Thirteen chapters: action, memory, and time
When does action cease to organise the image? How does time become directly perceptible through sound, bodies, archives, platforms, and nonhuman scales? Each chapter develops these questions through films, concepts, and reference texts.
Action crisis, crystal, and sheets of the past establish the ontological and perceptual threshold of the time-image.
The bearers of time expand from human memory to objects, sound, and archival institutions.
The ontology of time becomes a question of distribution across ecology, labour, and intimate relations.
Death, algorithms, and generated images expose how the future is pre-managed and whether heterogeneous times can compose a common world.
When time stops hiding behind movement
The threshold of the time-image is not slowness but the failure of perception to lead automatically to action that can close the situation.
How the crystal exchanges actual and virtual within one circuit
The crystal-image keeps actual and virtual distinct while making them exchange places in a minimal circuit.
How memory searches the past and the present forks
Sheets and peaks are two different chronosigns: recollection searches a virtually preserved past for a sheet, while peaks let incompossible presents each persist in its own right.
Temporal relations within a shot
Character action, actual–virtual exchange, and the persistence of sound offer distinct ways to understand the time-image.
Ask how time connects the shots, then choose one evidence path
Begin with one question: once the character's action-goal is removed, what temporal relation still connects the shots? Then choose only the evidence path that fits the passage: a pure optical or sound situation tests the sensory-motor circuit and an audiovisual remainder action cannot exhaust; a crystal tests actual–virtual exchange and retained difference; chronosigns test sheets of the past, peaks of the present, or branching series; audiovisual disjunction tests the incommensurable boundary between sound and the visible; body or thought paths test how attitudes accumulate time or how an image forces thought. A passage need not satisfy every criterion at once, but the claimed mechanism must persist through the analysed passage rather than rest on slowness, confusion, or one anomalous shot.
Seven steps for a crystal
Find the actual face, then the virtual face; describe how mirror, editing, sound, body, archive, or space performs the exchange; confirm that difference remains; confirm that no original wins absolutely; then analyse who bears time and what the exchange changes in later shots, actions, and viewing tasks.
Five criteria for a generative time-image
At least two heterogeneous temporal structures exchange structurally; the exchange modifies the original categories; shot, sound, medium, or editing carries it materially; no central time rules every rhythm; and the exchange has lasting consequences for character, viewer, or world.
Texts, scholarship, and shots
The two Cinema books · Scholarly readings and debates · Shots and scenes
Perception, shared time, and image practice
Temporal autonomy, attention, and shared viewing
Temporal autonomy
Can participants help determine rhythm, continuation, interpretation, and ending rather than merely receive the next item? (Authorial synthesis)
Failure mode: treating autonomy as individual discipline while ignoring devices, labour, care, and budgets.Attentional continuity
Can attention form memory, hesitation, and re-viewing without being cut by autoplay? (Authorial synthesis)
Failure mode: treating residency length as attention quality and encouraging extractive dwelling.Sensory density
Do image, sound, haptic imagination, and spatial relation rewrite one another rather than merely add stimulation? (Authorial synthesis)
Failure mode: commodifying sensory intensity and packaging new attention capture as immersion.Communal synchronisation
Can different bodies negotiate shared time without having their differences flattened by one rhythm? (Authorial synthesis)
Failure mode: temporal paternalism that prescribes the correct slowness for others.Archival persistence
Can failed shots, refusals, versions, and interpretations be revisited later rather than leaving only the final cut? (Authorial synthesis)
Failure mode: archival capture, turning every silence and refusal into material for further extraction.How does a recommender turn what just happened into the ranking of what comes next?
Continuing, pausing, skipping, returning, and leaving are five viewing actions for studying recommendation rankings. Comparing the sequences that follow under the same account and version shows whether these actions alter the presentation of the next image.
Read about platform time ↗How bodies, sounds, and archives carry time
Ten comparative readings trace the duration of sound, the rearrangement of archives, the rhythms of labour, and platform ranking, asking how each changes temporal relations in images.
Move from one shot toward concepts, films, books, and disputes
Eight routes trace interrupted action, crystal exchange, and audiovisual separation. Follow each question through concept definitions, film comparisons, book passages, and scholarly debates.
Film comparisons and research topics
Five viewing routes approach films through perception, sound, and memory. Ten research topics connect related works, concepts, and chapters.
Five viewing routes
01 · Sound before image
Can we hear something before it becomes an image?
Viewing action: Begin with eyes closed. Log when the sound arrives, where source and image diverge, and how the body reacts; reopen the image to test whether listening changed spatial judgement.
Film comparisons: Memoria; Sound of Falling; April
Concepts: Pure optical / sound situation; Audio-visual disjunction
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory; Festival de Cannes: Sound of Falling
02 · Images age too
Does an image record time, or is the image itself damaged by time?
Viewing action: Place two versions of one old fragment side by side. Record how clarity, compression, captions, and recutting change visibility; grain alone is not evidence of time.
Film comparisons: Caught by the Tides; With Hasan in Gaza; Dry Leaf
Concepts: Media–body crystal (working term); Sheets of past / peaks of present
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Time Reproduction: research report; The Reproduction of Time: expanded revision; New York Film Festival: Dry Leaf; Kamal Aljafari: With Hasan in Gaza
03 · The dead have not left
How do the dead continue through space, bodies, and dreams?
Viewing action: Mark the absent person’s objects, sounds, and waits in the space, then ask how dream or haunting changes the living person’s action. Keep absence in the evidence rather than supplying its psychology.
Film comparisons: Vitalina Varela; Cemetery of Splendour; Viet and Nam
Concepts: Fabulation; Belief in this world
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Time Reproduction: research report
04 · Cinema dreams its own past
Is film history a dream from which cinema has not yet woken?
Viewing action: Place the quoted or re-scored old form beside the present shot and mark where the quotation changes viewing position. If only easter-egg recognition remains, stop at film-history reference.
Film comparisons: The Image Book; Long Day’s Journey into Night; Resurrection
Concepts: Crystal-image; Powers of the false
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Time Reproduction: research report; Deleuze time-image: global research review
05 · Time that is not human
When trees, strata, caves, and wind become temporal scales, what remains of the human story?
Viewing action: Use shot length, sound scale, framing, and a responsibility log to track nonhuman rhythm; identify the cut that makes humans cease to be the only scale of the event.
Film comparisons: Il Buco; Silent Friend; Back Home
Concepts: Belief in this world; Body–brain
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Deleuze time-image: global research review
Ten essay routes
01 · After the time-image, still within the time-image
The openness and limits of Deleuze’s film categories today
Do names such as neuro-image, death-image, and algorithmic image make the time-image obsolete, or show that it was never a closed genre?
Rather than classifying a film as or not as a time-image, ask through what formal mechanism time becomes sensible; movement-image and time-image are mobile, folded, and mixed principles of organisation.
Reading action: Choose a passage in which seeing does not lead to immediate action. Separate perception, action, pause, and later consequence into four columns, then test the same mechanism against a digital interface to see whether a new image changes temporal structure or only the device.
Film comparisons: Memoria; Caught by the Tides; Youth trilogy; The Beast; With Hasan in Gaza
Concepts: Movement-image; Sensory-motor schema; The seer
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Time Reproduction: research report; Deleuze time-image: global research review; The next step: real-time production of temporality; Kamal Aljafari: With Hasan in Gaza
02 · How images age
Digital media, low resolution, and the material turn of the time-image
When an image carrier ages, degrades, is forgotten, and returns, does the site of the time-image move from characters and narrative worlds to the medium’s structure?
Propose a ‘material-media time-image’: time is not only narrated content but the carrier’s wear, failure, obsolescence, ageing, and return; a technical state matters theoretically only when it governs temporal structure.
Reading action: Place different carriers or editions of one fragment side by side. Log how clarity, compression, captions, colour, and recutting change the visibility of people and space. Ageing exceeds style only when material wear keeps rewriting the viewing relation.
Film comparisons: Caught by the Tides; Dry Leaf; The Image Book
Concepts: Crystal-image; Sheets of past / peaks of present
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Time Reproduction: research report; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; New York Film Festival: Dry Leaf
03 · Hearing what has not become an image
Sound crystals in contemporary cinema
Can sound make a temporal fissure before anything is seen?
A sound crystal is not an auditory version of the visual crystal but sound’s capacity to produce past, present, and virtual worlds independently; source, delay, occlusion, and cross-cutting must be auditable evidence.
Reading action: Listen with your eyes closed before opening the image. Mark arrival, source location, blackout, and the moment the image compensates for sound. Remove mood adjectives and keep only how sound changes space, action, and the judgement of reality.
Film comparisons: Memoria; Sound of Falling; April
Concepts: Pure optical / sound situation; Audio-visual disjunction
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory; Festival de Cannes: Sound of Falling
04 · The future-perfect archive
How old images are re-viewed after catastrophe
How does a future unknown at the moment of filming enter today’s viewing after later knowledge of catastrophe, death, and destruction?
An archive does not transport the past into the present; it lets the future keep modifying the past. ‘Future-perfect’ names hindsight changing an evidentiary relation, not footage predicting catastrophe.
Reading action: Draw a timeline for an archive covering event, filming, storage, rediscovery, and recutting. Separate what was unknown at filming from what is known today, then compare the two viewing positions to show hindsight changing evidence rather than predicting the event.
Film comparisons: With Hasan in Gaza; Meeting with Pol Pot; Blue Heron
Concepts: Powers of the false; Fabulation
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; The Reproduction of Time: expanded revision; Time Reproduction: research report; Kamal Aljafari: With Hasan in Gaza
05 · After human time exits
Nonhuman time in cave, plant, and multispecies cinema
When rock, caves, trees, air, and animals are no longer background, how do humans remain answerable for the consequences of their scales?
A more-than-human time-image is not a slower nature film; it reconfigures camera position, temporal scale, sound layers, human centrality, and the power to watch.
Reading action: Choose a passage of cave, plant, air, or animal duration. Log shot length, framing, sound layers, and whether editing follows a human beat. Identify the scale exchange that changes what counts as an event, then ask what consequences humans still bear.
Film comparisons: Il Buco; Silent Friend; All That Breathes
Concepts: Belief in this world; Body–brain
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Deleuze time-image: global research review
06 · Action no longer changes the world
Labour surplus, institutional time, and contemporary political cinema
What happens to the sensory-motor schema when people keep labouring, maintaining, negotiating, and resisting but cannot accumulate action into their own future?
Propose an ‘action-surplus time-image’: the time-image can arise when action keeps occurring but cannot become historical agency, not only when characters are unable to act.
Reading action: Break a labour passage into bodily action, local result, value capture, and institutional reset. Record who gains time and who is forced to start again after each repetition. This distinguishes blocked action from action that continues but cannot accumulate.
Film comparisons: Youth trilogy; Direct Action; West of the Tracks
Concepts: The seer; Time democracy (research extension)
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Time Reproduction: research report
07 · Asynchronous intimacy
Queer time, non-reproductive futures, and the contemporary time-image
When intimacy refuses growth, marriage, reproduction, and a shared endpoint, how can shots let it retain a complete present?
A queer time-image does not follow from the presence of queer characters; it emerges when encounter, care, and bodily duration refuse a normative life course. Deleuze’s virtual and branching time can be placed beside ‘not-yet’ without replacing it.
Reading action: Mark waiting, missed encounters, returns, and care across the shots. Ask whether the relation must reach a shared endpoint to count. If editing keeps an encounter unfinished, show how it retains its own present instead of inferring time from identity.
Film comparisons: Days; What Time Is It There?; End of the Century; Tropical Malady
Concepts: Actual / virtual; Belief in this world
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory
08 · The past is not finished
Time debt, ghosts, and the death-image in Global South cinema
How does history that was not acknowledged, mourned, or repaid keep organising the present through bodies, houses, and sound?
A ghost is not the past returning to the present but the past never leaving it; the death-image is death as an unfinished temporal condition, not merely a visual depiction of a corpse.
Reading action: List each absence carried by a house, cemetery, hospital, or daily action, then distinguish a death event, institutional second death, and sustained absence. Let space and sound carry the evidence rather than completing the dead person’s experience by narration.
Film comparisons: Cemetery of Splendour; Vitalina Varela; La Llorona
Concepts: Fabulation; Powers of the false
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Time Reproduction: research report
09 · The future pre-occupies the present
From the neuro-image to algorithmic time
When prediction, risk, recommendation, and affective computation press the future into the present, does algorithmic time still belong to an open time-image?
Algorithmic time is not the future finally arriving but the future occupying the present through probabilities, models, and interface prompts. Algorithmic images may be an extreme future dimension within the time-image, not a proclaimed third image.
Reading action: Find the passage where the future enters the present as a risk prompt, purification procedure, recommendation, or memory retrieval. Place preset system paths beside a turn the character genuinely could not foresee, and record where a branch remains open and where probability only replays itself.
Film comparisons: The Beast; Coma; UKI; After Yang
Concepts: Actual / virtual; Body–brain
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; The next step: real-time production of temporality; The Reproduction of Time: expanded revision
10 · Cinema dreams its own century
Genre memory, media history, and the reflexive crystal
How can a film make past cinematic forms more than quotations and give them life again in the present?
When film history is organised as a sensory space to enter, dream, repeat, and transform, cinema itself forms a crystal: past forms and present perception rewrite one another.
Reading action: Freeze a passage where an older film form is quoted, sped up, re-scored, or displaced, and watch it beside the historical form it recalls. Test whether the quotation changes present viewing and narrative closure; if only recognition remains, stop at a film-history easter egg.
Film comparisons: Long Day’s Journey into Night; Resurrection; Grand Tour; Genealogy: Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
Concepts: Crystal-image; Sheets of past / peaks of present; Powers of the false
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters; Deleuze time-image: global research review
Ten image relations and their concepts
A crystal exchanges actual and virtual while preserving their difference; an irrational cut breaks commensurable linkage between shots; an assemblage concerns how bodies, technologies, and institutions jointly organise viewing.
Films and formal questions
Start with action, memory, and sound in each film. Open its title for readings and shots.
Memoria
Delayed source: the blast reaches the body before explanation, carrying a private symptom toward geological and colonial memory. · Viewing question: After the sound is located, what remains of the moments that could not be located?
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Spatial crystal: search, dream, and return exchange actual and virtual within one extended passage. · Viewing question: Does the dream repair action with an ending, or deprive the present of a single centre?
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
Caught by the Tides
Media–body crystal: DV, digital, and 35mm leave more than two decades of format change on bodies and spaces. · Viewing question: When does a format change become a relation inside the shot rather than a date marker?
Sources: Deleuze time-image film catalogue; Time Reproduction: research report
Contemporary images: platforms, synthesis, archives, and nonhuman time
Platform ranking, synthetic faces, interactive edits, database narratives, returned archives, and nonhuman scales alter shot connections, positions of speech, and the effects of viewing on subsequent images. These cases explore each change in relation to Deleuze’s concepts.
Four routes through contemporary images
Who decides your next second?
Contemporary images are not simply faster; the next moment is pre-arranged. Pause, skip, replay, and dwell can all become inputs to the next image. Move from Cinema 2’s broken sensory-motor schema to the continuous modulation of the ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’; the platform is infrastructure that selects sequence, not a new movement-image genre. The index names here point to one observation chain: ranking reads dwell, writes feedback into the next item, and autoplay makes waiting the default action. Record that chain first, then ask how it occupies the interval between perception and action.
Viewing focus: Save a recommendation sequence from a dated version; record what appeared, dwell, exit, the next change, and which behaviours the platform explicitly treats as feedback. · Conceptual extension: Start with one dwell. After a pause, skip, or replay, the same feed delivers a different next item. Time shifts from duration inside a video to a sequence reordered by behaviour, moving the object from the shot to the viewer’s trace. · Counterexample: Long videos, livestreams, and slow landscapes can also enter a feed; shortness, speed, or vertical framing alone do not prove platform temporality.Who sees you, and who decides?
This lane begins with surveillance and classification: the key is not an all-knowing eye but an assemblage of cameras, databases, permissions, thresholds, and enforcement. Neuro-affect is only a bridge to a separate open question. Pisters connects brain-screen, surveillance, and affect in the neuro-image; Deleuze’s powers of the false asks who can manufacture a credible reality. Surveillance can repress and alter bodily capacity at once. Institutional control (pouvoir) and affective/creative capacity (puissance) must be recorded together.
Viewing focus: Follow capture → classification → permission → feedback → bodily consequence, and show how one low-resolution frame becomes a decision, false positive, or appeal. · Conceptual extension: Begin with one low-resolution face frame. A camera turns the body into features, a database pushes them across a threshold, and a permissions system sends the judgement back to the body. The neuro-affective question lies in how a visible instant becomes an executable command. · Counterexample: A film that criticises surveillance does not automatically provide a counter-surveillance method; test whether the viewer’s position is actually redistributed.Probability is not the virtual
Generative images compress the past into training data, weights, prompts, and seeds; the question is not whether they have time but who redistributes the source of time. Cinema 2’s actual/virtual keeps two faces distinct while making them exchange; a model’s probability space can be compared with the virtual but cannot be equated with it. The Beast, Coma, UKI, and After Yang place affective purification, screen dreams, game engines, and machine memory on one future chain, while each film retains a distinct media mechanism.
Viewing focus: Record model or database version, source, prompt, output, revision, consent, withdrawal, and consequence; separate visual novelty from a genuine branch in reality. · Conceptual extension: Start with different faces generated from the same prompt. The variation looks open, yet stays inside clusters set by training data and model weights. Extending actual/virtual to generative images means asking who can be recalled, who is excluded, and who bears the consequences. · Counterexample: Repeated variation from one prompt may be modulation within a preset probability cluster; without relational or ethical consequence, it remains an effect.Archives rewrite themselves in the future
An archive is not a warehouse of the past but a relation changed by filming, naming, storing, reenacting, recutting, and accessing. Sheets of the past and the crystal-image show past and present coexisting; the atlas’s ‘future-perfect archive’ is only a working term for hindsight changing public evidence. Decolonial work is not merely adding old material; it redistributes who names, annotates, refuses reuse, and bears the harm of recirculation.
Viewing focus: For each archive, record original production, what was unknown then, what happened later, who recut it, and how absent people are named. · Conceptual extension: Start with a recut of an old image. An event unknown at filming enters captions, display, and access rights after catastrophe. Archive time lies in how hindsight rewrites who may name it and who may refuse its return. · Counterexample: Reenactment and recutting do not restore the original event; hindsight can change viewing conditions but cannot masquerade as a prophecy present at filming.Are you choosing, or is the system remembering?
Interactive images write viewer actions into the work, but choice is not automatically freedom or the virtual. The spiritual automaton, powers of the false, and crystal relations help distinguish genuine branching from preset circuits and reversible failure. Bandersnatch, Immortality, and After Yang turn choice trees, shot databases, and memory access into spectatorial labour; whether the work really remembers the player is decisive.
Viewing focus: Code input, visible branch, hidden state, save point, rollback cost, system memory, and exit; do not describe only ‘immersion’. · Conceptual extension: Start with one branch choice. The system saves, rolls back, or erases it, changing the next viewing. The extension of temporal interactivity lies in whether the work remembers the action and makes exit carry a cost. · Counterexample: If every failure is routed back to a preset path, interactivity is a more complex sensory-motor loop, not temporal autonomy.Time that is not human
When birds, air, caves, roads, and plants become temporal scales, the human story no longer owns the only account of the event. Nonhuman duration is not filming nature more slowly; it lets scales exchange structurally and makes humans answerable for consequences. All That Breathes, Il Buco, Silent Friend, and The Plains connect ecology, city, transit, and care as shared more-than-human duration.
Viewing focus: Record camera position, sound layers, scale changes, and who bears consequence; if nonhuman rhythm changes neither edit nor judgement, it remains background. · Conceptual extension: Start with a shot not cut to a human beat. Cave echo, plant growth, or road noise interferes across scales. Extending nonhuman duration requires showing which cut, judgement, and bearer of consequence the exchange changes. · Counterexample: ‘Deep time’ easily becomes sublime scenery; show which relation changes rather than merely displaying spectacular nature.A disaster cannot fit inside one image
A war or disaster image carries a chain of source, place, time, device, transcode, crop, caption, circulation, and harm—not only a resemblance to reality. World-memory and audiovisual disjunction help analyse the position of witnessing. Victims absent from the frame must be located through specific sounds, archives, and acts of speech rather than replaced by a concept. Multiple screens expose chains of responsibility rather than adding truth. The Zone of Interest, Memoria, With Hasan in Gaza, and Welcome to Chechnya treat offscreen sound, bodily event, delayed archive, and digital face doubles as distinct ethical problems.
Viewing focus: Write what is seen, heard, missing, who is forced to watch, and who can stop, while publishing source and uncertainty. · Conceptual extension: Start where an offscreen sound does not match the face in frame. A disaster image brings source, caption, crop, and circulation into the act of seeing. Extending witnessing to platforms asks who is forced to watch, who can stop circulation, and who carries the chain of evidence. · Counterexample: Multiscreen, digital face doubles, or intense sound can repeat the consumption of trauma; formal complexity is not a substitute for ethical legitimacy.TikTok For You: what decides the next image?
Research hypotheses
The core of platform temporality is not the length of each video but the sequence being re-ranked through interactions, video information, and device settings. Likes, shares, comments, follows, creation, completion, and ‘not interested’ become recommendation signals; feedback is not an ending but the next item’s prehistory.
All Light, Everywhere: who interprets the body camera's blind spots?
Research hypotheses
The film places the shared histories of cameras, weapons, policing, and justice in one visual chain, making objectivity an institutional effect to interrogate. Body cameras, Axon technologies, historical archives, multiple narrations, and performance undo one another; the viewer cannot treat the frame as unmediated testimony.
The Viewing Booth: the viewer is in the frame
Research hypotheses
The film has a viewer watch short videos about life under Israeli military rule and then revisit her own reactions, making evidentiary judgement visible as temporal labour. Booth, video fragments, facial response, explanation, and later re-viewing form a minimal circuit; the same image changes meaning on the second viewing.
Sources for contemporary cases
- Pisters: The Neuro-Image guide and author page
- TikTok: How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou
- Neon: All Light, Everywhere official film page
- ICA: The Viewing Booth institutional page
- BFI: The Beast review
- New York Film Festival: Coma film page
- UKI: Shu Lea Cheang press kit
- A24: After Yang official film page
- Cannes: All That Breathes official film page
- David Easteal: The Plains director site
- Niko Pajkovic: Algorithms and taste-making
- Firth / Marinelli: Datacasting
- Simone Browne: Dark Matters
- Jihoon Kim: Fabulations of Light
- Daniel Binns: A media-materialist method for generative AI images
- Matthew Fuller: Third Nature on UKI
- Sukchang Lee: Memory embodiment in After Yang
- Simone Svensson: Digitally enabled witnessing and Sichuan earthquake documentaries
- Kristen M. Daly: Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image
- Máiréad Ní Chróinín: The body as digital archive
- Sreyashi Ray: Airborne Hospitality
- Bidisha Banerjee: Care and disgust in more-than-human worlds
- Vinzenz Hediger: Documentary spectatorship and justified trust
- Venice: The Beast official competition page
- ICA: UKI film edition page
- ROCO: The Viewing Booth distributor page
- Cannes: The Zone of Interest official film page
- Emilija Talijan: Attention and ambience in The Zone of Interest
- Neon: Memoria official film page
- Bilibili: 09:42 opening excerpt from Memoria
- Mariela Herrero: Los tiempos resuenan…
- IDFA: A Night of Knowing Nothing film page
- Debashree Mukherjee: Cinema, Love, and Collective Struggle
- Unifrance: Dahomey film page and press kit
- Rita Keresztesi: Reinventing the archive in Africa
- FIDMarseille: Pepe official material
- Sanjay Surin: The right to remain opaque
- Steam: Immortality official listing
- Marco Caracciolo: Complexity and near-aha moments in digital narrative
- Before Your Eyes: developer site and Steam listing
- Vanderhoef / Payne: Blink and you’ll miss it
- IDFA: Grand Theft Hamlet film page
- Machinima as a Production Technique: Grand Theft Hamlet
- New York Film Festival: Flee film page
- Neon: Flee official film page
- Flee: Sounds of Fright and Flight
- Marrakech International Film Festival: With Hasan in Gaza
- International Documentary Association: Aljafari on With Hasan in Gaza
- HBO: Welcome to Chechnya release material
- International Documentary Association: the digital veil in Welcome to Chechnya
Sound sources: appearance, disappearance, and displacement
Sound can precede an image, persist across a cut, or organise space after its source disappears. Each case develops one of these audiovisual relations.
Memoria: the blast before its source
The blast arrives first as a bodily event, then enters verbal description and sonic reconstruction. The manuscript separates actual, remembered, technically approximated, historical, and nonhuman sound; the layers can be distinguished, but no single ‘original’ closes the circuit.
Return to film card ↗Sound of Falling: an intergenerational sound field
Sound does not label four generations by date; it lets one house, different bodies, and memories not personally lived bleed into one another. Anticipatory sound makes bodies bear an event before they know it.
Return to film card ↗April: breath turns the body into a clock
Breath, low frequencies, rain, darkness, and interior bodily sounds are not atmospheric padding; they write a life cycle directly into the soundtrack. It is a boundary case: the sonsign is forceful, but medical investigation and causal procedure still operate.
Return to film card ↗Cemetery of Splendour: historical residue sounding in the hospital
Insects, construction, machines, sleep, and a historical hum overlap the hospital’s present sound field, allowing ancient war and the state apparatus to inhabit contemporary bodies. Sound does not reveal one hidden object; it makes the present space sound already occupied by another history.
Return to film card ↗The Zone of Interest: sound witness, not sound crystal
Domestic talk, children’s play, and chores occupy the visual foreground while shots, cremation, and industrial hum from the camp remain off-screen. The historical source is clear; what is split is ethical response, not origin. Sound therefore forms a coexistence of witnessing: the spectator bears the reality the visible subjects actively exclude.
Return to film card ↗Six sound-times: from listener to bearer
Classify sound by temporal relation rather than mood: present confirmation, suspense delay, residue, anticipation, recursion, and bodily cycle. ‘Bearer’ is not a new label but a shift in viewing position: record who or what bears the sound’s consequence. The manuscript lists ‘witness coexistence’ separately as an ethical mechanism, so it is not silently folded into the six.
Return to film card ↗Primary texts, research literature, and quotations
Deleuze’s texts, cinema scholarship, and contemporary-image sources, with editions, page references, and available links.
- New York Film Festival: Dry Leaf
- Festival de Cannes: Sound of Falling
- Kamal Aljafari: With Hasan in Gaza
- Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image primary editions
- Deleuze time-image film catalogue
- Time Reproduction
- The Reproduction of Time: expanded revision
- Time Reproduction: research report
- Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
- The next step: real-time production of temporality
- Deep synthesis on Deleuze’s time-image
- Deleuze time-image: global research review
- Notes on research into Deleuze’s time-image
- D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine
- Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory
- Keith Wylie Faulkner, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (PDF)
- David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (PDF)
A cinema of the seer
This short quote is an entry point; the test still returns to whether received sights and sounds exceed action’s adequacy.
Cinema 2, Minnesota 1989 translation, p. 2; five-word excerpt, edition-dependentThe smallest internal circuit
A mirror is not the definition of the crystal; the quote returns the question to two faces remaining different while exchanging.
Cinema 2, Minnesota 1989 translation, p. 68; four-word excerpt, edition-dependentSheets of the past
A sheet is not a folder in a memory warehouse but a region of the whole past that the present selects and actualises.
Cinema 2, Minnesota 1989 translation, pp. 98–99; four-word excerpt, edition-dependentDebates on long takes, slow cinema, and generative images
How does a shot’s duration become a temporal relation? How do generative images handle possibility and memory? These discussions present competing interpretations and their conceptual disagreements.
Time-image ≠ slow cinema
Sustained labour in Youth may be action surplus, while The Beast’s extended passages remain gathered by a romance premise and causal tragedy. Similar forms can have different temporal mechanisms.
Select the mechanism pathway first—sensory-motor break, crystalline exchange, sheets/peaks, audiovisual disjunction, or body-thought—then apply pathway-specific evidence and its countertest. The workbench separates records; it is not one cumulative threshold that every shot must pass. ‘Slow’ remains an observation, not a conclusion.A long take is not a sufficient condition
Average shot length cannot say what the viewer is waiting for or whether the interval is reclaimed by an organic narrative.
Place duration inside the six-dimensional shot code: duration, sensory-motor linkage, ordering, actual/virtual, spectatorial labour, and historical-social articulation.The generative time-image is not Cinema 3
If a new label only replaces an old one without new shot tests, provenance rules, and counterexamples, it is an illusion of theoretical upgrade.
Publish it as a cross-media working frame and mark which claims are primary, scholarly, or atlas proposals on every card.Feed-image is not Deleuze’s term
Without product versions, recommendation sequences, and pause/skip records, platform critique becomes an abstract allegory.
Place the platform loop beside the practice loop: capture → predict → rank → solicit response, against encounter → wait → re-view → stop.Model probability ≠ Deleuze’s virtual
Equating ‘can be generated’ with ‘virtual’ erases training provenance, labour, consent, and version responsibility.
Compare the middle layer of model, interface, and viewing behaviour, and build provenance cards instead of leaping over the evidence gap with one term.Project self-description ≠ independent validation
Claims such as ‘success’, ‘community formed’, or ‘course implemented’ exceed the evidence without scripts, rehearsals, budgets, observations, and interviews.
Publish open questions as a testable design: material list, observation method, consent and withdrawal, right to stop, and version records.Death-image is an extension, not a universal label
Show how absence keeps organising the present, how institutions produce a second death, and who is denied speech or mourning.
Separate death event, film fact, ethical judgement, and authorial synthesis; do not speak for the dead.Shot analysis: image, sound, and action
Follow shot boundaries, sound sources, and bodily attitudes into interrupted action, actual–virtual exchange, and the question of who determines rhythm.
Mark the shot boundary
Where does the passage begin and end? Is the cut triggered by action, sound, material, or an external condition?
Write only visible facts
What is actually visible: bodies, objects, light, space, text, occlusion, and absence?
Trace audible facts
Where does the sound come from? When does it appear, disappear, become occluded, or cross the cut?
Record speech and silence
Who speaks, pauses, or cannot speak? Is silence a character strategy, an editorial interval, or an institutional absence?
Diagram perception and action
Does seeing still lead immediately to a workable action? If action continues, who owns its consequence?
Separate actual and virtual
Which face is occurring? Which acts on the present as memory, mirror, archive, or sound? How do the two exchange?
Name the bearer and organising power
Who or what bears time: character, sound, format, architecture, archive, labour institution, or platform? Who sets the rhythm?
Write the countertest and attach sources
What evidence would falsify this reading? Which sentence is primary, scholarly, or an atlas proposal?
Further research: interaction, politics, and planetary time
Staying and leaving in VR, platform rankings of what comes next, the sources of memory in AI images, and multiple temporalities across decolonial and planetary scales.
