RESEARCH CHAPTER 01
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.
Central question
What changes in the image when perception no longer leads automatically to an action capable of resolving the situation?
Questions still open
- Beyond Europe '51, which replayable passage in each of the other three films crosses the minimum threshold of the action crisis?
Argument and analysis
The threshold of the time-image is not slowness but the failure of perception to lead automatically to action that can close the situation.
The vase in Late Spring, the factory in Europe ’51, the volcano in Stromboli, and the disappearance in L’Avventura expose what action leaves over. Characters may still walk, search, work, or flee; the problem is that action can no longer turn the world back into a solvable task.
Record image, sound, body, space, and editing: where does action fail, and which duration cannot be reclaimed as narrative information?
Scope
Editorial synthesis: the action crisis is grounded in the primary text; the four-film constellation and minimum threshold are the atlas's synthesis, with only part of the shot evidence verified.
- Chinese manuscript locator
- Bearing Time Chinese DOCX, paragraphs 44–133.
References
- 01
CHINESE RESEARCH MANUSCRIPT
Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
The complete Chinese chapter and its bibliography.
- Locator
- DOCX paragraphs 44–133
- 02
PRIMARY TEXT
Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image primary editions
Defines the sensory-motor break, pure optical/sound situations, and the seer. The primary text supports a relational threshold, not a label for slow cinema.
- Locator
- Cinema 2 English translation, opening discussion, approximately pp. 1–13; 'a cinema of the seer' at p. 2.
- Note
- This page uses short paraphrases and edition navigation rather than reproducing the book; Chinese display propositions are not verbatim Deleuze quotations.
- 03
ATLAS ANALYSIS
Deleuze time-image film catalogue
Compares action, memory, sound, and media material across films.
- Locator
- The corresponding film entries in the Deleuze time-image film catalogue.
Films and concepts
Concepts and terms · 4
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Films and viewing entries · 4
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Counterexamples and limits
If a long take or pause is fully absorbed by a character's action and closes the situation as a solvable task, slowness alone does not establish a break in the sensory-motor schema.
Further reading
The crystal-image keeps actual and virtual distinct while making them exchange places in a minimal circuit.
03How memory searches the past and the present forksSheets 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.
08Action continues, yet no future arrivesThe contemporary crisis is not too little action but too much action that cannot accumulate into workers’ own future.