00:04:31Mental and relational image · SHOT EVIDENCE
Caged birds, the shop-assistant role, and lovebirds: how ordinary relations are established
Are the birds background, merchandise, or a third term that sustains the shop-assistant role, mutual testing, and pursuit between strangers—and which function actually persists into the bay attack?
Film and viewing version
The Birds · The Birds · Alfred Hitchcock / 阿尔弗雷德·希区柯克 · 1963
Reviewed passage by passage on the 01:59:24 single-part Bilibili repost. 00:04:31 is the still anchor and 00:02:00—00:07:10 is the atlas's working boundary. Bilibili's official feature page ep291861 runs 01:59:30, so the two carriers cannot share second-level coordinates.
Version boundary: The timecodes on this page apply only to the named viewing carrier. Restorations, differing leaders, or platform transcodes may shift them.
Passage and still timecodes
approx. 00:02:00—00:07:10 (00:04:31 still shows birds filling a wall of cages)
The window locates the passage; its boundaries remain approximate
The passage window and still anchor are separate coordinates: the Bilibili still at 00:04:31 was checked on 2026-09-01; it does not turn an approximate passage on another carrier into exact bounds.
Visible facts
- 01
The passage cuts among Melanie, Mitch, cage racks, and individual cages as the two figures change position across the counter and caged birds.
- 02
The 00:04:31 anchor shows neither Mitch nor Melanie: stacked cages fill the frame and small birds line the perches.
Audible facts
- 01
Bird calls continue through the conversation. Mitch repeatedly asks about species and care, and Melanie's answers gradually reveal her unfamiliarity with the shop.
- 02
In the dialogue, lovebirds names both a species and the gift Mitch wants for his sister.
Action relation
A role test staged through feigned misrecognition initiates later action. Melanie pursues Mitch through the search for lovebirds, and the cage shifts from shop inventory to gift and means of approach.
Temporal relation
Before the first attack, the passage repeatedly assigns birds predictable positions: inside cages, under species names, within price and gift relations. A later deviation becomes legible only by looking back at these prior relations.
Conceptual reading
The pet shop does not become a mark merely because it contains many birds. The atlas retains the candidate only if merchandise, gift, captivity, and environmental presence form a recognizable habitual series across later passages. If the analysis reduces to a romantic meeting or the birds do not recur within a series, the mark claim must be withdrawn.
Concepts used in the judgement
- Relation-imageimage-relation · CANDIDATE
Birds initiate interpersonal exchange as a third term, but this passage alone does not establish a relation-image; it must hold together with the later series.
→ - Mental-imageimage mentale · ADJACENT
Feigned misrecognition, species judgement, and gift intention become objects of inference for characters and spectator while still serving a clear pursuit action.
→
Primary and scholarly coordinates
- 01Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
Minnesota 1986 translation, chapter 12, pp. 197, 203–204
Page 197 gives the mental image's three classes of thought-object; pp. 203–204 distinguish mark, demark, and symbol. Page 204 directly names the first attacking gull and the flock as a whole, but it does not analyze the pet shop or playground shot by shot.
- 02Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images
David Deamer, Deleuze’s Cinema Books (2016), pp. 132–137
Deamer reconstructs the operative difference among mark, demark, and symbol: a habitual series, an anomalous term departing from that series, and a concrete term bearing abstract relations. The pages provide criteria rather than classifying these three passages for the atlas.
- 03Cinema After Deleuze
Richard Rushton, Cinema After Deleuze (2012), p. 50
Rushton lists Melanie and Mitch's meeting as an initiating event in the relational chain; he does not thereby classify the pet-shop passage shot by shot as a mark.
Terminological coordinates
Chapter relations
Viewing and still sources
Direct scene · Watch 00:02:00–00:07:10 continuously and record each shift of the birds among merchandise, classified object, gift, and medium of flirtation. The timecode applies only to the 01:59:24 single-part repost BV1jJ411g7Yj; the official feature page, Blu-ray, and other streaming editions require fresh location.