User:Nicole Hametner/Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies 2012-04

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, 1985

In Cinema 2 Deleuze treats questions about the representation of time in film, this volume follows Cinema 1 (1983), which focussed on the mouvement in film. Basically Deleuze says that in the first period of the history of film the the mouvement-image dominated, with an action-reaction structure and a chronology that is rationally comprehensible. Then after the Second World War, mainly in cinema of the neo-realism, this mouvement-image was subordinated to the time-image, which had different temporal structures, often non-chronological and supplemented with irrational cuts. It was about capturing time in an image in an unconventional way, without following anymore the movement of an actor like it was the case in the traditional cinema. Another specification of the time-image was to integrate empty interiors, still lifes and other deserted spaces. Deleuze writes that the so called crisis in action-image (…) let to these pure optical-sound-images, subjective images treating on the one hand the ordinary life and on the other hand the extreme. A lot of filmmakers are cited, like Viscontis With Nights, Antonionis dehumanized landscapes and from the Japanese filmmaker Ozu the famous still life. It is a cinema of the seeing which replaces the action, it is going beyond the mouvement with pure optical-sound-images using fixed shots and montage-cut. Those pure optical-sound-images have two poles, they oscillate between the physical and the mental, the objectivity and the subjectivity, the real and the imaginary, the world and the I.

(In his text Deleuze attempts to structure different signs without deepen his introduced notions. By starting to read the first chapter of Cinema 2 it rapidly emerged that it would be helpful to first get to know some of the definitions before continuing the lecture..)

Movement-image
Action-image
Sensory-motor-schemata
Time-image
Optical-sound-image
Any-space-whatever
Opsign and Sonsign
Hyalosigns
Chronosigns/ Lectosigns/ Noosigns
Image of thought
Affection-image
Perception-image
The actual and the virtual image