Films and analyses
Su goes for noodles and Chow waits on stairs and corridors; the same music returns similar routes while distance, glance, and hesitation quietly change. When they act out how their spouses began the affair or how a confrontation might unfold, a scene often reveals only midway that it is rehearsal. The unactualized conversation thus determines what they can still say in actual life. The cavity at Angkor Wat preserves not a completed romance but a relation already becoming memory as it occurs and still continuing to act.
Mounted on horseback or hurled like a weapon, the camera is first freed from fixed support. Superimpositions and the triptych screen then juxtapose, collide, and expand local movements. Present battle and immense history are not unified by one viewpoint; they produce a mathematical sublime between interval and whole.
The camera travels against the street crowd, enters a skyscraper, and finds one desk among countless windows, embedding the individual in an exchangeable mass. John repeatedly answers the city with effort only to return to the same situation. The large form S–A–S′ fails, turning upward mobility into an S–A–S loop.

Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. · 1928
Buster Keaton / 巴斯特·基顿 · United States
The cyclone turns the town into a continuously transforming milieu: façades fall, buildings slide, and wind transports bodies. Keaton's small body does not overpower disaster but passes through it by exact position and improvised trajectory. Burlesque small form thereby carries a sublime scale usually reserved for epic large form.
Film stills and scene analysis
64 scene analyses describe images, sounds, characters’ actions, and temporal relations. Bilibili viewing links accompany 16 of the films.
Theory unfolds inside the shot
Each essay begins with continuous scenes and connects them to primary passages, seminar records, cited scholarship, and atlas analysis.
Ask whether it merely supplies causal information; time becomes the issue only when distinct sheets of past coexist without reducing to one recollection.
A mirror is only a formal clue; a crystal requires actual and virtual to exchange while remaining indiscernible.
Duration is not the conclusion; ask whether persistence, waiting, and intervals subordinate movement to time rather than merely slowing action.
Edition, source-label, and viewing notes
Timecodes refer to the edition named in each entry. Primary-text locators distinguish Minnesota 1989 from Bloomsbury Revelations 2013; scene analyses and bibliography records have direct links. Research library
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Title, year, and director distinguish films with the same name. Posters include their source; original title cards are labelled separately.
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Primary conceptual case
Deleuze directly uses the film to establish, distinguish, or deepen a concept.
Brief mention by Deleuze
The film appears in Cinema 2 as a brief example, list item, or supporting mention.
Cited later scholarship
Established by a named monograph, article, or special issue.
Atlas analysis
Conceptual interpretations and comparisons developed from specific shots.
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