Deleuze terminology dictionary

The cinema books follow Bergson’s starting point: matter is the aggregate of images, prior to the split between object and copy.

The movement-image names how movement and sensory-motor linkage organize images; it is a structural category rather than a period label.

The criterion is how temporal relations organize movement, editing, sound, and image; slow motion, long takes, waiting, flashbacks, and temporal themes are possible materials.

Direct names time’s organizing role across several forms beyond the crystal, including edited, real-time, and moving images.

The perception-image concerns how selection, centres, and viewpoints emerge within the universe of images; the subjective shot is one possible form.

In the affection-image, faces, close-ups, or any-space-whatever carry power-quality. Expression is possible material; the conceptual relation exceeds psychological information.

The action-image depends on action carrying a situation toward a resolvable new situation; bodily movement is material within that structure.

The four structural terms must form a relation, but symptom and fetish are two types of signs, not extra structural coordinates, and need not both appear. Stroheim proceeds through decay, descent, and entropy, while Buñuel proceeds through repetition, cycles, and restart; these likewise are not cumulative requirements for every case. Strong desire, violence, or animality alone remains insufficient.

Large refers to the situation's encompassing and determining role, not spectacle, feature length, production scale, wide framing, or heroic stature. The test follows how the milieu bears upon bodies, how a duel concentrates forces, and whether action actually transforms S.

Small does not mean a minor character, low budget, short film, tight framing, or modest event. If an already totalized situation governs the characters, the structure may remain large form. The evidence for small form is an action functioning as an index from which character and viewer infer the situation.

The reflection-image mediates the extension of action into mental relations by making the direct S–A or A–S relation indirect through figures of attraction, inversion, and discourse. Mirrors, reflections, self-examination, symbolic dialogue, or a supposedly reflective theme are each insufficient, and the three figures need not always convert one action-form into the other.

The mental image is not a catch-all for point-of-view shots, inner monologue, or psychological subject matter. Thirdness finds its most adequate cinematic representation in relation; relation is not the grammatical subject of that claim. The atlas separates mental-image and relation-image only as reading interfaces for a problem-field and its Hitchcockian realization through Thirdness. It does not claim parallel source-level ranks or place recollection- and dream-images beneath the former.

The relation-image organizes reasoning through a mark within a habitual series, a demark that breaks from the series, and a concrete symbol bearing abstract relations. Character relationships, multi-strand narration, plot complexity, or viewer confusion are insufficient unless the image makes relation primary and reorganizes its terms.

Dispersive situations, deliberately weak links, wandering or voyage, consciousness of clichés, and the exposure or denunciation of conspiracy—the network of control behind the plot—form a constellation of surface symptoms. They are external negative conditions of the time-image, need not all appear in every film or sequence, and are not sufficient conditions. One must still test whether optical and sound situations escape practical use and establish new temporal relations.

The schema enters crisis when seeing and hearing lose their natural extension into adequate action, even while bodies continue to move.

Pure means that an optical or auditory situation exceeds its extension into action and acquires relations of its own; it describes function, not formal purity.

Do not classify every motionless object as a cinematic still life or begin by asking what it symbolizes. First check duration, adjacent shots, and the sound field, then ask whether these relations give time an organizing role not exhausted by narrative function.

The opsign marks a pure optical situation; classifying a film still depends on its full set of image-relations, with composition as formal material.

Voice-over, noise, or silence becomes a sonsign only when it ceases to function merely as a cue for action and acquires relations of its own.

The tactisign is a local extension in Cinema 2 chapter 1; the conclusion section’s recapitulation begins with opsign and sonsign.

The seer’s incapacity for action becomes intensified perception or witnessing; staring and observation are surface gestures.

Any-space-whatever loses the stable coordinates and total continuity required by action; ruins, empty shots, and abstract sets can carry this despecification.

Actual and virtual both belong to the real and remain related through actualization and virtualization.

The virtual is a fully real field of differential relations capable of actualization, distinct from falsity and preformed possibility.